Time Flies

I've been horrible at doing this blog thing.. it's been 50 weeks since my last post. I suppose I owe some apologies to all of my faithful followers but I'm not going to admit guilt and apologize. Instead, I'm just going to add a couple quick thoughts and call it GOOD.. maybe for another 50 weeks, or maybe not. We'll all just have to wait and see.

For those interested, April had surgery 10 days ago. She'd been suffering with a lot of pain in her back. An X-ray revealed a kidney stone. One doctor measured in at 18mm and another at 23mm.. so somewhere between the size of a nickel and a quarter. It was too big to pass, so she needed surgery. It was a painful experience for her.

They inserted a tube through her side and into the kidney. Then they went in and broke the stone up into smaller pieces (yes with a jackhammer!) and sucked the smaller pieces out through the tube. The doctor said it was a very hard stone to break up and was probably growing there for years and years. We have a good share of the pieces on display for anyone who wants to see them. I'm thinking of giving it (the stone) a name and a blessing.. April's experience was worse than childbirth and maybe we can claim it as a dependent for a tax write-off!

Keep smiling everyone!

Friday the 13th

Have you ever wondered why Friday the 13th is ALWAYS one day ahead of Saturday the 14th? I have. And this year it's so obvious of an phenonemon because it happens in February on the Valentines Day weekend. Don't you think congress could have come up with a better plan? The Democrats must surely be behind this evil thing.

But since it's out of my control I thought I would post some interesting facts I found online about Friday the Thirteenth compliments of Thomas Fernsler, a math specialist at the University of Delaware who has studied the number 13 for more than 20 years:

1. The British Navy is said to have built a ship named Friday the 13th, or the HMS Friday, which on its maiden voyage left dock on a Friday the 13th, and was never heard from again. As LiveScience readers pointed out, however, this story seems to be a legend. The Royal Navy Museum states on its web site that this story, which has been told before, is a hoax. "There has never been a Royal Navy ship named HMS Friday - or after any other day of the week for that matter," the museum states.
2. The ill-fated Apollo 13 launched at 13:13 CST on Apr. 11, 1970. The sum of the date's digits (4-11-70) is 13 (as in 4+1+1+7+0 = 13). And the explosion that crippled the spacecraft occurred on April 13 (not a Friday). The crew did make it back to Earth safely, however.
3. Many hospitals have no room 13, while some tall buildings skip the 13th floor.
4. Fear of Friday the 13th - one of the most popular myths in science - is called paraskavedekatriaphobia as well as friggatriskaidekaphobia. Triskaidekaphobia is fear of the number 13.
5. Quarterback Dan Marino wore No. 13 throughout his career with the Miami Dolphins. Despite being a superb quarterback (some call him one of the best ever), he got to the Super Bowl just once, in 1985, and was trounced 38-16 by the San Francisco 49ers and Joe Montana (who wore No. 16 and won all four Super Bowls he played in).
6. Butch Cassidy, notorious American train and bank robber, was born on Friday, April 13, 1866. 7. Fidel Castro was born on Friday, Aug. 13, 1926.
8. President Franklin D. Roosevelt would not travel on the 13th day of any month and would never host 13 guests at a meal. Napoleon and Herbert Hoover were also triskaidekaphobic, with an abnormal fear of the number 13.
9. Superstitious diners in Paris can hire a quatorzieme, or professional 14th guest.
10. Mark Twain once was the 13th guest at a dinner party. A friend warned him not to go. "It was bad luck," Twain later told the friend. "They only had food for 12."
11. Woodrow Wilson considered 13 his lucky number, though his experience didn't support such faith. He arrived in Normandy, France on Friday, Dec. 13, 1918, for peace talks, only to return with a treaty he couldn't get Congress to sign. (The ship's crew wanted to dock the next day due to superstitions, Fernsler said.) He toured the United States to rally support for the treaty, and while traveling, suffered a near-fatal stroke.
12. The number 13 suffers from its position after 12, according to numerologists who consider the latter to be a complete number - 12 months in a year, 12 signs of the zodiac, 12 gods of Olympus, 12 labors of Hercules, 12 tribes of Israel, 12 apostles of Jesus, 12 days of Christmas and 12 eggs in a dozen.
13. The seals on the back of a dollar bill include 13 steps on the pyramid, 13 stars above the eagle's head, 13 war arrows in the eagle's claw and 13 leaves on the olive branch. So far there's been no evidence tying these long-ago design decisions to the present economic situation.

Wow! This is cool! Welcome to the future!

Scientist Teleport Matter More Than Three Feet

Scientists have come a bit closer to achieving the "Star Trek" feat of teleportation.
No one is galaxy-hopping, or even beaming people around, but for the first time, information has been teleported between two separate atoms across a distance of a meter — about a yard.
This is a significant milestone in a field known as quantum information processing, said Christopher Monroe of the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland, who led the effort.

Read more about this here.

Imagine being transported.. from my house to yours, from home to work and then back at the end of the day. Do you think it will happen in our lifetime? Will the animal rights people allow us to test it on a monkey like when we used monkeys to test flights into space? I think this is really cool stuff.. what do you think?

Here's another news story that caught my eye:

Tom Hanks Apologizes for Calling Mormon Supporters of Proposition 8 'Un-American'

Read about it here

Even if he has apologized he's lost so much respect in my eyes. I had thought of him as one of the few Hollywood folks that had any sense.. obviously he's just like all the rest and can't help but open his mouth to say or do something stupid without thinking first. One of the things that bugs me about this is that he mad the original comment personally but he was too much of a coward to apologize himself. Instead he used a publicist.

You Decide...

President Obama has signed an executive order to close the U.S. prison at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. Pennsylvania Rep. Jack Murtha (D) has already said he would be willing to house prisoners from Guantanamo Bay in his congressional district if the president closes the prison.

So where is he going to put the prisoners? Do you want them in your backyard?

This Just In...

Beatrice Farve
BRUNSWICK, Ga. (AP) _ Beatrice Farve, considered by Guinness World Records to be the second-oldest person in the world, has died. She was 113.
Farve died Monday in her sleep at the Brunswick home she'd maintained since she was 21, her daughter, Joan Farve, told The Associated Press on Tuesday.
Farve became the second-oldest person earlier this month with the death of 115-year-old Maria de Jesus of Portugal, said Robert Young, a senior gerontology consultant for Guinness World Records.
Joan Farve described her mother as "a very soft, smiling lady" who always stood her ground. The elder Farve was healthy her whole life, rarely going to the doctor and never taking medicine, her daughter said.
Farve was born Beatrice Scarlett in Camden County, Ga., in 1895. Her family says she sold beauty products until she was 100.
The world's oldest person is 114-year-old Gertrude Baines of Los Angeles, Young said.

source

Even as only the second oldest living person.. that means I am half-way through life. Dang! I hope the second half goes better than the first! Here's to another 56 years fo me! Cheers!

I haven't entered any posts for such a long time.. but I'll try to be better at it this year!

So leave me a comment - what are you going to try to do better this year?

We were "tagged"

It's been a couple weeks since I've updated this blog and today I noticed an email saying that I had been tagged by our good friend Betty Odom in Texas. Well, when I checked out her blog I realized that she had actually tagged April.. but since I do most of the blogging on this one, I'll follow through with it and then let her do it too.

Here are the rules:
1) Link the person who tagged you
2) Mention the rules on your blog
3) Tell six of your quirks
4) Tag six fellow bloggers
5) Leave a comment to let them know
Here is the link to Betty's blog:
http://bjodom.blogspot.com/

My Quirks:
1) I like being able to put my keys, wallet, etc someplace when I walk in the door. April likes to move them to a drawer or someplace out of sight.. then I can't find them when I need them. I usually pull them back out of the drawer or wherever April has put them and I put them back where I can see them and get them easily when I am ready to go out.. we drive each other crazy doing this!
2) I hate to shave but when I do I also do it the same way.. right sideburns and cheek first. then the right neck under my jaw. Then the left sideburn and cheek, then my chin and the neck below it. Then my upper lip and finally the left side of my neck. Then I go over it all again to be sure I didn't miss any little parts.
3) When I go to bed I start out by laying on my back with my head on my pillow, but before I can really drift off to sleep I turn and face the outside of the bed so I'm laying on my left shoulder. I stay that way for a few minutes and finally I turn onto my stomach and push the pillow up and rest my head on the mattress itself.. then I can sleep.

Okay that's 3 for me.. Since this is a joint blog I'll save the last 3 for April..

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