Where do they get these people...?

Alright I'll admit I watched it... Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader (or better known as Gameshows for Dummies). This is where they take adults who proclaim to have degrees from UCLA but who couldn't quite pass the auditions for Jeopardy, and have them compete against 10 year olds by answering elementary school questions. Throw in Jeff Foxworthy and you get a gameshow spurned from his joke about "you might be a redneck if your dad walks you to school because you're both in the same grade."

The guy with the UCLA degree needed help on the first 3 questions, and "dropped out" on the 4th for a prize of $5000. The questions he needed help on were like "What month does the holiday Columbus Day fall in?" He guessed September. C'mon gimme a break. Hopefully the board at UCLA were watching and retract his degree.

But then I also don't remember us learning in the 5th grade that the first president to be impeached was Andrew Johnson (who?). In fact, I don't think I knew what "impeached" meant in the 5th grade. I also don't remember figuring the area of a triangle and calculating the length of the sides... are they really teaching things like that in grade school nowadays?

I don't have very high hopes for the next adult contestant either... she struggled on the first question about the name of the ship the Pilgrims sailed to America in... geez, where do they find these people?

Heck, let me be on a game show! We can still have Jeff Foxworthy as a host.... it can be called "What's your husband thinking?"... so sticking with the theme of Foxworthy's jokes I know I have two choices of answers... "I want a beer" or "I wanna see something naked".

This week on Survivor...

Can you believe it took these people this long to figure out how to start a fire? Especially after the show has been on how many seasons now(?) and it's always been the biggest factor was whether the tribe had fire or not... so you'd think before going out to the island they would Google certain topics like, umm, ways to build a friggin fire! We said from day one, you have eyeglasses, use them to start the fire. Didn't any of these people burn ants as a kid???

Tired of still-lifes yet?...

I'm getting there... this time we drew a tree branch, bottles and a pot.

We did do an interesting twist in media though. We took a white sheet of paper and completely blackened it with charcoal. Then we used an eraser to remove the charcoal in the areas we were drawing... so in other words we "DREW" the picture with an ERASER. It was a concept I never would have thought of. Here's the end result:

BTW, there was a mannequin head wearing sunglasses inside the pot, but I opted not to draw it. Just a little too creepy for me in this arrangement, haha. A bit too Silence of the Lambs.

Meet some of the family...

Nothing interesting to tell y'all, so here I'll bore you with some pics of our "children"...

April

Here's a pic of April doing what she does best... begging for food. This shot doesn't do her justice, if you looked up the term "round" in the dictionary you'd see her picture. My mother left April with us when we bought Mom's house... talk about eating her out of house & home...
She's also our smartest and most devious cat. I know it's only a matter of time before she figures out how to use the can opener herself and won't have any use for us meddlesome humans anymore.

Oreo & Jag

Aren't Oreo and Jag sweet-looking as they ruin our leather sofa?

Oreo lives up to the stereotype of cocker spaniels... he's dumber than a rock. He chases light... and I don't mean chasing flashlights on the wall... I mean SUNBEAMS ON THE FLOOR. He walks in circles around the room and bites at the sunlight as he walks by, and he'll do it for hours on end if you don't tell him to stop. He's a little neurotic.

And Jag? Well, Jag's just Jag. She's the "good" kitty... works for a living as the family hunter tracking down field rats, unlike the other free-loading panhandling pets here...

Porsche

This is Porsche displaying her abilities to play fetch as good as any dog I've ever seen. Hard to see I know, but that's a milk-tab in her mouth... you throw it, she bounces over to get it and runs back to drop it at your feet. Over, and over, and over, and over...

By the way, yes I named the sisters Jag & Porsche after a slight car fetish...

Ginger & Bandit

Here's Ginger & Bandit, better known as the "special" children... as in special ed. They're a few bricks short as the saying goes... They also were part of the deal when we bought Mom's house, but they live outside (other than being in the garage in cold weather like right here). But they're sweet and Ginger does a damn good impression of a lion at this time of year with her thick orange mane.

Ashley

Or as Hubby calls her, "Lady Ashley". We got her to lift her head out of the food dish long enough to take her picture. If friends bring their kids over she guards her food dish and hides all her toys... she thinks the kids are other little dogs that are going to steal her stuff. But she's our oldest doggie and I'm afraid she won't be around too much longer.

A scam by any other name,
would smell just as fishy...

Is it just me, or does it seem like there's more scams buzzing around the world than before the Internet was developed? Or did we just not hear about them as much? You can't trust a damn thing on the Net...

What's got my dander up? People looking for legitimate jobs having their e-mail inbox flooded with phishing scams. I'll add right here that yes, Hubby has a job now (selling security alarms and video surveillence systems)... but we're still getting tons of these "management offers" that I'm referring to. Beware to anyone who receives e-mails from WORLDVOICENEWS.com, VoiceUSA.com, AskAmerica.com, or anything with the name INSTANT HUMAN RESOURCES. Every e-mail employment offer he's received I've Googled the business name first... and each time they come up with websites telling about these scams. You go to the website listed on the e-mail which looks like a credible company, and fill out their "job application". What you're really doing is giving them all your personal information which they then sell to spam advertising companies, etc. Or, try to sell, I repeat SELLLLLLL, you a membership to sell products for them, and plus sell you extras like printing business cards for you and crap. People out there are already in a stressful enough position when they're trying to find a job, and here they are being taken advantage of at a difficult time in their lives... it really aggrevates the hell out of me (and if you know me, you know it takes a LOT to aggrevate me). I swear, it does no good to post resumes on CareerBuilder, Monster, etc... buyer beware... only use those websites for browsing the job postings by REAL companies that you've heard of.

Here's a good blog that discusses the history of this scam and some of the companies I've mentioned... well worth reading- http://mediamorgue.blogspot.com/

Alright, I'll get off my soapbox now... just throwing the word out about these scammers.

Just some FYI school notes...

Some folks have asked how school's going, so here's a little bit about it. I'm still enjoying it, I really look forward to the days I go to class (versus the days I go to work!) And I'm still getting A's so far... although the exam I took for my Speech class has me a little scared. The class had been so easy thus far, about sending e-mails, posting text messages on the discussion board (hhmm, no experience with THAT huh? haha), reading the textbook... so I was surprised at how difficult the test was. Now I know for next time, TAKE MORE NOTES! (We're allowed to bring one page of notes to the exam) I'll find out next week how badly I did on it.

I think my drawing class is my favorite. The only thing is that we keep drawing still-lifes over and over. There's a big closet in the classroom full of all sorts of odds and ends that the instructor pulls out and arranges for us to draw. For example:

Here she had a lamp (minus the shade) and an old ram's skull for us to draw... interesting combination. By the way, yes it was drawn completely FREEHAND, in 2 hours with willow charcoal. Plus you can't tell the size but it's HUGE... on 24"x36" newsprint paper (okay so it just seems huge to me). I only finished half the ram so you only see the one horn and barely the outline of the other, and didn't get to the bottom of the lamp which was behind the skull... but still you get the idea. I tend to be a bit on the perfectionist side when it comes to drawing, so I'm slow, but luckily that doesn't matter to the instructor. A lot of people in the class have never drawn anything more than a stickman, so she's just happy if you can tell what her students have drawn, haha.

In my Digital Publishing class and Intro to Computer Graphics the instructors are covering the EXACT SAME THING... but with two different (but similar) programs... QuarkXpress and Adobe InDesign. We're just going over typography and how to measure fonts and layouts, easy stuff since I've been creating flyers, brochures and other advertising material for several years now. I just hadn't had the opportunity to use this software, and to use a Mac. As long as you're somewhat computer literate switching to Mac is pretty simple, the shortcuts are the same, etc.

One more thing... in the Digital Pub class for our next project we have to take a quote by a famous person and give it graphic interpretation, only using FONTS and no images. I mention this only to share this quote by my favorite author, C.S. Lewis. Lewis is most famous for his Chronicles of Narnia children's books ("The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe", et.al) but he was also a theologist and wrote a book called "The Problem of Pain" which explores why man has to endure pain in life. Anyway, I like this quote from the book:

"God whispers to us in our pleasures,
speaks in our conscience,
but shouts in our pains;
it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world."

I just like that quote... something to think about at times when life is difficult.

Happy Valentine's Day...

Don't forget to give a big ole smooch to your Sweeties today... spouses, kids, pets, whomever you care about...

Hubby's tradition is to give me a miniature rose bush for Valentine's Day, which I then plant outside. But I should mention our marriage has lasted longer than the bushes, I seem to have a knack for killing them! At least one has survived the last couple years...

Anyway, have a happy loving day everyone! (And a happy loving night too)

We all have our dreams...

An upcoming project that I have to do for my online (oops, sorry, "distance learning") Business & Professional Communication class.... I have to conduct an information seeking interview- in other words I have to set up an appointment to sit down and ask questions to someone. Our instructor suggested we interview "someone who is doing something we aspire to do someday".

Hhhmmm... so how DO I find somebody who's won the lottery? hahaha

;)

Work for a company that's going nowhere?...

This may seem familiar to anyone who's ever worked for a large company or corporation, especially one that changes things on a daily basis trying to "improve the process"...

The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed down from generation to generation, says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.
In modern corporate America however, a whole range of far more advanced strategies are often employed such as:

1) Buying a bigger whip

2) Changing riders

3) Threatening the horse with termination

4) Appointing a committee to study the horse

5) Arranging to visit other countries to see how others ride dead horses

6) Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included

7) Re-classifying the dead horse as "living-impaired"

8) Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse

9) Harnessing several dead horses together to increase the speed

10)Providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse’s performance

11) Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse’s performance

12) Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries less overhead, and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line than do some other horses.

13) Re-writing the expected performance requirements for all horses.

14) Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.

SEVERAL of these practices have been employed by the company I work for... yet the dead horses are still being ridden into the ground...

Breakin' the law,
breakin' the law...

Okay it's bad enough I'm having to sit through a 6-hour defensive driving course on the computer. (Yes, it seems I committed a little traffic misdemeanor of speeding in a school zone a few months ago. Paid a hefty fine and plus taking the online driving course.)

But then today after my classes I walked out to my truck sitting in the campus parking lot, and what was on the windshield? A CITATION! And for what?

"Pull-through parking".

WTF ?????

When I parked I drove through the first spot and parked face-out in the next spot. That's not allowed on the campus parking lot???? What's the friggin problem with that??? There was only a zillion open parking spaces, in fact there were only a couple other cars even in the whole lot. No cars were even parked near me! Give a poor college kid a break!

I guess I'll be having a word with the campus police department...
Probably with my checkbook in hand...

Bored yet?...

Sorry folks, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy... not that my life is boring right now, but it would be boring for y'all to read about

I could talk about how I'm lost on the tv show LOST... but that's boring

I could talk a little more about school... but you've probably heard enough about that

Work isn't much better of a subject...

Talking about the silly antics of my cats would be like people telling endless stories about their kids...

So for now this is all I've got:

The store for the ultimate shotgun wedding

Maybe I'll think of something halfway interesting in the next few days...

Happy weather-predicting-big-fat-rat day!...

Punxsutawney Phil's official forecast as read 2/2/07 at 7:28 a.m. at Gobbler's Knob:

El Nino has caused high winds, heavy snow, ice and freezing temperatures in the west.
Here in the East with much mild winter weather we have been blessed.

Global warming has caused a great debate.
This mild winter makes it seem just great.

On this Groundhog Day we think of one thing.
Will we have winter or will we have spring?

On Gobbler's Knob I see no shadow today.
I predict that early spring is on the way.

Quote from a website-
"I'm sure all those meteorologists are happy to hear that some fat rat is just about as skillful as them when it comes to predicting the weather."
Actually in my opinion, Phil's MORE ACCURATE! No offense to any blog-reading weathermen out there, but again the snow we received yesterday wasn't mentioned anywhere in the forecast until a few hours before it hit.

So, let's go celebrate the big rodent by watching the movie Groundhog Day... over... and over... and over... and over...