Update

The iTunes card came from Jae & Mark (technically my aunt and uncle, but I don't call them that). It didn't show up correctly in Hotmail/IE7 or whatever the problem was. At least now I know it's not a mystery. Now I have to decide which songs I want next :) Yay!!!

I got a response!

So I had been curious about a section of one of my oft-used food history books. I noticed that the author had a website, so I sent her a note/question last night about it. She wrote me back today! She was really nice and suggested where I might go for further research. I mean, I'm sure she doesn't get requests everyday, but she has written quite a bit. Thanks Laura Schenone, author of A Thousand Years Over A Hot Stove!

Betcha didn't know...

Remember "Jump Around" from the mid-90s? Remember "What it's Like" (ie "Then you really might know what it's like") from the late 90s? Same guy. Well, kind of. "Jump Around" was a group, House of Pain, while "What it's Like" was just one guy from House of Pain. Everlast. I always thought Everlast was a group, but apparently it's a person. Thanks VH1's countdown of one hit wonders! More incredibly useless trivia to fill my brain. I miss the 90s when I knew the songs on the radio that all the kids were listening to because I was a kid listening to the songs. Now I listen to one of those stations that teens don't listen to, and I am utterly uncool. Except that Green Day and the Red Hot Chili Peppers are still cool, so I guess I've got something... Since I don't remember how to link to previous posts, check out my July 2, 2006 post for more info about how 5th graders love Green Day and the Chili Peppers.

You know you're from Vermont when...

You know you really want to go to the mall to stock up on winter sales, but you're annoyed by all the people in the parking lot and clogging up the sidewalks. Of course, it didn't help my jolly mood that the closest mall is an outdoor mall (who builds those in Illinois? It gets cold here!) with a layout that is utterly confusing and idiotic. In order to get from one side to the other, you either have to snake around 1/2 a mile of stores or go down 2 sets of stairs, through a parking lot, down a driveway, and up another set of stairs that almost look like stairs you shouldn't really be going up. This is why malls are inside - then you don't have to worry about cars, scary stairs, or weird shapes. A building isn't usually Z-shaped.

By the way, if you sent me a $20 Itunes gift card, thanks. I just got it in my email from [?]. Literally, that's what it says "from [?]" This reminds me of the random Payless gift card that I got for my birthday a year ago that no one ever took responsibility for. How can you thank someone if they don't tell you they sent it?!

Can I teach preschool?

So I've been doing this Children's Ministries director thing for about 4 months now. The first time through, I had a hard time getting someone to teach the preschool Sunday School. This time, I ran an "ad" in the bulletin for about 6 weeks with no volunteers. Then, over the last week, I've had 4 people volunteer to teach. 4. It's feast or famine, I suppose. Now I just have to convince them that they'd rather teach children's church. :)

Why we don't have 2 MINI Coopers

Well, James (Sutton) requested to know why we don't have 2 MINIs, and since Andy has been too busy playing with photos, I'll respond.

1. Grandpa Palone didn't work for MINI, he worked for Ford. No discount means a LOT more money goes to the car dealer and a lot less stays in our pocket.

2. A MINI only has 2 doors. Have you ever tried to put your friends (or parents, for that matter) into the back of a MINI? It's not as easy as it sounds.

3. A Mazda 3 has a real trunk that will hold more than groceries. So when my parents come to visit, we won't have to take 2 cars to pick up their luggage. In case you didn't know, my parents have forgotten how to pack light. We used to go camping in a VW Beetle. Not exactly a lot of trunk room in one of those.

4. I liked the Mazda. Now, it's not as sporty as a MINI, and I'm actually surprised that they call the Mazda "sporty," but I guess it has more of a sporty feel than a Corolla. In any case, it has some good features, a bit of a kick, and an input jack for an MP3 player. One benefit of a less sporty car is a slightly softer ride, which does feel nice on a few of the bumpy roads around here.

5. Sometimes you want to blend in. Everyone stares at you in a MINI. We don't always drive in the nicest neighborhoods, and I'd rather that I wasn't quite so noticeable. However, every 3rd car isn't a Mazda, either, so at least I can (sort of) find it in a parking lot.

So I think Andy would probably still love to have 2 MINIs, but sometimes you have to be practical. We got a good car for a great price (thanks Grandpa!), with good gas mileage and enough space to hold 5 adults and a whole lot of luggage (as we discovered when we took a wrestler and his friends to the airport). Oh yeah, and we got it with a manual transmission. That saved us a lot of $, and it's a lot more fun to drive.

Maybe this will inspire Andy to add his comments.

Merry Christmas everyone!

I got an A

3 A's this semester and a 3.945 GPA. Summa Cum Laude here I come! That GPA will go up even more once my master's essay is figured into the mix. In case you were concerned that I wasn't doing well enough. :)

I'm sitting on my bottom!

In my Toddler Time storytime, I have a problem with some kids getting so excited about the books that they stand right in front of them, thereby blocking the view for all the other kids. Granted, these are 2 year olds, so you can't expect too much from them. However, we try to teach them the importance of sitting and listening to the story. Call it reading appreciation. In any case, I tell them that they can come close to the books as long as they "sit on their bottoms." This isn't always successful, as you can imagine, but I try. I have one girl who is a total ham and completely adorable. She recently turned 2, but she talks like she is 4. In any case, after I said, "ok everyone, let's sit on our bottoms when we listen to the story!" She replied (very loudly), "I'm sitting on my bottom!" with a big grin on her face. Very cute.

I am the queen of gelatin

I submitted my jello paper online yesterday, and I got my response today:
"Whatever doubts I might have had about jello as a topic have disappeared. Your essay uses an excellent combination of primary and secondary sources to create a shimmering and colorful concoction of your own. It is also an excellent piece of writing. The argument now stands out a bit more, the ideas flow well, and the rise and fall of Jello is quite clear to the reader. I suggest you submit this to the McCluggage Prize committee in the Spring. Excellent job. I'm giving you an A on the Paper."

How good does that feel?

Would you eat this?

Cottage cheese and ketchup. Apparently Nixon ate it because he had to eat cottage cheese for "weight control" and added ketchup to make it edible. The bizzare things you learn while reading books about the history of food. Also bizzare is the fact that Mozilla's spell checker doesn't recognize "bizzare." I checked Word to make sure I was spelling it correctly.

90210 anyone?

Season 1 was recently released on DVD, which I am very happy about. For a recap, check out this Slate article. However, I am a little bummed if some of the music isn't in it, which the article seems to indicate. I was a huge Barenaked Ladies fan long before "One Week" thanks to 90210. They played "Brian Wilson" on some episode somewhere along the line. All they need now is Saved By the Bell, and we can get the ultimate California 80s and 90s experience. 90210 was on for 10 years! I feel so old.

Saying goodbye to the old Saab

Sadly, the Saab had a problem that even I wasn't ready to try to fix. On Tuesday, I tried to take it to work. I got to the end of the alley and realized that it just wouldn't go into first or second gear. Now, one of them you might be able to live without, but not both. A call to the Saab dealer confirmed that it probably wasn't anything other than the transmission. Something that would cost far, far more than the car is worth. So, I had to say goodbye to the car that I took my driver's test on, drove to my first ever Ben and Jerry's Free Ice Cream Cone Day in Hannover, and just generally spent a good part of my teens and twenties driving. I wonder if I'll get this nostalgic when my parents get rid of the ginormous truck I took to college to haul all my stuff in?

In any event, we decided that we would indeed get a new car. Thanks to Andy's grandpa, who worked for Ford, we were able to get a good deal on a number of cars. Anything that Ford owns, we could get a discount. We've been considering a Focus for more than 3 years now, but I was never quite ready to commit to one. Then, we discovered that Ford owns Mazda. Well, I'd never even been inside a Mazda until Wednesday, but when I drove it, I liked what I saw/felt. So we're now the proud owners of a Mazda 3i. (The cheaper model, but not the cheapest.) I was excited to get a manual transmission, even though I had thought about the conveniences of an automatic in Chicago traffic. Hey, we might not live here forever, right? Getting an automatic also saved us around $800. Never a bad thing. Unfortunately, it snowed on Friday and got insanely cold, so I wasn't excited to take pictures in that weather. I'll get them when it's not 10 degrees outside.

Goodbye Saab :( I'll miss you.