| Wednesday, May 30, 2007 |
| I'm undecided... |
Heh, look Jen, I tied for Deanna and a Redshirt!!!
Your results:
You are Deanna Troi
| Deanna Troi |
| 75% |
| An Expendable Character (Redshirt) |
| 75% |
| Will Riker |
| 70% |
| James T. Kirk (Captain) |
| 70% |
| Geordi LaForge |
| 60% |
| Beverly Crusher |
| 60% |
| Leonard McCoy (Bones) |
| 50% |
| Uhura |
| 45% |
| Chekov |
| 45% |
| Mr. Scott |
| 40% |
| Jean-Luc Picard |
| 40% |
| Mr. Sulu |
| 25% |
| Spock |
| 22% |
| Worf |
| 20% |
| Data |
| 15% |
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You are a caring and loving individual.
You understand people's emotions and
you are able to comfort and counsel them.
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Click here to take the Star Trek Personality Quiz |
posted by Jen @ 10:28 PM  |
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| What's that noise? |
I had difficulties falling asleep last night, and then around 6 AM I woke up hearing something strange... Is that water dripping? It didn't sound like rain so much as dripping water. Know what I mean? When it rains there's usually more of a background noise, but I didn't hear any of that. Having left the sprinkler on all night a few nights ago (doh!!) I was a little paranoid, so I crawled out from under the covers and peeked out my window. It was rain! A very, very light rain. I couldn't see the rain falling, but I saw it dripping off the porch. Whee!! We haven't had any rain in almost a month, so this is quite welcome. My car was very pleased this morning, too. Regardless of how many times I wash it, all the very dry dust and dirt in the air makes it look horrible again within a day. Anyway - it was 6 AM and I was done sleeping.
So I slept for about 4 hours last night. This is becoming a trend...I'm like those idiotic commercials with the animated butterfly or the lampshade that flits around peoples' heads. About twice a week I have a hard time falling asleep, and then can't stay asleep to save my life. I may just be excited (or stressed?) about freshman camp - it is sneaking up pretty fast. I dunno.
Kas' baby bro is getting married on Saturday. The wedding will be outside, so the rain can only stay a couple days. :) The rehearsal will be Friday evening in Crestview, and I told Cam that he and I would be on our own that evening as everyone else was involved somehow in the ceremony. It also just happens to be payday (woot!) so I told him I'd take him out to dinner, and would even let him choose the place. Where does my child want to go? He wants to go to Ichiban. For sushi. Fried tofu and at least one eel roll. We went to Panda Chinese over the weekend and they have a sushi bar - he went up and was like, "Can I just try two of everything?" The guy rolling it grinned and put two of everything on his plate. He tried a California roll and liked it. I thought he would like the ones with cream cheese, but he wasn't all that impressed. He did NOT like the crab salad-looking ones at all. But he tried - bonus points for that!
Cam got straight As on his last report card. He got his Standford 9 results back the last day of school - the best way to describe the test is as a pre-FCAT test. They tested various reading skills, various math skills, and then "environment" skills, which is everything else: science, social studies, etc. He scored lowest on reading comprehension - a low 3rd grade level (he was in 2nd grade at the time) and highest in math problem solving: a very high 5th grade level. Yeah. So all those times I laughed about having to put Aunt Fay on speed dial for math homework help? That will come back to bite me in the butt shortly.
I start UWF in the fall. I attempted to finish filling out my FAFSA online last night...it didn't go very well at all. Before I gave up in complete frustration I realized that while I don't have any money to speak of, we are not nearly poor enough to be considered POOR. We don't have money, but what we do have plenty of is W2s. I have one from the store, one from the school district, and a 1099 from the Boosters. TJ had one from the BOCC, one from PJC, and I'm pretty sure there was one other, but I can't remember which job it was for. There were countless bank statements, student loan statements, a day care statement, and investment statements to go through. I gave up and will try to wade through it again tonight with TJ's help. He's done it once to file the taxes, so I stand a much better chance of surviving with him there.
I need to get my medical records together and get whatever shots I need out of the way. Blah. I need to find out where to go to track that info down...I'm off to do something more productive! See y'all later! |
| posted by Jen @ 9:16 AM |
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| Tuesday, May 29, 2007 |
| I'm quirky, too! |
Thanks to Maevyn for this quiz. Interestingly enough, we both scored Katharine Hepburn. Heh...go figure.
Your Score: Katharine Hepburn You scored 21% grit, 33% wit, 38% flair, and 19% class!
You are the fabulously quirky and independent woman of character. You go your own way, follow your own drummer, take your own lead. You stand head and shoulders next to your partner, but you are perfectly willing and able to stand alone. Others might be more classically beautiful or conventionally woman-like, but you possess a more fundamental common sense and off-kilter charm, making interesting men fall at your feet. You can pick them up or leave them there as you see fit. You share the screen with the likes of Spencer Tracy and Cary Grant, thinking men who like strong women.
Find out what kind of classic leading man you'd make by taking the
Classic Leading Man Test.
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| posted by Jen @ 4:52 PM |
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| Sunday, May 27, 2007 |
| I need a(nother) vacation |
Well, it's been a week, and I'm mostly recovered from our little vacation to New Orleans. We really did have a great time - the wireless was a little spotty so I couldn't do as much online as I'd have liked, but hey. I'm cool with that. I've finally managed to get my pics in my online album the way I want them.
Before I give you the link, you need to know this: you'll have to register to be able to see the pics. All the info is on MY site and through MY server, so you don't have to worry about your email or name or anything getting out onto some freaky mailing list anywhere. When you get to the album there should be a button up on the top left that says "register"....just click it and follow the instructions. I'll have to approve the registration (I apologize for the hoops you have to jump through, but I'd rather do this than have the pics open to god and everybody), but once I do you'll have access to my complete album. Please...be gentle. LOL
So, after all that, here's a link to my album. There's an album titled "vacations"...the New Orleans trip is there. Note it's the ONLY vacation so far. ...sigh... Email me if you have any questions!Labels: vacation |
| posted by Jen @ 12:21 PM |
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| Saturday, May 19, 2007 |
| Sweet! |
The place we're staying has turned out to be amazing! I've taken lots of pics and will try to get some up here if my spotty wifi connection will hold out long enough. The pic to the right was taken from one of the doors that leads to an adjoining room. The hallway is brick, with wood beams scattered throughout. The doorway in the extreme right is the bathroom, and a closet is between the bathroom and the bedroom. you can see the table (with my laptop - heh), the white fireplace, and a smidge of the bed.
This is a view facing sort of toward where I was. There are three twin beds in this room, 2 are pushed together to make a king. My favorite parts of the room are the chandelier and the dark wood beams. Very nice! The floors are a very dark wood, too.
There are other rooms and more pics, but I'm going to move along. The pic to the right is of a part of the courtyard. The steps to the left lead up to an upstairs apartment - there are actually two upstairs apartments in the main house. The stairs to the right are to the top floor of the slave's quarters, where the owners (and their doxies!) live. There's a really cool frog statue there that I got a great pic of, but I'll post it later.
 We got in around noon yesterday and got unpacked. We stashed the car and went down to the Riverfront Mall to get some lunch, and then went to the Aquarium. Kas and Billy had never been - and it's just fun! Frank, the pic to the left is for you. "Whee-SNAW!" Tell Clark that I have a pic for him too, but it's not NEARLY as funny as this one. :)
We headed back to the B&B to rest a little while, and then went out to drink and get dinner, and then did a Ghost tour. It was pretty cool - very educational and not at all the idiotic "jump out and scare them" kind of thing. Not something I'd do again, though. My buzz wore off about halfway through, and it wasn't the walking that hurt my feet and back, but the standing for long periods of time while the guide talked. Then we drank some more, and headed back to the B&B.
I woke up this morning around 6:30...I'm almost completely unable to sleep late any longer. Even on vacation! I got up and showered, and then took a nice, hot bath. I'm currently sitting across from the kitchen, wondering why I didn't start a pot of coffee yet, and waiting on the owners (incredibly nice people, with two little doxies) to bring us our complimentary piping hot croissants for breakfast. I'm also staring at a fresh, unopened bottle of Baileys. It's calling to me. :) Time for coffee! |
| posted by Jen @ 8:01 AM |
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| Thursday, May 17, 2007 |
| Happy dance! |
In 11 hours, the adults of Paulding Manor will be on the road on the way to New Orleans, Louisiana for the weekend. The crown prince of Paulding Manor will be spending the weekend with my mother-in-law. The grown-ups plan to party our buttocks off (hee...'buttocks') while he bonds with Grandma. Thanks Grandma!!!!
I plan to bring my laptop and camera, and I leave with every intention of blogging while away...assuming I can remember how to type. :) As for now, I'm too excited to sleep. ...sigh... |
| posted by Jen @ 10:50 PM |
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| Sunday, May 13, 2007 |
| Pic from the banquet |
One of the band parents saw me taking pics at the Banquet and she asked me if I'd gotten any with my son...and I had, in fact, NOT. She offered to take one, and here's the result:
I had my pinky fingers in his armpits because he kept crossing his eyes, and I was apparently grinning like a loon. Anyway - there we are - ain't we cute? |
| posted by Jen @ 8:50 PM |
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| Time flies... |
So here we are, at the tail end of another school year. Summer band? Check. Football season? Check. Concert season? Check. Band banquet? Check. All we lack now is graduation, and that will be next week. Granted, had you asked me November if the year was going by quickly, I'd have asked if YOU wanted to go to football games every Friday for 4 months, and then cheerfully throttled you. :)
So let's chat about the Band Banquet, shall we? I decided in September that I wanted to put all the pics I was taking of the kids at games and various competitions together into a slideshow for the Banquet. Nothing fancy with music or anything - just a constant revolution of nicely captioned pictures, in as close to sequential order as I can achieve. Simple, yes? Heh. If you agreed with that, you obviously don't know me very well.
I asked some of the parents I'd seen taking pics throughout the year if they had any they would like to contribute to the cause. I wasn't thinking that this would A) postpone the project until I had all the pics, and B) create MORE work for myself. The first thing I did? Procrastinate!! I told the lady in charge of the banquet what I was going to do, and she made arrangements for me to be able to do it. I still hadn't started.
About 2 weeks ago I realized that I ought to get started captioning all the images, and then immediately realized that I hadn't transferred my Photoshop over to my new laptop. There was no way in HELL I was going to go into each image and type "Emerald Coast Marching Classic" or "FBA Competition" or "Gator Bowl Parade" or whatever the caption was to be. I had to wait for Billy to transfer the program for me. We moved it over Monday night - 6 days before the banquet.
I started captioning the images Thursday evening. Billy recommended that I dump all the images into Windows Movie Maker (WMM from now on) and turn it into more of a movie than just a slideshow. Sure, ok. (oh, if only I had known then what I know now...) Friday I got down to business. I had all the images captioned and filed away in separate folders arranged by event, and all the events were in chronological order.
WMM is obviously one of Microsoft's more evil inventions. I don't know if Bill Gates found out that I'm doing my damnedest to find a plug in that will sync my PDA with Thunderbird so I can get rid of Outlook or what, but WMM caused me more grief and pain than anything I can recall in recent memory. I spent two days working on JUST making this movie, and I mean 5 hours at a time, and had nothing but little red patches on my cheeks and a vein throbbing on my forehead to show for it. I did get to experiment with various combinations of swear words - that part was fun - but nothing to show for it. My brand new laptop bogged down MISERABLY when I ran WMM, and it took nearly 10 minutes to load the project after every reboot that followed the program crashing.
I needed to leave between 4:30 and 5 to get there early enough to set up, and I spent 3:30 - 4:30 getting ready and still futzing with the godforsaken movie. At that point, I had an epiphany. Threatening my laptop with a swirlie is NOT going to get this movie done. I scrapped everything I had been working on the past week, and went into my nice, simple image viewing program. I clicked 'file,' 'slideshow,' 'and dumped in all the images, clicked 'save as' and POOF, I was done.
I took Billy and Cam with me to the banquet. TJ was scheduled to teach Fire Academy that day, and they were scheduled for a live burn (they set the fire tower on fire and send the youngsters in), so he was out. I thought Billy would be ideal in the event something dreadful happened with my slideshow (I mean really, the way things had gone to this point?), so off we go. We got there and hauled up my laptop, the projector, extension cords, tape, and everything we could possibly need. Then we find out that the screen we're supposed to use is like 50 feet away from where they set up the cart for the projector we brought. That's a little TOO far.
I went to set the rest of my stuff down and Billy futzed with the projector for a while, and when I returned, he was talking to some guy in a UWF shirt (we were in the Conference Center there). I don't know how they found each other, and I can make many, MANY jokes about tech nerds being able to sniff each other out of a crowd -but I won't!- but this was the guy in charge of the technical bits of the center. He asked if we wanted to hook up to the Center's large overhead, and Billy said, "Sure!" He was drooling over it from the time he came in - it's enormous, y'all. There were at least two dozen ports on the back for various inputs and outputs, and as if that wasn't enough...there was a remote for it that did everything but wipe your behind. It even had a laser pointer built in!
So I went to check in with the lady in charge, and she said to see if they were going to charge for it - she didn't sign up for that because there was a charge for it. Hmm. I moseyed over to where Billy and his new best friend were hooking everything up and said, "Um, this wasn't in the contract, so-" and he smiled and says, "Don't worry about it. It's nice to find someone that understands it and enjoys it as much as I do." Hee!!! So we got the overhead for free!
Every year the Banquet's theme is set on the theme of our halftime show. This year it was "The Rise and Fall of Rome", so we had columns everywhere, laurel wreaths on every surface, and even flags hanging from the ceiling. Very nice decor. You'll never guess what kind of salad...wait for it....wait....hee! Caesar salad! Ha!
We got set up, my boss called me from the Commons (where we had it last time) asking where everyone was, and I got him headed in the right direction. He got there and we let the kids in. The dress was "Sunday best or your best Senate toga" so we had about 2 dozen people come in togas. I set up my slideshow and we went off to eat.
Overall, it was a GREAT night. We ate, then my boss and I talked up at the podium; we passed out awards for service, and then got some gifts ourselves. We announced next year's student leaders, and then the dance started. I ran the slideshow throughout the dance so the parents would have plenty to do while the kids ran around acting like monkeys.
I got a very nice framed scrapbook page with pics of me and the kids on it, and then two of the freshmen parents made my boss and I entire scrapbooks for the year. They are amazing! That made me tear up a little. I wasn't expecting anything like that. I got a lot of compliments on the slideshow, and one parent suggested I rip it to CD or DVD and sell it for $5 as a fund raiser. I would have to get back into WMM to do that, but I think that I could start over and maybe do it in a more timely manner...it could work. :)Labels: Band |
| posted by Jen @ 8:07 PM |
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| Wednesday, May 09, 2007 |
| um, where was I? |
Let's see...time to play catch-up.
Running: I did the first two days on week 2 without a hitch. They were by far the best runs EVER. Then Billy ran with me for the 3rd day, and I didn't think I was going to survive, much less finish the run. That was when I decided that while I appreciate the company, I run better alone. So Monday night Billy and I went to the park together, MP3 players in tow, and I did my run/walk thing and he ran. It was better than the last one, but not NEARLY as good as the first two. I was actually thinking about moving up to week 3, but not so much now.
Dieting: Doing well. I lost 2.5 pounds last week, and I don't know if the leaders were just in a really good mood or if they were playing it up for the new girl signing up to join, but I got a "way to go," a couple "attagirls," and the announcement of, "Jennifer, you have lost fifty-nine pounds!!" I mean, not that I'm ungrateful, but it's really only 2.5 pounds less than the LAST time I was there. I still have about 15 pounds till I hit my next big goal - and then my reward. :) I won't post about that here, though.
Everything else: Kind of a broad category, but there you go. School: almost over. Work: going well. Family: doing great. I'm leaving for New Orleans in just over a week - VERY excited about that. For now, though, I need to go get Cam and get his hair cut - the Banquet is this weekend and he looks like an English Sheepdog. |
| posted by Jen @ 9:45 AM |
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| Tuesday, May 01, 2007 |
| It was almost TOO easy... |
I moved up to Week 2 last night, with so little fuss and fanfare that I'm almost suspicious. All this time I've been worried about going from 60s running to 90s running...I mean, I could always tell when I hit 45s because my lungs went into a panic attack. I'd start breathing too fast and would lose whatever semblance of rhythm I had going and would just sort of flounder for the remaining 15s of my run. What the hell was I supposed to do when 45s became the halfway point? Yikes!
The first run was amazing. I didn't even look at the stopwatch until 1m 15s - which is most of the way there. Whoo hoo! The first two runs I ended up doing 90s running/90s walking because I'm an idiot and didn't remember the instructions. So I was actually cutting off WALKING time...ignorant!! The last two runs were the hardest, but still quit doable.
I finished the full 20 minutes without adding time to walks or shaving off time from runs, and tried harder this time to keep a steady pace. I also noticed that I'm getting my toes up when I run now - when I started I had this awkward flat-footed running thing happening that was just plain ugly to watch. I still look like a lumbering moose when I run, but at least I'm a lumbering moose with her toes up. As a marching band instructor, that makes me feel better. I'm wondering if I'll get some more of those "first time" aches and pains now that I've stepped up a little. I suppose I'll find out tonight. :)
On another note, I have plans for this weekend. I refuse to put them in print for fear that they will not come to pass, so you'll just have to wait until this weekend to find out. Neener neener!Labels: running |
| posted by Jen @ 11:21 AM |
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