I'm number 1!

It appears that I am #1 in the search list on Google for "english stereotype". Who knew when I posted this that I would end up with a #1 hit!
What's crazy is the number of people interested in this topic enough to Google it! I get more referrers from it than anything else. Nice to be popular - I guess.

PDA woe and laptop woes...

Well, I have had hardware successes and failures this week. My laptop keyboard has started acting up. Two of the keys have started sticking. The "s" is one of them.
I have taken apart the keys and cleaned thoroughly and they began to work again. TERRIFIC! Or not. They quit again. I took off the caps again and tried to make them work with the little nipple underneath. Nothing. They come and go. It's very annoying.
Right now to type an "s", I actually have it on my clipboard. I typed a word in Word and looked up synonyms in the thesaurus, erased all but the s, and use Ctrl + V every time I want to type an s. What a pain.
On the other hand, my pda quit syncing to anything a while back. It recognized the device, but wouldn't sync. I had to do a hard reset, wiping out everything. Thank God for sprite backup (sorry - only have a lowercase s on the clipboard and well...it's just not worth capitalizing right now). sprite rocks hard. I'm completely back to normal (or will be once I sync to my calendar at work).
I love/hate technology.

Renaissance Faire

On Labor Day, I took the twins to the Des Moines Renaissance Faire. For this year's faire, they built a permanent Renaissance village and I was very anxious to see how it turned out. It was pirates' weekend and there were pirates' galore walking the grounds. They were painfully polite, however. Not at all how I would expect a pirate to act!


I was surprised at how much they had been able to get done. Following the construction on their website, it looked good, but couldn't capture how much they were actually undertaking. Built on the southern part of Sleepy Hollow, it's a great location. The trees along the creek make a great Sherwood Forest. There was a variety of food to choose from including turkey legs (very fitting), buffalo burgers, lots of pastries, kettle corn, real root beer and creme soda from the barrels, and "adult" beverages. The root beer and creme soda was fun because you bought it in old looking glass bottles that they filled and corked on the spot. Then you could bring your bottle back for a refill for only a dollar.

The participants at the faire were great and a lot of visitors got into the spirit by dressing up as well. The queen and her court made their way through the village and presided over the events.

The boys were excited about the jousting and all of the "fights" that broke out throughout the village with regularity. Although the majority of them were staged, there was one presentation of authentic sword fighting that was unscripted. It was presented as an educational program about the armor, the weapons, and the culture of the knights and squires.

The comedy shows were a lot of fun too. The Muddy Misfits were hilarious and managed to get me with sloppy mud on top of the head (they did warn us).

The twins favorite part was the fencing. They were able to get all suited up and actually fence each other. As you can tell from the picture, the object was to pop your opponent's balloon. They had a blast fighting each other (go figure) and actually asked me to check out the fencing club in Des Moines. Unfortunately, they meet on Monday nights and the boys are in football - and then basketball - and then track - and then baseball. Too many sports, not enough time.

Chick Trip 2006

I realized that because of my absence there is no post regarding this year's Chick Trip! Can't have that!
We went to southeastern Minnesota this year. We stayed in a tiny town called Whalen, just outside the small town of Lanesboro in the bluff country. It is quite spectacular. The river was positively phenomenal! No one got wet, yet we had enough canoe challenges to keep us from falling asleep.

There was a couple with matching little canoeing outfits and expensive canoe with customized seating waiting to put in at the start of the trip and watching our canoes take off. At this particular point we had to immediately get into the middle of the river to go around a bridge support. One of our canoes got a bit close and had to shove off of the concrete with their paddles. The woman of the couple snickered and made a comment about how that was amateurish. I told her that we had a couple of newbies with us, but that I was sure they would do just fine. She grinned sarcastically and stuck her nose in the air.

Throughout the trip we hopscotched each other. They stopped for a picnic and we passed them - we stopped for a quick whiz and a beer and they passed us - they pulled up to explore an inlet - we stopped...well...for a quick whiz and a beer. You get the idea. Every time we saw them we'd waved like we were seeing old friends and this woman was snootier and snootier.

At a particularly challenging portion of the river we were basically neck and neck. There was a small island in the lake with narrow passages to either side. Both required a quick turn in the rapids (I use that term lightly) to avoid smashing into the bank. We pulled up to confer and our party decided to use the left channel. The designer couple took the right. One after the other, our boats made it through. Hooting and hollering ensued with each success. We're paddling around the last of the island and who do we see but the couple - WET! She is standing with her arms crossed and he is bailing out the boat. I waved and yelled that our newbies were doing GREAT!

I took the GPS this year and persuaded a couple of the chicks to go geocaching with me. It was a lot of fun and we got to see some really cool spots. This one was like something out of Indiana Jones and was worth the trip.


On the way home we stopped at the Spam museum. Yes, there is a Spam museum.
Been there - have the t-shirt.

Great fun was had by all and the countdown to 2007 has begun.