Happy New Year

Waiting for a friend to pick me up to go to lunch, I walked around the yard today, taking winter photos. Enjoy the tour of the yard as I recall Christmas day!. So here is how Christmas went. Christmas was great. I spent it with a few friends in town. At one point on Christmas morning, we drove around in Athens, and were admiring how closed down the city was. "Yay!" we'd say, passing a closed and shuttered Wal-Mart. "Good for them!" we'd shout when passing an empty mall. It was also spooky. Weird that there were literally NO cars (lol, except ours) on the city streets. It was like Day One on "Life After People."

We returned to their house and started making brunch. They had just gotten back the evening before from North Carolina, having visited their daughter and son-in-law for Christmas Eve. Therefore, there was no turkey cooking, lol, but we were thrilled with making 15 grain toast, home fries, and omelets. Retiring to the living room, we watched "A Little House on the Prairie Christmas", hokey I know but sweet and charming also. After that, we exchanged gifts and talked until early evening. That was Christmas.

This Christmas vacation since then  has also been great. I've had plenty of time to do what I love best: read, write, and research. I read Christian novels. I usually spend most of my day researching deep hermeneutics, bible interpretation, and my brain longs for something lighter by the time night comes and it's time to kick back. I read a very good Christian book called "Tides of Truth: Deeper Water." I liked it very much and appreciated the character development and scene-setting. Best of all, it is the first book in a series so there are more coming. I read some other books too but they are forgettable, only time-passers designed to provide their part in a relaxing night-time apartment environment.

Yesterday I spent a good amount of time at the library tutoring another friend on how to use the internet. She is fearful but curious, so we brought our laptops, set them up in tandem at the back table so we wouldn't disturb anyone,  and dove in. Today I went to Olive Garden with a friend who had received a gift certificate and she called me to share it with! Woo-hoo!  We enjoyed lunch very much. I had that great special, the endless soup and salad and breadsticks thing. I admit I had two bowls of salad. If I could make dressing like that I would eat salads every day. I saw a bunch of friends at the restaurant, which was great.

Being in Athens already, and making use of the gas, we did some errands after lunch. She had to go to a vitamin store in the mall, and lo and behold the vitamin store had bulk nasal salt! I've been looking for that since I moved to Georgia. I can get nasal salt for my neti pot/ nasal wash at the local drug stores, but it is in pre-packaged packets, like sugar is. 100 to a box and it's kind of expensive, $11.00. This jar was $5.50 and offered about the same amount of nasal washes. I use the stuff when I have a cold or bronchitis and I would not live without my nasal salt!. I definitely felt like I'd scored!

My friend had a couple more errands to do, one of them being the Christian bookstore in town, an always fun stop. I leafed through a Chuck Norris book, "written by the actual Chuck Norris!" but I wasn't temped to buy anything I had browsed in the store. Back home, I made some tea and checked my Facebook page. And then wrote a blog entry!

Happy 2010!

Party crashers make good point

Merry Christmas from Bert and Luke!

source

Sundays are for Masterpiece Theatre

I spent a wonderful evening Sunday watching a reprise of Masterpiece Theatre's "Cranford." I hadn't see it on its first go-round, so I was delighted to stumble across this fantastically well-written and funny drama. The ripostes, the retorts, the language...it was music to my ears. Further, it brought to mind happy high school days.

You see, I am a nerd. A geek. A brain. Someone people edge away from because of my social ineptitude and penchant for seques that are far removed from current conversation but which to me, make perfect sense. In high school, I felt that spending an evening outside and cold, uncomfortable on wet bleachers, and screaming my head off for the football win was less than desirable. So I stayed home and watched I, Claudius. The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Elizabeth R, I, Claudius, Upstairs, Downstairs, crown jewels of the Masterpiece Theatre of the 1970s. Like I said. Geek.

Watching Cranford brought back all that I love about period pieces with high wit and good writing, great costumes and a moral point. An example of the writing:

"Put no further pastries to your lips for you will choke when you hear the news I must report."

"Miss Deborah Jenkyns: I would prefer it if I did not enjoy oranges;   consuming them is a most incommodious business."

LOL. Anyway, I recommend Cranford. Masterpiece Theatre, 9 pm Sundays. It's better than football!

Merry Mao Christmas!

 Breitbart's Exclusive: Transvestites, Mao And Obama Ornaments Decorate White House Christmas Tree

Why let a holiday season come between the White House and making some political statements? The White House pegged controversial designer Simon Doonan to oversee the Christmas decorations for the White House. Mr. Doonan, who is creative director of Barney’s New York has often caused a stir with his design choices. Like his naughty yuletide window display of Margaret Thatcher as a dowdy dominatrix and Dan Quayle as a ventriloquist’s dummy. For this year’s White House, he didn’t disappoint.

These photos of ornaments on the White House Christmas tree in the Blue Room were taken just days ago. Of course, Mao has his place in the White House.

And, of course, it wouldn’t be Christmas without an ornament of legendary transvestite Hedda Lettuce.

He/She even signed it:

And, so soon after collecting the Nobel Peace Prize, why wouldn’t the White House have an ornament super-imposing President Obama onto Mt. Rushmore:

Post from Andrew Breitbart's Big Government.

Ice, Georgia style

Anything frozen is an attraction to a Georgian. Ice doesn't last long down here, so when I saw that the edge of a puddle in my yard had frozen overnight, I took some microphotos of it.

Corner View: Books

Jane's Corner View this week is "Books." Be sure to check out the link which links to all the other Corner Views on this week's theme!

City Lights Books, San Francisco


City Lights is an independent bookstore- publisher combination that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics. It also houses the nonprofit City Lights Foundation, which publishes selected titles related to San Francisco culture. It was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin (who left two years later). Both the store and the publishers became widely known following the obscenity trial of Ferlinghetti for publishing Allen Ginsberg's influential poem Howl and Other Poems...

It is a mecca of the Beats, the crowd that came to the fore in the late 1940s and early 1950s. "In 1953, as Ferlinghetti was walking past the Artigues Building, he encountered Martin out front hanging up a sign that announced a "Pocket Book Shop." He introduced himself as a contributor to Martin's magazine City Lights, and told him he had always wanted a bookstore. Before long he and Martin agreed to a partnership. Each man invested $500."

I love traveling and where I am, if there is something related to books, I go there. Paris was Shakespeare & Co. and Gertrude Stein's house; Key West meat Hemingway's house where he wrote A Farewell to Arms and To Have and Have to among others; Florence meat walking where Dante walked and his house is still there...anyway, San Francisco meant ground zero for the Beats, and Richard Brautigan. I love Brautigan's works, and for a time, chased down the more elusive ones vigorously. Walking in to City Lights Books, with its warped floors and steeped history was thrilling. And all the books! Floor after floor.

Ahhh, books. I love them.

'Obamaville' sign posted near homeless camp

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KRDO) -- Someone has put a lot of thought into a welcome sign that may surprise you, it's in front of a homeless camp off I-25 in Colorado Springs. Its message, "Welcome to Obamaville, Colorado's fastest growing community." Despite repeated calls no one could answer the question, who put up the sign? To some homeless the sign's message says enough. Mark Limonez, a homeless man living in "tent city", says the sign doesn't make him feel good about trying to get back on his feet. "Guys are trying to work but there's not enough work out there, so they go pan handling or flag a sign" Limonez says, "I've never seen so many camps since I've been out in the streets - there's no money." There are no logos on the front of the sign and no clues to where it comes from.

White rose in December

This rose is in my North Georgia yard, on a mature bush that blooms heartily in summer with lots of roses. We've had three hard frosts yet this rose is blooming in December. Is this unusual?

Corner View: Evening

Jane at Spain Daily has a themed weekly blog entry going, called Corner View. It's the view from our little corner of the world. This week's theme was "evening.," Here's mine, and be sure to check out Jane's other participants' Corner Views, listed at her blog, linked above.

My tiger cat Bert is literally evening and also emblematic of evening. After a long day at school, I come home at 3pm to my second shift, writing. I run an e-mail free subscription prophecy newsletter, and I also run an end time blog. That, and the occasional newspaper column plus this blog's writings, keep me busy all evening. I write at my kitchen table on my laptop, and Bert and my other cat Luke doze on the couch. But around 7 pm I call it quits and curl up on the couch with them. By this time of the evening I'm in my comfy clothes, usually sweats and a loose cotton shirt, with the afghan tucked around my knees. The remote is handy, so I don't have to get up. See, that is what it's all about in the evening, how long can I go without having to get up? I have my tea and my bible, which I read a bit before turning on the tv.

So, relaxed kitties, gentle reading, some innocuous tv, and a couch. That's my evening.