Sports don't always equal evil

Sports does not equal evil when it means that you get out of work. A couple of weeks ago we had a workteam get-together on work time. We decided to go to a hockey game. Since the arena is only a few blocks from my apartment I worked at home in the morning.

Around eleven I walked over and, eventually, met up with the other folks from my department. We grabbed food from the local vendors and sat down to enjoy the game. My food included a pint of beer so I really did enjoy the game. Never got too cold either even though we were just two rows up from the ice.

The Griffins ended up beating the Manitoba Moose. It went into sudden death overtime and then shoot-offs. I had to have this explained to me as it went along.

Here are the souvenirs I got:



Here is the Griffins' mascot:




Here are a couple of shots that show just how close we were to the ice:

Storm at Sunset

Actually, it was stormy off and on all day. As it got toward sunset the sky started to clear a bit. I love the pinks that were showing through here.

Sports = Evil says Mr Bloggerific

Well, I'm sitting here, the day after Thanksgiving, feeling properly full from yesterday's leftovers. I had finished my housework and was all primed to watch General Hospital. However, upon turning on the TV, I saw FOOTBALL! Mr Bloggerific says sports = evil. I say he couldn't be more right.

I finally saw the Harry Potter movie on Tuesday. I might go with Ichabod tonight. Probably after 10:00 which is very late for me, but maybe there won't be as many kids.

Anyway, enjoy your weekends, everyone. I'm off to Bucky's site as I have it on the best authority that she has updated her blog.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

Here's wishing everyone a safe and happy day, whether it's Thanksgiving in your country or not. :-)

Training was grueling, but the training site wasn't

Well, last post was fall colors. Now we've had snow. Looks like it's not going to stop my using my camera. This is the place where my training last week was held. This place is gorgeous year-round, but I hadn't really thought about how great it looks in the snow.

This is overlooking the lake.





The main house, in the old days, before it was used for meetings.






And the training room buildings, one of which was a boathouse in the old days.




As always, they look better when viewed in the large size.

Time for some pretty colors

I've been in training today, Thursday, and will be again on Friday. I thought I'd have time to catch up on everyone's blog tonight but I had to put together a ten minute presentation for tomorrow.

Back in high school I had no problem getting up in front of class. But when I had to take a speech class for my bachelor's degree I started getting the dry mouth, sweaty palms, sick stomach, pounding heart thing. I actually volunteered to go to this class.

Well, wish me luck. I couldn't figure out what to talk about so I thought about some of my blog stories. Decided to talk about the advantages and disadvantages of living downtown. There will be some panhandler and rude neighbor stories involved.

In the meantime, here are the last pretty fall pictures that I took. As always, you may click on the pictures and choose all sizes if you want a better look. Enjoy the colors!

First Kiss

This is mrtl's Monday Motif. I found it through Susie this morning.

My parents had decided that I shouldn't date until I was 16. I think a lot of parents use that number. I wonder how often they end up sticking with it. Kinda hard when you have access to members of the opposite gender close by in town. Susie was saying that she didn't have the opportunities, living in the country, that the city kids had. Well, I was a city girl. And well, being in the city means living closer to other teenagers.

There was a group of us, male and female, who used to hang out together. There was an elementary school nearby and we could walk over there, or we could walk around town. Most of us were 15 and nobody could drive yet.

I was really wanting to have a boyfriend by that time. There was one boy in the group who I really liked, but he liked my bitchy friend better. I never get that: guys going for girls who are bitches, and girls going for guys who are real jerks.

Anyway, there was another boy who occasionally hung out with us. Bill didn't go to our school. He went to the Christian high school in the town to the north of us. The kids who went to that Christian school thought they were really hot stuff. Their attitude wasn't one I'd like to attribute to "Christians" in general. But this guy was kinda cute and we seemed to get along.

It was the end of winter and we'd just been over with the group trying to break up the ice at the little rink (rest of the year tennis court) at the elementary school. He walked me home and we kept talking outside the house. Just before he left, he kissed me. It was nothing to write home about, but it was my first kiss.

Well we were"going together" for a few weeks when he abruptly cut it off. His father had found out that I was Catholic so Bill wasn't allowed to see me anymore. Another lesson learned about religious intolerance.

I'm not saying that taught me to be any wiser in choices of boyfriends after that. But at least none of the others used the religion excuse to break up with me.

Everybody's workin' for the weekend

Hey, I'm gonna leave you for the weekend with some more pictures. I'm not sure how much blogging time I'm going to be getting, but here, for your viewing pleasure:

Last Wednesday the clouds looked like this for about ten minutes. I was lucky enough to be able to get these shots. And, I always feel that they look best when you click on them and view All Sizes.

The moon over the willows

I had a meeting at work today that started at 1:30. I was told that it probably wouldn't take the full two hours that was scheduled. Well, that information was sooooo wrong. It was after 4:00 (my quitting time) when the meeting finally let out. I got back to my desk and was hoping to make a quick getaway.

Why, oh why did I have to go to the bathroom? As I was leaving and getting ready to go back and pack up to leave I got caught by someone who'd been in that long meeting with me. He had another 10 minutes worth of crap he wanted to talk about.

Well, I managed to pull myself away and all I could think about was getting the hell out of there. But as I was pulling out of the driveway I found I had to stop and back up because what I saw looked so pretty to me.

I love it when the moon shows in the middle of the day. This shot over the willows was too much to miss. It's kinda hard to see in the first shot. It's a little easier in the second shot. If you really want to see the moon you might have to click on the picture and then choose All Sizes.

Chas's Revenge

A lot of us are using Word Verification these days. Spam comments are irritating and most of us don't want to deal with all the deleting they make necessary. And, come on, we sometimes have fun with the verifications and the word associations they bring up.

One day I was on Susie's site. One of the WFs I came along was not any particular word, mostly a jumble of consonants, but it did remind me of an incident from some years earlier.

When Ichabod and I lived in Grand Haven we used to hang out with a buddy from work, Chas. Chas was working in the engineering department at that time. He and a young guy from that department had a friendly rivalry going. They enjoyed playing tricks on each other.

One Friday night the three of us had been hanging out and doing a little drinking. Ichabod was showing Chas his text-to-speech software. You would type in a sentence and the computer would say it back in that monotone computer type of talk. Ichabod's favorite sentence to have it say was, "(Squirl) eats kitty litter with a fork."

Well, the three of us tended to get silly when we were together. It didn't matter if we were drinking or not. But somehow we decided we needed to leave the young engineer a message on his voice mail.

Ichabod typed in random letters so that it sounded like a very garbled message. He spelled the guy's name in, phonetically, once or twice and a few words that were pertinent to the product our company sells.

I think Chas almost peed his pants the next Monday. He could hear the guy asking everybody around to come listen to his message. It was hard to understand and he thought maybe someone could decipher it.

I'm not sure how long Chas let him go before he burst out laughing. He told him we'd played a prank on him and the message was meaningless. I don't believe the young guy thought it was as funny as we did.

Swans and clouds and trees, oh my!

Well, I went for a ride last week. I know, what else is new? But the sun was shining, there were beautiful clouds, and the trees were really changing color.

This is by the Grand River. This, and all the others, look better when you click on them and choose all sizes in Flickr. The large version shows them off much better.


Here's where it's imperative to see the large version if you want to see the swans. Even if you can't see the swans, I love the reflection of the clouds in the water.


Though you can only see three here, there were a pair of swans with their three (full-sized) babies.


Distant swans.


Then I had to get shots of the different trees.





But this one really thrilled me. The only thing that has been changed in this photo is that Kitty used Photoshop to take the telephone line out. Please click on this one even if you didn't on the others. The rainbows are really something.