The Race is On

So the 9th installment of The Amazing Race started tonight. I have to say that it is probably my favorite reality show. I love that this show actually makes people participate in cultures that they aren't familiar with. However, I don't think that I could ever be a contestant on this show, because I would forget about the race aspect and get caught up in the tasks and taking part in the ceremonies and stuff.

Running Around Day

Well today I had errands to do. Mostly I needed to go to the copiers to get my handouts printed that I had ready so far. Unfortunately, I still have 2 sets left. One I got done earlier tonight, but the last I'm still working on.

I managed to get down to the used bookstore today and found a couple of books that I've been wanting to read so I was able to pick those up and add them to my ever growing stack of "to be read" books. Sadly, the stack is growing taller faster than I can read them. Of course right now that's not going to change because I'm trying to concentrate on my research reading materials.

No Flying Disk Golf

So Ryan and I wanted to go out and play Frisbee golf today, but the fates were against us. First, we could hardly find any Frisbees to buy at the store. Are they just not really making and selling Frisbees anymore? At some point did this become a by-gone pastime to be lost in the annuals of history? Or has it suddenly become the popular thing to do and thus the stores can't keep the gravity defying disks in stock? Whichever the reason we could only get a hold of 2 Frisbees and they were about the same size.

Then the second set-back. The Frisbee golf "holes" were no longer at the park! It seemed that there was a problem a while back in that there were so many people wanting to play that the field was over-run and players weren't practicing good sportsmanship. Plus, this was in a park that also had a lot of playgrounds and walking trails and non-Frisbee golf players where getting annoyed by all the Frisbee golf players. So what was the city's solution? To put in a second Frisbee golf field in another park to relieve the congestion? No, the solution was to just get rid of the thing all together. No more Frisbee golf for you!

So we ended up just throwing it back a forth for a while. And on a funny side note, when I ran my spell check it corrected my lack of capitalization of "Frisbee". When I mentioned this to Ryan he explained about the term being trademarked and that if it's not a "Frisbee" it should be called a "flying disk." Now, I'm not sure if we were throwing a Frisbee or a flying disc. I think will call it a Frisbee anyway.

I spent a lot of the rest of the day trying to work on getting my handouts for the presentation this Saturday ready to take to the copiers. Then we watched the closing ceremonies of the Olympics. How sad it is to see them go. It's always so great to see all the stories about athletes being able to win medals for their countries after long years of not medaling and all the stories about good sportsmanship because it's the right thing to do.

Worn Out

Well today I substituted for the beginning bellydance class then one of our troupe members, my mom, and I all went out shopping for supplies for my workshop demonstration next Saturday. I think it should be a really good presentation and a lot of the girls will get some good information. But I am worn out from all the shopping we did today.

I finished the book I was reading by Mary Daheim. I'm not sure what book I'll pick next for leisure reading, but right now I'm reading sections of Rough Guide to World Music Volume One: Africa, Europe & The Middle East for research for my presentation in April. I think its going to end up being a really good resource for me and I may need to get ahold of the second volume which covers music in North America.

But right now I think I'll take some time to relax and rest as I watch the biathlon.

TGIF

Well, we got the exhibit done and opened to the public. Some of the descendents from the family that the exhibit is about came to the museum today. They had a story for nearly every item in the exhibit and I think I saw tears in their eyes as they remembered their "granny." The few minutes we spent with these people maybe all the work and stress for this exhibit worth it. This is the real reason why we go to work every day. To share personal stories of real families and help people remember the way things use to be is such a rewarding experience. It's rather hard to really explain.

Exhibit Opens Tomorrow

Well by the time I left work today the exhibit was well on its way to being finished for the opening tomorrow, but I think we are all exhausted from it. However, I think the exhibit was well worth it and probably one of our most impressive exhibits.

Class tonight was really good too. We've gotten through just about the whole routine. Which is good since we have a month till we perform it for the first time. I think its going to be freaking awesome.

I've got some updating to do on the troupe website, plus the ever on going getting presentations to get ready, and a few last things to do with the podcast for the museum. So things are busy as usual.

New Exhibit

We're installing a new exhibit at work so things are rather stressful. Some of it ends up being hurry up and wait because furniture has to be built and stained and other things. But by Friday it will all be installed and look freaking awesome.

I'm making progress on both my presentations, unfortunately I seem to be making more progress on the presentation that I'll be giving in April and not the one that I'm giving in March. But that just seems to be the way things work on presentations.

Other than that a lot of housework is going and I'm kind of tired of it.

Oops!

Oops, I almost forgot to blog. Well I've got a ton of things I'm trying to get done. Trying to figure out some more podcasting stuff as far as best equipment and what not.

I'm trying to finish stuff for my presentation on March 4 and then finishing stuff for a different presentation I'm doing in April. Plus we are installing a new large exhibit that we started working on today and will continue to work on through Friday.

Thus I go to bed to prepare for a hard day at work tomorrow.

Break From Yourself

How do you break from yourself? How do you change life long habits? These are the things I ask myself. Ryan planned a really fun activity for us tonight, painting a collage, and because of me the night ended up being not so fun.

First, I'm totally intimated by paints and brushes. It's something I've never been good at, I've never been able to make anything look as good on paper with paints and brushes as it looks in my mind's eye. So I gave up trying to paint a long time ago. Give me a stack of magazines and glue and I'll make a dynamite collage, but I can't paint it.

Second, I've never been a messy person. I'm not even sure I played with finger paints as a child. It's been a joke now with my family for a while, especially when I told them I wanted to go into archeology. My mother's first reaction was "you want to dig in the dirt? You couldn't stand being dirty as a child." It even became a joke to all the people I've ever been on digs with because I was hardly ever really dirty. They all agree that I work just as hard and dig just as much as they did, I just somehow never really got dirty.

So how do I stop being a type A personality? I know in my heart Ryan just wanted us to cut loose and have some fun. He thought we would paint some cute little thing and then get in a cute fingerpaint to the face type war. I knew that's what he wanted to do and I wanted to have fun with him, but I just couldn't have fun that way. I just sat at the table most of the night staring at the brushes and paints trying to figure out what I could do, what I should do, and my mind was a blank. He was painting all kinds of cute little things like our dog and Mardi Gras beads and other things that have meaning in our relationship and I couldn't think of anything.

There are times in my life that I just look around at my friends cutting loose and doing crazy, bizarre things and I wish soooo bad to join in with them and be crazy, but I can't. I've never been able to just let go. How do you break from yourself? How do you change life long habits? How do you learn to let go?

Staying In Again

Well, we decided to stay in all day because of the weather. It was a pretty nice day, we caught up on some curling coverage, did some housework in anticipation of my parents visiting this weekend, and watched birds eating in our backyard. We also caught up on some movie watching and playtime with Magaidh in the snow.

All in all a nice little day.

Staying Home

Well, I did have to go into work earlier today. However, we did decide to leave early encase the roads refroze in the early evening. It wasn't too bad at work. Nice and quiet, but we had to get out and shovel the walks. I was already tired from cleaning off the car to get to work so I didn't get a lot of the work done that I had plan to do. I did spend sometime going through possible photos to use for my presentation so that was good for me. Ryan also came to work with me today to do some computer stuff for us in the photo library.

After we decided to close early, Ryan and I made the obligatory store run. I was surprised by several things. The store did not look looted or like it had been picked to the bones. There was still plenty of milk, bread, juice, and eggs. I was also surprised that the store was pretty empty as far as shoppers went. But it was actually a nice shopping experience, because there weren't a lot of people there and everything we wanted was at the store.

We then came home to a quiet evening. We took the dog for a walk and the three of us played around in the snow for a bit. Magaidh was very cute playing and running around in the snow, especially when she would get snow all in her beard. We also put more feed out for all the cold little birds who have been flocking to our backyard.

Oh, one funny thing that happened this morning, as we were driving on the snow and ice to the museum we kept looking around for road vehicles that might be putting gravel down or trying to clean the ice off. The only thing we saw was a bulldozer cleaning off the parking lot of the liquor store at the county line.

Snow Days

Well it is sleeting here and freaking cold. We risked the gas bill and turned on our fireplace for a little while tonight. I'm suppose to work tomorrow, but I'm not sure how that will turn out because of the weather. Part of me is thinking I have so much I need to do at work, but then the other part of me thinks how nice it would be to just snuggle in bed with a good book and hot tea watching the snow fall the rest of the day.

Oh well, I really shouldn't spend anymore time blogging cause I need to do some work on my presentations.

Moving On

Well I've gotten all the editing done for the podcast. Now we need to go back and record an introduction and conclusion part for it. Then there's a few house keeping things we need to do on the website and talking to the IT guys to get it done and up.

But I want to talk about the Olympics for a bit. I'm watching the men's long figure skating program and I have one question. Where is the artistry? For too long all the figure skating disciplines have stop awarding artistry and have been concentrating too much on the jumping. Plushenko's routine was basically a bunch of jumps with some hand/arm waving thrown in between jumps. There was no really good footwork sequence (a la Scott Hamilton). There were no spread eagles, no flying camel spins, no spirals. It was boring as heck. I much preferred Weir's and Buttle's performances to Plushenko. Sigh.

In other news, the new James Bond girl has been picked. So now we have Daniel Craig as Bond, Eva Green as Vesper, Jeffrey Wright as Felix Leiter, and Mads Mikkelsen as the bad guy (can't remember that character's name) in the new Casino Royale. Now if someone can just mange to not ruin the script.

Reading picks

Well as you can see I've picked a new lesiure reading book. So far its ok. I'm also trying to decide which book in my pile of research that I'll read first. Once I've decided I'll post it up as well.

Work is busy as usual this month. Lots of exhibits and programs to get ready for. I got my registration filled out and mailed for the state museum conference. There are still a few of the sessions that I'm not sure which one I'm going to go to yet, but I still have time to decide.

Other than that I need to get Ryan to help me clean the house before my parents come up next weekend.

Happy Chocolate Day

We had a nice quite night at home. I spent most of the day listening to Michael Buble and Peter Cincotti music so I was in a nice romantic mood. I got home and made Ryan a card to go with his present. We didn't want to do anything major tonight so we had 1/2 price burgers from Sonic, watched some Olympics, and exchanged presents.

All in all a nice sweet little evening. Just what we like.

Life Is Not Like a Box of Chocolates

There is a map. Well, at least there is a map in the box of chocolates that Ryan brought home tonight as an early Valentine. He also brought home a couple of bottles of wine and then we had a very nice pasta primavera type dinner for our Italian dish tonight.

Oh, and that reminds me. Ryan was talking to all his co-workers about how we are eating Italian throughout the Olympics to get us in the mood for the games. Their reaction was that it was the stupidest thing they had heard of. They really thought it was a silly idea. They even went to other friends of theirs to tell them about this stupid idea of their co-worker. Here's the interesting part.

All the friends of the co-workers thought it was a great idea!! They all loved it and thought it sounded like fun. HA!

Bad News Day

Well the day started off really nice. Ryan and I had a Valentine's date, since its easier on the weekend than a week night. We went to The Celtic Grill in Bentonville and its a really nice place. Good Irish food and atmosphere. We then ran some errands this afternoon and go home to settle in for the rest of the night.

Then the bad news started coming in. First, we heard Michelle Kwan pulled out of the Olympics. I've been a huge fan of hers since the beginning. I personally thought she should have competed in Lilehammer instead of Harding. I also feel that she was better than Lipinski in Nagano. And the thought that she will never get a gold just saddens me. I'm not sure it will be impossible for her to come back in the next Olympics; however, it seems, even with the new scoring system, it wouldn't be surprising if judges, and the establishment of the skating community, would be too basis to let someone of that age be successful at competitions.

The second bad news we got today was that O'Flaherty's Irish Pub in New Orleans closed because of Katrina. We had eaten there the last night we were in New Orleans for our honeymoon five years ago and it was a very special night for us. We talked about going back to New Orleans for our fifth anniversary (in 2005) but decided we couldn't afford it and a few weeks later Katrina hit. Most of the places we went in New Orleans faired well so we thought everything would be fine. We heard news in October that O'Flaherty's had some cleaning and repairs to do, but they were planning on reopening. Then today there was a post on their site that they decided not to reopen.

It's just all so sad.

What to Read Next

Well I finished reading Yankee Doodle Dead by Carolyn G. Hart. It was a pretty good read, but I felt the author had too much going on at once. Too many suspects and too many detectives. I personally think that if an author is a talented enough writer they do not need a lot of suspects to keep the reader questioning "who done it."

I'm not sure what I'm going to end up reading next. I might have to sideline the recreational reading for a bit so I can concentrate on my research reading.

Let's Go Babe!

That's right the Olympics have started. Unfortunately, Ryan and I are not ready to go with our food choices. We got lucky tonight because we had the fixin's for chicken Parmesan. I'm going to start trying to do some searches for Italian dishes. Mostly we are looking for finger type foods that will be good to just snack on throughout the night and not really have a formal dinner.

I had a little trouble with my blog, in that one of my posts was missing. I couldn't find it in the list of my posts to edit. It was my post from last Friday and it was just gone. I looked all over for the dang thing and was very upset because I thought it was going to kick me out of a friendly blog-a-thon competition that I have going on with my husband and a friend of ours. But it finally turned up and I got it reposted.

Now I just have to figure out what I'm going to do while I'm in Smackover during the museum conference in March.

Party Day

Today has been pretty fun. We had a birthday party at work with jambalaya and Italian Wedding made by our education coordinator. Than the board had a banquet meeting at the new country club. It was a great fried chicken and pasta dinner, plus our outreach coordinator gave an awesome program on Valentines using a number of the historic Valentines in our collections.

I had wrote more earlier, but blogger shut down for some maintenance just as I went to publish my post and it lost everything and I'm too tired to rewrite anything else.

Busy Work

Today was pretty busy at work. We have two new volunteers that we are getting projects ready for and, even though we are feeling pressed for time to get things set-up for them, we know that in the long run their time is going to be so helpful to us to get things done.

I'm nearly done editing the audio for the podcast. I'm sure someone else could have done a better job, but I think it will work and I think that it will be a better quality than some of the podcasts I've heard.

Tomorrow night Ryan and I will be going to a museum dinner at the country club. So maybe that will be a chance for me to have some un-winding time.

Stress

Things continue to feel stressful for me.

I'm frustrated at not being able to better understand audio engineering. We have about 4 exhibits opening at the museum between now and the beginning of May. I have a belly dance presentation in March, the museum conference in March, a presentation at the museum in April, and belly dance performances in March and April.

I'm trying to catch up on all this podcasting stuff and what's really frustrating is that it does not seem to be loading onto my iPod correctly. The names of the podcasts are showing up in my podcast menu on the iPod, but the individual episodes are not. However, if I want to scroll through all my album titles, and I can figure out what name the podcast would have used in place of an album title, then I can find it and play it that way. Which to me, is very annoying and contradictory to the easy set-up that its suppose to be.

Podcasting

So I'm trying to learn my way through podcasting as the museum I work for is thinking about trying to do some. I think this is a great idea because I feel it will help us reach out to the teen-young professional demographic that so many museums struggle to attract.

First, I've noticed from the places that list their casts on iTunes that it looks pretty lame to post a cast and say that its suppose to be a recurring cast and its been over two months since you posted a new one. Second, most of the casts don't have a really good description so its hard to tell what you are downloading and even when they do have a description, in my opinion, they don't really seem to accurately describe the cast.

But enough about that. In my personal life, my parents are coming up at the end of the month and I'm not sure what all they might want to do while they are here. I think there my be a country western store that we may want to take them to because one of the rooms in their house is decorated in horse themed stuff. For Christmas we got them horseshoe curtain finials and they really seemed to like them so they may want to go to Back to the Ranch to see if there are more neat things they can add to their decor.

The End to a Quiet Weekend

To say that I'm not a big sports fan is an understatement. So today was not a big deal for me and I did not watch the Superbowl. Instead I watched the Puppy Bowl II on Animal Planet. I am a big fan of dogs.

I did some work on our household inventory. I'm trying to get it "finished" so that it will be done for insurance purposes in case there is an accident with the house. Of course it will never really be finished as we are always buying new things and getting rid of old things that we don't use anymore (hence the quotations marks around finish).

As I'm writing this, I'm watching the Sherlock Holmes Mysteries and I am shocked to learn that Holmes used cocaine! I just don't get it and it shocks me. Of course, I don't know why it should shock me. But I digress.

Finally after a quiet afternoon we decided to go out to the store. We needed to pick up a birthday gift for our nephew who will be 3 at the end of the month. I'm not mention what we got as his mom, my sister, will probably be reading this and I want it to be a surprise.

We then went to Barnes & Noble where I looked at some books on Podcasting and home recording studios. The thing that frustrated me about all the books is that they covered a lot of stuff I already knew and not really any of the stuff I don't know. I feel pretty confident I have most of the gear I'll be needing to learn how to do this stuff. What I really want is a book on sound engineering, using a mixing board, and what terms, like equalization, normalization, or FFT filter, mean and how they effect the audio. So the search continues.

Saturday, Saturday

Well I had to go into work today because we were having a special event and I was doing a digital audio recording of it so that we might be able to use it as a podcast later. It went really well, we probably had about 200 people show up and the recording seemed to be good too. I'll just have to listen to it and maybe do a little quality editing on it.

My massage was very nice and much needed. The rest of the afternoon we spent being lazy. Taking a nap, working on a jigsaw puzzel and getting some music from iTunes.

I got a gift card and I've been slowly using it, tonight I kind of went a little crazy and bought a handful of songs all at once. Usually I only by one at a time, but there and been a lot of songs that I had been hearing lately that I've been meaning to get. So I got caught up and bought the following all at once.

One Thing by Finger Eleven
Breathe (2 am) by Anna Nalick
You're Beautiful by James Blunt
I've Got Dreams to Remember by Buddy Guy and John Mayer

Nearly the Weekend

Well my weekend is not going to start until tomorrow around noon. I have to go into work for a special presentation, because I'm the one in charge of doing an audio recording of it so we can try to make a podcast. Tonight Ryan and I went and tested out the equipment to make sure that we had everything and knew how to set it up correctly. But then when that's over I'll have my massage and the rest of the weekend is mine.

I've been trying to think of what to really say about the horse show and I just can't figure out how to put it into words. It meant so much to finally see the Lipizzaners in person that I just can't grasp the impression that it has made on me. However, I really do intend to write a more substantial review and give my impressions of those wonderful horses.

Oh My!

I don't know what to say except you should get yourself out to a showing of the Lipizzaner Stallions! I have been watching the Disney movie for years wanting to see them in person and words are failing me to describe the beauty of it.

The video does no justice to the artistry of these wonderful horses. It was pure joy getting to see them and I can't wait to see them perform again.

If You Love a Wednesday

So the Monkee's song has nearly all the days of the week in it, but I'll try not to use it more than once.

Ryan and I are gearing up for the Olympics. Last time, when it was in Greece, we learned a lot about Greek food and had a Greek cuisine every night as we watched the Olympics. It really put is in the mood. So this year we are looking forward to learning Italian cuisine, but we don't want to do the regular spaghetti, lasagna, and pizza stuff.

I got my travel plans for the conference pretty well taken care of today. I still have to fill out the registration forms and there are some last minute details that will need to be worked out but they can wait until closer to the conference.

In less than 24 hours I will be seeing the Lipizzaner Stallions!! I can't wait.