It's like shearing sheep...

What the heck is this mangled tangled mess of hair? Is it a sheep? Is it a mop? Is it Cousin It?

Nope, it's our dog.

And here he is after I tackled him with a pair of clippers...

I didn't get a pic of the huge pile of hair that I took off of him... but it was enough to build another dog. It's a good argument for only having short-haired pets.

At one point Oreo decided he'd had enough, and it took two of us to hold him still... we actually had him in a headlock.

At least he doesn't look like a dirty mop and won't be such a flea factory. Now he just looks like a stuffed sausage.

Sorry I haven't been updating the ol' blog much lately, but it's the last 2 weeks of this school semester so I've been busy with final projects & homework for that, busy with my job revamping our whole training program, getting a new training manager tomorrow (the last one only stuck around for 3 weeks), not to mention household duties like shaving the dogs, mowing lawn which I still haven't gotten to, grocery shopping, yada yada. Sorry folks.

More blogger blabber...

Strong storms again tonight. Another tornado warning of an unconfirmed twister to the south of us, and sirens went off in our town too... 60 mile/hour wind gusts. We were standing out on the porch when those hit, Hubby rushed me back inside. He was watching rotations in sky the whole time, naturally the satellite went out so we lost the newscast. Other than that, just rain... lots and lots of rain.

Speaking of sirens... when I first moved to a small town (pop 119) in rural Kansas, it was noon on a sunny day when all of a sudden the town siren went off. It was almost right behind my house, so needless to say it was LOUD. I was like, What the hell? looking out the window. Clear sky, not a cloud. So later that day I was in the local store and asked about it... turns out they ran the siren EVERY DAY AT NOON to tell the farmers out in the fields that it was lunchtime, haha. And sure enough they did...

It was the year 2000, and I was thinking "Don't these farmers own a watch?" haha Heck even in rural Kansas I'll bet the farmers carry cellphones now...

And as a joke Hubby & I asked each other, What if a tornado hit at noon? Would the farmers just stop and eat their lunch? haha

Okay, enough wine for tonight...

Mo' money...

Christmas in the mailbox again... turns out the Pell grant is paying for my Summer term. Yay!
Thank goodness

Derby fever setting in...

Part of an article by Steven Crist at the Daily Racing Form has these stats for first fraction, last fraction, and final time of Derby preps:

Hard Spun 1:11.66 + 37.75 = 1:49.41
Scat Daddy 1:10.99 + 38.01 = 1:49.00
Nobiz Like Shobiz 1:10.90 + 38.56 = 1:49.46
Tiago 1:12.72 + 36.79 = 1:49.51
Curlin 1:12.89 + 37.20 = 1:50.09
Dominican 1:17.35 + 33.98 = 1:51.33

I missed the races with Hard Spun and Scat Daddy.

Nobiz ran a good one, but was looking pretty tired to me at the end.

I'm still liking how Tiago did in the Santa Anita Derby... nice late kick, but he was really working for it, (and the second slowest times since 1968 for this race?)...worries me a little if there's a fast pace in the Derby... for the Derby I would think he'll have to sit back a little more, hope the front end speed tires out, and pray he can get through the traffic of those dropping back. Same old story for closers. Speaking of stories, you know the press will wear that one out about him being the brother of Giacomo... especially with same trainer John Shirreffs and Mike Smith aboard...

And I still like Curlin... I don't think that last fraction in the Arkansas Derby is very relevant, I don't think he was pushed very hard towards the finish since he didn't have any other horses pressing him. He should improve... and that's the name of the game is who hits their peak at the right time of the year. We'll see if not racing at 2 makes any difference. Since Steve lost Tiz Wonderful to his tendon problem it appears he wasn't planning on Curlin being his Derby horse... we'll see what kind of merlin Steve is with prepping him so quickly. But if any trainer can prep a horse fast, it's Stevo...

And Dominican? I just won't bet a horse coming off polytrack in a race like this. (That being said, watch the friggin horse win just to prove me wrong! lol)

So May 5 I'll be glued to the tv...

Past to present...

Neat website for folks interested in old nostalgia/historical type items (thanks Ronnie)...

Penny Postcards

You click on a state and then a county, and it shows old postcards from towns there. What I think is funny is how the locations compare to present-day. For example:

"Dallas skyscrapers", I think this said it was dated 1926...

Those 4 or 5 story "skyscrapers" seem tiny compared to now (note the old buildings in the lower left-hand side of pic)...

Then there's the "New Expressway" through Dallas... how pleasant... I would guess this might be I-35? I dunno... I don't know the date for this postcard either... but doesn't it look like a nice peaceful city highway? A nice place to move your family to?

Here's our modern-day highway system... notice how many more lanes there are... and yet still there's congestion... there's never enough lanes for all the traffic now...

Maybe this is a pic of all the city people trying to get out of town back into the country, haha.

On Monday's VTech shootings...

You know, there were a bunch good kids doing the "right thing", going to college and planning a nice life, minding their own business, and suddenly out of nowhere some asshole walks in and ends it all.

Life's not fair.

The Associated Press has a story headline "Gunman's Family Had Hard Life in Korea"... just from that bad choice of headline I know that's one story I'm not going to bother reading. I work with a ton of people from various countries, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nigeria, you name it... and most of them had hard lives where they came from... but they don't go around shooting people. What's worse, is the press bringing up race in all this. Who gives a damn if he was a poor Korean or a rich kid from Long Island... it doesn't matter, he was just another nut with a gun.

Curlin anyone?...

It appears that my former boss Steve Asmussen has a live one for the Kentucky Derby this year. His horse Curlin yesterday won the Arkansas Derby (a KD prep race) with a record 10 1/2 lengths over the rest of the field. Previously he had two wins in two starts- by over 5 lengths in the Rebel Stakes and almost 13 lengths in his maiden race. Wow, Stevo might have a real runner this year. The Daily Racing Form reports Curlin may be the Derby favorite. That'd be respectable in this year's crop of 3yos, it's a tough field.

What the hail?...

Yes Jaydee, we did get some storms on Friday night. We just got some little hail where we're at... but about 10 miles to the south they had a small tornado go through town. There was a Nascar race that night at the Texas Motor Speedway 5 miles away from us, and all kinds of rotations in the sky over that area but they were spared anything serious. Good thing with all the people at the races... can you imagine if they had a tornado there?

As soon as Hubby heard about the prospect of hail he started clearing the garage to pull the Jeep in. It's only a small one-car garage, and filled with big man-tools... table saws, routers, huge vacuum form oven, etc... and I've never seen him clear the garage so fast! We managed to squeeze the Jeep in as far as we could and just as soon as I turned the engine off the hail started... just in the nick of time, haha. But the little quarter-sized ice probably wouldn't have hurt it anyway.

Suprise, suprise, suprise...

I love getting the mail. It's like Christmas... you never really know what you're going to get. Yes, normally it's just bills and junk mail which is the same as getting socks and underwear for Christmas... things that you don't want to get but unfortunately you have to have. But once in a blue moon I get something wonderful that I wasn't expecting.

This last year a Pell grant had paid for my college classes. However when I reapplied for the 2007-2008 year it turns out I made $1000 too much on my 2006 income to qualify. So I'm thinking Ah damn, I'll have to start applying for a boatload of scholarships to try to pay tuitions, or take out loans to pay for it.

But then Thursday was Christmas in the mailbox... I received a financial award letter from the college, saying I was awarded the "Texas Public Education Grant" which will pay for both semesters of next year. YAHOO! THANK GOD! I don't really know how all this grant stuff works, but obviously if you don't qualify for federal grants your name must then be automatically submitted for application for state grants.

So man I'm happy, next year is taken care of. wooHOO!

Now I'm just trying to work out the details of paying for these next two summer semesters... the first of which starts the end of next month...

Just another day in the life...

I screwed up my birthday today. What else would you expect from someone born on Friday the 13th? Hubby had some things planned, but I unknowingly fudged them. Oops. He's still going to surprise me with a cake, rosebush, etc... but the surprise will be that it'll be on another day.

So, here's some nice quotes about AGING:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
- Dylan Thomas, Welsh poet

A diplomat is a man who always remembers his wife's birthday
but never remembers her age.
- Robert Frost, poet

You all of a sudden realize that you are being ruled by people you went to high school with. You all of a sudden catch on that life is nothing but high school... class officers, cheerleaders, and all.
- Kurt Vonnegut, novelist

There's nothing worse than being an aging young person.
- Richard Pryor

If you get to thirty-five and your job still involves wearing a name tag, you've probably made a serious vocational error. (OUCH!)
- Dennis Miller

If you pull out a grey hair seven will come to its funeral.
- German proverb

Middle age is when your old classmates are so grey and wrinkled and bald that they don't recognize you.
- Bennett Cerf, publisher

Old age is the only disease you don't look forward to being cured of.
- Citizen Kane

From birth to age eighteen, a girl needs good parents.
From eighteen to thirty-five, she needs good looks.
From thirty-five to fifty-five, she needs a good personality.
From fifty-five on, she needs good cash.
- Sophie Tucker, singer

Lone Star Park, opening night...

Tonight was opening night at Lone Star Park. Too bad I missed it. :(

Lone Star's celebrating its 10 year anniversary this year. Tomorrow night they have the band Foreigner playing. The concerts at LSP are pretty good, you get up close & personal to the band, there aren't as huge of crowds or big stage in the way. They're practically arm's length (not that you would want to touch guys from a band that went big in the 70's... not quite the young studs they used to be) . But still, I wouldn't mind seeing them.

A couple years ago it was Willie Nelson on opening night and then the Beach Boys the next night. While I was sitting at my window I saw Willie walk by, and at least one of the Beach Boys although I wouldn't care what his name was. By the way, MAN, is Willie short! Tiny wrinkly little dude.

It was funny how the crowd changed each night according to who the band was. On Willie night it was the drunken cowboy bar-brawl crowd. On Beach Boys night it was 'family' night with a bunch of baby boomers with kids in tow, very docile concert-goers (but danced as goofy as the drunken cowboys even while SOBER). And then there was weekends when a local alternative type band would play and it was drunken college (or high schooler with fake ID) night... girls were arrested left & right for flashing themselves like it was Mardi Gras. Made for interesting nights at work.

Alas, too bad I'll miss it all.

Oops...

A note about my previous post- it turns out part of my problem with not knowing the software has more to do with not knowing MAC computers... the keyboard has 2 "delete" keys unlike a PC board... I was hitting the wrong one... duh

Stuck in a software time warp...

I'm so outdated. In my graphics classes we've been using some software that I'd never had the opportunity to use before (QuarkXpress, InDesign, etc) which has been a memory confugulation trying to remember where on the menus things are at for like 4 different programs. But finally on a project we started this week I was able to use Photoshop which I've been using for, oh, about 9 years now... and I'm thinking I know this program. Welllllll, unfortunately my Photoshop at home is just a leetle bit outdated. Without all the upgrades I didn't keep up, so the latest version is practically like learning another new software program. Just a simple function was giving me fits... with my OLD program I simply draw a selection square around something, hit the delete key, and *poof* it's gone. I cannot seem to do this with the new one. I don't know why... it wasn't a wrong layer or anything easy like that. I know there's a way to do it, but I have to go in circles for 15 minutes first. Why didn't they just add new features to the updates, rather than change the standard functions? Grrr...

And now for something completely different...

Okay, enough serious stuff. Seeing as how my 34th birthday is next week (Friday the 13th... and yes I was born on Friday the 13th... I think that's why my mother named me Angela, which means "angelic", to counter-balance the evil bad luck stigma haha) This and the new movies coming out such as Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (can you believe these have made a comeback? Or did they just never die??) got me to thinking about other nostalgia of growing up in the 80's. So websurfing I came across this site-

You might be a child of the 80's if...
http://www.80scartoons.net/ymbaeci.html

Some excerpts:

• You know that another name for a keyboard is a "Synthesizer."
  Everyone wanted one back then, they were so cool...
• You know the profound meaning of "Wax on, Wax off."
  Not to mention "Clap on, Clap off"...
• You know what "psych" means.
  Hey, I STILL say that!
• You fell victim to 80's fashion: big hair, crimped, combed over to the side, and you wore spandex pants.
  You will never, I repeat n-e-v-e-r see photos of me from high school...
• You remember when ATARI was a state-of-the-art video gaming system.
  I remember the Christmas we got an Atari... we felt so proud to have this new technology... had Pitfall Harry, Frogger, and of course Pacman and Pong...
• You own any cassettes or albums.
  Still do... the problem is finding a car I can still play them in...
• You inserted the word "like" into, like, every sentence.
  Again, like, I still do...
• You ever had a Swatch Watch.
  OMG, I remember the big fad was to have not just one Swatch, but (like) 8 of them all on your arm at once... and it seemed expensive for a high-schooler to have a $35 watch...
• You remember when Saturday Night Live was funny.
  Ah, those were the days... Mr. Robinson's Neighborhood, Church Chat, Toonces the Cat, "WE VILL PUMP *clap* YOU UP!"...
• You had Wonder Woman or Superman Underoos.
  I'm not going there...
• You believed that "By the power of GREYSKULL, you HAD the power!"
  Man I hated that show...
• Partying "like it's 1999" seemed SO far away.
  Yep... and now it is still so far away... the other direction... boy I feel old now...
• 3 words: "Atari" "IntelliVision" and "Coleco". Sound familiar?
  Already mentioned Atari, but friends had the others...
• You remember "Friday Night Videos" before the days of MTV.
  And I still watched it up until the early 90's... I couldn't get cable where I lived in the country... but yes I waited up until 1:00am just to watch FNV...
• You were shocked and horrified at the Challenger explosion (which you were probably watching in school at the time).
  As a matter of fact I was...
• You remember "Hey, let's be careful out there."
  Of all the shows in syndication, WHY do they not show Hill Street Blues on Nick at Nite or any other networks??
• You remember when film critics raved that no movie could ever possibly get better special effects than those in the movie TRON.
  Please... please let us move on from that...

I feel so much older now. So much for the trip down memory lane. I feel about the same as the day I found my first grey hair (why do you think I dye my hair? For Warlock to make me the butt of his blonde jokes?!? NOT!)

But the good news is I still look fairly young... in fact just last year at the local convenience store a little high schooler in a pickup truck asked me to go to a party at the football game across the street... I told him, "Son, I'm TWICE your age!" He got this shocked/confused look on his face and drove off, haha.

Then just TODAY at work, a new guy asked me, "Are you a model?"

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

When I stopped laughing I said, Umm, NO

And yet then I remembered the grey hairs... which brought me back to reality.

A bike for Sam...

If you've been to my profile the last couple days, you may have noticed I've started another blog... this one for a reason.

Background: Hubby is a huge Denver Broncos fan, so he is a member of a forum called The Orange Mane. Well, there's another member of the board in Southern Illinois who has a young son, Sam, with cerebral palsy. Sam is 3 1/2 years old and doctors didn't think he would live this long. So anyway his Daddy had posted a message on the board asking how he could get a special bicycle made that Sam can ride along on. Sam's palsy is pretty bad, so all he could do is just ride in a seat on the bike. Here's a link to the thread on it:
http://www.orangemane.com/BB/showthread.php?t=54609

Well, this hit Hubby in the heart because from his first marriage he has 2 sons, one of which has cerebral palsy too. Although his isn't as bad, he's 26 years old now and enjoys repairing lawnmower engines and such even though he has a child's mentality. So anyway, Hubby wanted to help out with Sam by building a bike for him. (Actual shops that have designed bikes like this charge around $1800-2000, which may be difficult for Sam's family to do)

So when he posted on the Orange Mane that he would build the bike a lot of people wanted to help out too, and were asking about giving donations to the project. Hubby and I aren't able to do this for free, so what we did was set up a blog for folks to see the progress, and also put a link to PayPal for making donations to the cause.
http://bikeforsam.blogspot.com/

So if you were wondering what the Bike for Sam blog was about... there you go.
And one more thing... I'm really proud of Hubby for stepping up to the plate on this and doing something good for another family out there. That's my man. :)

Art exhibition results...

So last night we went to the awards ceremony out at DFW Airport... me, Hubby, Mom, and Mom's Hubby. I didn't know what to expect, but it turned out to be a semi-gala affair. Folks were dressed nicely, there was a jazz musician, and there were some nice little finger-foods and apple juice punch (c'mon, where's the champagne?)

During the ceremony they announced there were 180 people who entered artworks, some of them multiple works so there was over 200 pieces. They had a projector showing slides of the artworks on the wall as they handed out awards to folks, which I thought was a good idea so we could see what their works looked like. But I think it would have also been interesting if they had someone talking about the works, what the judges saw in the piece, if they liked it for the composition or color or why they chose it for an award.

What did I win? I won an award for "Best Work on Paper" for a prize of $100. (They also had a "Best Work of Painting" and "Best Work of Photography".) I have mixed feelings on this, and let me tell you why.

They had 3 adult catagories: Amatuer, Intermediate, and Professional. I entered the Intermediate division... I feel I"m more than just an amatuer and yet I'm not supporting myself with my art (I sell maybe one piece a year for a paltry couple hundred dollars, not what I would consider a professional).

So I walk in and see my artwork on the wall, and the placard next to it says the title and "Professional" division.

What??

So I tracked down the woman who was coodinating the evening's events, and asked her why they moved me up to the Professional division.

Woman: Are you currently working in the art industry?

NO. I'm in college and work for a place that fixes cellphones.

Woman: Have you been in any public art exhibits anywhere?

NO.

Woman: Well, the judges moved some people around and made some changes, it was up to them.

So at first it was a bit flattering, I thought well they thought I should be a part of the Professional division, that's a good thing right? I must have won an award in that catagory if they moved me?

Wrong.

This is what I don't understand and what I'm a bit peeved about. In each division they handed out prizes for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place (and honorable mention), prizes of $275-375.00. They moved me up to the Professional division but I didn't win anything for it, when I could have possibly won a prize in the Intermediate division (if they thought it was good enough to be in Professional then it could have won a prize in Intermediate, right?)

The people that won the Best of Painting and Best of Photography awards also won prizes in their division, so they won two prizes for a total of $375 or $475... but I won $100. I hate to sound like a sore loser, but I kinda feel gypped here. Out of over 200 artworks I won Best on Paper, but nothing else. I don't know why they moved me, it just doesn't make sense to me.

I'm trying to tell myself just be happy you won something, there are a lot of folks who didn't. Oh well, there's always next year.

The works will be on exhibit through May4 in the Car Rental Center at DFW on the 2nd floor.

Oh, and here's the piece that won Best in Show and 1st place in the Intermediate division, "Hats on Sticks":

As they say, art's in the eye of the beholder.