Friday, November 2, 2012 @ 12:05 PM
Good afternoon! We’re
having a little bit of an emotional moment here. We realized not too long ago this morning
that today is our oldest son – Maury’s birthday today. This is him pictured above 32 years ago. Oh my gosh how special he has been. And, to add to that? Maury and Nikki’s daughter was born 14 years
ago yesterday. It is a major marker
point over at Maury’s house as well as ours.
I just can’t believe it has been so many years since this picture was
taken. I could have had no idea on how
life would be 32 years from then.
I’m going to try hard not to go down all those lanes my mind
is turning right now, but I will say that the day the nurse brought me Maury
hours after his birth were one of the most incredible hours on my life. It is probably true where they say you remember
more of your first child, because the whole novelty of being his or her parent
is so unique. The first thought I had
was how incredibly beautiful he was, and then that thought was followed by the
thought – are you sure, he’s really, really mine?!!! Oh my gosh he was so incredible – still is!
Hmmm… that was a lot of time gone by … it’s now 1:48
PM. We finally got Maury on the phone
and we talked for a few moments and he reminded me we could vote early. So we got dressed, went to our voting place,
and then BLAH! Now we’re back and we
DIDN’T vote. Very grumpy now. The voting place was the second floor of a
town a city or two over. We as you KNOW
can’t stand or walk for more than 8-10 minutes, and they DID have an elevator
up, but there wasn’t anyone there to see we needed assistance. There was just the long line going to the
back of the staircase. People looked at
you terrible and there wasn’t enough space to scoot past the first people in
line – there SHOULD have been someone assisting people who were disabled. It’s an older town. There was nothing to do, but go down the
stairs where the people were lined. We
had seen from the top everyone was holding a piece of paper that I assume was
to fill out name and such. BUT we had to
stand in line for that too. We couldn’t
stand so at that point it seemed the only option was to leave the
building. There wasn’t a voting person
on the top OR on the bottom, so AGAIN NO ASSISTANCE!
We called Rich on our way home and he was of no help. He said that we should go back and complain,
but we’re NOT going back. Our trips out
of this house are limited and there was NOBODY to greet voters at the
door. People up at the top of the stairs
looked cranky so I imagined they had stood a long time to get to the front of
the line. I wasn’t going to break
through that. WE ARE not happy. Well, a little happy, we stopped by Wendy’s
for a Frosty on the way home. It’s not
the perfect arrangement, but it does count.
*Grumble, grumble*
OK what can we do?
Nothing to do, I suppose, but go back at a later time, but the lines are
just going to get worse. HUMBUG!
Shhh, shhh… We need a distraction. Hmm, It IS Maury’s birthday. Still.
I guess that’s where it all started.
When we talked to Maury on the phone, he talked about donating blood platelets. That was really a nice something to do. He said that it takes about 2 hours and
something happened with the needle and it started putting blood back into his
arm where it didn’t belong. He said that
it was suddenly very painful. They fixed
the problem soon enough and Maury didn’t really think it was anyone’s fault,
but then a mother hears that kind of thing and frowns heavily at the thought of
something going wrong with her child. It
doesn’t seem to matter how old the adult child is … most likely there’s always
going to be a feeling that you can’t protect them enough. It has to be the MOST dissatisfying feeling
thinking that one of your kids is hurting.
He said it was for only a few moments, but I guess we’re still a little
huffy. I’m sorry.
I know I’m going to need focusing on something else. Hmm, focused for a few moments on something,
but now it’s 2:24 and I don’t remember what I just did before Rich
walked-in. Now he’s saying he’ll take me
back and we’re too out-of-sorts to do it again.
OHHH that’s what we were doing.
We registered a complaint.
Apparently, in Chicago, they will help you with curbside assistance, but
you have to tell them you need it one week in advance. That doesn’t do me any good now. That’s a lousy service if you can’t arrange
to vote before election, because your only noting it 4-5 days in advance. We’re back to HUMBUG!
I’m not in a very good mood yet. I remember we were going to distract
ourselves. We’ve looked at our online
updates (email, FB and Twitter). Now our
tummy is too full because of too much chocolate from the shake. It wasn’t mixed well and had too much chocolate
making it feel like drinking Hershey’s syrup.
It didn’t get finished. Another
Blah.
Shoot, I hate being this grouchy. Maybe I should take my afternoon medicine and
then rethink my purposes.
Ahh, I feel a little better … took the medicine AND I got a
couple smooch’s from RICH! That guy
still wiggles all the right buttons!
Hmm, don’t seem to be getting much done today. Rich sounds like he is in the kitchen working
through dinner? It is starting to smell
like food! He said he would make tonight
some Chili for when he is gone over the weekend. I think he’s leaving very early Saturday and
getting home WAY late on Sunday. He knows
chili is my favorite meal when he’s out of town … it leaves me feeling warm and
appreciated. Tonight might be sausage
and left over something … what was it?
Maybe dinner from last night? I’m
not sure … we had gone out to eat after Dr. Marvin’s because Thursday is
half-price for their hamburger dinner.
We LOVE the waffle fries that come with it – AND you can’t beat a
special hamburger meal for $4 Ok, maybe
the price was raised a little with the amaretto stone sour. BUT, it is a really nice way to appreciate
being out. I figure as long as we don’t
go over ONE drink an outing, we’re doing pretty good. Besides it’s only a “GIRLY” drink,
right? AND, half orange juice to
boot. That HAS to be healthy J
Nothing yet from the Linda-side. I think they were planning on having lunch
and then leaving after and I THINK it’s like a 3 ½ hour trip, so we’ll start
looking for her in an hour or two, and at latest maybe up to 8 PM. I’m pretty sure with a coin show for Tpony tomorrow,
they are going to need getting home and getting some good sleep tonight.
Ok, then moving on … bearing in mind that it is already 4 PM
and Rich will probably have dinner within the hour, we do want to go on and on
about a new subject this week. It is
more or less actually a subject left over from one week ago. Before the “Austin” entry, we had been
writing about looking again for the LMS (learning Management System). We actually found it sometime by late Friday,
I believe and now it somehow got to be an entire week later. Grrr.
I remember that we knew about it on Saturday morning because
we talked a little bit about it to Austin.
We had then gotten out the last blog entry by Monday, but didn’t post
until Tuesday and now it is Friday and two sessions have gone by unnoticed with
Dr. Marvin, and we’ve progressed our thoughts a lot to again the new LMS. FIRST, as to that … the new system is called,
“Canvas” through the up and coming company of “Instructure.” As it turned out, they have been in the news
over the last couple of days, because they are introducing into the market a
competitive product alongside the really BIG online courses of edX and
Coursera. You might remember that they
are the avenues of the really elite campuses like Harvard, MIT, Berkely, TX
Univ., Stanford, and the Univ. of London.
Ok, hold on a sec.
Small welcome break … not that it was MORE fun than writing, just time
well spent. Rich wanted me to cut apples
for some LITTLE pies he’s going to make soon. We are the official apple cutter,
but we weren’t doing it because our scraper thing got rusty and he bought a new
one that didn’t do a good job cutting apples.
SO for our anniversary … did we say this already? Anyway for our anniversary he got us a new
apple peeler like the old one, but it has a rubber handle. THAT’s a sweet deal! So we cut THREE apples and have nothing to
even complain about! YAY for us! Now he says we have a have hour (now 4:30 PM)
before dinner so we can type our hearts out.
J
Hmm, just have to find that part who would rather write than
even cutting apples. You there? Let’s read back, hmm?
OK, mostly back. Anyway
this new MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) has already like 4 ½ million
students through at least a couple hundred schools. They were like sneaking themselves up in the
market. I knew they were competing
against the five most popular LMS of
Blackboard, Moodle, Desire2Learn and edmodo, but now they are saying
they are just going to skip past those markets and go for the big ones. Well not actually sweep it, but they don’t
have the numbers of these others, but have a package that is new enough to
explain that and are pushing forward to being the better product – big and
flexible enough for the stylized Universities.
They’ve just in the last few days take a major leap in their advancing
cause. I couldn’t be more happy that I’d
looked at quite a few of the HUNDREDS of systems out there and had picked a
leader W/O knowing how big it is going to get.
The main draw – OUTSIDE the usability of the program??? IT’S FREEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!! Yup, yup you heard it here. It’s really major that something so valuable
is being offered for free. Not to be
confused, they do offer other services like installation and consulting to the
big universities, but for the private person they’ve give a whole lot of
economy sense. They also aren’t trying
to bully you by saying you can only have 5-10 students or five courses, they
are offering the best for the BEST price!
After going into it HEAVY for a few days we’re sitting back
now to appreciate how much we’ve learned.
The first night, we put about eight hours into just watching its
training videos. It’s a lot more
complicated, hence useful than the program we’d pictured here last week. Wait I’ll give you a few snapshots!
(late 6,920/984)
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