If you're normal, this should really only take you ten minutes or so.
It's a great idea I learned about through Paolaccio, who got it from Michelle at Bleeding Espresso.
It's a way to make a pretty representative mosaic using bits of your life and personality. Here's how, if you want your own:
I'm not saying that I did this post from my sexy new iPhone while sitting in a field- but I totally did! I know I'm paragraphs behind, but I don't come from a first adoption kind of family. Call me naive but I can't help feeling a little like I'm on some weird Star Trek episode.
I mean seriously, all this wireless and internets business totally kicks ass.
Alright, enough bragging and amazement. I'm going back to work.
Does anyone know if these things work overseas?
A warm hello and a hail-fellow-well-met to the people who've been visiting due to our being named a Typepad Featured Blog, woot woot! Now I can wear my cute glittery shirt with the Typepad logo without feeling like a total pretender to the throne.
A brief rundown of us - my husband and I have been writing on and off here for, holy crap, three years now. Wow, I really appreciate being made to think of that. I do most of the writing, though Husbear does put in a more than occasional post about something delicious he's concocted. His tasty food bits can be found over in his own Kooking Korner.
We first moved to Austin, Texas in August 2001 after graduating from the University of South Carolina. Go Gamecocks, et cetera, whoop whoop. We've been here ever since, with one pretty major exception - we spent August 2006 through May of 2007 living in Florence, Italy, while Husbear went to cooking school at Apicius.
While we were there, we learned some Italian, figured out how to shop at the amazing local markets, entertained lots of visiting family and friends, and traveled. While we did mostly stay inside Italy, we did make it to a couple of other places in Europe and spent an amazing and not entirely comfortable week in Egypt.
Perhaps the best month we spent there, though, was when we threw on our backpacks and caught a plane to Palermo. Our almost-month spent in Sicily and southern Italy was indescribable, not that that stopped me from using way too many words trying.
We couldn't bear to cut our year of travel short, so we took the long way home to the States through London and on to Hong Kong, Thailand, and Vietnam. I'm still blogging the trip here, because finishing it would mean that we're really back now, Waaa.
So, now we're back in Austin with our cats, putting up pictures on Flickr, working to repay our travel debt, and trying to figure out how soon we can get those backpacks back out of storage. Please comment, and feel free to ask us any travel questions you have!
(Early posts are pretty bad, though I am of course partial to the ones about our 2004 honeymoon in Italy and Greece - some of which aren't awful, I promise.)
Ci vediamo subito,
Girlie
Yes, I'm still here. But I'm listening to the State of the Union address, which renders me unable to blog anything beyond the State of the Union...
8:15 - it would be nice to have a balanced budget.
8:19 - really? Health savings accounts and tax breaks for people that aren't covered through their employers? That would be nice, too.
8:20 - OH HELL NO TORT REFORM BAD BAD BAD KILL.
8:21 - NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND NO WAH WHY BAD BAD!
8:22 - faith-based grants are also not something I enjoy. Ahem. 300 million dollars? From the Pentagon's $500 billion request (which doesn't include monies for Iraq or Afghanistan), perhaps? HA HA I KEED.
8:24 - Made in the USA - what about the Northern Mariana Islanders? Products from there can say "made in the USA" but the workers don't yet have to be paid minimum wage...
8:26 - And, there's the first nukular.
8:30 - no buying, selling, patenting, or cloning of human life. The patenting one may throw a wrinkle in my "make a million by age 30" plan.
Nah, I won't liveblog the whole thing. I'm sure angrier bloggers than I are already out there doing it.
And here's the fact-checking, for you geekazoids! I include myself in this category. You'll have to move from that post to NPR's main blog page for updates.
Hey, if you get bored waiting for a new post, check out my new photo project. A picture a day, every day, for the 366 days of 2008.
So far, I seem to have an unhealthy fixation on alcohol. And farmers' markets. And putting things on my dining room table and taking pictures of them. 28 days in!
Here's a Project 366 picture from this weekend that I particularly like. Who says I'm not a quivering bundle of neuroses, topped off with a dash of obsessive-compulsive disorder?
If you click on this picture, it will take you to the page on the flickr photostream - on the right you can click on the "Project 366 - here goes nothing" set to see the rest of the pictures. I promise there are some cool ones.
Or, you could just follow this link, where all the shots will be arrayed in chronological order.
Now, back to your regularly scheduled yelling at the TV. Or radio, if you're me.
8:32 - YAY NEW ORLEANS! He mentioned it. Not that he's been particularly helpful in rebuilding it...
uh-oh, immigration. Here's where I'll bow out.
I love this video, probably because back when we had cable I spent an awful lot of time watching the TV shows it's skewering.
On the other hand, it makes me miss TV because there are hilarious satirical shows like this available to watch. If you live in the UK, that is.
You're welcome!
We like to track what brings people to our site. Who wouldn't? So, tonight's winner:
German Google, with "The Cats and the Griddle and the Silver Spoon."
We love you, searcher, for the mental images you provide. And we hope our site was helpful!
love,
girlie and husbear.
Sadly, our lovely ladies have returned to the States, leaving our home bereft and sad.
I am categorizing and organizing our many September pictures (looks like we took just over 3 gigs last month) and putting together a post or two about our weekend in Rome. Until I get that done, let me keep you occupied with a few of my new favorite things.
Last Thursday, we took the ladies up to Fiesole for what we had been told were killer views of Florence. Unfortunately, the haze made things a little difficult to differentiate, but Fiesole makes up for it with an interesting Roman and Etruscan archaeological site, which I may have a chance to blog sometime after my 45th birthday, at this rate.
Fiesole is very concerned for your safety.
2.) Also on my list of fun this week is a newly refound obsession with the Vegan Lunch Box. Now, I'm not vegan (not even close) and Husbear is a vegetarian on cooking-school hiatus, but I still very much admire the discipline Schmoo's mother has in packing daily lunches beautifully using only vegan ingredients. It's a fascinating blog, and has great ideas for all you lunch-packers out there (even us non-vegan ones).
For me, it brings back sometimes uncomfortable memories of standing paralyzed in front of the fridge in middle school, trying to throw something together with the absolute minimum amount of work I thought I could get away with. Mom started checking my lunchboxes regularly after she caught me leaving the house with two slices of bologna, two packs of Fun Fruits, and a napkin.
3.) Just before leaving the US in August, I read a HILARIOUS story about George Allen, current Republican Senator from Virginia, who is running for re-election. A representative from his opponent's campaign was trailing him with a video camera, apparently hoping to get footage to use against him in the campaign, and hit paydirt when Allen twice called him a "macaca" on tape.
Apparently, it's a rather obscure racial slur... but no matter what, it was still a pretty dumb thing to say on camera.
Since then, he's put his feet all the way into his mouth on several occasions, prompting the people over at Slate to put together this wonderfully insane George Allen Insult Generator. Go. Have fun.
NOTE NOTE NOTE: There has been a change to the visit calendar! People planning to visit us(and we're still hoping to see many of your smiling faces here!) please head over there and check it out. (auntie, you make a good point - our visit calendar can be found here, on the About page.)
look for a Rome post hopefully later today, though possibly tomorrow at the rate I'm going...
girlie
We went out last night to have a late birthday dinner at Mike and Soozes, which was lots of fun (cause we hadn't seen them in a while) and they gave me the most wonderful gifts for my birthday!
We came home to several increasingly frantic messages from Auntie that Boots was inaccessible! Oh dear.
Typepad apparently is suffering a "sophisticated Denial of Service (DoS) attack" - meaning that most typepad blogs were unloadable for good chunks of yesterday. Perfect timing, of course, since Derrick at Obsession with Food is working on the Is My Blog Burning roundup, so hopefully our entry will go up in the next couple of days.
On a happier note, at least for me, I got to hear Brandy on the way into work today. That left me happy.
So, DOO de DOO de DO DOO de do DE DOO.
(In more interesting news for other people besides me, there are some honeymoon pictures posted to Flickr that will likely get a post of their own sometime later today.)
girlie
There is a part of me that is absolutely fascinated with social statistics. I love charts (occasionally, though I do have a deep-seated hatred of the pie chart) and tables.
That's the reason I've been spending like 80% of my spare time here:
At the Baby Name Wizard NameVoyager!
This thing is seriously fascinating. Try your name! Try the most common names of the girls and boys you went to school with! For me, it's interesting to see that there was a reason half of the girls in my class were named Sarah or Jessica or Rachel (even) or perhaps Heather or Hannah.
The accompanying blog is engrossing, also - the author helps in picking out oddities, including pointing out that "Wm" and "Geo" were both in the top 1000 for boys' names at the turn of the last century because these common abbreviations for William and George were often entered on birth certificates.
You can pick out trends in names - for instance, did you know that consonant clusters in general have fallen out of fashion (think Gertrude, or Wilbur) though starting a boy's name with "Tr" is the new hotness?
Try German names, like Helga and Hildegard - see when they were popular? It's like a social studies and history and geography lesson all rolled into one! (Why didn't I get my ass kicked in school more often? I sure don't know.) Try Adolph, for an interesting result... Or Laci, or Monica, or Shirley (Temple!) or Paris (Urkblah!).
It's your turn to go find your own, now. I'm not going to do all the work around here!
-girlie
PS - Check the name "Logan". Ha!
I just found out that I missed Ben Franklin's birthday! So, let me slip under the wire and wish the gentleman a happy happy.
I'm sure a lot of people are quoting his pithy sayings about those who sacrifice freedom to preserve liberty deserving neither, or perhaps the little chestnut about beer being proof that G-d loves us and wants us to be happy, but I think I'll go in this direction:
One good Husband is worth two good wives; for the scarcer things are, the more they're valued.
All you menfolk out there - I think you just got burned by Ben Franklin! And he's 300 today, so I'm pretty sure he knows whereof he speaks.
(and kisses to you, husbear - you're definitely worth any two of my wives.)
girlie
