Amy Pickett

The phone debate

I've had my Palm Treo 650 for four years or so now. I paid a lot of money for it - maybe $500 (yikes!) and it's now got a cracked case, been dumped in a cooler full of ice water (which it survived) and I've had a hot-and-cold relationship with the calendar function on it (mainly because my entire calendar got deleted a few times, which makes me really like the pen-and-paper calendars of old).

Anyway, I've been warming up to the idea of a new phone. We looked into the Google phone, but it's a lot of money unless you're renewing or getting a new contract with T Mobile. And then it goes for the low, low price of $179. I've been thinking about what I do with my Palm phone, and here's what I use it for: phone calls when I'm out, texting my family once in a very blue moon, and storing my contacts and some passwords. Now, I can store contacts and passwords on my computer, and the tiny keyboard is nice I suppose, but it makes for a larger phone. The Google phone also allows you to get your email and surf the web, but am I ever going to need to do that when I'm running errands? Do I want to pay the fee for using that service? Not really! I think it might be the case that you have to pay for that if you use the phone with T Mobile, but I'm not sure. I also don't play games, so I don't need a hefty phone for that, and when I read books I still like the kind with the bound pages.

In any case, when our contract is up in April, I'm going to get this Nokia phone that Neale researched for me...I suppose it'll be free with the contract, and I'm perfectly happy with that. Right now I've switched to this free Samsung phone we got almost two years ago, and it works great. I like how small it is.

I think the Palm phone would have worked better if the synchronizing of the contacts and calendar hadn't always been so messed up. It would add deleted contacts back into my phone and onto my computer, and the same thing with appointments. This is the first time in years that I've gone without a Palm Pirate, and since I'm using this Evolution email program with a calendar and a nice contact setup, I think I'm going to be fine without it. Might even simplify things a bit!

Posted Sun Jan 4 14:36:16 2009

Christmas pics

We had a really fun Christmas season this year. Here are some highlights!

First we had Early Christmas at ?BagaBada's house with the grandparents, Auntie April, Uncle Dave and Ariana. The girls had a lot of fun, as usual, being around each other.

Ginnie decorating the tree.

Opening packages.

Ginnie and Ariana really liked the Cabbage Patch dolls they each got. Ariana's already got hers in the stroller we gave her.

The girls in their Christmas dresses from Baga and Bada.

This is why Jada can get over our fence now. Too. much. snow.

Enjoying our Christmas.

I put on everything people gave to me - my awesome LCI jersey, my red hat, my gaiters...

Cute!

Posted Sat Jan 3 17:16:49 2009

Happy 2009!

Let's see, it's been a little while. But it's New Year's Eve, so neat! I think we're headed down to Albuquerque today, and we'll probably stay the night and come back up tomorrow sometime. I'm in the middle of painting our bedroom. It's the last room (forgetting the bathroom) on the bottom floor that I've gotten to for a paint update, and my god, did it need it. I'm really tired of living in the ugliest room in the house, and so far, so good. It's also the coldest room in the house, and yesterday I finished weatherizing the leaky sliding glass door by putting plastic sheeting over it. Yes, tacky, but it's covered by the new floor-to-ceiling drapes, so you can't see it anyway. But wow, did that make a difference! It's definitely warmer in there already, which is a really nice improvement from drafty, drafty, drafty. Anyway, it's a good temporary fix, and if not this coming year but in the next few years, we'll build the wall back up and put in a nice quadruple-pane window. ha.

Neale and I have been talking over the projects we'll be tackling this year with the house, and we've decided to just do the roof and the woodstove. The roof is necessary, the woodstove will save us on our gas bill, so that'll be nice. And who doesn't love the smell of burning pinon? Those are the expensive projects...we'll be taking on insulating the floor ourselves. That should also bring the heating bill down. Those Popular Mechanics books are great! We're also going to do our deck ourselves. We had contemplated hiring that out or just tearing it down and pouring a cement patio, but if we strip it down and rebuild and really seal the wood right, it should be just fine for a long time. It is a nice deck design. The bridge has got to go though - too many injuries that can happen with that thing. We have nice cement stairs leading up to the 2nd level in the backyard, so the bridge is kind of pointless.

I've been watching the mortgage rates at our bank, and looking for the 10-year interest rate where it's worth it to refinance the house. We could refinance at another 15-year mortgage, and the payments would be significantly lower, but we don't feel like tacking another five years of interest onto our mortgage. I figure that if the rate drops to the low 4's for a 10-year, we'll do it. It's already at 4.575% today. If the closing costs are like what we paid when we bought the house, we'd save $6k by the end of the mortgage, and that's good enough I think. It's funny to think of how low the rates are right now. Even ours right now is still very good if you look at the last 30 years of interest rates. When Neale's parents bought their first house, it was 15%. yikes!

I got my final GRE score back - a 5.0 (out of 6) on the analytical writing. I'm pretty darn happy with that. It's nice to know when you're right about the part of the test that you'll be good at. I didn't even practice for the essays, because I feel like I can write well enough to save my butt when the time comes. The first section you do on the GRE is the writing, and by the end of that I felt good enough to think "I could do that for the next 2 hours!" Too bad I had to do the verbal and math sections. I scored a 620 on the Verbal and ahem...530 on the quantitative...I'm not great at standardized tests and I'm only sharing these scores because everyone was so nice about sharing their scores with me. So there they are. And yes, I could definitely tell the section that was their "test" section - the one that didn't count in the score. It was a Verbal section, and it was ridiculously hard. I felt like a drooling moron by the end of it, so imagine my happiness when the 2nd Verbal section popped up at the end of the test.

Anyway, then Christmas! Twice! I really enjoyed having two Christmases - one with Neale's folks and one with just us. Pictures to follow here as soon as I can get them loaded here...and Birthday Season is rapidly approaching and so is Kellie and Bill's visit (yay!). Au Revoir to my 20's and hello 30!

Posted Wed Dec 31 09:13:41 2008

Facebook

private.

Posted Mon Dec 22 17:23:56 2008

Skating

I took Ginnie ice skating again yesterday, and she spent half the time pushing around that little red walker thing for kids learning to skate, and then ditched it after watching some big kids skate and decided to try skating on her own. Well, as I suspected, she can skate by herself just fine. She was even trying to skip on her skates, which was crazy. I don't even do that! I think her favorite part was taking her little steps and getting a good glide going and then throwing herself to the ice and giggling hysterically. After 5:00 rolled around and we had to get off the ice for the hockey players (and also because I was turning blue...ah, an outdoor ice rink at 25 degrees...fun), she really really wanted to stick around and watch the little kids play hockey. So we did, and she was all about what the hockey players were wearing and why they had sticks and pucks. I had given her a tour of the goals marked on the ice, so she vaguely has an idea of what hockey is all about. I had one dad trying to convince me to sign her up for peewee hockey next year - he said that their best skaters were girls. I remember watching some middle-school aged girls skate with their hockey gear last year, and they really were pretty good...well, we'll see. If she really wants to, I think that'd be fun.

Posted Sat Dec 20 09:32:51 2008

Email forwards

yep.

Posted Wed Dec 17 16:14:03 2008

Apple pie

I'm going to make an apple pie for early Christmas at Neale's parents' place. I have this great recipe which I'll only sell for $3000 plus your social security number.

This week has kind of sucked. I think I'm just cranky and fed up with a lot of things. But at least the cards are out and packages mailed. My hip pain is flaring up again...it's to the point where I'm having trouble pulling my knee up higher than a 90 degree angle. I've been treating it with heat because that always feels so nice, and I'm chronically cold all of the time so the heat pack is a bonus. But I think the heat is actually making it worse. It was getting better for awhile, but it was during the time when I had stopped using the heat pack...bah. I don't want to ice it because I'm a wimp and hate the cold right on my skin. I'm starting to think that this is just never going to get better. Oh well, at least I'm not a professional gymnast...haha. sigh I tried doing Kellie's pilates video that she sent me years ago, since getting my "core" strong will help my screwed up back (I wonder when people started coining that term...and if getting your "core" strong will go the way of the Jane Fonda leg lifts). Anyway, there's this move where you curl up in a ball and roll back and forth, and it totally left my tailbone bruised and battered. I probably just needed to use the bigger mat...anyway, boo hoo!

We get to get the bleep out of this town on Friday morning. I'm ready for a break...starting to think that commuting a few times a week to ABQ for school wouldn't be a bad thing. I know I've said this before, but I still miss the anonymity of a large city.

Posted Tue Dec 9 20:04:26 2008

Yardwork...in December?!

We're supposed to get snow starting tomorrow, so since it was sunny and nice out this afternoon, we ran outside and did our last-minute winterizing of the backyard. Lawn chairs up the deck, yearly collapsing of the picnic table, and then Neale decided to transplant the Locust tree whose location he'd been bemoaning since the beginning of last summer. Digging that up took a couple of hours, so I made a compost bin in the meantime out of hardware fabric, lawn stakes and zipties. Easy-squeezy. I actually managed to do some raking too, and in the process discovered that our nice little garden snake was dead. I don't think it'd been that way long, but I was sad about it...I liked seeing him peek out as I worked around the yard. Ginnie's reaction was interesting...she was pretty sad, and when I picked him up with the rake she thought I was going to hurt him. Even after we explained that he was dead, and what that entailed a few times, it still wasn't sitting right with her. So we had a short memorial service. We built a rock cairn for him by the compost bin, which is where he wound up buried, and after we dumped a bucket of leaves on him Ginnie seemed to be fine. The way that we deal with death is so interesting to me...but anyway.

I hope we have more snakes in the yard in the future. Poor little snake.

Posted Sun Dec 7 22:00:55 2008

The Daily at the UW

I still read the Seattle Times, and today they ran an article about protests over an article that appeared in The Daily, the newspaper we all used to work for. This is the article they're referring to. I'm not too surprised that they ran an article like this...typical for a college newspaper to want to act like they're shaking up the establishment a bit (and the UW is fairly liberal, so good job, dude - what a rebel). The author just makes a lot of comments along the lines of anti-gay rhetoric that's been out there for awhile, so I'm not sure what he hoped to accomplish by writing it. If he wanted to piss people off, I think he succeeded. I find that picture of the man by the sheep particularly offensive. I guess he made his feelings on the subject known, but he certainly didn't say anything we haven't all heard from anti-gay groups before.

What a jerk. Yeah, sure we all need free speech, but then there's that long-lost art of being a decent human being. I guess The Daily doesn't care about that.

Posted Sat Dec 6 11:45:47 2008

GRE

I took the GRE today. Yay. It's over at least. I liked the analytical writing section the best (if "like" is the right word...I even felt pretty relaxed and confident by the end of that), and the Verbal went well, and I froze up on the Quantitative section a bit. But I tried to get an idea if I was getting some of them right, and since they got a little harder at times, I figured it was good enough. Anyway, my score was more than good enough for the school I want (not that it was a stretch to do that - they only want an 850) and I get the essay scores in the mail in a couple of weeks.

It's nice to have it behind me. This was something I knew I'd have to do eventually, and now that it's done I can enjoy the holidays! Until school starts in January!

Posted Fri Dec 5 20:44:37 2008