What Did YOU Do On Saturday?

I wasn't watching a race, but I was hanging-out will the dogs.

My Desktop

(Click desktop to view full page)

Whether at Disney, FRSA, home or elsewhere, it's been noted that I have a "busy", maybe even "cluttered" desktop. Yes, I like icons. I dread using the favorites drop-down menu. Besides, mine is so full, yet organized, I go there as seldom as possible. How much easier is it to just be one click away from a website or file. The files on the desktop come and go, the websites are a little less transitory.

Oh Columbia

Jeff Koterba - 9/21/07

From "The List Universe"

English is a wonderful language with some of the strangest pronunciation rules and words that come from many other languages.
This is a list of 20 weird English words.

1. Erinaceous
Like a hedgehog

2. Lamprophony
Loudness and clarity of voice

3. Depone
To testify under oath

4. Finnimbrun
A trinket or knick-knack

5. floccinaucinihilipilification
Estimation that something is valueless. Proper pronunciation based on Latin roots: flockə-nowsə-nəkələ-pələ-fək-ation.

6. Inaniloquent
To babble

7. Limerance
To be in love

8. Mesonoxian
Pertaining to midnight

9. Mungo
A dumpster diver - one who extracts valuable things from trash

10. Nihilarian
A person who deals with things lacking importance (pronounce the ‘h’ like a ‘k’).

11. Nudiustertian
The day before yesterday

12. Phenakism
Deception or trickery

13. Pronk
A weak or foolish person

14. Pulveratricious
Covered with dust

15. Rastaquouere
A social climber

16. Scopperloit
Rude or rough play

17. Selcouth
Unfamiliar, rare, strange, marvelous, wonderful. For example: "You Don't Need To Know This, But..."is such a selcouth blog!

18. Tyrotoxism
To be poisoned by cheese

19. Widdiful
Someone who deserves to be hanged

20. Zabernism
The abuse of military power or authority.

I Didn't Know She Grew Up In Henryetta!

Actress Alice Ghostley Dies at 81

And went to OU for time. I loved her character "Bernice" on Designing Women.

Lakefront

Another on-the-way-home-from-work photo. I stopped at St Cloud lakefront park to snap this photo of an afternoon thunderstorm. We haven't shared the rest of Central Florida's deluges or severe storms this week. We had an occasional shower, but have missed the heavy stuff.

Disney's Saratoga Springs Resort

I've been a slacker lately and haven't gotten around to posting pics from Saratoga Springs Resort. This was the hast hurrah for now of the Disney stays. We were also celebrating our anniversary and getting out of the house BEFORE football season began in earnest.

Obviously, the resort is modeled after upstate New York resorts with the racetrack/horse theme. It's quite pretty actually and lots of walking trails. You can also take the water-taxi to Downtown Disney and the Port Orleans resorts. One thing you have to watch-out for though, is the occasional shut-down of the water-taxis due to inclement weather. A Florida thunderstorm can leave you stranded with a bus to look forward to. We were clued to the lightning issue in advance and took the car for late afternoon excursions.

Above and below is the Artist's Palette Restaurant on property at Saratoga. We ate breakfast there a couple of times. We had dinners out at Disney's Beach Club Resort at the Cape May Clambake and Saturday evening went to the Irish pub, Ragland Road.

Watch The Blogs Go By

From Blogspot:

"Today we’re pleased to launch Blogger Play, a neat little toy we’ve cooked up to show you photos and blog posts as you’ve never seen them before.

Shortly after Blogger launched photo uploading two years ago, one of our engineers whipped up a web page that would show us the pictures that were being uploaded in real time. The result was fun, often beautiful, but above all, compelling. We couldn’t stop watching.Over the years we’ve kept this photo scroller as part of the Blogger offices, on a monitor or projector, as an interesting (distracting?) slideshow, and a reminder of the diversity and vivaciousness of Blogger blogs. The fame of the scroller spread within Google, until one day we were asked, “so, when are you launching this?”“Um...,” we replied. But we knew a good idea when we heard one. We got our UI people to come up with buttons and fadey effects and we got our engineers to make the whole thing fast and robust. A bit of work later, and now we can share it with all of you:

http://play.blogger.com/Blogger Play

will show you a never-ending stream of images that were just uploaded to public Blogger blogs. You can click the image to be taken directly to the blog post it was uploaded to, or click “show info” to see an overlay with the post title, a snippet of the body, and some profile information about the blogger who uploaded it. We also wrote a Blogger Play FAQ with more information.

A caveat: we use many techniques, including Google’s SafeSearch technology, to keep the images clean. Nevertheless, on rare occasions an image that you may find vulgar or obscene will slip through our algorithmic filters. Google does not pre-screen the images that appear in Blogger Play, nor is it responsible for their content. To report a terms of service violation, you may fill out this contact form."

The States of Oklahoma and Sequoyah

(Click on map to see larger version of the state of Sequoyah)

The US state of Oklahoma almost entered the Union as two states – Oklahoma and Sequoyah. The latter is the name of a failed attempt in the early 20th century by Native Americans, who formed (and still form) a large part of the population in eastern Oklahoma, to constitute a state of their own.

This map of the ‘State of Sequoyah’ - complete with a proposed State Seal - was compiled from the USGS Map of Indian Territory (1902), revised to include the county divisions made under direction of Sequoyah Statehood Convention (1905), by D.W. Bolich, a civil engineer at Muskogee. It was found at this page of the McCasland Digital Collection of Early Oklahoma & Indian Territory Maps at the Oklahoma State University Library, where it can be seen in greater detail.

A Postcard From Texas

Fred On The Issues

Maybe Fred T can be the conservative we thought President Bush would be. Don't let the "paid lobbyist" label put you off. If Newt G isn't going to run, then I'll take Fred T's plain-spoken opinions for now. (Of course, this doesn't mean I'm not still completely disappointed with conservatives in general.)

Here's the link to Mr T's positions.

Badges? We ain't got no badges!

Wikiquote's List of Misquotations
Just the facts, ma'am. That's what this page lists. Except, as Wikipedians are quick to point out, Sergeant Friday never uttered this beloved quote on the old radio and TV show "Dragnet." The detective actually said "All we want are the facts, ma'am." Likewise, Scotty beamed plenty of people up to the Enterprise on the original "Star Trek" series, but not a soul actually blurted "Beam me up, Scotty." The requests ran more to the likes of "beam me aboard" or "beam us up home." There's more.

Talk About CONSTRUCTION

Friday, September 7, 2007

New ConstructionAn aerial view of the man-made palm tree-shaped islands in Dubai.

You Know I Love Me Some Clouds

I was coming home from work on Monday, September 10th and had to stop to snap this pic of an impending thunderstorm off to our east. Thank goodness it held-off until after school dismissal. I've found out that the 3:15pm storms are not much of a treat when you're getting those kiddies on buses.

C & D Construction Update

From the back porch looking into the house

From the living/great room

The front porch

The decking and framing crew working viewed from the street

Larry King-Style Blogging

Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don't. Sometimes you feel like blogging, sometimes you don't.

I've been reading rather than writing lately.

The job-change was definitely the thing to do. It's a challenge, different every single day and I so far I love it. I miss the "Disney culture", but I'll remedy that soon with something seasonal or part time. I'm very impressed with the teachers and staff. I've been mostly lucky that way, even at Disney. Good folks.

The walls are completely up on C & D's house. The trusses and roof goes on this week.

Brooke is getting her own Weight Watcher meeting in St Cloud as a leader, not a receptionist. She loves her move to the 2nd graders. I know firsthand now that kindergarten is HARD. As cute as they are and endearing, bless their hearts, they don't have a clue.

I remember now why I love weekends.

Lucy doesn't hate Dixie anymore. They've finally become best friends.

Dwain isn't working all the time now. Of course, it's college football season. That makes a difference and apparently things are better at work. He's more comfortable with the responsibilities.

Recipe Sites

101Cookbooks.com - A constantly updated archive of recipes. Look them up by food style, search, or discuss in the forums.

AllRecipes.com - Over 40,000 recipes all created and tested by home chefs.

BakeSpace.com - Social networking for trading recipes.

Build A Better Burger - Over 5,000 burger combinations, start with what type of meat you want and build from there.

CDKitchen.com - Recipes by and for home cooks. Recipes are submitted by chefs and home cooks.

Chef2Chef.net - Recipes, instructions for beginning cooks and more.

CookThink.com - Enter the ingredients you ar craving and receive a recipe in return.

DinnersInAFlash.com - Recipes as well as guides on how to organize a dinner, to do lists and grocery lists.

FoodieView.com - Over 1 million searchable recipes.

FoodNetowrk.com - The website of the big cable network has tons of recipes and instructional articles for you.

GroupRecipes.com - Recipes and social networking rolled into one. Also has a Firefox plugin.

iFoods.tv - Written out recipes accompanied by instructional videos.

MealsMatter.org - A site filled with quick and healthy meal recipes.

MyRecipe.com - Share and discover food recipes, cooking tips and everything about cooking.

Nibblous.com - Upload and share recipes with a growing community.

PimpThatSnack.com - Got an odd combination of leftover foods? Pimp That Snack may have a recipe for you, or make your own.

RecipeMatcher.com - Enter the ingredients in your pantry or bar, get shown results of what you can make.

RecipeThing.com - Store recipe’s, share them, helps auto-generate grocery lists.

Recipezaar.com - Find, share and create recipe’s and menu’s with people around the world.

Rouxbe.com - Not only does it have recipes, but it walks you through each one in a step-by-step manner to help you learn how to cook.

Snacksby.com - Enter the foods you have on hand, and not only see what you can make, but if it is low fat or vegetarian.

Tastefora.com - Share and search recipes, look them up also by meal or category.

TasteTV.com - Recipes and instructional videos by top chefs.

WeGottaEat.com - Upload your recipes, share them with friends, make grocery lists.

Rainy Season

We've gotten our share of thundershowers in the last few weeks or so. One afternoon I got the chance to snap a few pics of the impending storm. Can you believe it? This storm brought NO rain. It looked as if it was going to rain for a month.

Not A Great Pic

But you get the idea. Cory and Danielle's house now has partial walls. It's going nicely according to Danielle's dad, the builder.