I Never Promised You an Organic Garden

Matt and I had a great trip back to Virginia for my mom’s and sister’s birthdays. We had a wonderful time, including some hilarious Wii antics with my mom and sister. (Check out the pictures) Neither of them had ever played before, and it turned into a full contact video game pretty quickly.

We were quite glad to miss out on all the snow here in Richmond and enjoy the 50 degree weather in Virginia. I have to say though, as we were driving home I realized this was one of the first times in my life that I did not dread leaving the comfort of my parents’ house.

(more…)

Well, after two false alarms it seems we might actually be getting a “real” snow storm. It has been snowing all evening, and it is supposed to continue for most of the night. Of course, the last time the meteorologist said we were supposed to get a big snow we got 1/2 an inch.

Oddly enough I am actually looking forward to some snow. Normally it just annoys me, but this year I am longing for a good snow that I can play and sled in. It seems to snow more often here in the mid-west, but we got bigger, more substantial snow storms back home in Virginia.

I remember getting at least one big snow storm almost every winter growing up in Virginia. My sister and I would put on layer after layer of warm clothes, boots, gloves, and itchy wool hats and spend the whole day outside sledding, making snowmen, and eating snow. Then we would come in and set our wet clothes and boots in front of the wood stove to dry for round two.

Living here in the city, where the closest “sledding hill” is a 10 minute car trip away and the snowplow wipes the streets clean before any really accumulation can build, I am missing my country winters in Virginia.

1) Our Wii came

2) We stayed on top of our dirty dishes for one whole week

3) The days are getting longer

4) I have the most wonderful friends here in Richmond and back home in VA

5) I learned new shoulder exercises

6) Racquetball makes the gym entertaining

7) I am doing well on my new year’s resolutions

It is official… we bought a Wii. After three weeks of desperate searching, the McKimmy household finally found a reasonably priced Wii and accessories on eBay and won the auction.

It was quite an interesting experience. Instead of standing in crazy lines every weekend and making innumerable impromptu visits to stores that might sell them, Matt and I employed our technology-know-how to find our Wii. We used rss feeds to craigslist searches for Dayton, Indy, and Cincinnati that emailed us when a new Wii became available, and for a short time even sent me text messages. We also signed up for services like wiialert.com and itrackr.com, which sent us text messages when a wii became available in either brick and mortar or online stores. The technique that finally paid off was an rss feed to a honed search string Matt created that alerted us every minute to any new “buy it now” Wiis that appeared on eBay in our price range.

I am very excited to play with it and hopefully it will be worth all the trouble we went through to get it.

I had to bring back my “Happy Thoughts” post to mention a new version release of Picasa for Linux. (Thanks to Life Hacker and Matthew for showing me this information.) Google has finally released (in beta for now) a new version for Linux that is not only much more stable, but also allows you to upload photos to your Picasa web album quickly and easily from within Picasa.  For me this is great because I have family members who do not use Facebook or any of the other social networking sites, and this is an easy way for them to see my photos online.

I also love Picasa’s photo organization features.  I know a lot of people swear by Flickr, but I love the unified local and remote experience of Picasa.

With a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend just finished, I thought I would post some of the things I am thankful for:

• A great family (mine and Matt’s), who came all the way from Virginia to spend Thanksgiving with Matt and I
• A dog who doesn’t bark at my cat non-stop
• A job I love
• A husband who is a whiz in the kitchen among other things
• Two working vehicles
• An amazing group of friends

I wanted to share a couple interesting items I saw on the web this past week. The first I was pointed to by Mark Stosberg:

Complaints Choir: Complains Choirs have swept eastern Europe and are now becoming popular in the USA & Canada. Essentially a group of people get together, form a choir, come up with a list of complaints and put them to music. There are numerous choirs across the globe but my favorite so far is the choir from Canada:

The second is from the Simpsons’ movie website, and it allows you to create your own Simpsons characters . I of course created Matt and I:

I spoke with my dad this evening and got some not so great news. He has been feeling worse than usual and has had some tests run because there was concern that he might be having some heart problems. Turns out his left ventricle is only working 40% of the time. The Dr. is running more test to see what might be cause of it and what the next step should be.

He suffered a minor stroke back in March at which time they realized the left side of his heart was enlarged but they assumed it was b/c of a history of high blood pressure. Unfortunately, it looks like there is more to the problem than originally anticipated.

In a way this is good because they now have something to work with whereas before there was no real answer to what was making him feel bad. Unfortunately this also means potential for future complications.

I am currently staying upbeat about it and hoping that things will go as smoothly as possible. Please keep him and my mother in your thoughts.

1. I successfully rooted and potted my first baby spider plant
2. It is almost time to wear my favorite leather boots again!
3. I got to talk with Emily for a long time this evening.

I have the urge to blog but can’t think of anything interesting to write about, so I thought I would take the time to post some happy thoughts from the week:

1.  Tomorrow is Friday
2.  Book club was amazing on Tuesday
3. I am finally feeling back to normal — no more inflated balloon syndrome for me
4. I made it to the gym today
5. Hopi is letting me borrow her bike (THANK YOU HOPI!)
6. I’ve already gone on two bike rides this week and plan to bike to work tomorrow
7. I found a great pair of Bermuda shorts at J. C. Penny for only $6

I am still looking for another name for my “Happy Thoughts” section, so if you have any suggestions please share!