Poll on pets and sharing meals with them.

Today at KFC, I ordered my usual order of the four piece meal with sides chosen for their "rat" likeability (cole slaw and corn). I feed the cats the breast meat and I eat the leg, wing and thigh. The person working the window was new. She kept trying to give us mashed potatoes and gravy even though Eric's sides were mac and cheese and corn. After she repeated our order for the third time inserting the mashed potatoes yet again, I finally said "The rat loves mashed potatoes. Leave it." She said she'd fix it to what we really wanted.

That made me ask Eric, do you think other people order food for their pets like I do? He didn't think very many people do. So, here's my poll to find out.


[Poll #262614]

Stolen from blonderoots

L - Love is something you deeply believe in.
I - You are always smiling & making others smile.
N - You like to work, but you always want a break.
D - You have trouble trusting people.
A - You can be very quiet when you have something on your mind

Spell your name and see what it says about you!
A - You can be very quiet when you have something on your mind.
B - You are always cautious when it comes to meeting new people.
C - You definitely have a partier side in you, dont be shy to show it.
D - You have trouble trusting people.
E - You are a very exciting person.
F - Everyone loves you.
G - You have excellent ways of viewing people.
H - You are not judgemental.
I - You are always smiling & making others smile.
J - Jealousy.
K - You like to try new things.
L - Love is something you deeply believe in.
M - Success comes easily to you.
N - You like to work, but you always want a break.
O - You are very open-minded.
P - You are very friendly and understanding.
Q - You are a hypocrite.
R - You are a social butterfly.
S - You are very broad-minded.
T - You have an attitude, a big one.
U - You feel like you have to equal up to people's standards.
V - You have a very good physical and looks.
W -You like your privacy .
X - You never let people tell you what to do .
Y - You cause a lot of trouble.
Z- You're always fighting with someone

Friday Five

Friday Five
If you...

1. ...owned a restaurant, what kind of food would you serve?

Pastas, tons of fresh veggies with options for either vegetarian protien or meat.

2. ...owned a small store, what kind of merchandise would you sell?

Books.

3. ...wrote a book, what genre would it be?

Children's adventure.

4. ...ran a school, what would you teach?

Music and drama.

5. ...recorded an album, what kind of music would be on it?

Eclectic mix of pop music including Big Band, Swing, Be Bop, Folk, Country, Rock & Roll, and Jazz.

Help with medical pronunciation needed.

Hi gang! Does anyone know an online source for medical terms where there's a sound byte so I can hear it?

I subscribed to dictionary.com but only a few of the words have sound bytes. This is a matter of some urgency because I've taken on a project for a friend who needs to memorize muscles, what they attach to and what they do for a university class.

I seem to emphasize the wrong syllables about half the time.

(yes Gail, I'll probably be calling you)

Update time!

I've just gotten to a point with my contract programming where I need an answer to continue. Since it's ten minutes before 1AM here and three hours earlier there I don't think it's a good idea to call him. I emailed the technical person at his distributor with my question. By the time I can log on to work again, I'll have my answer. I have to work at night because the PC my client has for hooking me in is used by his back office person during their workday. It's fine with me. My mind works best at night anyway.

I've almost finished the redo of my friend's Commercial Demo CD cover. Creating her new Character Demo CD cover will take very little time since I'm using the same background and replacing the sun with a daffodil character. Hmm... I've still got to do the CD labels. That'll be easy for the sun one.

Tomorrow afternoon I've set up a private lesson with a locally renowned voice (singing) teacher. It turns out she's my dear friend from choir back when we both started at the community college. She definitely knows about putting a singing demo together and we're going to discuss that and have her assess my singing voice to see if I've managed to scrape all the rust off of it in the last three years.

I've been fighting depression a lot lately. It's so hard to not give in to it. For a few days last week, I was unable to do anything other than my two projects. There was housework that desperately needed to be done but I couldn't get myself to do it. The longer I stayed in the house without talking to anyone, the more depressed I got.

Because I keep forgetting the second step of my steroid nose spray regimen which is super necessary this time of year, I decided to read a chapter of a book every morning in the bedroom for the ten minutes I need to wait between steps. I started reading a novel my aunt gave me by an author who writes romance novels. I don't tend to read many romance novels anymore because they're so predictable but this one is ok so far. There were two things in this morning's chapter that really hit home for me. The first was about the main character being frustrated that she loved art but just didn't have the ability to be an artist. She described the chaos all artists lived with and created from and how she was just too driven to be organized. I like that. It's nice to have validation for my chaos! The second thing was that she spent an entire day alone at home buried in research and realized that she needed people in order to have energy. I'm like that. I have to get out among people or I feel drained.

The voice lesson tomorrow is part of my plan to bust out of depression. It will give me an extra edge in finding an agent to have a singing track on my demo. I'll also have to research audiobook demos to see if I can create my own, too.

Yeah, I'm breaking out of this depression. I'm kicking its butt!

Jan of Jan & Dean has died... this leads to a wandering train of thought

Here's the news article.

I had the luck to see them in concert at our county fair in the 90's. Jan was obviously fighting the brain damage from his car crash, half his body was nearly paralyzed but he was on his feet moving to the music and singing! At first I thought he was going to fall over until I realized that was how he danced. His courage to get back on his feet and to go on tour was inspiring. Now he's gone. He isn't fighting paralysis anymore.

I think I was there with yeoww, wasn't I? I know we saw Weird Al there together!

Funny, that was the same stage I'd seen Rick Nelson perform at in the same time frame. He died in a plane crash a couple of years later.

That stage is gone now. It was a portable stage that they hauled out on the race track in front of the grandstand on the days they weren't having harness races, sprint car races or the demolition derby that happened the last day of the fair. Going to the fair in the first two weeks of August was a tradition for several of my friends and me. There was a growing gang presence in the carnival area and families started staying away. The bands and music acts they were booking were less and less interesting. The fair people didn't understand why attendance was dropping. They decided to tear down the livestock barns and remove the race track to build an arena. They also moved the fair to sometime in Spring. That meant the people who used to enter produce in competitions didn't have it ripe yet, the 4H kids didn't have their animals ready yet and since all the kids were in school it was hard for families to find time to go. Since nobody much attended the fair in Spring, they moved it back to summer last year, for less than a week. The music acts were nobody I wanted to see plus it happened to be the one week I couldn't go.

Now that I'm not formally employed anymore, maybe I should make an attempt to give the fair board my views on why the county fair is dying. As a kid, I was a square dancer. My family used to dance there a couple of evenings per week. We got in free those days. It meant doing all the fair stuff in my square dance clothes, but that was fine. I entered an apron I'd made and embroidered for my Gramma one year. I'd embroidered "Grandkids" at the top and put everybody's names in with families color coded. Next to my cousins with kids, I put an asterisk of another color and in a "Great-Grandkids" section below I embroidered all of their names in the color of the asterisk next to their parent. I won 3rd place! It was cool!

I was part of that fair. I loved going through the barns and petting the animals. I loved the crazy looking roosters in the poultry barn, and the sweet bunnies that shared it. I loved watching the newborn piglets.

Jan Berry is gone. The fair I used to love is also gone. This is how life works, but I don't have to like it.