We’re moving…

I have finally given up on WordPress. It doesn’t let me do any editing unless I pay money, and I’ve been wanting to switch to Blogger for a while now. So…I know it’s a pain, but please edit your links so that my blog is now:

http://kyhotbrowns.blogspot.com/

I spent all day transfering all my posts to the other blog, so it should be identical.

So long, WORDPRESS!

Tagged by Marissa

Alright, Alright…

I am: blogging for the umpteenth time this week. Sorry…
I think: this country is doomed.
I know: that my redeemer lives. (we sang that this morning)
I want: to find a way to get educated.
I have: everything I could possibly need, and am so grateful.
I dislike: when people smack their gum.
I miss: my job.
I fear: alligators.
I feel: so happy that it’s finally Fall again.
I hear: my husband talking on the phone.
I smell: spit up.
I crave: chips and salsa.
I cry: regularly. A good cry is medicinal.
I usually: am happy.
I search: the scriptures. (corny, I know…I couldn’t think of anything else.)
I wonder: If Cami will have any medical problems.
I regret: not working harder at getting more school done.
I love: my little family.
I care: way too much about what other people think.
I always: love to shop.
I worry: about offending people.
I am not: a girly girl, no matter how much I wish I was.
I remember: when the only care in the world was who I was going to play with that day.
I believe: in God.
I dance: but not well.
I sing: as much as I can.
I don’t always: pick up my dirty laundry after taking a shower.
I argue: with myself more than anyone.
I write: in my blog ALL the time. It’s my journal!
I win: free cell almost every time I play it.
I lose: every time I play Ticket to Ride. And yet I LOVE that game. I don’t get it either…
I wish: my husband were done with Dental School already…Blah!
I listen: very poorly. Ask Blair. ADD maybe?
I don’t understand: a lot of things that Blair talks about.
I can usually be found: at home reading a book.
I am scared: that I’ll have to support my family for whatever reason w/out any ’skills’.
I need: alone time every once in a while.
I forget: a lot of things Blair tells me. (see the listening one)
I am happy: that I have such a beautiful and healthy baby.

I tag Rachel F. and Jodie H.

Just if you feel like it…

Laundry Day

I have an announcement to make.

I officially LOVE to read.

I used to be very indifferent to books and reading. It was always so hard for me to sit down and read. My mom can testify to that. She’d always try to get me to read, but I was never interested.

What I have always loved is checklists. I love to make to-do lists, and then check everything off as I finish them. I remember times when I’d put things like “wake-up” on my checklist just so that I’d get to make an extra little check mark next to it.

Blair had this list of books that a friend made him that was just 13 or 14 books long. He had asked his friend to make a broad list of classics from various time periods and places that were must-reads so that he could be a little more well-read. When I found this out about Blair, I went in search of a list of my own. I never liked reading, but loved those checklists…

So I went online and found a list of books about 150 books long. I was feeling extra ambitious that day, so I turned it into the list you can find in my right hand column with a goal to read one a month and finish in about 14 years.

Then I was at Barnes and Noble one day and grabbed their list. It had a lot of other books that weren’t on my list, so I added them to my list, making it a whopping 299 books long (and now the list is going to take 25 years…at best) The books that have the stars next to them are the ones that were on both lists…so I’ll probably try to read those ones first.

I started by reading The Aeneid by Virgil. Can I just say…that the only good thing about starting with that ‘book’ (it’s not even really a book, but a poem) is that I was able to get it over with while I was still feeling so ambitious. Boy, was it tough. And to this day…I’m not really sure I even know a tenth of what it’s about. But it’s done!

I kept going, one by one, and definitely didn’t do so well with the ‘once a month’ thing, but I kept pushing, and finished some amazing books. Every time I get done with another book, I feel so fulfilled. Even if I don’t really like it, I feel like I can always pull something from it.

So, today I decided to make it official. I really enjoy reading. Maybe it’s like how running is for some people. It’s really hard to stay dedicated at first, but once you get going, it’s addicting!

Some of my favorites to date are:

1984-George Orwell

The Count of Monte Cristo-Alexandre Dumas

Dracula-Bram Stoker

A Tale of Two Cities-Charles Dickens

The Odyssey-Homer

Alright, I’m ready…

What kind of book is it that makes me so into it that I can’t put it down, yet so excited to be done with it so I can move on?

That would be the Twilight Series. I really hope you don’t take it personally if you feel differently.

Who wants to lend me Breaking Dawn so I can get on with it…?

And for the record, I am really excited to see the movie. I vote that it’ll call for one heck of a Girls Night Out.

The Tao Teh Ching by Lao Tzu

My review

This was a ‘book’ that I had been assigned to read selections from when I was in my English 101 class. I had been quite intrigued by the parts I had read, so I was looking forward to reading the rest of it. When I went to the bookstore in search for it, I had no idea how long it actually was, and imagined I was in for another really long, tough read. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was 159 pages long with Chinese on every left hand page and English on every right. So It was only really 80 pages. It took me the whole of 2 hours to read.

Just like it had been in my Eng 101 class, the rest of the book was also intriguing. It’s a sort of religious text for the Chinese, and had a lot of truths in it. (While it had some things I wasn’t so sure were truths…) It is all about humility, seeking for simplicity, doing only that which is necessary, not seeking to be acknowledged, etc. etc. It talked about governments and what makes them successful or unsuccessful (something that definitely graps interest from me in election times). It talked about the heavens and their role in man’s life.

I gave it a 2 (“it was ok”) because it didn’t leave me feeling changed or empowered or anything like that. Not to mention that I wasn’t necessarily riveted. The only reason I went ahead and read it for 2 hours straight was to be done with it so I could move on. That’s not to say that it’s not interesting and that I wouldn’t go back to it and quote it and such…I actually marked a lot of parts with stickys so that I could do just that, it just wasn’t anything special.

Oh well, definitely not a waste of 2 hours, and I get to put another FLAG on my reading list. Hooray!

View all my reviews.

The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck

My review

I don’t even know where to begin. While I don’t think I could give this book 5 stars as I would Monte Cristo or A Tale of Two Cities, I can say that my life has been changed by this book. So many lessons can be learned through the studying of Wang Lung’s life:

1. What we wish for one day becomes necessity the next.

Wang Lung goes through a period of famine in his lifetime, and while his wife and children and father resort to begging in the streets to purchase enough food for that evening, he works all day carting people around the city to earn his meal. While even one extra piece of silver in his hand is unheard of one day, silver runs from it the next after he finds a small fortune.

2. Ugly women are harder workers, and cause little upheavel in a home.

I have to laugh at me even listing this one, but it is so true. The book begins with Wang Lung praying for rain, and washing himself wholly for the first time in a long time in preparation for his new wife. He knows from his father that she is not attractive, but that one should hope for a wife that is not. She turns out to be the most selfless, hardworking woman out of all the women in Wang Lung’s life. I have to say that his wife, O-lan, could be now considered one of my heroes. If only I could be so selfless. I’m not saying that you have to be ugly to be selfless, but that sometimes beauty paves the way for vanity which just causes all sorts of problems.I won’t say any more so I don’t spoil it for anyone who is planning on reading it.

3. Land is the only completely secure place to invest your money.

I actually was talking to Blair yesterday about how all this stuff going on with our country’s economy makes me nervous to want to invest any of our money, for fear that all will be lost. I told him we might be safer just burying our money in a hole in our backyard. He said that the only thing that really is safe, since even cash in the backyard can lose its value, is land. It was fitting that I was reading this book at the time…

4. Giving in to lusts will not bring joy.

I’ll just leave it at that.

I could really go on and on, but I’ll go ahead and call that good. I highly recommend this book to anyone. It is relatively short (my copy is 357 pages) and an easy read.

What next? The Tao Teh Ching by Lao Tzu.

View all my reviews.

Do the ChaCha!

The moment I broke $100 for the first time!

Preface:

So, when I worked at Highwood Place Apartments, I had a lot of downtime, and I was constantly looking for ways to fill it. I particularly looked for ways to fill my downtime and make money at the same time. My brother introduced me to Amazon Mechanical Turk, which would take another blog post to explain, but while participating on the forums for that website, I heard about ChaCha.

Back then, ChaCha was solely internet based, and the guides would work with people that were asking questions AT their computer…so the niche market that ChaCha had snatched was probably mostly old people who don’t know how to Google, and someone who had a really hard question that they just couldn’t find the answer to.

I applied. “We are not hiring at this time, but we’ll let you know when we have openings” was what I was told. I didn’t think too much of it, and went on with ‘Turking’.

It was at least 4 or 5 months before I received the invitation in the mail. ChaCha was starting a new service. textChaCha. It’s where people can text message ChaCha from their cell phones a question like “Where can I find the nearest Walgreens” or “What is the score of the Louisville vs. KY game?” and a guide will receive their ‘query’ on their computer, search the internet for the answer, and then send the answer back to them. I was all about this because it was supposed to take less commitment to each individual search. So I applied, took their tests, and passed. I was a guide. I ended up making about $56 guiding. Then I got tired of it. People would ask inappropriate questions, or I’d get a really hard question, and then the phone would ring at work, and I’d have to abort the search (a BIG no-no) and I just didn’t like that.

So I got an email about a month ago saying that ChaCha had come up with a new role besides being a Guide. It’s called the Expediter. The Expediter takes the original question, makes it a true question (so if someone says “walgreens, 40222″, I would change it to “Can you tell me where the nearest Walgreens is to the zip code 40222?”) and then categorizes the question. That one would go in Travel-Directions and traffic. I’d also select the specific location so that the Guide has an easy time finding the answer.

The difference is that I don’t actually have to FIND answers (phew!) and most of them take under 10 seconds. Now that’s still only about 5-7 dollars an hour, but hey…it pays the internet bill!

The Point (I know…it’s about time!):

Well, they only pay you by direct deposit without a fee (you can get paid whenever you want for a fee…) when you’ve reached the magic $100 benchmark, and only once a month do they make the payments. After I tested and was accepted to be an Expeditor, the goal was to reach 100 by Sept 15th so that I could get paid. Up until now, I had never even been paid the $56 I made while I was a guide. For all I knew, I’d never see that money. Well, I made it to $100 on Sept 13th, and today I checked my bank statement. Guess what was there! $101.84!

My free advertisement for ChaCha:

Now, just in case you’re wondering, ChaCha is a free service. You only have to pay for the text messages, so if you have unlimited texting, then it’s totally free. If you’re ever out looking for something or need a phone number for something and don’t have access to the internet, Text your questions to CHACHA (242242) and a guide will send you back the answer. It’s all ad supported, so that’s how they make their money. Oh, and if you’re bored, you can ask for a joke and a guide will send one. If you just want someone to text, you can just strike a conversation with a random guide (it’ll be a different guide every time you text, though). So, Do the ChaCha!

Breaking Even

So last week, I broke even on my pre-pregnancy weight. It’s a good thing there are a few wonderful things about nursing to make up for the tough stuff. Like that extra 500 calories a day that my body uses to produce that ‘heavy whipping cream’, as I like to call it, really helps combat baby fat. I continue to drop, which is totally awesome, but I’m still hanging on to the little muffin top (the baby fat above my belt).

Now I just need to get to my pre-wedding weight. I’m not even sure that’s possible…

Hurricane Ike

Does it make me a sensationalist if I made Blair go out yesterday and take some pictures of the furry of Ike? We’re just glad we aren’t one of the 340,000 people in the city without power.

Local News Article Here

As we were driving home from church (which was let out an hour early…) We saw that the train was stopped on the tracks. “That’s odd” we thought.

Then we looked the other way down the tracks and saw the culprit:

Probably the biggest tree that we saw that was down fell on this building on New Lagrange Rd.

Blair took a bunch more pictures, but you get the idea. One day I’ll be the one with no power and a tree on my house, and then I’ll probably hate the people driving around taking pictures of the mess.

If anyone needs to do some laundry or take a hot shower, give me a call!