Author: cebliss

Lord of the Rings was wonderful.

I waited years to see The Chronicles of Narnia.

But NOTHING can match the excitement over this upcoming release!

A nice new, overdue, batch of powder on the ground this morning.

I stayed up late watching 24 with the pretty one. We thought it best to tape it and watch it after the kids were in bed. We exercised our viewer discretion as advised.

The one thing I love about watching that show on tape is that you have a good idea how much time is left. We started it at 9:15pm and got excited when the minutes on the show caught up with the real life minutes (we fast forwarded through the commercials, except for the American Idol commercials. Those are usually pretty funny).

I am finding my self quoting a verse to my children that was often quoted to me.

“Be sure your sins will find you out”

I got an oversized Hershey’s Kiss for Christmas. It has been sitting on the side of my bed.

One of my youngn’s has been snitching some of the candy. It wasn’t hard to determine when comparing the teeth marks. (I will protect their identity, but you can be pretty sure it wasn’t “thing 3… that would have been a tooth-mark”).

Her sins found her out pretty quickly.

But, that doesn’t nearly compare to the lady in this story.

Now HERE is a marketable skill!

Great intentions for the weekend. Saturday night was supposed to be a birthday party for Thing 1. However early in the day on Saturday, I felt that something was not quite right. By lunch time (or lack thereof), I was getting to know my porcelain friend.

So we had to call 16 little girls and tell them they could put away their princess costumes for a week. The “ball” had been postponed. That made me feel worse than my illness.

Sunday morning, things were starting to feel better, but I was just weak and didn’t have much of an appitite (as you may not after reading this entry thus far).

I felt bad about wasting a day in bed, but then remembered that the day was filled with 2 play-0ff football games and the season premier of 24. Not a bad day to be ill.

24 didn’t fail me, with its 2 hours of unbelievable (as in “there is no way this would ever happen”) action. In the first minutes of the show, one of my favorite characters was gunned down(spoiler link here).

Congratulations to the journalism students at my High School Alma Mater for breaking a pretty big story.

http://www.startribune.com/1592/story/179500.html

I never got along well with much of the “Pony Express” staff when I was there a decade ago, but that may be because I always had a feeling they could take over the world.

(Later edit…)

Holy cow, I just re-read my post. I wasn’t there a decade ago. I was finishing my second year of college a decade ago.

I am getting old!

I saw a letter jacket yesterday with an “11” for the year. I remember going to school with “91’s” THAT’S 20 YEARS FOLKS!!!

(Later, Later edit)

Wow… my second year of college 10 years ago. I started a part time job with my current employer May of my Sophmore year.

In May, I will have been with the company for 10 years.

For a Gen Xer who entered the workforce at the peak of the technology/employment bubble, I would say that’s pretty good.

I am not a big pet person, but if you want to be creative, consider a gift of a glow-in-the-dark pig.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/01/12/taiwan.pig.reut/index.html

My computer died this week. The hard drive made a funny noise, then nothing…

I went from having 8 Gig free on my hard drive, to having 32 Gig free on my new hard drive.

Needless to say, stuff was lost.

I was in the habit of backing up, so things aren’t as bad as they could have been. I am just slowly discovering what exactly was lost, as I go through my normal computing.

I have born witness to the great battle between “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Holidays”. Now it is getting a bit sick.

I work/play/study/socialize in many Christian circles. It has gotten to the point where the word “Holiday” is often frowned upon.

I was at church recently and commented on a recipe I had received. I mentioned it would be great for the holiday parties.

I was quickly corrected; “Don’t you mean Christmas parties?”

“No”, I stated, “I will not be having a Christmas party on New Year’s Eve”.

Completely Unrelated

I was sent this link to a facinating commercial. (thanks to Whitey)

I love it when real effects are used in place of CG effects.

www.bravia-advert.com

Here is another interesting example of odd news writing style.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/12/15/presidential.poll/index.html

Because I know the live version is constantly being edited, I will post it as it exists at the time of my publication.

What I want you to notice is that, in this article about an upcoming campaign, it isn’t until the 15th paragraph (if you can call them paragraphs since most of them consist of one sentence) that we given a glimpse at what the specifc race is.

I will admit that I knew immediately what race they were talking about, so perhaps they have enough faith in their readers to know that it is a detail upon which they do not need to waste bits. However, it does seem like the most basic of information to the story. It may well have been the New York Senatorial race they were mentioning.

Here is the text of the article as it appears now.

(CNN) — If the results of a recent poll pan out, voters will see two big names from the Big Apple on the ballot in November 2008.

Those names are Sen. Hillary Clinton, a Democrat, and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Republican.

The CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released Thursday indicated Clinton and Giuliani were the early favorites to win their respective party’s nomination.

But those polled said they believe the former first lady would have a smoother path to the nomination than her GOP counterpart.

Conducted December 9-11, the telephone poll asked 393 registered voters who described themselves as Republicans and 446 registered voters who described themselves as Democrats who they were most likely to support in their respective primaries.

The survey had a sampling error of plus or minus 5 percentage points.

Clinton snared the majority of the Democratic voters polled. And with more than two years before the primaries, she was ahead of her two nearest potential competitors by nearly 30 percentage points.

Giuliani, on the other hand, edged out Sen. John McCain of Arizona by only 8 percentage points, 30-22.

Another 18 percent of those polled selected Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, despite her repeated assertion that she has no plans to run.

Bringing up the rear on the GOP side were Sen. George Allen, of Virginia, 7 percent; Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, 3 percent; Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, 3 percent; and Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, 2 percent.

The remaining 15 percent of Republicans polled said they would support someone else.

Clinton was the favorite of 43 percent of the Democrats polled. Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts and Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina — the party’s candidates in 2004 — each had 14 percent.

Eight percent of the Democrats polled selected Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware; 3 percent chose Virginia Gov. Mark Warner; another 3 percent picked New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson; 1 percent opted for Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana; and 1 percent favored Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack.

The remaining 13 percent of Democrats polled said they would support another candidate.

The 2008 presidential race could be the most wide-open contest in more than five decades.

With President Bush unable to seek another term and Vice President Dick Cheney insisting he won’t succeed him, the table is set for the first race since 1952 in which neither a sitting president nor a vice president is on the ballot.

In that race, Republican Dwight Eisenhower defeated Democrat Adlai Stevenson by a landslide electoral vote of 442 to 89.