Exceedingly Mundane

I caught more of the segments today, but maybe I missed the best ones, as I was a little “underwhelmed” (is that a word?? It should be you know, opposite of overwhelmed). Today, Matt Lauer was in Shanghai China. Most of the segments I saw were ok, but nothing really stands out in my mind. Most of the people he interacted with only spoke Chinese, and couldn’t answer his questions. The main thing I got out of out of it is that now there are 1.3 billion Chinese. 🙂 And that Shanghai is a very large city, and very fast growing. Oh, and I saw a bit about a place in Shanghai where you can get 16 steamed dumplings for the equivalent of $1.00 US. Now, that’s what I’m talking about! 😀

OK, the clue for the last day is totally lost on me. I have absolutely no idea. He said the clue is “We’ve jumbled Cruella’s evil plan.” HUH?

I just updated the Hambones website with a few new pictures of Nathan that Wendy had sent me. He’s getting so big and is about ready to sit up!

I also added a bunch of fortunes to the fortune cookie section. I haven’t entered any of the ones in a while from our Chinese eating excursions. 🙂 Go check out your fortune for the day!

Well, apparently Matt traveled to Innsbruck Austria today. I missed most of it, and so far, they don’t have a lot of his video blog up on the Today Show website (today.msnbc.com). Maybe later. I did see the video of him doing the zip line across Innsbruck, which looked beautiful.

This location really ties in with the books I am currently reading (The Zion Covenant). The first book was entitled “Vienna Prelude” and quite a bit of it took place in the Tyrol and in Vienna, of course.

The clue for tomorrow’s destination was something along the lines of “this river city is known for it’s shopping, but the surprise is that there is no Eiffel Tower”. So it could be most any major city in the world. I’d like to guess that it’s Milan (but I don’t think Milan is located on a river); Milan is the next city after Paris that springs to my mind when I think shopping!!

Like yesterday, I missed some of the segments on the Today show about “Where in the World is Matt Lauer”. Sigh. I like to sleep too much, I’m afraid. I did see most of the second half of it though.

Today – Matt traveled to the Panama Canal. Matt went up into the control booth (gate house) and turned some dials and levers and opened the gates for a cruise ship (the Coral Princess with about 1,900 passengers on board) to begin its trek through the canal. He talked about the history of the canal, how many ships go through, how long it takes, and surprising to me – the cost. I had never thought about the ships having to pay, and the price is pretty steep! I believe for this cruise ship alone (don’t quote me, my memory is terrible), the price was about $265,000 dollars. I watched the video blog on the Today show website (today.msnbc.com) and the administrator of the Panama Canal Authority said that they generated over 1.2 billion dollars in revenue last year. So, it is very much a business. They also did a segment on the history – the locks and canal were built by the US Army Corps of Engineers and lots of people lost their lives due to accidents and things like yellow fever. President Carter agreed in the 70’s to turn over the management of the canal to the country of Panama, and this was done at the end of the century, December 31, 1999. The country of Panama and the Panama Canal Authority now run the canal.

It was very interesting, and you can go check out the video blog on the Today show website, or you can go here and read more about the locks, canal, lakes, and history at Wikipedia. Lots of good information here.

The clue for tomorrow’s stop – to quote Matt “The gold flowed here for a second time, after a bust in the Rocky Mountains”. Anyone got any ideas? 🙂

All of my life, I’ve been a TV addict. Now, that I am at home during the day, that means I watch a lot more daytime TV. I turn some of the talk shows on in the AM, and mostly just keep them on for noise. I enjoy some of the segments (some actors on promoting their latest movie, author promoting a new book, the occasional singer or band, etc). But, for the most part, I really just have it on in the background.

However, one thing I truly enjoy is the “Where in the World is Matt Lauer” series they do on the Today show once a year. Or less, I don’t remember him traveling last year. Anyway, I saw a couple of weeks ago that they were promoting this for November, and I wanted to be sure to tune in every day.

Today, I was not disappointed. Matt traveled on Day 1 to Easter Island. I have heard and read of this place before, but earlier this year, in reading the book “Three Weeks with my Brother” by Nicholas and Micah Sparks, I had a renewed surge of interest in the place. Located in the South Pacific and a province of the country of Chile, Easter Island is the most isolated inhabited island in the world. The famous stone statues, the Moai, line the coastline and have given rise to many questions as to their origin, use, how they were carved and erected, etc. You can read more about Easter Island here at Wikipedia.

Can’t wait to see where he goes tomorrow! Tune in!

I was on the computer some yesterday afternoon (Friday) while Tim was working on removing the last of the adhesive from the floor in the guest bathroom. I turned around and looked outside the window in the computer room, and realized it looked like fall outside! One of the things we really like about our little subdivision is that they have in the covenants for everyone to have one of these big oaks planted… and they are starting to get bigger and show some nice color in the fall.

Click to see some pictures, one that I took yesterday, looking out the window in the computer room, and a couple I took this morning. 🙂

Read the rest of this entry »

I found this neat little map while surfing earlier this morning…. go sign up and put a pin in our map!

“I know where most of you live” you know! 😆 But, I still thought it would be fun! After we get a few more pins on the map, I’ll move it over to the sidebar.

I was looking at some statistics from our website and my blog this morning, from the month of October. I’m very pleased to report that on my blog alone, I had visitors from all over the U.S. and several foreign countries. I recently signed up for Blog Explosion and that has generated more traffic to my blog. Most people just stop by for a cursory visit and don’t stay and read much, which is fine with me. My blog is not like most, it’s more personal diary than it is views on subjects like politics, religion, world views, or even movies and television. That’s me, I’m not one to force-feed my views and opinions on others. In fact, I’m very non-confrontational, and prefer to put lighter, happier, more personal entries in my blog.

Irregardless, it was interesting to see what kind of traffic the blog is receiving. In the last few weeks alone, I’ve had visitors from Malaysia, Australia, the United Kingdom, Italy and Singapore. From within the US, the most visits obviously come from Mississippi, but I’ve had others stop by from Texas, New York, Georgia, Illinois, Tennessee, Florida, Oregon, Michigan, Maryland and California, among others. Pretty cool

To everyone who visits – welcome, and thanks for stopping by!

Tim stayed pretty busy all weekend, helping me with some blogging stuff (and also learning about laying ceramic tile!). We upgraded my WordPress to version 1.5, setup a new blog for Suzanne, and upgraded Gail’s blog as well. We will work on every one else’s upgrade over the next few days and weeks. It takes quite a bit of work and I think I wore Tim out with all my requests!

Be sure to go check out Suzanne’s blog here 😀

My pansies aren’t doing great yet, but at least my yellow mums and Confederate rose are blooming! Scenes from outside our house today….

Good thing the time changed this weekend. Tim is on-call and the phone rang about 5:30 AM this morning. They were having problems with a gateway and so, of course, they called him. Thankfully, he was able to resolve the problem fairly quickly, and we were able to go back to sleep and get some more sleep. That extra hour really came in handy!

I know most people don’t like the time change, but I do. I’m an oddball, I know. I like it being daylight earlier in the morning, because I prefer to get up and go walking in the morning (something we don’t usually do when it’s dark in the morning). That way, we don’t walk when Tim gets in from work (which often interferes with my cooking/supper schedule). 🙂 I like it getting dark earlier, I like settling in earlier in the evenings, lighting some candles, cooking supper when it’s dark, lighting a fire before Tim comes home from work (once it gets a little colder), things like that. Total nesting type things. I didn’t like it as much when I was working and commuting, though, so I understand why most people don’t like it. But I do!

I posted over 2 weeks ago (here) about our Confederate Rose and how I was patiently waiting on it to bloom. There are now about 20-25 blooms on this thing, and still I look every day for one to pop open. Finally, today, we’re looking like it’s really close!

I wonder if the thing is going to be pink?

Stay tuned!!!!

One of the things I disliked about my former job (besides the Nazi boss, the hours and being oncall 24×7) was the commute. Now, granted, we don’t live in a huge city so I know it’s tons worse other places. Still, here it was bad enough when I was working. These days, I avoid rush hour like the plague.

Except for today, since I had to take Suzanne to the airport, so she could fly home to Chicago (bye Suzie, we miss you, we had fun while you were here!).

Today, I got to re-experience rush hour. We couldn’t even pull out onto the main road by our subdivision because the traffic was backed up past our subdivision entrance. A nice man let me in, and then we inched down the road for a while, trying to get to the interstate. The interstate did flow pretty well for the most part, but the other main road out to the airport (Lakeland Drive) was pretty backed up. I had thought that our trip to the airport would take 20-30 minutes, but it ended up taking about 35-40. I think Suzie got there in enough time, but I hated to be running late. Traffic. Gotta hate it! 🙂

Kudos to Shanna for being spotlighted at Blog Carnival about her recent post on comedy shows to watch on TV. Blog Carnival finds great blog posts about different topics (this one is in their On Television section) and highlights them for all of their users to read. Hooray for Shanna for being singled out from the THOUSANDS or maybe MILLIONS of blog entries out in the blogosphere!

You can read it here, or of course, at Shanna’s blog here at Hambones.

Do you see pumpkins? This is a blog design I worked on last week for Gail, then I decided to swipe it for myself when she wanted to use a picture she took in the mountains last fall. Hope it’s working right now! 🙂