Suzy's Blog

As I posted earlier today it is Olivia's birthday. I had to call her and wish her a happy birthday. She was so cute she had to tell me everything that she got for her birthday. My mother said her party was almost a three ring circus. They invited 19 children all age 4. Her other grandparents brought everything but Barnum and Bailey .

Today is Olivia's 4th birthday. Happy Birthday From Aunt Suzy and Uncle Art. I checked my email this morning and had this picture from my brother in law. My mom and dad gave her the bicycle for her birthday. She also started school last week. I Hope she is enjoying it and eating lots of cake. Not much for me to say except for happy birthday to my niece.

Well today I downloaded SP 2 for my desktop. Getting it to download was slower on my desktop. It seemed to hang up my desktop for some unknown reason. Anyway, no problems after it downloaded just a pain getting it to download and install. I was surfing blogs on blogger the other day and found this link. I did some surfing of the links she had posted and found some great information. She has a site for work at home moms and a discussion board. She has also compiled information and good links. Anyway, I found her pages very informative and interesting. You should check them out.

Well I finally did it I downloaded service pack 2 for win XP home. All I have to say is ouch it is a big download even on broadband. I highly recommend if you are on dial up to take advantage and order the CD from windows. It is free and it will make your install less of a pain. My wireless connection kept disconnecting me. The reason why I am talking about this download is that I had to format the hard drive on my laptop to get rid of the crap that gateway installed on it. They seem to like putting scripts on there that when you reboot it reverts to factory pre-installation specifications. Art and I removed those late this afternoon. Anyway, it slowed my system down something fierce. It also had a folder created on there named owner. You couldn't change the name of the folder or delete it so we formatted the baby. Anyway, I noticed that when I ran windows update it prioritizes your critical updates and put service pack 2 ahead of older updates. I rebooted and it did not give me...

Quad-City Times Newspaper Online - the Quad-Cities Home Page Well it is about time Mediacom offered this type of thing. At&t has done it as has knology. I was actually going to look into this to see if it was available here but now if my ISP is doing it maybe I can get a package deal. I have only had mediacom since we have been in the quad cities which is 3 years. My dad got a package deal with knology and it includes his long distance. He gets his cable, internet and phone all on one bill. I really like that idea having it all on one bill.

My niece Olivia stayed last week with my parents while my sister and my brother in law were out of town. Anyway, my mom and niece were in target buying a the new jimmy buffett CD when Olivia declared that she is a parrothead. I guess they start at an earlier age these days. I was in high school before I discovered Jimmy Buffett. I think I would worry if she didn't declare herself a parrothead. My sister and brother in law have stood in line for buffett tickets more than one time. I should say that Olivia will be 4 years old on Sunday. Anyway, even Art thought it was funny.

Art and I first discovered blogging about 2 years ago at Gnomedex. After attending Gnomedex we were inspired to set up our own blogs at blogspot using blogger. We soon moved on to using moveable type for our blogging software. After some issues with comment spam we went back to using blogger again. I was just telling Art the other day how I am liking the improvements with blogger software. I have also noticed how blogger has grown since we returned. When we discovered blogging blogger was owned by an individual and now it is part of my favorite search engine google. One of the reasons we moved over to moveable type was for the features it had. Blogger was small and did not have a lot of the features we were looking for. In the time that we were away from blogger they made massive improvements and I am happy with it now. I would recommend it to anyone wanting to set up a webpage to update friends and family on your life. It is easy to use and I really like it.

Art sent me an email last night at 8:30 pm so I checked my mail and did not receive anything. I asked him if he was sure of which email address he sent it too. He said yes. So I logged out of yahoo a few times and logged back in still nothing. I checked at midnight last night still nothing from art but my spam made it to me. So obviously yahoo wants me to get my spam but not email that I am actually expecting to receive. I know I am ranting but this is ridiculous that I would get my spam before I would get something from someone in my address book. I finally did get the email this morning around 9:ooam.

In the past two weeks I have received more than one email warning me not to open emails referencing 9/11 or the WTC. This particular email is a hoax. This email comes from family or friends. All I ask is that people take time to research these things before they forward this stuff to all their mailing list. You can search for email hoaxes at this place or this place. I get to the point where I do not want to check my email because people do not think before they forward a virus hoax. It only takes a few minutes to search about the title of the virus or name of the virus.

Art and I are sitting here watching the gymnastics and the beach volleyball. I like to watch the gymnastics to see what happens with all the controversy surrounding Paul Hamm's gold medal. I don't think that I have ever seen such poor sportsmanship from one gymnast over the female all around finals last week.

I just finished setting up my moblog at textamerica. I do not have many pictures up yet but will continue to add more later this week. I couldn't believe how easy it was to upload pictures once I set it up. I will be moblogging from Gnomedex at the end of the month in Tahoe. Can't wait to go.

I am sitting here watching foodtv. They are airing a special where hot sauces and barbecue sauces are judged in a contest. The last hot sauce that they are judging is rated at 7.1 million scoville units. The judges had to sign a wavier to taste it. The people serving the extract at the contest had to wear gloves and cover their mouths with a cloth. This extract as it is called is meant to be added to foods to make them hotter. That is hot. Sounds to me like the festival should be called Pain challenge not the fiery foods challenge. Now I know why I can barely eat jalapenos.

Who knew when I was growing up that the trampoline would become an Olympic sport? I remember when we used to have one. It was a Christmas present and I was about 7 or 8 years old at the time. My parents put clues all over the house that eventually led us to the garage. My sister was in middle school and going through a growth spurt shall we say. Before my parents could tell her to watch out her head had hit the ceiling.

Official Website of Rock Island County - About Rock Island County Jury Duty is a pain. A few weeks ago I received a summons for jury duty in Rock Island County. So I called last Friday like the instructions said and it told me to call back on Monday and then I called on Monday and was told to call back today. Well I called today and have to go to the Courthouse tomorrow morning. I have to be there at 8:30 am. In all my time of having a drivers license and being a registered voter I have never been tapped for Jury Duty. I am hoping that I won't get picked. I know that is probably the wrong attitude to have but they have been jerking me around since Friday. On another note as I blogged about last night we have made our arrangements to go to Gnomedex in Lake Tahoe at the end of next month. I told Art that we need to set up a moblog so we can moblog from Gnomedex. I think that it would be fun to post pictures from Tahoe.

This dish is quite tasty and easy to make. I cooked wild mushroom couscous to go with it. If you like new ways to cook chicken this is a good start. I found the recipe on the package of Tomato Basil Feta Cheese.

It is now a done deal as Art blogged about last night we are going here for this event at the end of September and I am excited. I just booked our flight from Chicago and our reservations for Gnomedex. It will be more expensive than when we could drive to Des Moines but it will be worth it to hear Wil Wheaton and Woz speak.

Well it looks like Costco has given new meaning to one stop shopping. Now you can buy your food, electronics and a casket to go. Not sure if this is a good thing or not. I should say this is only at Costco in Chicago right now.

Well it looks like Symantec is issuing a patch to work with service pack 2 of windows XP. As if windows did not have enough problems before they issued service pack 2. It sounds like I will be waiting to install service pack 2 until I can get the patch from Symantec since we have Norton antivirus on our computers. I would rather my antivirus work than not work. Art had said something about Symantec products not working properly with the new service pack but as per usual he heard it before I did.

Yesterday after we returned from this event I told Art that it seemed warm in the house. We think that our airconditioning is broken as a result of Mondays brownout that we had. We still do not know what caused it. Anyway, it has been cool here all week so if the airconditioning broke on a day where it was only 65 for a high then I would not have noticed it until I was hot like yesterday. I was supposed to have jury duty this week. I called on Friday night and my number was not for Monday but it said call back on Monday night for the rest of the week. Anyway, I guess I will be calling an airconditioning repairman tomorrow. Not sure how much more of this I can take. It was 80 degrees in here by noon today not fun.

I just told Art earlier this evening that I am glad that we are not living in Florida anymore. I was surprised to see that they had actually closed Disney World. When we lived there 11 years almost 12 years ago I do not remember Disney closing for bad weather but I guess they do. Art and I are sitting here watching the opening ceremonies for the Olympics. There are some interesting names for countries. Places I have never heard of. Probably because they were called something else when I was growing up. Anyway, it is interesting to see the parade of nations.

As Art talked about we ate dinner at this restaurant tonight. They have very good Jagerschnitzel. I recommend it to anyone in the Quad Cities who likes German food and beer.

I was watching the local news today and it was announced that Rock Island County will be getting new voting machines for the November election. I say way to go it is about time that the county get rid of punch card ballots. Why on earth would you want to continue to use antiquated equipment after what happened in Florida 4 years ago? In this age of computers and electronics you would think that someone would have perfected electronic voting and or give voters the option to vote from your pc at home or work. I think that computer based or electronic voting should be countrywide but I guess that is the geek in me talking now. Computer or electronic voting I think would be a good thing.

Well it looks like the Country of Botswana wants to flog their criminals under 40 for minor offenses instead of jailing them. I find this quiet interesting. I guess they think that they can save the taxpayers some money by using this approach. In other news what some people would do for love. I guess if you love someone enough you would do anything for love. Apparently Keith Olbermann thinks that this cat should be known as a weapon of mouse destruction.

Have I said this before that power outages suck? Today around 1:40 Our power went out. I checked the circuit breakers and they were fine so I called the power company to report the outage. You may wonder why I am linking to this article when it says that power was restored in 30 minutes. It was around this same time that our power went out here in Illinois. It tried to come back on and we had low voltage power in some places in the house and no power in other places. Weird isn't it. I know the car wreck was not the cause of our power outage. I still do not know what caused it. Art seems to think it was the wind and or somehow related to this from last Tuesday. When it did return it was not all at once either. First the cable box turned on and off and the ceiling fan resumed normal speed in the living room and then the lights came on. I went to the other part of the house to tell Art that the power was trying to come back on and we still had low voltage in the bedrooms. So as I was...

So I was browsing the entertainment news on reuters and found that this artist is releasing a new album on Tuesday. I loved his music years ago. I still like him today. Call me crazy or whatever you want but this guy can sing and he is nice to look at too. I listened to one track off his new cd and it is pretty good. Sounds just like he did 17 years ago when I first discovered his music. I know that Art will think that I am bonkers for liking the same music that I did 17 years ago but a lot of my favorite music is Country, Classic Rock or 80's music. I know that people my age will probably laugh but hey when you like someones music you talk about it. Today Art and I watched Lost In Translation. It is a fairly interesting movie. I was surprised by it. It was written and directed by Sofia Coppola. I think that it was up for some awards this year too.

Art and I went to breakfast this morning at the Iowa Machine Shed. Breakfast was good. After breakfast we went to Borders so I could buy the new Jimmy Buffett Cd . Even art liked one of the songs on the cd it was titled Simply Complicated. I had blogged about Buffett not that long ago just after his new album was released. I like it pretty good. I noticed on the label it had mailboat records as the label. I was surprised to see that it is a fairly new label but what surprised me was the artists listed on mailboat records. I was surprised to see Brett Michaels formerly of Poison as an artist on the label. If you are a Parrothead I suggest you try out License to Chill. It is a good cd but then again I like country music too. After returning home from Borders I had the tv on while Art was mowing the lawn. I was watching vh1country and saw a video for a band called the Notorious Cherry Bombs . The song that was playing is called its hard to kiss the lips at...

I read this article and have to say this guy should be the poster child for gun control. I have no problem with one protecting their own but why would you cock the gun before you put it in your pants? Are you that unnerved that you would not be able to cock the gun if and when you had to? In other news I read this article. I find this funny but disgusting at the same time. What is the world coming to when the Dutch want to make a law that bans unsolicited toe licking based on what one man was doing for three years and just now getting caught for it?

After reading this article I have decided that President Bush either needs cue cards or he needs someone to proofread his speeches before he gives them in public. I told Art that this Bush blunder should make this website. In other news it looks like the Quad Cities of Iowa and Illinois have again made it on Countdown With Keith Olbermann. That has got to be a record twice in One Week the same town gets mentioned on the Countdown. What are the odds that 3 banks would be robbed while Bush and Kerry were in the Quad Cities yesterday then today 2 more banks get robbed.

Davenport police busy with three bank robberies during candidates visit Art and I were watching Countdown with Keith Olbermann and he was talking about 3 bank robberies that happened today in this city. Just before we sat down to eat dinner I had told him about the bank robberies. I said that this would be good material for Olbermanns show tonight seeing how the big news was that both Bush and Kerry were in Davenport today during the multiple bank robberies. I guess that the Davenport Police had nothing better to do today than respond to something like a bank robbery. Anyway, I thought that it was funny that Davenport made Keith Olbermann's show.

As I blogged about last night we had a pretty nasty mess of thunderstorms move through the area around 8pm last night. The power finally came back on just before 11pm last night. We had more thunderstorms after midnight but the power stayed on that time. As I was surfing the web looking for something to blog about this afternoon I came across this article. Chicken Pox suck when you are a kid but what if you are a 34 year old adult with chicken pox. I have heard that getting chicken pox as an adult is worse than if you are a child. All I have to say is that I am glad I had them as kid and not an adult. Content is hard to find so I will blog more later.

Art and I went to get ice cream at Whiteys Ice Cream tonight after dinner. We had barely made it home when we had a storm hit and the power went out. We rarely have outages around here that last any length of time. Usually it is a short one. Our power went out around 8:15pm and it just came back on about 10 or 15 minutes ago. I never realized how dependent we are on technology until the power went out. Art says that I could never live in a cave because I have to have the noise of TV or radio going all the time. I even fall asleep with the TV on. Good thing that sleep timers were invented. I have to say our power company is on the ball. When I called to report the outage there was a message on the line said we were experiencing scattered power outages in Rock Island County and that power would be restored as soon as possible. I guess Art had a point that we live in a good section of town to get our power restored quickly as the hospital is a few miles away from our house. I say it i...

theyrule Art just pointed me to this cool website. You can see who sits on what board of what company and how many company boards a person is on. I thought that I would post a link. Kind of neat to see who is connected to who.

Red Lobster Menus Art and I ate dinner at Redlobster this evening. We had not been there in awhile. I had the Salmon New Orleans. It was pretty good. It had grilled salmon and broiled shrimp in a butter sauce with vegetables and rice. I usually get shrimp or scallops and lobster but wanted to try something different. If you want to try something new this is a good start. Not much to blog about here so sorry if this is boring I am having a hard time finding material. I went to Target today to buy a grill pan. I had found one online that I wanted but the store did not have it so I bought my second choice instead. I think that I will like the one that I settled on. It was about $15 Dollars cheaper but It will serve the purpose that I wanted it for to begin with. I think tomorrow I am making a lemon garlic pork loin for dinner and I am going to get some squash, zucchini and eggplant and cook that to go with the pork loin. I am dying to use my new grill pan. I wished that Wal mart carrie...

Internet Week > Spam > Big Time Spammer Shut Down By CAN-SPAM > July 30, 2004 I have never been one to like government interference but I am glad that someone is trying to do something about spam. This is one of the few cases where I think that the government should step in. They passed the can spam act lets utilize it. Now if only there was a do not spam list or something similar to the do not call list that the government could run.

As Art recently stated he had the pleasure of working 13 hrs last night not the standard 12 hrs that he was scheduled for. So I thought that I would make something simple for dinner since he has to work 12 hrs tonight too. I don't mind it too much as it is part of his job and I am getting used to him working rotating shifts. Anyway, my thanks go to Bamablog for this receipe for Oriental Chicken salad. Oriental Chicken Salad 1/2 head of cabbage & 1/2 head of lettuce (torn in small pieces) 3-4 chicken breasts cooked and cubed (or a whole cooked chicken, deboned) 2 packs Ramen noodles (not cooked- just broken into small pieces, oriental or chicken flavor) 1/2 c almonds 1/4 c sesame seeds or to taste ( I just sprinkle in as wanted) Mix the above, set aside, then mix in a separate bowl: 1/2 c veg. Oil 3 tablespoons soy sauce 2 teaspoons vinegar 2 flavor packets from the noodles Pour over the first mixture, mix together and refrigerate. The longer it sets,...