My 2013 Vacation in Virginia

If you asked me ten years ago where I wanted to go on vacation, Virginia probably would not have been on my mind. My aunt and uncle live here though in the Shenandoah River Valley and they were always telling to me come and visit them so here I am. I flew in on Saturday and coming from California, that took the better part of the first day. I woke up at 4AM to get to the airport by 5AM to get a the plane by 6:30AM for a flight at 7AM. I didn't want to drive to the airport, so a friend from work took me to LAX. In the dark. On a Saturday morning when she could have been sleeping. That's what friends are for. The plane experienced turbulence over Illinois and near where I landed at Dulles. It made my stomach a little queasy. After almost six hours on the plane, the landing at Dulles was easy. The airport is modern and has a high speed shuttle to take you from the gates to the terminal. Once your bags are collected at the luggage carousel, all you have to remember is who you rented your car from and find where to stand on the curb to catch the shuttle bus to where the rental car terminal is. Rent your car, find it in their parking lot, and you're off!

Driving from the airport to Winchester took maybe 40 minutes? I had to stop and get something to drink because I was thirsty from the long flight.

So I got in on Saturday and they fed me. I got up on Easter Sunday and they fed me. And we had an early dinner of ham, three veggies and tea. I was so full... These seniors eat way too much way too often. They are so sweet and so retired. They are in their 80's and don't volunteer much anymore. Tressa makes things to sell at the craft fairs around town. She handed me the instructions sheet for Star Pot Mat. Guess what I know how to make now?

STAR POT MAT

Three skeins of yarn, 4 ply worsened weight.
variegated (4 rounds)
white (3 rounds)
Your choice of solid color (3 rounds)

Directions:
Using variegated colored yarn:
Chain 8, slst, chain 2
Round 1 - dc 15 times into ring, slst
Round 2 - *chain 21, skip one st on ring and join in next st of ring. Repeat from * 8 times. Slst.
Round 3 - 10 sc, then * 3 sc in next stitch, 20 sc, 3 sc in next stitch. Repeat from * 7 times, 10 sc.
Round 4 - Continue to sc and when you reach a star point, 3 sc in same st.
Round 5 - Continue to sc and when you reach a star point, 3 sc in same st.
Round 6 - Continue to sc, and when you reach a star point, 3 sc in same st. End variegated colored yarn.
Round 7 - Yarn on white. Continue to sc and when you reach a star point, 3 sc in same st.
Round 8 - Continue to sc, and when you reach a star point, 3 sc in same st.
Round 9 - Continue to sc, and when you reach a star point  3 sc in same st. End white yarn. Shape work to look like an 8 point star
Round 10 - Yarn on solid color, then  * 7 stitches from point of star then sc, and when you reach a star point  3 sc in same st. Sc in next 7 st, sc [repeat from * seven times]. Slst onto first solid color st.
Round 11 - sc in each st, and when you reach a star point, 3 sc in same st.
Round 12 - sc in each st, and when you reach a star point, 3 sc in same st. End solid colored yarn.

I was feeling a little stir crazy on Easter Sunday night with the rainy and cold weather, and not knowing where I was going, I drove around until I found a grocery store that was open (Food Lion) and picked up some things. I also bought two VA scratchers at $5 a piece and won $10. Made my money back.

On 04/01, I went to the visitor's center: http://www.visitwinchesterva.com/visitor-info/visitor-center

I went to Stonewall Jackson's home and took the docent led tour with my uncle. Tressa stayed in the car knitting because she didn't feel like negotiating all those steps. I bought a $10 ticket and then later found out they were across the driveway from the visitor's center.

http://www.winchesterhistory.org/society_museums.htm

After that, we decided to take a drive out of town, but before doing so, because by then it was noon, we stopped for lunch and ate at Perkins. I found the food to be very much like Coco's. They offer a 2 or 3 item lunch special. I had the chicken noodle soup and lemon meringue pie, and tressa and frank split a 3 item special - frank had the tuna melt and tressa had the loaded potato soup and split her salad with frank. The bill for three people was less than $20.

Then I drove with them over to the arboretum. They had an herb garden I walked through that looked pretty shabby right after the end of winter. I picked a few leaves of sage and lavender and put them in my pocket. They also have a driving tour of the property which we took. Afterwards, my guts were so shaken, I had to stop the car again and parked across from the herb garden in order to walk to the office building to where the restrooms was. It was a good thing they were there. OK, then we tooled on down the road to Milltown, but the mill building there was closed for renovation. I quickly ran around the building and took some pictures and got back into the car because it was a cold, blustery day.

We drive through Milltown, which is actually older than Winchester and not much of a town at all, and then went back to the house. That was outing for the day. And then we ate again. And I made another star pot mat. I'm on my third one now.

The never end saga of the tomatoes in my back patio

I was a bad tomato farmer last year. I let the fruit fall and I didn't pick it up before it sprouted and made tomato babies in my flower bed. This is called self-seeding. I honestly though that the flower bed would never be any good for growing anything but weeds. For years I did just that. Two years ago I gave it my best shot and landscaped that thing, pulling up all the weeds and laying down black landscapers cloth and topping it with bark. Then I planted three topsy turvy planters with various varieties of tomato plants. They hang over the flower bed off of the roof beams from the right side of my neighbor's condo unit which buts up to my patio area creating the back wall of my patio.

In 2011, I first started with three:
Chika Japanese cherry tomato
Pink Lady
Beefsteak

In 2012, I got ambitious and planted four:
Chika Japanese cherry tomato I grew from seed (the star performer from last year)
Sweet 100 cherry tomato
Cluster tomato and
another cherry

So at the end of the season in March which is also the start of the next season and coincidentally is when the batteries decided to die on my rainbird automatic watering system, I salvaged two stalks from the two best performers, placed them in a vase full of water and threw the rest out. And on the day before I was scheduled to pack and leave for my trip, I bought all of the supplies to plant my tomatoes for this year and promptly left. It appears I'm still a bad tomato farmer. We'll see if I can salvage the drop when I return from vacation.

Dumping Sprint, kind of...

Have you looked at your cell phone bill recently or do you blindly pay-pay-pay through the nose for service because it's what you've grown accustomed to shelling out monthly?

I'm not a big talker and yet I pay $89 something for my Sprint plan. I've actually been a Sprint customer for years. Once I got the Android smartphone (I'm on my second one) and the iphone came on the market, everyone's bill at Sprint got jacked up by $10 a month for 'premium' service which allows your smartphone to stay online and this, Sprint says, it expensive.

And then there is Virgin Mobile.  This company is also on the same Sprint network and charges $55 a month max for the same unlimited 3G/4G service. Why pay more? I mean, what can you do with an extra $34 a month?

Match.com 2013 Update

I'm on the third month of my Match.com membership and I decided I had to update the zip code and mileage range on my profile because I'm getting too many responses from...(wait for it) Beverly Hills. It seems some men don't even bother to read the fact that I wrote my geographic dating range is between work - El Segundo and home and BH is nowhere near my normal route. Do you know when the last time I was in Beverly Hills? It was so long ago, I couldn't even tell you because I don't remember either. Maybe before 2000 for an IRC picnic meet? I may gave driven through to get to somewhere else like my friend Mimi's house, but even that was in 2006? Yeah, so I don't see myself traversing all over LA county for a relationship. Oh, and speaking of which, my cheapskate lunch's suggestion was a bust because his broker friend got married 9 years ago. Nice.

So you had a bad day

There was something in the air today. Or a planet in retrograde somewhere. Maybe it's the impending Spring Forward time change this weekend and the notion that we'll all loose an hour of sleep. All I know is that something was up. One of my peers at work freely used the code word 'bizarre' today. It's an insider buzzword for something that went wrong and we all know who did it, but that person won't take responsibility for it.

How is it that I get to be called confrontational by You when You were the one who came to My desk to talk to Me about fixing a problem someone on your team created and then Secondary asked you to take care of? Huh?

Leadership: Are you Teflon or Velcro?

Photos I'm proud to say I've taken

I can't say that I'm any sort of photographer or even someone that has taken classes for it, but because I have an artistic eye and understand a little bit about symmetry, once in a while without trying all that hard, I take some pretty awesome photos, if I do say so myself. So here's a few for your enjoyment.

This is the lighthouse located in St. Augustine, Florida. This photo was taken in September, 2007, before I found the energy and the strength to climb to the top.

And this is what the view was like after climbing to the top of the lighthouse. This is a photo of an inter-coastal waterway which sometimes runs on the east side of the state. In the background is Anastasia State Park.

This is the home of FDR in Hyde Park, New York, and this photo was taken in October, 2011. I was staying in Fishkill and driving up to Red Hook almost daily for genealogy research before my mother's funeral and I wanted to do something touristy to lighten my mood. This national park was on the way.

On a rainy day, once on a guided tour and inside the home, after about 20 minutes, it became so uncomfortable for me to be there because there was no air circulating due to preservation efforts that I began hyperventilating (but especially after hearing the script from the docent which emphasized the fact that this was his mother's home before it became his and then the realization hit me for an ever so brief moment that my mother has nothing of significance for me to inherit, among other things about my mother that hit my consciousness all at once...) and that this was an extremely rare time when I realized my anxiety was kicking in, so I had to excuse myself from the tour in order to catch my breathe. I stepped outside, found my way to a stone bench outside the front door and then to a second bench across the driveway. It started to sprinkle and I quickly took this photo before making my way back to the visitor's center.

Fwd: Create Google Maps of Your Own To Share & Collaborate With Friends

Sometimes I really love getting email from makeuseof.com . This is so cool!

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: MakeUseOf <news@makeuseof.com>
Date: Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 8:25 AM
Subject: Create Google Maps of Your Own To Share & Collaborate With Friends

Tip of the Day: We've announced the winners for a lot of our giveaways! Duane Vosper won the ASUS Transformer Pad Infinity, George Tanaka won the Tokyoflash Kisai Online LCD Watch, Dan Nguyen won the ZIIIRO Saturn watch, Preston Coppage won the Bosch Tassimo coffee machine, 25 people won WinZip 17 Pro licenses, and 25 people won BatchPhoto licenses. Congratulations to all of the winners! Unsubscribe Create Google Maps of Your Own To Share & Collaborate With Friends by Tina Sieber Google Maps is the best free tool for all your mapping and navigation needs. It's comprehensive, intuitive to use, and available across platforms. Since there is no serious competition in sight, you might as well settle with it for now and use some of the awesome features, like custom maps. Google Maps allows you to edit its maps, save them as your own map, make it public or private, and share the link. This is ingenious and I think this feature where you can create google maps of your own is not used enough! Let me give you 3 reasons why you should use it more or better yet, let me show you 3 things you can do with custom maps. Introduction For those of you not familiar with custom Google Maps, let me briefly show how to use them. Go to Google Maps and be sure you are logged into Google. You should see a vertical menu on the left. If not, click the little arrowhead in the top left of the map to expand the menu. In the left-hand menu, click the My places button. Google has recently added an interactive tutorial for making custom maps. The tutorial is extremely well made, so I instead of me taking you through the process with text and screenshots, I recommend you follow this quick tutorial to create a Google map for the first time. Note that if you accidentally close all tutorial windows while editing a map, you can restart the tutorial anytime via the respective text link in the left-hand menu. Give Directions: Showing Is Easier Than Explaining I started using custom Google Maps to give people directions to my place. This is better than just giving them the address because you can customize the map, switch between map and satellite view, mark bus stops, highlight shortcuts, add comments, and much more. You can create custom maps with directions and comments for many occasions, for example events, hikes, trips etc. Collect Information: Creating Literal MindMaps Helps You Keep an Overview There are many places we regularly visit; shops, restaurants, bars, cafés, galleries, schools, or doctors, just to name a few. And if you live in a big city and have friends all over, chances are you get around quite a bit. Keeping a map of where your friends live, your favorite places, and other frequently visited sites helps you visualize locations and maybe connect the necessary with the good. Above is a map of MakeUseOf team members. It sure brings home the point that we are a global company. Here are some examples of how you personally can use a custom information map: Want to meet with a couple of friends and wonder what's the easiest place for everyone to get to? Check the map. Maybe your favorite restaurant is smack in the middle of everyone. Need to run an errand and want to get as much done as possible? Check who or what is on your way. Maybe there is a chance to save time or enrich your life! Found a cool place and want to keep it in mind for future reference? Put it on your map and add a note to it. You can even add a picture, provided it's hosted online. Collaborate On Maps: Allowing You To Tap Into Collective Knowledge Collaborative maps are my favorite use of Google Maps and they are a spin-off of informational maps. Instead of populating a map with information all by yourself, invite other people to do it with you and thus help you collect better information. Collaborating on an informational map lets you tap into collective knowledge. Google makes collaborating on maps very easy. While you are viewing one of your custom maps, click the Collaborate link in the top left of the vertical menu to the left of your map. Now add the email addresses of the people you would like to invite, set Advanced Permissions, add a personal message to make the invitation meaningful to people, and finally send your invitation. Need examples of how to use collaborative maps? Here you go: Traveling to a place some of your friends have visited before? Share your destination map with them and let them mark the places for you that they enjoyed most. Better than any guide book! Want to discover new places like restaurants or bars where you live? Share your custom local map with people you know and have them add their favorite places. Sure, you could just check out sites like Yelp or Qype for public recommendations, but your friends know you and will likely personalize their recommendation. Summary Google Maps is simply awesome On top of that, custom maps allow you to personalize maps, thereby making Google Maps even better. The collaborative aspect of custom maps is huge and can truly enrich your life away from the computer. How do you create use Google Maps? Have you created any cool custom maps that you want people to know about? Please share! Share This Article Now: Comments How Did You Like This Newsletter? Game On: Useful Tips And Apps To Optimize Windows For Gaming 9 Beautiful & Useful Instagram Tools To Get More Out Of The Service How To Optimize Your DNS For Faster Internet Be My Valentine - 10 Love Playlists On Spotify Get a Free Copy of BitDefender Internet Security 2013 from MakeUseOf Rewards! Bitdefender is one of the leading names in the security business and Internet Security 2013 is one of their best products. It combines features like real-time anti-virus protection, a two-way firewall and parental controls into a single, easy to use package. Get it Now for 650 Points! Learn More about Rewards Read More Articles Advertise on MakeUseOf Share button graphics taken from ChethStudios.net: Icon Pack and Google+ Icons MakeUseOf Limited, 105 Collingwood Road, Colchester CO3 9BB, Essex / UK

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My Superbowl Weekend

Friday night and feeling like a looser in love because even though one guy in Torrance wants to talk, a gut feeling tells me he's not the one, only a crush, an Aryan fascination of mine for blonde haired blue eyed men, I stay late at work to see if I can finish my P&P, which was requested of me a month ago but couldn't, so a little before 7PM, I bail and head for home. I'm thinking Friday night - movie night so I stopped by Best Buy on the way. I was looking for two movies specifically - Seven Psychopaths and Looper. Best Buy had a deal to where if you let the cell phone guys check to see if yours is upgradable, then they will give you a $5 coupon for a dvd purchase. I'm game. I had to wait around for a rep because the one other guy was helping someone else and the transaction was taking fucking 4ever. I could only find Looper, so I got that and headed to the checkout where I encountered another line and my this time it's 8:45? They close at 9PM on Friday and I was just about to throw down my dvd to the floor and walk out when another checkout lane opened and I was up next. One out of two dvd's acquired and I headed for home.

So Saturday rolls around and, hey it's Groundhog Day and with the freaky hot and icy cold winter we had, I'm am done with it. Thank goodness that damn rodent in PA did not see his shadow. And then there was a news that another earthquake hit Japan this morning. You know what I think? I think as long as Japan keeps having earthquakes, it lessens the chance for California to have a big one. And I say this on 02/02 when it was a seventy-some odd degree days today so no need for long sleeves or a jacket. Now this is my kind of Winter weather...

After sleeping most of the morning away because sometimes, I've just gotta sleep in, I decide I'm hungry and head for the kitchen. And I notice my son has left dirty dishes in the left sink and standing water in the right one where the garbage disposal is. So I must go out and get at least some Drain-o this weekend. I still want that other dvd... what to so, what to do... I know. I'll go to the new Walmart in Irvine. And so I did. And I got the dvd and saw that Looper was a lower price there than at Best Buy so I think they just lost my business for new releases. And I also pick up some chips, salsa and ginger ale for the game tomorrow and they also has loose Italian sausage and the package's serving suggestion was pizza - I can make that. Another great choice for game food. And so I don't have to leave the house again to shop, I got my cats provisions, too. The food, the litter, a new laser pointer. OMG, AC wore herself out chasing the damn thing.

I watched the superbowl munching on the sausage and peppers pizza I made from scratch - take that! Woo! And yes, I was appalled that the lights went out in the superdome...And then the Ravens won. And again, appalled.

Match.com 2013

A new year and a new love. That's what I posted on my Match.com profile headline. I'm paid up for six months. I'm a good person and I deserve more than just the errant bootie call. I deserve a relationship. My in box is flooded with emails every day and I've had over

Today it's Jan 12th, and so far I've talked to one guy on the phone who decided he only wants to date women in the city he lives in, and instant messaged with another guy who turned into a ghost a day later.

Then at work yesterday, I mentioned to my cheapskate lunch date I was on match.com and he said something about fixing me up with one of his broker friends... who is funny and short like me. Hrmmm.

Monday's Financial News

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/bank-america-pay-3-6-124602052.html

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/wells-fargo-provides-statement-independent-211200500.html;_ylt=A2KJjb0Yo.tQG1YAQRLQtDMD

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2013-01-07/citigroup-names-forese-manuel-medina-mora-co-presidents