my book arrived!

I am totally enamored.  I am thinking of putting in effort for a rewrite or at least some editing to make it worthy of public attention.

me feel smart

Free IQ Test

my adopted city is the Happiest City in America

Check it out:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/05/worlds-happiest-cities_n_2624787.html

Pretty cool, huh?

7th happiest city in the world, and the ONLY US city to make the cut.  Unbelievable.

TESOL and Esperanto

Between Christmas shopping and work I've been working on getting my TESOL certificate through Global Leadership College.  What happened was a coworker found a Groupon for it and told me about it.  It's a great deal - $69 for a 150 hour certification course, which usually runs $599.  So I went ahead and got it.  It expires in March.  Since I paid for it and it expires, it's my priority (except for December gift shopping/cards/etc. I mean).  So far I find it very extensive and moderately difficult.  I have to take notes, can't just wing it.  I'm getting a B so far (didn't take notes at first).  But I want to bring that up to an A eventually.

The other thing I've gotten into recently is Esperanto.  There are a ton of free courses online.  I like the idea of learning an easy-to-learn international language of peace and being able to travel to other countries and stay with natives who also speak Esperanto for free.

Tonight I went as far as the TESOL course could take me (you get graded manually for some sections and then it unlocks the next lesson) so then I tried some of this Esperanto course.  It was fun!  I feel like I have a bit of information overload right now.  So I think I'll start another blog or two about Esperanto perhaps and maybe TESOL too, not sure about that one though.  It'll be fun once I finally get to a point where I can converse in another language.

That's it for now.

C

Fascinating Stuff

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathy-freston/vegan-diet-cancer_b_2250052.html?utm_hp_ref=healthy-living

This is Amazing

Art by Animals

just want you to hear this song..

This is So Unbelievably Awesome

It made me cry at work.

banking...

Reason to change to an online bank like ING direct (what I have).  Check out the average 111-page disclosure form for checking accounts!  That's crazy.

What is Carnism?

Just watched this video and I'm recommitting to veganism.

Eenteresting...

Just parking this here for more in-depth perusal later.

Anyone want to go on a find-private-public-spaces-no-one-knows-about hunt with me?

Happy Valentine's Day!

Tony Bennett's here and will sing "I left my heart in San Francisco" at noon. The mayor has asked all the radio stations to play that song at noon! So we're debating about going into the Columbarium to sing along but there's a memorial service at 1pm.

Movie Recommend

One of the best films I've seen in a long time:

The Flowers of War

I would only read Roger Ebert's review after you see the film, because then you can see how off it is. (In discounting the review it helps to know a bit of history also, which you can get from simple online searches, at the link above, or by reading "The Rape of Nanking" by Iris Chang, which I'm currently reading. I don't mean you need to know a lot about what happened to get the film; just to understand where the errors are in some of the movie reviews I've seen.)

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In other news, the funny little things that were glued to my teeth for the Invisalign have been removed, and a one-year "permanent" retainer has been attached to the back of the top teeth. My orthodontist will be widening the gap a little bit more. I'm also doing more implant quote hunting.

Hope all is good.

What's in a name?

My Viking Name is:

Siv

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Your Wu-Name is

Sabre-Toothed Portillo

Use it wisely, soldier.

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Yarr olde name be Protected for Security. But we'll now call ye:

Yellow Hillary Straw

Yarr.


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My Sexy Christmas Name is:

Sweet Kitten the Hot Penguin


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My Hobbit Name: Orangeblossom Gamgee Whitfurrows


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My Elven Name: Celebriän Aldaríon


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The Na'vi Name Generator:

The will of Eywa has given you a new name:

Tarya


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My Star Wars name is Saiph Fissionflame


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Sweet Kitten the Hot Penguin??

Front Page!!

That would be my article about running on the Front Page of Hubpages! I took a screenshot here for posterity.

Yup, that means my article got "Hub of the Day".

More exposure and prestige on Hubpages, yay!

Enron

Watched the Enron documentary last night. It was incredibly interesting, disturbing, and well done. For some reason I just thought the story of Enron was about top executives making off with the retirements of their workers. I had no idea it was also about a sham company, playing the stock market, stealing from California, causing the rolling blackouts in California, ties to the Bush admin and Schwarzenegger, and utter, despicable greed. No wonder people don't trust Wall Street. The story of Enron is like the story of a bunch of criminals who only worked to figure out how to make millions -- even BILLIONS -- ANY WAY possible. Boy that movie got my blood boiling. I think watching a documentary is more educational than trying to glean the story from the news. Recommend. I think it's called something like ~ Smartest kids in the room; the Story of Enron.

And what a total SHAM company. They never made any money, they kept losing it and lying to Wall Street and tricking everyone to inflate their stock.

I feel sorry for the honest workers in the company that Enron bought, who lost their life savings. And all the damage they caused with deregulating our power and causing all those rolling blackouts here.

And of course I'm pissed at all those Enron traders who acted like bullies to us, cutting off our power and stealing billions.

GRRRR!!

facebookable

Google, What were you thinking?

I'd facebook this but facebook is blocked at my work. I'll do it later.

back to work...

how goes it

How goes your dear Caro you ask?

Well, I'm sniffling, hacking, and generally monitoring a constant stuffed-up drip from my nose, unfortunately. :(

Hit with a massive cold. I missed work Friday. More like, they sent me home! That's never happened to me before. It was nice to have the time to get some stuff done, rest, and stock up on anti-cold supplies.

Excuse me. Need tissue...

I hope everyone is pleased with their Christmas loot. I am! I got a Kindle! And a Razor scooter! Awesome!

I was thinking of exchanging the Kindle for a Nook so I can swap books with my sis, but after some reading up on it, decided to keep my Kindle because it has audio so I can get French audiobooks, which will really help my French learning.

That is right, I am learning French. I've already started with Assimil a few days ago. You just do a little a day, get a lot of input in your head, and worry about the talking part in the future. The good news is the input you do get in your head is already full sentences, so when you do start the talking/expressing portion, you already have a lot of phrases to draw from rather than trying to string together separate single words. I'm also using The Linguist and Lingq for language learning. I'm enjoying it so far.

The Razor scooter is going to be really helpful for me in the city. It should definitely shave down my commuting time around town. Not to mention it will enable me to go swimming at lunch (since I only have an hour and there's a pool 1 large block by 1 large block away.)

I'm lining up my New Year's Resolutions, to have them all good and ready. Besides French, being a good vegan, and paying off debt (a no-brainer), I'm interested in learning guitar this year also (as the budget allows). For right now I'll just concentrate on French though, since I already have a ton of material to delve into.

Looking forward to hanging out with people soon. I just hope I'm better and not contagious when it happens. I'm cutting out dairy completely as of today. I like the idea of starting resolutions a bit earlier than New Year's, because you get those few extra days to practice and perfect your habits.

So everyone have a good time fighting the crowds today. :)

celtx is on sale!

I just bought this last night.

Celtx is screenwriting software that includes a ton of other wonderful pre-production stuff. Check out the link to learn more.

They have two types, a standard which is free and plus which is usually around $15 (pretty cheap anyways, considering the quality of the software). It's on sale for the holidays for around $10 right now, so I'm glad I swooped it up.

I was looking at Final Draft and MovieMagic (which I'd gotten for my parent's old computer, a long time ago, and never really adapted to) but I'm glad I went with Celtx. First off, saved oodles of money. Second, it has more capabilities, and third, I was able to just start writing. It worked great, SO much better than Word.

So I thought I'd pass on the news. :)