Happy Lunar New Year

According to the Chinese we are supposed to do a thorough cleaning of our house to sweep away the old year but on New Years day you don’t do any sweeping as you might clear away the good luck.

It’s a big holiday in China with decorations, fireworks, celebrations, parades and good food. Oh and you are supposed to wear red. I can do that.

This year it lands on February 3 but it’s not on the same day every year. It is always on a full moon but I’m not sure how to figure it out. I just look at my calendar.

If you didn’t make a resolution or haven’t been able to keep the one you made January first you have another chance to start again.

This will be the year of the rabbit. Hopefully that will bring financial luck since rabbits are lucky. Maybe our economy will improve. It could happen.

The Lunar New Year is a tradition held by many Asian countries and before Christianity came along the Pagans observed it as well. Most of their history was indeed swept away by the Christians so we don’t know all of the rituals and festivities they carried out but we can be sure it was a fun time of year sending out the old and bringing in the new.

So Happy Chinese New Year, Lunar New Year or Imbolc; no matter what you celebrate it’s a great time to wear red, eat Chinese food and think about the future.

Hunted- Rabbit Hole:

Security Questions

I understand the need for security and asking personal questions only we know is a good idea. My complaint is the selection of questions they use.

For instance, most of the sites must assume we are college age and have a good memory of our childhood. A sixty-year old man isn’t going to remember his favorite childhood food or next-door neighbor in the third grade.

If your family was military and you moved around a lot and they ask the name of the elementary school you went to. Which one?

Another question is, “What is the baby nickname of your youngest/oldest child.” You have to remember which child you used.

Recently my husband was trying to get into one of our bank accounts online and it wanted to know his wife’s nickname. I don’t have one. I have a pseudonym but that isn’t really the same thing.

Then they want questions like childhood friend. Well some of us had more than one friend and if we forget which one we chose for the question we are in trouble.

There has got to be an easier way to get past security online. I’m all for the fingerprint scanners on computers so at least then they can see if we are who we say we are.

Personally, I prefer the old days when we went in the bank and they knew us because our kids went to the same school. You chatted about the weather and you didn’t feel like a criminal trying to get your own money out of your own bank account. Two of my banks are that way but we have this one that had really good rates and is not convenient to drive to.

My father in law was a president of a bank in the small town he lived in many moons a go and he knew most of the customers and in some cases never even asked for a driver’s license to make transactions. I wonder what he would think of the way we bank today?


Pink Floyd-Money:

Vampires in New Zealand; Werewolves in Wisconsin

It’s big business among writers, shows and movies these days but now there is proof they are real! We thought they were harmless sex symbols that drove expensive sports cars but we were wrong. They are dangerous and people need to beware.

Some poor woman in New Zealand is now partially paralyzed because a man was sucking on her neck. They say it is a hickey but I’m convinced the man is a vampire. I mean how many people do you know that have been immobilized by a love bite?

The poor woman was minding her own business watching television when suddenly she couldn’t move, couldn’t change the channel and couldn’t go get a snack during the commercial. Terrible.

They don’t show his picture, probably because he is pale and sparkly with fangs but we can just imagine how scary he must look.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/4563716/Lovebite-partially-paralyses-woman

And Wisconsin has werewolves. Just when we thought it was safe to send our kids outside to play, a boy was almost attacked by one. Luckily he was able to get rid of it with antifreeze. I thought you needed silver bullets or wooden crosses or something but apparently these modern day werewolves require antifreeze to kill them.

http://emtoast.com/?p=1258

So be careful, don’t go out on a date with any sparkly guys and keep the antifreeze nearby.

Vampires Suck Trailer:

Life is a Box of Chocolates and I Only Want the Tasty Ones

I love the line in Forrest Gump where he says, “Life is a box of chocolates; you never know what you will get.”

That may be true but I never cared for those fancy boxes of chocolates anyway. Some have gotten smart and give a legend so you know what is inside but if you don’t have that sometimes you get those yucky syrupy ones that ooze out and make me nauseous.

Personally I prefer those cheaper bags of Hershey’s or Dove’s that tell you what to expect. I guess that makes me a non-risk taker. I want to know what comes next.

Unfortunately life isn’t that way. We can buy specific flavors of candy knowing exactly what is inside but we never know what tomorrow will bring.

There’s an old saying, “There are only two things you can count on in life: death and taxes.”

It would be nice if we could write our own story and have all the loose ends tied up in a nice pretty bow but it doesn’t work that way. The trouble is there are other people in this world with their own idea of how things should work out and sometimes their story messes up our novel. They want to be the protagonist and live their own idea of happily ever after.

We can manipulate our life to an extent and part of why we are where we are today is due to decisions we make.

You choose whom you are friends with and that has results. In most cases we pick our own marriage partners and that has still another result.

When we give birth we can’t decide which children we have but the spouse and in-laws we marry and lets face it you do marry a whole family, helps decide the outcome or our offspring.

Our career choices determine the income we make, the people we interact with and the area we live in help form the people we become.

And speaking of where we live that also has a factor in our lives. If you live in the northeast you will be exposed to a certain type of people and weather. Living in the south has a different set of folks and climate, west coast yet another condition.

So even though we can’t choose exactly how our lives turn out the decisions we make has a lot to do with the outcome.






Billy Joel- My Life:

Laughing Out Loud

I have discovered that I overuse this odd acronym way too much. When we talk to people on the internet it is not always evident if we are joking or serious since we do not have the advantage of facial expressions so to lighten the mood we sometimes put the letters “lol” to show our comment is all in fun. However, some of us, me included, have gotten a bit carried away and use it like punctuation marks after our sentences.

Talking to a friend, recently, I realized how frequent I used it and she mentioned if we really laughed out loud as often as we wrote it we would appear to be raving lunatics. So, with that said I have decided to replace most of my lol’s with happy faces. :o) I do smile a lot so that should suffice and not make me appear to be too crazy. I hope.

Another popular one is ROFLMAO. If we indeed rolled on the floor laughing there would need to be an entire lane just for these tumbling fools so no one would be injured.

“I would have gotten here sooner but there were a lot of people rolling on the floor laughing and I just couldn’t get by.”

Putting in a search for this term I discovered there are blogs, books and even a movie titled “Laughing Out Loud.” We love to laugh that is why comedy is so popular. Laughing is good for our health and soul.

Incidentally, I do laugh quite a bit, so much so a serious teenage girl once told me, “You laugh a lot.” I said, “Yes, there is a lot of funny things in this world.” She just nodded.

Give this video a little bit of time and you will see the funny part. I love the guy in the middle, his laugh is contagious and yes, I am laughing out loud. :o)