Friday, March 04, 2011

I wish it were so, JFK...

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
-John F. Kennedy, 35th US president (1917-1963)


From the A.Word.A.Day mailing list.

Tuesday, March 01, 2011

Computer stuff

I am not fond of having to download software to be able to use a web site, but I am kicking myself for not having installed the Flickr Uploadr sooner. Rather than selecting the photos you want to upload, waiting for them to upload (which can take a while if there are a lot), and then having to come back and label them, you can select and label them first using the software, which them uploads them directly to Flickr without you having to go to the site and log in first, and when it is finished, all the labels, tags, and sets are already done.

I don't know if I mentioned it already, but we used our xmas loot to buy a new digital camera. Our old one was about 5 years old and had already been in the shop twice when it gave up the ghost. The new one is a Fujifilm camera that has a way-more powerful zoom feature than the old one and uses an SD card instead of whatever the old one had (for which I had to buy a separate reader when the cable croaked since our computers only have SD slots).

Right now I have some photos loading from February, so head on over there later if you would like to see them.

And on that note, I need to get back to translating.

--Nee in Germany is only uploading photos right now as a favor to John

Sunday, February 27, 2011

Let's see...

Getting lots of stuff done lately, here and there. Yesterday, Hannah's class had a hot dog stand at their school festival / open house for incoming 5th graders. John and I took a turn through it, dutifully buying hot dogs for lunch--24 of which we had already bought and donated for selling--and washing them down with a chocolate milkshake to benefit a school in Uganda and chocolate-dipped bananas on a stick (well, John ate those).



Here you can see the classroom a little better. Hannah and I spent half a Saturday in January painting it green. It started out a rather distressing yellow, but this is a big improvement, even if all of the adults involved on painting day said, "Better the kids than us," regarding having to sit in such a bright green room.



Then we walked over to the library to return 3 books. Now I remember why I don't take John with me--he checked out 3 dvds and 8 cds. That means one of us has to go back in a week to return the dvds and in 2-1/2 weeks to return the cds. You get books for a month, so there's no pressure to hurry back until you need more reading material.

After that, we got some groceries so we could make aloo baingan (Indian eggplant and potato dish) and gumbo and tamales. John found the ingredients for tamales in a kit when we went to the commissary a while back and wants to try it out.

I finally got the floor of the shower stall good and clean after trying out various cleaners and spending way too much time on my hands and knees scrubbing. When the cleaning bug bites, you just have to go with it.

Every year at xmas, I am inspired to make a gingerbread house. My attempts at making one from scratch in the past have always failed, so I aim to buy a kit as early as possible in the season and hold onto it until Hannah says, "I'm bored!" Next year, I'm going to let Hannah munch on it the first time she asks, because by the time I decided we no longer needed it as a decorative holiday element, it had gotten so hard that Hannah had to saw through it with a serated knife and scraped her gums trying to chew it. I finally threw it out this morning.



We have been eating our way steadily through the American food bought on post, but it has not all been as good as we remembered. I made a strawberry cake for VDay from a mix; not good. Looked good, but tasted odd. And I mentioned John's canned chili recently--yuck.



I spent a big chunk of the day on Friday labeling photos from our Italy vacation in 2008(!). I don't know if I am ever going to manage to be done. There are so many photos! And I am still only on day 3 out of like 12 days. This may end up being my new neverending project.

--Nee in Germany doesn't seem to be making as much headway with her projects as she thought