Thoughts Have Wings

I finally did something I have been wanting to do for some time.  A friend brought me his old computer that was no longer working correctly.  It was extremely slow to respond and he had lost the Windows disk so he couldn’t re-install.

Last night I downloaded Ubuntu  and burned it to a cd.  This afternoon I hooked his old computer up to my monitor, turned it on, and put the cd in the cd drive.  All it took was one click and it started loading the files it would need.  When it was done it gave the message to remove the cd and reboot.

When I rebooted it gave me the choice to boot into Windows or Ubuntu and that was all there was to it.

It gave me the choice when I was first installing to install Ubuntu with Windows or remove Windows completely.  This time I was kind of a chicken but next time I think I will just throw Windows off a cliff.

My kids still have a few issues with Ubuntu and things like flash and I haven’t had time to see if things will work better on thsi version than on the older version that is on the old laptop.  I have literally been up and running in Ubuntu for about ten minutes! The only issue I have so far has to do with screen resolution and I will try to get that resolved later.  I’m just tickled that it worked and was so simple!

More later - I have company coming!

Yesterday I was watching Bobby Flay’s Throwdown. “Bobby challenges Maribel and Aristides Barrios, NYC restaurateurs who hail from Venezuela, to a throwdown featuring their house specialty, arepas, which are delicious grilled cornmeal patties filled with sweet and savory treats.”

I watched carefully to see how the arepas were made because they looked and sounded wonderful. When I went to the Food Network website, however, the only recipe was for bobby Flay’s and I preferred to make the original Venezuelan ones. I did some searching around and found a blog article that described them very closely to the ones on the show and had pictures. I tried to find the masa arepa (pre-cooked cornmeal) and of course I couldn’t. I got the closest thing I could which was corn flour and I think that mine are not as good as they would be with the correct ingredients. I will keep looking and if nothing else when we go for Dale’s next appointment in Dallas I will pick some up there and try some more.

They look similar to English muffins but they don’t taste the same and are different texture. They were pretty good right out of the oven with butter. The dough is very simple to make and you pick up a ball of it and basically toss it hand to hand til it makes a dense ball and then kind of rotate as you toss smoothing it into a disk about a third of an inch thick. You cook it over medium heat on a cast iron griddle or non-stick skillet. Cook about 7 minutes on each side being careful not to burn it. Place in oven for about 15 minutes to finish cooking (350 degrees).

Here is my finished result:

The recipe and other pictures can be found here.

I hope you will give it a try and let me know how it turns out for you!

It is 5:00 P.M. I say this because I just got home and we left the house this morning at 8:00 A.M, We went to look at a used car which we ended up buying but I never dreamed we would have been gone ALL day.

We saw the ad in a sale paper last night. It’s a pretty 2005 blue Impala. We had been looking at cars knowing that when school starts we were going to need another vehicle. We were looking at something that would get good gas mileage for obvious reasons. I was leaning towards a Toyota Corolla or Nisson Sentra but Dale has always liked the Impala so he is happy.

I just can’t believe how disorganized the whole experience was. The car was not even at Bonham Chrysler which is where the ad was from. They looked all over the lot and then started calling around and it ended up being in Greenville. The salesman got a car (a 2008 Dodge Magnum which is very nice, by the way) and drove us over to Greenville It was lunchtime by the time we got there. The car was there but the key was NOT! They hunted and couldn’t find it and decided to go up to the Pontiac place and get them to cut a new one. Keeping in mind this is only a little ways down the road, an hour later we finally have the keys. We drove the car and liked it and then had to drive back to Bonham. Next we had to do the whole paperwork thing which didn’t take too long but by the time it was all complete it was about 2:30 and we have still not had lunch. They were cleaning the inside and washing the car and by the time we left it was 4:00.

We headed for the nearest restaurant because we were starving and then got to sit in traffic because a long stretch of 82 was being resurfaced. We are tired, cranky, and the proud owners of a “newer” car. If you know me you will know how much I hate to part with money for a car but now I just hope it turns out to be a good car and that it lasts half and long as my little blazer but with better gas mileage!

Let’s make a quick guide for someone planning to visit Paris. There is more that could be included but this will be enough to get you started! The instructions came from the Google Docs Blog which is a wonderful resource!

First, determine the sites you will use and open a Google docs spreadsheet

In the first column put the addresses

In the second column put the names and a short description (you can include a link)

Click and drag to highlight both columns

Click Insert on the toolbar and choose gadget

Select Google Maps

You can add a title but you now have a list of sites with their addresses and links and a map to boot! Cool and simple.

Save it, click publish and check the box - republish changes and you can continue to add to it and you can email a link to it to your friends and family!

Here is a link to mine:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pgVdUefx1CH0V_U5tumJrHw

Here is a screenshot:

My son called last night. He and the rest of the NL Debate team and their coaches are in Las Vegas for Nationals. There are seven debate students, two coaches, and their son in a van pulling a u-haul trailer full of luggage, a huge ice chest, cases of evidence and dollies for hauling the evidence cases around.
They have been to The Painted Desert, Hoover Dam, The Petrified Forest, and the Grand Canyon and are still speaking to each other. Last night they made it to Vegas and the hotel they had reserved had a few guests that decided at the last minute to extend their stay so the hotel just gave their reservations away. On top of that, instead of calling the coaches cell number which she gave them as the designated contact number, they called yesterday to her home number in Paris to tell her. This meant they had no idea until they showed up at the hotel that they had no rooms. They were supposed to stay at Homewood Suites Henderson Nevada Hotel. They ended up at Circus Circus on the strip. THAT should be interesting!

My daughter got her drivers license (finally) this week so I haven’t been able to run a single errand myself all week. She is going to try to find a summer job and I am hoping that with her skills with Microsoft Excel and Access that she will find something besides slinging burgers.  She has decided to try to do municipal band this year as they can use a base clarinet player so at least I won’t have to drive her to practice everyday!

Dale and I are having a pretty peaceful summer so far - aside from the kids stuff that is!  I am all for keeping it that way!

My sidebar contains a list of historical events of the current day and today in 1954 President Eisenhower signed an order adding words ‘under God’ to the Pledge. It was the year that Marilyn Monroe married Joe DiMaggio, IBM announced vacuum tube “electronic” brain that could perform 10 million operations an hour, Bob Dylan was Bar Mitzvahed, the Moonies were established, Ellis Island closed, Davy Crockett played by Fess Parker appeared on Walt Disney (oh man - I remember Disney nights when we could eat potato chips and drink red pop in the living room!).  The first atomic power station opened near Moscow, Russia and Joseph Welch asked Senator Joseph McCarthy “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” during Senate-Army hearings.  Armistice divided Vietnam into two countries, Charles C Diggs Jr. was elected Michigan’s first black congressman (my home state!), and Senator John Kennedy appeared on “Meet the Press” which brings us around to this weekend.  Tim Russert, only four years older than I am is gone.

So many events of my birth year were foreshadowing the things that would shape my opinions and relationships and politics. How many folks were educated, informed, entertained, and shaped by watching this gentleman.

To a wonderful father, who wrote a book about his father, that spoke to sons of fathers everywhere - you are now with the Father.  Happy Father’s Day.

This is an experiment to see if I can embed a Google Docs spreadsheet and then see if it will update on my blog as the data is populated via forms.

I will post results of this experiment in the comments.

I am having one of THOSE weekends - you know, the ones that make you appreciate root canals or colonoscopies! My eldest is graduating tonight, we have company coming and things scheduled all through the rest of the weekend. My kids are out of school but the school I work at has another week and I have not even begun to get the lab ready for summer. Last night Dale got up about 11:00 to take something for a headache and found that the washing machine had overflowed. He turned it off until the water drained down and then turned it back on. I shouldn’t really say the washing machine overflowed - the drain pipe behind it did - and it first backed up into the kitchen sink! It did it again. About that time I came up to the kitchen because he had been gone awhile and there were noises.

I mopped and mopped, and put the drain cleaner in the pipe behind the washer. When I went to get warm water to flush it with I realized that the sinks were full of water as well. I turned on the garbage disposal which instead of helping the water drain which it has when this happened in the past, the water backed up in the pipe some more - more mopping!!

I checked the outside cleanouts and they were empty which tells us that the problem is inside so I voted to let it all just sit til morning. It was slowly draining. This morning I have already put the drain cleaner in the pipe and let it sit and flushed it with hot water and it is going through that process a second time and hopefully that will do the trick. I do NOT like plumbing problems any time but especially not THIS weekend!

Sondra is coming tomorrow night and we will go with her to Dallas for her six month checkup to make sure she is doing ok with her one kidney. It will be good to see her. I’m going to drive one vehicle and let Dale ride with her so they can have a couple of hours to visit.

Through all of this I feel like the world is spinning just a bit too fast. I know it is graduation that is getting to me under everything. I can hear this quiet ticking in the background - the tiny, less than 4 pound baby that I was terrified I wouldn’t be able to care for as well as he needed. The little guy in diaper and pajama shirt with a Happy Meal box on his head singing with beauty and the beast. Tick tick. Now he is almost four, wearing shorts and cowboy boots and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Near Christmas time in kindergarten he asked our pastor if he could read something from his bible in church. His kindergarten teacher and principle actually came and he stood in front of everyone and read The Magnificat and sang The Foolish Man song. Now we fast forward and the ticking is so fast I can hardly discern the spaces between. Jr. High band (bassoon) and basketball. Band at the beginning of High School until he discovered that debate was his passion and he stuck with that throughout high school.

Next year my daughter will walk across the stage and a chapter in our lives will have ended and a new chapter will have begun. Tick Tick

The plumbing problem is fixed - it took one of those devices you attach to a hose and put in the drain and it lets pressure build up to break up a clog. I’m probably not describing it well but I do not want to understand plumbing just like I don’t want to think about this clock that keeps ticking!

Dale went for an extra check up today because his blood work came back wonky last time. His creatinine was up from 1.1 to 1.4 and his white blood cell count was up. Those things could indicate an infection, a need for meds to be adjusted, a need to drink more water. They were about the same this time - no worse. They want him to come back in 2 weeks and do another glofil test and they adjusted the meds and both were medicines that could create this effect. Soooo…he’s fine though not happy about doing the glofil again.
We got back just after lunch and I went to work though I wondered for a while if we were going to have to pull over in Commerce and wait out the storm - it was raining so hard we couldn’t see and it lasted almost to Paris.

The school year is almost over. We went to a cookout for the debate team last night and the kids got to burn their files. There are six seniors moving on this year and they have spent a lot of time together and they have spent a lot of time with Kristy so it was kind of emotional. We left before about 8:30 and left the kids to spend time with each other and Kristy. I can’t express how grateful I am for all the time Kristy put in with these kids and especially mine.

Tonight we go back out there for a cookout for the AP US History class that my daughter has been in with Dennis as her teacher. They have both obviously had a lot to do with my kids education and growing up.