Breathless exageration

I am so tired of people on the internet completely overblowing things. Can't people be informed before they start going off on how everyone is going to be racially profiled in Arizona?

Can't they just read the Oklahoma bill before they start talking about how doctors are now free to lie to their patients about if their babies have birth defects?

Too many subjects for a title

1. We bought a new car. It's my 3rd Saturn. The first two ended badly. The first one (white 1992) got into a HUGE fight with a bull and lost. The second one (blue, 2002) met its demise by hitting a car that ran a red light. The new one is a white 2002. My dad thinks I need to be careful next Friday (the 13th) as we drive to his house...hahaha.Anyway, we're happy with it and hopefully I won't wreck it any time soon. Or ever.

2. We dressed up for Halloween. We did indeed dress up like the Doctor and Rose Tyler.

I had to wear a blonde wig though, and it made my head look gigantic because of all the extra hair I had hiding underneath it. Jose was the ninth

Doctor 2.0 because we couldn't find

a jacket just like the one he wore on the show and also because Jose didn't want to shave his goatee. Whatever.

3. My Spanish husband has discovered, and wholly embraced, one of the most American traditions that I can think of: the garage sale.

Last night we made a garage sale map and this morning we got up at 6 am and drove all over Austin. We went to around 13 garage sales. (!!!) We didn't just go to the ones on the map, if we saw a sign for a garage sale, we had to stop at it.

4. Yesterday I went to Target and noticed that they have already decorated their entrances with Christmas decorations. The funny thing is that they put big snowflakes on the windows. However, it's in the high 70s here and not going to snow any time soon.

5. My neighbor's yard smells like a horse crap. Her landscapers put "natural fertilizer" down, if you know what I mean. Oh man, does it stink.

I just cried. A lot. Over a TV show.

Um, we just watched the last episode of season 2 of Doctor Who. I bawled and I am not even kidding. Jose laughed at me, but it was really moving!

Okay.

I have become just slightly obsessed with my Rose Tyler costume.

I have almost everything I need to dress just like her in the 1st season episode "Boomtown." I've got the blue jean jacket, the pink jacket that goes underneath the blue jean jacket, the finger gloves, the scarf, the black tights, the boots, the skirt and a wig. I need a pair of gold hoop earrings and I think I'll have everything.

So, I got this $10 blonde wig. The night that I bought the wig, I put it on and I was kind of disappointed in it. It's just not exactly right. And on top of that, it makes me look like I have no forehead. When I put it on I must have had a disappointed look on my face. Well, I think Jose may be on to my obsession because he gave me a sympathetic look and said, "Sara, you're never going to look just like her, you're not her!"

Definitive Halloween Costumes

So Jose decided to actually dress up with me this year and we're going as the 9th Doctor and Rose Tyler from Doctor Who! Jose will be this guy:

I'm going for this look:

She's wearing a jean skirt with black tights too, but I may just go in jeans. I have pretty much everything I need. I just have to get a blonde wig and I'll be done.

Dress Up Dilema

For the last few years for Halloween I've dressed up as a group with some friends. Last year we dressed up as female cartoon characters. I went as the very obscure Marzipan (from homestarrunner.com) but not just as Marzipan, but as Marzipan dressed up as Frida Kahlo. Everyone thought I was just Frida, and I didn't really argue much. There was only one person that I met who know exactly who I was. The year before that we were Ms. Pac Man and the ghosts. That one was really good! The three of them had dressed up together before as Madonna in different eras, and one year as the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

This year we've decided that our theme will be favorite TV characters. I can't decide of I want to dress up as Mel the one (very obsessed) fan of Flight of the Conchords or as Jadzia Dax from Star Trek: Deep Space 9. The others are going as Betty Draper (from Mad Men), Caprica 6 (from Battlestar Galactica), and I think Kate Austen (from Lost). Anyone else who wants to dress up like TV characters is welcome to join us!

Our experience* with Newmark in Austin (*horrible nightmare of an)

When we signed the contract to buy a house in 2 1/2 years ago, we were so excited. It is exciting in the beginning. Nerve racking and exciting.

At that blissful time, we had no idea what a frustrating and stressful road we were about to embark on. The reason that is was (and is) such a frustrating experience was (and is) because the company that built my house, Newmark Homes in Austin, TX, was so incompetent, unorganized, and generally impossible to work with. (Actually, Newmark went belly up in Austin last year and some of their assets were bought by another company. You can find the name of that company on the Newmark website in the Austin section. Hopefully they'll treat their customers better than Newmark did.) We should have seen it in the beginning, after we were lied to for the first time.

When we were negotiating buying the house, we stipulated that we could not buy the house if they couldn't put a sink in the garage. The superintendent (who always said "yes" to everything) said, "Yes, we can put a sink in the garage. No problem!" Well, as they were beginning with the plumbing, we kept looking for the drain pipe for the sink in the garage. We kept asking him about the drain pipe for the sink in the garage. "Oh, just wait, just wait, we're not done yet, we'll put that in later."

Guess what - NO drain pipe was ever put in the garage. He gave a lot of excuses and said we could still put a sink in there, but it just wouldn't have a drain. No drain for the sink. We were scammed for the first time. We should have backed out then, and we came very close to doing so, but we're positive, optimistic people. Oh, but Jose was so mad a the super. So. Mad.

Another that should have tipped us off to the complete incompetence of Newmark was this next little gem. One afternoon, we were at the site, checking the work (because you HAVE to check everything yourself) we noticed first, that there was only one pipe for a downstairs toilet and, second, that it was in the middle of where the living room was going to be. In our floor plan, there are two toilets on the bottom floor and neither of them are supposed to be in the middle of the living room.

When we told the super, he didn't believe us. I had to convince him that it was wrong. He kept looking at the plans for our house and finally realized that the office had sent him the wrong plans. In short, they were about a day or two away from pouring the concrete for the foundation and they had plumbed the floor plan for different house. Luckily (for them) they hadn't poured the concrete just yet. Unluckily (for us), we still didn't see the writing on the wall.

These are only a few of so many times that I, or Jose, or our Realtor had to call, convince, reorder, argue, etc., with Newmark. However, thanks mostly to our tigress of a Realtor, we got a lot of things done and a lot of money off of the closing price for all of our troubles.

Two years later, however, we are still having problems with the construction of the house. There is water coming into our bedroom wall and just sitting there. There is a water line slowly creeping up the wall and the baseboards are all warped and waterlogged. This was happening in April of this year and Newmark sent people to fix it, but whatever they did didn't fix it and now it's happening again. Normally, it wouldn't be that bad. We would just call and/or email Newmark 5 or 6 times and they would eventually send someone out to fix it again, and hopefully find the leak while they were at it. Except Tousa, Newmark's parent company, went bankrupt last year. Then they closed down Newmark in Austin. If you signed on your house before January 28th, 2008, you have absolutely no warranty on any part of our house. We signed on the house just 2 months before that date. Oh well. Too bad for us!

How about that great selling point of a 10-year warranty on the foundation? NOPE.

And the guarantee that they would come and fix things that they messed up? SORRY.

Hey, don't we have any rights as consumers? We paid for this house! We paid for the 10-year warranty on our foundation! This is all extremely frustrating. Newmark pretty much scammed us and all the rest of the homeowners here in my neighborhood.

My friend says we should just sell the house and move to Cedar Park. We won't do that though. We'll just call the house insurance company and fix it through them, but we shouldn't have to do that.

maybe I'll post more now...

Dude. I got a new laptop for my birthday, which is Monday. A Mac! I am stoked. I have to figure out how to use it now, but I'm totally excited! We've had a desktop for the past few years and it's been great, but now I can take my laptop around wherever I want and totally compute and stuff.

Jose is practically incapable of giving me a surprise, he gets too excited about giving me whatever it might be and can't wait, so I got my gift today instead of next week. That's okay though. I don't mind!

On a side note, I cut my dog's ear with the scissors yesterday. I feel so bad about it. It doesn't seem to bother her though, so I guess it's not that horrible.

How to Make Health Care Reform Bipartisan

This is a great article. Click on the title.

Obamacare will ruin our country and take away our freedom!

The new healthcare bill is freaking me out! If this passes, it will be the worst thing that has happened in this country in a very long time.

Ugh! I don't want to pay for anyone else's healthcare. I don't want other people to pay for mine either. I want to pay for my own! I want the freedom to use the money that comes into our household as I see fit. If I want to donate to charity, I should be the one to decide that.

What if I want an insurance plan with a high deductable, instead of paying a high monthly rate? That should be my choice. If people would be more responsible with their money, then I think a lot more people would have insurance.

Today I heard that 25% of those without insurance are illegal aliens and their children. Whoa. How are we going to pay for that?

I lived in Spain, a country that has a government run healthcare system, and I hated going to the doctor there. Also, there was never enough money to pay for it, so the gov't was always having to look for ways to suck more money out of the people. Did you know that the reason gas is so expensive in Spain is because of the heavy taxes that are placed on it to pay for healthcare?

The crazy thing is that the president and Congress will probably never have to even be in the public heathcare system (if it passes). Although they will have to pay for it. They are mostly "the rich." However, I wouldn't be surprised if they have written something into the over 1000 pages that makes them exempt from paying the taxes that would go toward healthcare. Obama couldn't even say that he would let his family go through the system if something happened to them. When asked, he obfuscated and never answered a clear yes or no. I bet not one congressperson would want to be in this system.

If this bill passes, if I ever get cancer I won't be able to make choices for myself and I will have to wait for treatment, if the "health board" decides that I am worth receiving that treatment.

I know very few people read this blog, but if you do, please look more closely at this bill.

Go to these websites and read the articles and posts about it:

The Cato Institute

The Heritage Foundation


It's really scary! Call your congressperson(s) and tell them that you DON'T WANT IT!

Article: "Michael Jackson and The Gorp Syndrome"

Michael Jackson was a good dancer and sang pretty songs and changed nothing and represented nothing and meant nothing.

I agree with this guy.

Alaska

Alaska is really big.

how not to treat a library book

A week and a half ago we went to the branch library and signed up for library cards. I was really excited about it and checked out my first book that day. Well, this is how I treat my wonderful library book:

The other day, as I was getting in the car to leave town, I set it on the roof of my car while I wrangled the dog. When we were about an hour out of town I started looking around for it in the car and asked Jose if he had seen it. The last place he saw it, of course, was on top of the car.

Yes, we had driven off with the book still up there.

I frantically called a few of my neighbors to get them to please look for the book in the street. One of them found it, called me back and said, "It looks like it got run over, but it's not damaged."

I let the book that the city of Austin entrusted to me to take care of as if it were my own get run over by a car.

When I got home, my nice neighbor brought it over. I don't exactly know what his definition of "not damaged" is but the book, unfortunately, is damaged and I will probably have to pay for it. It has tire marks in a lot of places and the binding is coming apart in another. Ugh. I can't believe that this is what I did to my first library book in years.

I actually erased most of the tire marks, except for the darkest ones. You can still see faint black tire tracks on the pages and the outside edges!

whoz cool? me.

Hey internet, I just want to give a shout out to myself for how cool I am. I am so cool. I just looked at my Twitter account and I signed up two years ago. I am way ahead of the times, ppl! I was on twitter before it even was a big deal! Now everyone and their dog is on twitter. I know, I know, ppl jst follw wht I do bc Im the coolest. oops...i reverting to twterspk. Of course I've also had this blog forevers too. Wow, I am soooo coooool. I can barely stand myself.

Oh man

It's so pretty out today!

R. I. P. Baby Bunnies :'(

You won't believe what we found in our flower garden when we got home tonight. There were 5 newborn bunnies in a hole under one of our bushes. Unfortunately they were all dead.

I pulled them out if the hole and lined them up to look at them. It was weird. I wonder when and how they got there. I think they must have drowned because it rained a lot this weekend and the hole was kind of in a low spot in the garden.

It would have been kind of cool to have baby bunnies in the yard.

Friday in Munday

My day today will include:

-Watching HGTV

-Watching What Not to Wear

-Avoiding sham-wow and snuggie commercials like the plague

-Chasing little rescue dog around mom's house to get him to go outside (little pooper is cute, but NOT friendly)

-Contemplating a shower

-Finally taking a shower

In conclusion, pretty much the usual when we're in Munday. Except the little pooper. He's new.

Two (formerly) stray dogs meet

My mom got a a new dog. Wait, let me rephrase that. She rescued yet another dog off of the side of the road and this time I think she's going to keep it. The poor thing was so skinny that all of its vertebrae were showing. Pitiful little guy.

Now we are here in Munday and my little dog is with us. I forsee a lot of dog wrestling this weekend. My mom's dog is gonna get TOLD by my dog! SNAP!

Posted with LifeCast

Angelinajolieified

Over two weeks ago my friend dyed my hair black. We used a type of dye that is supposed to wash out in a month. However, after all this time, my hair is still really black and I want it to wash out already!

Nerdy Star Trek Quote

I've been addicted to overheardinnewyork.com for a while now. This is the latest quote:

Cute nerd-girl playing scrabble #1: Did you see that episode where Data made a daughter? It was so good, and so sad!
Cute nerd-girl playing scrabble #2: Yeah, it was.
Cute nerd #1: And do you remember the episode when the little boy idolized data...
Cute nerd #2 interrupting: I remember all the episodes.
Cute nerd #1: But there was this one scene...
Cute nerd #2: I remember that scene.
Cute nerd #1: But I didn't finish...
Cute nerd #2: I remember all the scenes. Seriously. There was one time when my friend was flipping channels, and she flipped to Star Trek. And I only saw like, a quarter of a second of it, with Dr Crusher bending over a patient, and I said, "'his blood is turning to some kind of liquid polymer.'" and then Dr Crusher said, "His blood is turning to some kind of liquid polymer!" It's like when some people hear like 3 seconds of a song and can identify it. I can do that with Star Trek.

--Starbucks, 2nd & 9th

FYI, the episode where Data makes a daughter is one of my favorite episodes of all time!!

Conversation challenge of the week

Try inserting this into a conversation:

"Overall shorts are just an invitation to uncomfortableness."

I was involved in an exchange not 10 minutes ago in which I used that exact sentence.

Jose said

When talking about current movies,

Jose: "...a movie something like This is Not a Country for Old People..."

Oh my Lord, that was funny.

I had practically given up on blogging. I haven't felt like it for a long time. I still don't feel like I have much to say. I hate, however, having my blog out here un-updated for months, but I don't want to delete it either. So I'll just say a few things. We moved into a new house. We love it. It's really great to have more space to live in.

Today we are going to a memorial service for a friend who died of a rare form of cancer. She donated her body to a research facility that studies the type of cancer that she suffered from. Maybe they'll find a cure for others someday. Her name was Renee, here is here obituary in the Austin American-Statesman.

Some links that I've been into lately:

http://thelostdiary.com/
http://www.lostpedia.com/wiki/Main_Page
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

Oh, and I'm excited about the Spring and Summer coming up. Although we had a really mild Winter compared to the rest of the country, it's always beautiful here in Texas in the Spring and Summer. Especially Austin.

Communion crunch

At the church I go to, we sometimes take communion as a congregation. Each person is given a little piece of bread and a tiny cup of grape juice. The bread is a little bitty crunchy square cracker that tastes kind of like a wheat thin. After the pastor blesses the bread, everyone eats the cracker at the same time. The funny thing is that when it's really quiet and I don't chew my cracker right then, I can hear the resounding crunch of every person in the room biting down on and chewing their cracker at the same time.

Coming soon to a theater near you: Sara's War

I am happy to say that I won my personal war against at&t. It's a long and painful story which involves talking to 10+ at&t representatives including 2 supervisors in 4 or 5 different departments, including the Retention department (what is Retention? Think about it. It's customer retention. Last resort central. They could not help either, by the way). Maybe I'll tell it someday. Suffice it to say, I GOT WHAT I WANTED.

Lesson? Keep bothering them. Argue. Threaten to cancel. You will eventually come out on top.

Ha ha

Global warming: The newest religion

Do you ever feel squashed by post-modernism?

MLK, Jr. quote via The Irresistible Revolution

"To our most bitter opponents we say: Throw us in jail and we will still love you. Bomb our houses and threaten our children and we will still love you. Beat us and leave us half dead and we will still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory."

That is a beautiful example of radical grace.That is the kind of grace that Jesus preached and continues to preach to this day.

By the way, the Simple Way recently experienced a huge fire in their neighborhood. Go to their website to see what happened, what they are doing about it, and what you can do to help.

www.thesimpleway.org

Funny word

"Separatrix"

What do you think it is?

Also known as: virgule, solidus, slash, diagonal, or stroke.

Who knew that something so seemingly simple could have so many names?

If you aren't reading this website every week, you should be.

I thought I was the only one who couldn't get no. 5 out of my head

This is really funny. I saw this on digg. It's the top 10 songs that people get stuck in their heads. I have had experience with 5, 2, 9 and, of course 1.


1. Other. Everyone has his or her own worst earworm.
2. Chili's "Baby Back Ribs" jingle.
3. "Who Let the Dogs Out"
4. "We Will Rock You"
5. Kit-Kat candy-bar jingle ("Gimme a Break ...")
6. "Mission Impossible" theme
7. "YMCA"
8. "Whoomp, There It Is"
9. "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"
10. "It's a Small World After All"

The other day I had "Low Rider" by WAR stuck in my head for some reason, and also that song from the flea medicine commercial with the cute puppy singing, "I ain't got bugs on me, I ain't got bugs on me...!" That puppy is so cute, isn't it? I like it at the end of the commercial when he starts walking kind of sideways.

This bugs me

A pet peeve of mine since I got back to Texas is that people call the pronunciation of Spanish by Spaniards a "lisp." You may or may not know this, but is Spain the correct pronunciation of the letter "z" and the soft "c" is a voiceless "th" sound like in "theater." Because Americans are used to hearing South American Spanish, which pronounces the "z," the soft "c," with the "s" sound, when they hear a Spaniard (or someone like me, who speaks Spanish with the Spaniard accent) it sounds to them as if they were lisping, and they call it so accordingly.

Then, you get this story about how one Spanish king had a lisp. So to make him feel better, all of the people around him began to speak as he did. And there you have it=why Spaniards lisp. This is all complete crapola.

Okay people. A lisp is a speech defect. It means that the person speaking with a lisp is not pronouncing words correctly. Like they are defective in some way.

This is the real story. The "th" sound was evident in Spain even before the Spanish travelled to the New World. The sound developed from the sounds associated with the cedilla (ç) and the "z." So the original pronunciation of the "z" and the soft "c" is as a voiceless "th."

However, in some areas of Andalucia they started pronouncing them as an "s." One of the articles that I read says that this might have been because of the strong the Mozarabic influence in the south. People from Seville and other places in Andalucia still speak like this today (some also still use "ustedes" instead of "vosotros" which is another difference in the use of the language).

Well, I bet most of you didn't know this, but many of the famous explorers and "conquistadores" from Spain were from Andalucia. As were many of the subsequent Spaniards that immigrated to the New World. They were the original "mispronouncers" of the the "z" and the soft "c." They removed themselves from their original population and the "sss" stuck.

So if we are to say that someone is mispronouncing, who would it be? I, for one, would have to say that no one is mispronouncing. I believe that language is alive and it evolves as cultures evolve. I also speak American English, which is different than British English. If I say that the British have a speech impediment because when they pronounce the "r" they open their mouths more, that would be stupid.

So please, stop saying that Spaniards have a lisp. It's insulting.