O-Dark-Thirty

My favorite is bottom left. Emerson Eggerich is the main speaker for the Love and Respect Conference: ( http://loveandrespect.com/ ). He is an amusing, insightful speaker and gets his point across with loads of humor. Emerson Marriage conferences like to point out the obvious. Men and women are different. I think we’re all grateful for that, but there’s more. Lots more. Just to be clear up front, everyone wants and needs both love and respect. However, we are hard-wired (so to speak) for different interpretations. Men crave respect. When we get respect, we actually feel loved. Women crave love. When they are truly loved, they feel respected. Men, they said in the conference, are blue, with blue glasses, blue headphones and blue megaphones. They see, hear and speak the color blue. Women are pink, with pink glasses, pink headphones and pink megaphones. They see, hear and speak the color pink. When men speak to women, the blue sound gets garbled in the pink headphones, and vice-ve...

Not Mom. Not Grandma, either. My Mom was not a great cook. She  loved to cook and she  tried. Don’t confuse cooking with canning. My Mom was great at canning foods. Mom created quarts of green beans, tomato sauce, pears, peaches, pickles, apple sauce and various jams and jellies from fresh produce. For most of our young lives our pantry was overflowing with home-canned quart jars. Mom made these just fine. My brothers and I thought s he made good spaghetti.  Since she often used fresh or home-canned tomatoes, I’m sure the flavor was outstanding, and I love good tomato sauce to this day. We never realized that most people have thick spaghetti sauce with visible meat in it. Mom's was more like tomato soup with some spices and a little hamburger waved over it for atmosphere. I still think that's what real spaghetti is like, regardless of what the Italian restaurants serve. She made a great pot roast. I guess anyone can make a good roast, but it was her spec...

Talk Like a Pirate Day Today is "Talk Like a Pirate" day. I thought about writing this entire post in pseudo-pirate speech, but I'd probably get a sore throat sounding the words out. This was started in 1995 by a couple bored guys. Now it looks like they make a living out of it. That sounds a bit like piracy.  They have their own website: http://www.talklikeapirate.com/ They also have a Wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Talk_Like_a_Pirate_Day World of Warcraft even commemorates the day with activities in Booty Bay and Pirate quests. (Sometimes I really miss WoW!)   My brother and I have a similar plan as these Pirates, but it isn't nearly as cool. Well, maybe it is. More on that in the future. Everyone likes stories of pirates. I don’t know any pirates. Wait. I probably do. Not that I’ll hear the slow tap-tap of a wooden leg on my living room floor in the middle of the night as some beached scalawag tracks me home to finish me off. If someone co...

I should have been a movie star. Not a leading-man kind of movie star; I'm not that charismatic (or attractive). God didn't grant me the good looks of Cary Grant and the sense of humor of Ernest Borgnine - He intentionally got them backwards. Smile, for goodness sake! Like looking in the mirror. I love watching movies. Science Fiction is my favorite category, fantasy a close second, but I like drama and action and even, occasionally, horror. I'm not into the blood-spurting, limb-hacking horror movies; I prefer the ones like Hitchcock did, clever and daunting. I am especially well-pleased when I don't correctly figure out the ending beforehand. And, sadly, I have his profile! Many movies taught me lessons. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest convinced me that I'd rather have a free bottle in front of me than a pre-frontal lobotomy, even if I don't drink. Rocky movies reinforce that the amazing thing about the dancing bear is not that he dances so gracef...

There was a new candy in my coworker’s candy cache today: Andes™ mints. I’m not a big chocolate fan (except dark chocolate), but the smooth, creamy taste of chocolate, combined with the tingling mint flavor is a big hit with me. As I ate it, my mind traveled back in time to when I first encountered these delectable treats. A Mint and Earl Grey. Oh my. During my first year at Central Michigan University (my second year of college, the Fall of 1976 and Spring of 1977) I lived in Herrig Hall, on the third floor. At the time it was a foreign language floor, which didn’t really mean anything except that most of the students were taking a foreign language and we had a few foreign exchange students on the floor. I took German and was in a “German” room with four other guys. We crowded into two bedrooms and had a central study area and our own bathroom. We were a mess. Saxe-Herrig Hall, CMU One of my roommates was entirely forgettable, one faded into time and Nick remains a friend, thoug...

The attack. I watched it on TV at work with everyone else. Every post out there today will mention 9-11. Mine won't be any different, except I haven't anything to contribute to the topic. I have only personal reflections and stock photos from the internet. I don't personally know anyone who died on September 11, 2001 due to the terrorist attack on the United States of America. We had engineers from my company on United Airlines Flight 93. I didn't know them. I don't know the attackers, either. I am greatly saddened that a group of people from another country would hate Americans so much they attacked random people for revenge. And revenge isn't even the right word, is it? Revenge has a personal motive against a personal target. I can't really get my head around it. Five days later, and the effect lasts forever Years ago I was in a training class. The instructor went around the room and asked the same question "Who is your customer?" Eve...

Netbook (noun): a small, lightweight laptop computer used especially for Internet access and e-mail. They are essentially dead now, but that’s apparently my opinion, since you can still buy them for a few hundred dollars. A bit over a year ago I found one on sale and I convinced myself I had to have it, with some thought of turning it into the home computer for the kitchen. I think every room in the house deserves some sort of computer, and manufacturers agree with me. Tricky things, netbooks. They don’t have enough power to do much of anything, and they don’t have enough memory to compensate for the lack of power. They have minimal drives, and small hard drives.   Size isn’t everything, they say, but performance counts! So why in the world did I even want a netbook? It’s the SOFTWARE, not the hardware! The SOFTWARE Now you may not realize it, but your computer comes from the store loaded with BLOATWARE, a term indicative of unnecessary software installed after the har...