Rocks on the bank of Little River
May 5, 2009
Great Smoky Mountains National Park
(
photo gallery)
While we were on our trip in May, we watched almost no television.
While we’ve watched a bit more television since we got home, for me it’s been primarily limited to a half hour of local news and a half hour of national news in the evening. Karen watches a little bit more, but she’s not even watching her one soap on a daily basis.
We’ve had satellite television forever, it seems. We bought one of those big systems back in the 80s back when everything could be snatched out of the air for free.
Whenever it’s been available, we’ve always had premium movie networks, starting the first time we had cable TV.
The reason we went with satellite way-back-when was that cable was not available where we live and wouldn’t be “for a long time, if ever.”
The movie package we had for a long time was HBO/Cinemax. Then, a couple of years ago, we went with “all” available premium movie channels, and, then later dropped HBO/Cinemax. But we still had all of the rest — and we had the maximum package of other channels, over 250, most of which don’t have anything on that we’d be interested in, if we were interested in watching TV.
With our current viewing habits, that just doesn’t make sense, does it?
During the period of time that we had all of the movie channels, I recorded quite a few movies and most of them have yet to be watched. If we want to watch a movie, we have plenty to watch — or we can just rent one.
Time that we used to spend watching television is now used for other things.
It only made sense to stop wasting money on something we don’t use. We don’t get network TV here without the satellite receiver, so we needed to maintain at least minimum service.
Earlier in the week, I canceled all of our premium movie channels and dropped the number of channels we get from over 250 to just over 100.
It cut the monthly bill in half.
I guess it’s something we should have done long ago. Maybe we need to check to see if they “ever” brought cable out our way.
Do you have cable or satellite TV? If so, do you use all of the services that you are paying for?
Day 7
Started November 1, 2008: 285.6 lbs
Last week = 277 lbs.
This week = 275 lbs.
4 lbs over the 2 weeks of the holidays!
See other participants’ results at Blog to Fit – Wednesday Weigh-In.
Safety moment:
While exercise is an important component of health and fitness, doing it safely is also important. Unusual exertion when the body is not used to it can be dangerous. If you’re not used to exercise, it may be prudent to start slowly and, possibly, consult with a physician or exercise specialist.
Proper exercise and use of exercise/weight equipment is also important.
Unfortunately, on New Year’s Day, one of my former students and, later, department manager, had a tragic accident in his home when he was benchpressing alone. He was 49 years old and was alway fit and in shape.
Be safe while you get fit.
I had to take it under my tongue — and boy does it taste crappy!
I’ve got a dentist appointment in less than an hour — to have a tooth “surgically extracted” plus some other work.
I’m not very good about going to the dentist. It used to be a lot worse. I really hated going and I would put it off until I really had to.
However, the guy I’m going to now is pretty good. You see, he caters to “dental cowards.”
I have a prescription for xanax for appointments — one tablet the night before and another (under the tongue) an hour before the appointments to reduce my dental anxiety.
Then at the office I get gas before the novacaine. I usually don’t feel much until it’s all over.
When I was a kid, I think I only went to the dentist once or twice and never had any cavities. The water in the town we lived in in western Nebraska was fluoridated. At 15, I moved to the Houston Texas area and the water there was not fluoridated. I never went to the dentist there. When I was 20, I had the opportunity for dental work in San Diego — at Navy boot camp. That was brutal and probably why I have such an aversion to dentists. And 5 years away from fluoridated water had left me with a mouth full of cavities.
Boy, does that xanax taste crappy!
Okay — so it’s for a catalog.
And she’s only five — and our granddaughter.
We think it’s very cool.
It’s a school and library supply company and she’s on the cover of the 2008 catalog. The website description of the catalog says, “…. thousands of quality products in one place. Library supplies, AV supplies, and equipment, signage & display, furniture, Library Promotions™, learning materials, and more. A huge variety to choose from!”
Coincidentally with this, her mother found a picture of her in a Land’s End ad that she hadn’t seen yet. We’ve seen the picture in catalogs, just not in this location online. I think they’ve had this picture in at least two catalogs, except it had been photo-shopped with a different color for the coat.
The top Democratic party candidates were all on the same stage.
Three guys — a white, a black, and a Hispanic — and a woman.
How many jokes have you heard that started out something like that?
This, however, was not a joke. It’s amazing — and it’s America!
What I am referring to, of course, is the Democratic debate in New Hampshire sponsored by Facebook. They were randomly arranged in the order I described earlier, John Edwards, Barrack Obama, Bill Richardson, and Hilary Clinton.
What was really neat for me is that the diversity of the field didn’t strike me until late in the debate when I noticed how much Bill Richardson’s Hispanic heritage showed. Then it was, “Oh, wow!”
I watched both debates. They were strikingly different in tone and in substance.
I don’t generally watch debates until after the conventions when the parties’ presidential and vice-presidential candidates face off. These debates, though, were an opportunity to see the major candidates for both parties in a very short period of time.
The Republicans fielded five white guys.
The Democrats sent three guys — a white, a black, and a Hispanic — and a woman.
How amazing is that?
Can you remember having fun like these boys? I can!
Wishing all of you Happy Holidays! and many merry, happy memories!
I had stopped at Darren Rowse’s Digital Photography School and, after I left a comment, I saw an ad that interested me so I clicked on it.
The ad opened up and I read a few words.
My audio happened to be turned on and was set rather loud.
Normally I leave my computer turned on at night with the audio off so that incoming mail doesn’t wake us. This morning I had listened to something where the audio was rather quiet and I had to turn it up to hear it.
So when a guy started talking about whatever the heck it was that the ad was about, I jumped — it startled me, you see — and closed that browser window.
If I could go back and take back that click, I would!
No… I’ve reconsidered. I like it the way that it is.
Darren got whatever Google will pay him for that click and the advertiser will have to pay for it, even though I left and didn’t even have time to get a good look at his site.
I do NOT like audio that comes on automatically when I open a website, unless I know it in advance or reasonably expect it, as I would if I were going to a music site. If my sound is on and an audio clip starts, I’m gone!
And I might even blog about it, too!
But, I’m not going to mention the site I left, because, even if I remembered it, they’re not getting free traffic from me.
Related post: If your blog has music automatically start playing…
Actually, the head-line is intentionally misleading. We “fed up” pretty good with an early Christmas dinner, but we found it prudent to leave half a day early.
Our daughter actually was the one that suggested that we leave early.
The weather was a bit disappointing the entire time we were visiting. It was very foggy the entire time we were there, so much so that we were not able to see any of the countryside when we went anywhere except just what was right next to the road. With the amount of snow that was on the ground, it would have been really pretty — if we could have seen it.
We’ve been watching the forecast for this weekend since we got there on Wednesday and making contingency plans just in case. Saturday morning, our plans were to leave the hotel Sunday morning and go over to our daughter’s for a few hours, giving the road crews a chance to do whatever clearing they needed to do. At that time, the forecast was for two to four inches of snow. As the day progressed, the forecast changed to three to eight inches of snow overnight with widespread blowing snow and a chance of additional snow during the day on Sunday.
After our daughter suggested that we leave early, we decided that it would probably be prudent to cut the trip short and avoid potentially snowy roads combined with holiday traffic. We left the hotel at 3:40 P.M. and spent the night in Springfield, Illinois. We’ll be home some time late today (Sunday).
A year is a long time in the on-line world. A large percentage of the blogs out there today will shrivel up and disappear by the end of 2008. Many others will still be there, but posting on them will have slowed down to a trickle… or will have stopped all together.
Most blogs don’t have the staying power to last a year. Look at the archives of the blogs you visit. What percentage only have a few months in them?
Exit78 has been around for a little over a year now. It has gone through several transformations and the URL had to be altered slightly. For some reason, Technorati wasn’t recognizing posts to the original URL.
While posts on the blog go back to December 2005, those before December 2006 were transfered from an earlier blog… one that shriveled up and disappeared. Before that there was a blog on Blogger; that one didn’t last long.
Will I be here posting to Exit78 at the end of 2008?
I’m making this one of my 2008 goals, so, yes, I will be posting here this time next year!
How about you? Will your blog still be here at the end of 2008?
Saturday was day two of our trip home from Virginia. Normally, when we have a long travel day, we try to take breaks where we can get out and walk around a bit to loosen up. Often, we’ll stop at big box stores like Walmart or Lowes, a home improvement store. Sometimes, if we’re lucky or know where they are, we’ll stop at a shopping mall.
With the progress we were making on Saturday, I figured we’d be able to take a break east of Memphis at Wolfchase Galleria mall around lunch time.
What I didn’t fully take into consideration was the time of year and that it was a weekend.
It wasn’t bad getting off I40 and getting into the parking lot. We found a parking spot fairly easily, though we had to walk a ways, but getting in a walk was part of why we were stopping, even if it was in the rain.
Naturally the mall was packed. The food court was totally overrun and I didn’t see an empty table anywhere. All of the food vendors had lines in front of their spaces, most of them pretty small.
I suggested that we just walk the mall and then go find somewhere else to eat, but Karen felt that it would take just as long to go somewhere else.
I wasn’t worried about the time it would take. I just didn’t want the hassle of standing in line and then trying to find a place to sit.
We finally settled on the shortest line — a place that sold pizza and other “Italian” foods. The line moved pretty quickly and soon we were almost at the registers, when…
It was obvious they were trying very hard to keep things moving. There were two guys on the registers. Another fellow was passing food and drinks to the customers. As he was handing over a full drink between the two registers, the cup started gushing soda out of the bottom!
Apparently the cup was defective and wasn’t sealed properly. There was liquid all over the place.
Fortunately, none of our stuff got wet, but it ended up slowing things down.
Once we got our meal paid for, there was the challenge of finding a place to sit. All of the tables appeared to be filled and we made our way around twice through the table area before finding a place where a nice lady made room for us to sit by moving her bags out of the way.
The pizza was still warm… barely, but I can eat pizza at just about any temperature except cold out of the fridge.
Once we were done eating, we made our way around the rest of the mall — one level only as we had a bit of a walk out to the truck in the rain and four more hours drive to home.
We don’t normally go to malls on the weekends during the holidays — it’s a good thing we weren’t shopping.
