Wake Forest vs Duke

Wake wins!! It was a great game. Down to the wire.

In other news, J#1 is bringing someone named Sarah home with him when he visits at spring break about mid-March. "She is something of a neat freak," he says. So Renee and I have a deadline for getting things squared away now that the bookshelves are done. I looked at a box of paperbacks that I have the other day, and decided that if I don't want to put them on a shelf, then they have to go. Otherwise, we'll be stacking all the messy stuff up in my bedroom.

Also, we need to take the waterbed out of J#1's room and install a twin bed. Then we have to figure out where everyone is sleeping. We do have some very nice cots & sleeping bags.

Go Wake!

Paul Blart: Mall Cop

Well, we needed something funny. Paul Blart: Mall Cop has a charming story with a sweet ending. Kevin James is completely believable as a too ernest mall security guard who cannot pass the state troopers obstacle course. Jayma Mays is perfect as Amy.

And the award goes to: Best Segway Dancing -- Paul Blart and Amy.

Got a new sewing machine--basic Kenmore $85 at Sears and a new iron. Next week we might buy a dishwasher.

Bookshelves Finished!

Yesterday (Sat), we put the finishing touches on the new bookshelves and started putting books on them. They are beautiful.



We were also watching the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona It started at 3:30 pm Saturday, and ended 24 hours later (duh!). (no tv coverage from 10 pm to 7 am) John was here to watch it with us. His girlfriend's car was flatbedded to rest in our driveway for awhile. She had a little accident with it before Christmas. Looks like John will be working on it when the snow melts, or maybe before.




Reading now: The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life--not an quick read.

Just finished: The Reader by Bernhard Schlink. It's about the problems the children of the WWII survivors have coming to grips with the Holocaust. Worth a read. The movie The Reader was released this past December and garnered several academy award nominations.

Watchin basketball. To work tomorrow.

Bookshelves and Repairs

Our big after-holiday project is a new set of bookshelves in our house. The fill a 10 ft. wall and are 7 feet tall, with 6 shelves. Therefore, of course, stuff starts breaking.

Refrigerator water: John calls me at work one day after New Years to say the refrigerator is leaking water all over the place. The plastic line bringing fresh water into the fridge was cracked. We turned the water off, DH (dear hubby) came home early to see what it would take to fix. After several trips to Lowes, he thought he had a fix. However, the plastic line was too old and brittle, and it kept breaking. So today, I had a REAL PLUMBER come out. He replaced the whole thing with copper--yeah!

And then I found out that the 1/2 bath (off laundry room) sink was leaking. Water goes in then out into the bucket underneath. I asked Renee how long it had been leaking and she couldn't remember. This is not a sink we use very much. The whole sink is a mess, so I think I'll get a pedestal sink and have the nice plumber come back to install everything new.

{later} When I got home Thursday, the first thing hubby says is "your iron almost burned the house down." The auto shut off button failed and it had been left on. Needless to say, I need a new iron. The wires were practically melted.

And, the dishwasher is still broken.

Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously

Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously by Julie Powell

Julie Powell, a 29-year-old Manhattan secretary, unable to decide what to do with the rest of her life, decides to cook her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child. There are some drawbacks to this plan: she lives in an apartment with suspicious plumbing in Long Island City with her husband & menagerie of 3 cats, a snake, and I don't know what else, and she has a DAY JOB! that leaves her running around finding obscure ingredients and cooking until 10 or 11 at night AND there are 536 recipes--that's more than one dish per day.

She also says f*** a lot. That's not a problem for the cooking, but she is also blogging about The Project. Her readers--bleaders, she calls them--do complain. But they also support her when she gets down and even come up with a way to help fund the veal chapter.

And it's very funny the way she cannot name the government agency she works for. They are the ones who are deciding the appropriate memorial for the World Trade Center 9/11 victims and who have the visitor center for "the site" in 2002-2003. Not such a secret after all.

As Julie works her way through her angst, her possible futures, and her relationship with her husband, she comes to grips with who she is and creates her own future--as a writer! no kidding! And her husband--who is a saint by the way. He WASHES DISHES!!! and basically doesn't give up and leave no matter what disasters occur, is still there at the end.

So pick it up and read--but watch out, you'll be wanting to start cooking French by the end.

Stroke at the library

Saturday, one of the library staff members had a stroke while at work. Another staff member was having lunch with her when she started coughing, dropping things, and slurring her speech. Our intrepid staff member followed our stricken staff member and found her on the floor. She called 911 immediately.

Our hero says that she was suspicious of these symptoms because of the training our local hospital did for us on recognizing stroke symptoms. They even did a little video about it.

Signs of stroke

We are all very happy that our staff member will recover and our other staff member is a hero.