I Can't Complain

Wordless Wednesday: Soon Gave Me to Know I Had Nothing to Dread

 

Not Quite, Street View

So I just discovered that there's a Google Street View for a small-ish portion of my city. It doesn't cover the street my house is on, which I know because I immediately checked to see if you could see me or my car, and I was really disappointed to realize you can't even see my house. You can, however see my office building:

It's the one with the NBSC on top. Pretty cool, eh? You can almost see my office window. I look out over that beautiful green space, and I can see the statehouse out the window:

There's only one problem. They've been constructing a building in that green space for at least the past 18 months. A big one. With a really ugly concrete parking deck behind it. Now my view looks like this:

 

If I crane my neck just right, I can sometimes see the sky reflected off the mirrored windows up there at the top. And look, I think that might be part of a tree visible through the columns at the bottom left there. That's practically the same as my old view, right?  

Anyway, I understand they can't keep every area completely up-to-date all the time, but what really cracked me up were their suggested uses for using Street View. It was stuff like "check parking availability or wheelchair access" or... maybe find a nice park across the street from the state capitol in which to have a picnic. Another suggestion was "show your parents and faraway friends where you live." Or the view out your office window.

The "show your parents" suggestion also included "Look for a place nearby to take them for brunch." Like maybe this nice little cafe across the street from the statehouse:

I hear there's no wait for a table there these days. As long as you don't mind busting down the boarded up door to get in.  But don't worry, I bet that guy standing there will be happy to help you. 

Also, a Stinky Diapers update. Yeah, I'm on a blogging tear.

Thursday 13: Thirteen Things About Christmas Lights

As I mentioned yesterday, Larry and I hung our Christmas lights on the house on Sunday. It was...um... a not entirely successful venture. But it made me start musing about Christmas lights generally, so I thought it might make a good Thursday 13, in case anyone else also wants to muse about them. 

So here are 13 things about Christmas lights:

1. Thomas Edison, who is best known for inventing the light bulb, also invented Christmas lights. Which is actually a little silly if you think about it, since aren't Christmas lights just light bulbs? Why should he get credit for inventing the same thing twice? Sounds like some kind of scam to me.

2. Edison's friend and business partner, Edward Johnson, put up the very first string of Christmas lights in 1882.  They were red, white and blue. Apparently Johnson wasn't entire clear on which holiday they were celebrating.

3. Early Christmas lights were not pre-strung, but had to be individually hand-wired on the tree. In 1903, GE started selling kits with wires, light sockets and bulbs to the public, who then had to put them all together themselves.  Amateur electricians and primitive electricity...it's a wonder there are any houses left standing from that era.

4. In 1895, President Grover Cleveland had the White House family Christmas tree lit with electric lights. Despite what his name suggests, he was from neither Sesame Street nor Ohio. He was actually from my home state of New Jersey. All of which has nothing to do with Christmas lights, I realize.

5. The first president to light the national Christmas tree with electric lights was Calvin Coolidge, in 1923. Calvin Coolidge was also the only U.S. president to be born on the 4th of July.  Which also has nothing to do with Christmas lights, but I thought it was kind of cool.

6. You should never wire more than three lights together in one strand. Doing so may result in electric overloads, fires and really tacky lighting displays.

7. The most commonly used sizes for outdoor Christmas lights are C7 and C9.  The 7 and the 9 indicate the size of the bulbs, with size 9 bulbs being larger than size 7. The C stands for "CAREFUL, these suckers are REALLY FRAGILE! They'll shatter if you knock them together, drop them from heights as little as one inch, hit them with a pillow, feather or especially exasperated sigh, or look crossly at them." Some fly-by-night Christmas light sellers would have you believe the C actually indicates that the bulbs are candle-shaped, but I know better.

8. Most Christmas lights today are either wired in parallel (usually larger bulbs), or wired in series, but with special shunts (usually mini-lights). Either way, this ensures that if one light goes out, the entire string will not go out. This has undoubtedly saved countless marriages.

9. Even if the packaging for a string of lights says that the string will stay lit even if one bulb goes out, it is entirely possible for a string of lights to have every single red light not work. Just the red ones. For no apparent reason. Ask me how I know this.

10. It takes a really long time to remove the bulb from every single red light on a string of 100 C7 lights and replace it with another, presumably functional, bulb. Ask me how I know THIS.

11. Replacing every single bulb in every single red light on a string 100 C7 lights will not necessarily result in a string with all (or even any) functional red lights. Yeah, maybe you shouldn't ask.

12. It's virtually impossible to purchase strings of 100 C7 lights this year, despite these having been widely available for sale just one year ago. You're welcome to buy four 25 light strings, though. As long as you don't mind them all being a single color per string.

13. There's a hot new trend in Christmas light decoration - do half the lights on your house the regular way, with all the colors lit, and then do the other half with one color not lit. Red is an especially good color to choose for the unlit bulbs. Really.

Nature vs. Nurture

Despite our best efforts and our hardy yankee genes, we are apparently raising ourselves a southerner. Not only does the child y'all and ma'am with the best of them, but he cannot STAND to be cold.

On Sunday Larry and I hung our outside Christmas lights while the Bomber watched.  He started out dressed in jeans, a long-sleeved t-shirt and a sweater. Then he asked for his winter coat. Which he promptly zipped all the way up to his chin. After his first trip outside, he came back in and asked for a hat. Five minutes later he demanded mittens. Then he climbed up on a chair on the front porch and started rubbing his arms, saying "I'm SO cold!" with each word punctuated by a dramatic shiver. It was an award-worthy performance.  Since I didn't want him to expire from the cold, I went inside and grabbed a blanket to wrap around him. When I was all finished he looked like this:

Pitiful, isn't it? I know, I'm a terrible mother, subjecting my child to such frigid temperatures just for the sake of Christmas decorations.  In case you were wondering, here's what the weather was like on Sunday:

Brutal, wasn't it?

My Little Goblin

So, my fellow blogger and Plurker, Fear and Parenting in Las Vegas (again, not her real name) is running another contest, this one on her personal blog. Having tasted victory once (I won an autographed copy of The Blackberry Diaries!), I've become greedy for more. Besides, the contest is for the best Halloween pictures, and clearly there could be no better Halloween picture than the H-bomb in last year's Halloween costume:

 
Actually, I think his first Halloween costume was even cuter, but the photo is really fuzzy and out of focus:

But damn, he made a cute bumblebee, didn't he?

And just to finish it off, here's his very first Halloween:

It's hard to believe how little he was just three years ago. Now he's a big ol' bossy three year old, full of opinions and independence.  This year he wanted to be a bat, and the absence of a decent commercially-available toddler-size bat costume, I decided to make him one.  So far I've only sacrificed two fingertips and the side of one thumb to the hot glue gods, but hey, there's still three days to go.

Anyway, there you go, Nancy. Thanks for the fun contest!  And happy birthday to you!!

Thursday 13: Thirteen Things I've Learned From Food

Lately for a snack, I've been having these bitty squares of Laughing Cow cheese. I love cheese, and have been known to eat an entire block in one sitting, so I try to eat one of these little suckers instead whenever I have a cheese craving.

Anyway, each tiny square comes wrapped in this little piece of foil with random factoids on the inside. Actually, I've noticed that a lot of individually wrapped food comes with little sayings or facts on the wrappers - I kind of wonder what the point is, since I imagine it would be cheaper to put nothing on the insides of the wrappers.I guess it's marketing, but I gotta say, I'm not likely to pick one product over the other because of all the awesome information or inspirational sayings I'm going to get from the packaging. Interestingly enough, my favorite beer also comes with little sayings under the bottle cap, though they're neither inspirational nor educational. Mostly, they're just a little odd.

So, here are twelve things I've learned from cheese. And one thing I've learned from beer.

1. Vatican employees pay no income tax. This seems perfectly fair to me. I mean, who would they pay it to? The Pope? God?

2. In 1896 tickets from an Olympic competition cost about 16 cents. Incidentally, the 1896 Olympics were the first modern Olympics and were held in Athens, Greece from April 5 to April 16.

3. If the earth could be scaled down, it would be smoother than a billiard ball. I have no idea what that even means, but it sounds good to me.

4. The official bird of New Mexico is the roadrunner. And in case you're interested, the official flower is the Yucca flower. The state animal is the black bear, the state fish is the cutthroat trout and the state insect tarantula hawk wasp. Which sounds simultaneously very cool, and really scary.  The state motto is Crescit Eundo, which means "It grows as it goes."I have no idea what that means, either.

5. Roman statues were created with detachable heads so that one head could be replaced by another. Those crazy Romans... always thinkin'.  If only we could do that with people. 

6. Beer making requires a tenth of the 7 million tons of rice grown in the U.S. each year. I think it's interesting that my cheese has beer facts, but my beer doesn't have any cheese facts. Maybe I should suggest it to them.

7. In 1917 the first Girl Scout cookies were sold for less than 25 cents a box. In 1917, though, 25 cents was the same as approximately $3.50 today. So the price hasn't really increased all that much. The first cookies were baked and sold by a troop in Muskogee, OK in their high school cafeteria.

8. The world's number one food crop is wine grapes. Um, duh.

9. Americans spent more than $110 billion on fast food in 2001. And in 2002, they spent double that on angioplasty, heart transplants and joint replacements. 

10. Every second 3,300 cups of coffee are consumed worldwide. Many of them in my office.

11. 18 doctors in the U.S. share the name Dr. Doctor and one is named Dr. Surgeon. Frankly, I don't think I'd go to a doctor named Dr. Doctor. It shows an appalling lack of creativity. "So, what do you want to be when you grow up?" "I dunno... my name is doctor. I guess I'll be that." I'd be way more impressed with a Dr. Nurse or a Dr.Plumber. Or Dr. Middle-level Manager

12. Only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World still survives. It's the Great Pyramid at Giza.  Four were destroyed by earthquake, one by fire and one by arson followed by plundering.

And finally, from my beer bottle cap:

13. Time is slow when your [sic] six feet below. Not only is that the most depressing thing I've ever read while drinking a beer, but it's also grammatically incorrect. I guess whoever is in charge of the pithy bottle cap sayings has been sampling the product during work hours.

Plus a Stinky Diapers from yesterday.

Welcome To Our World...

The H-bomb is currently obsessed with the show Word World, on PBS Kids.  Basically, the show's premise is that all of the denizens of Word World, and most of the inanimate objects there, are made of their constituent letters. So, for example, the pig lives in a barn that's formed by the letters B-A-R-N, like so:

 

It's a nice show, actually. Well-made, well-thought out (although I could do without all the jumping on the b-e-d they do), and entertaining. But I have a small issue with it...

The main characters are a dog, a sheep, a pig, a duck, a bear and a frog. All of them, plus all of the resident insects and all of the secondary characters talk. Except the dog. What's up with that? Some was pitching the idea to PBS and they went... "I like it! Talking animals made of letters! Great idea! Except... that talking dog thing?  Has to go. It's just not believable..." 

The pig bakes, the frog invents things, the sheep solves mysteries and the bear rides a bike. The dog? Mostly just digs in the dirt and makes dog sounds. That said, he is a pretty good speller for a dog, and has an uncanny knack of digging up just the letters they need for any given word. But still, it hardly seems fair that he's the only one who is relegated to non-talking status.  On the other hand, he frequently seems like the smartest one of the group, so I guess that goes to show that talking isn't everything.

Which may be why some people seem smartest before they've said anything...

An Open Letter

To Whomever Was Breathing in My Face Last Night (and you know who you are):

Don't get me wrong. I'm happy that now that the cooler weather is here, you've decided to once again join us for that nightly ritual in which we turn out the light, close our eyes and lay on the bed in approximately the same position for approximately eight hours.We really do miss you when you spend the summer nights hanging out on the back porch watching the bats and owls. But you seem to be missing some of the more crucial points of the ritual; most notably, the part where we lay in the same position for eight hours, give or take. I understand large-ish portions of the bed are taken up by others and I realize that you want to find just the right spot for yourself, so I'm willing to let your wandering around the bed pass mostly unremarked, even though you frequently wander over various soft and ticklish parts of my body.

But let me assure you, I'm still fairly young and in pretty good health. In part because of this whole laying on the bed with my eyes closed in approximately the same position for approximately eight hours every night. The likelihood that I am not just partaking of this nightly ritual but have actually expired is quite small. There's no need to make sure I'm still alive by sticking your nose a half inch from mine, huffing on me until I open my eyes and then meowing directly into my face. Really.  So quit it, would you? Or you're going to find yourself on the wrong side of the door.

Yours truly,

The one who prefers not to open her eyes in the middle of the night and find someone else's peering into hers.

Cupcakes for Lunch

It's a beautiful fall day here in SC (which means it only went up to 78 instead of 90) and a group of my co-workers (and one boyfriend) decided to go out for lunch. And by "decided" I mean, I sent around an email begging people to go out with me and then rearranged their plans for them until they fit with mine. During the resulting email exchange *someone* mentioned the new cupcake bakery that had opened nearby, so we settled on cupcakes for lunch.

Okay, okay, we didn't actually have cupcakes for lunch. We went to some other place and had something else. I'm sure it was perfectly fine. But , really, who even cares when it was followed by CUPCAKES!  And not just any cupcakes... these were lovely, fancy, cupcake-only-bakery cupcakes. *happy sigh*

So, the place is called, aptly enough, simply Cupcake. It's actually something of a chain - there's two locations in the Charleston area, and now we in Columbia have one too.  Ours is located in the Vista, in one of the lovely old brick buildings that were part of the heavy industry that used be in that area.  It's all retail and eating establishments now, but they've kept most of the original feel of the buildings, which I really love.

Anyway, Cupcake is tucked away on one of the side streets in a suitably pink-and-confectionery little shop.

When I whipped out my camera, the employees gave me a kind of a funny look, so one of my co-workers announced that I was taking photos for my blog. Oddly enough, that did not make their looks any less funny. Such is the life of a dedicated blogger. 

Anyway, they offer nine flavors each day, which includes five regulars and four that rotate on a daily and seasonal schedule:

The cupcakes themselves are beautiful and beautifully displayed:

 

I ordered a mocha chip, which is pictured here with my co-worker's black and white:

 

The mocha chip came with a chocolate covered coffee bean on top, which was absolutely the perfect taste complement to the sweet icing. Also sampled were lemon and white chocolate raspberry:

 

We all  returned to work contentedly full of cupcakey-goodness, at least until the sugar high wore off and we all crashed. 

(Mostly) Wordless Wednesday: If You Don't Clean Your Fridge Often Enough

You never know what you might end up finding in there: