Friday Finds: A Link Round-up

The Official Simon's Cat Website.  If any of you own or have owned a cat, you'll appreciate the humor.  And if you've never had the joy of owning your very own kitten, you'll see what you're missing!

Freezing Food A to Z, A Thrifty Mom.  This is an AWESOME list! It's good to know the right ways to freeze foods so that when you use them later they won't be disappointing!

Beyond the BabySteps: Legumes, Let's Talk about Beans, Food Storage Made Easy.  I have always wondered about how to prepare beans and how to use them everyday!  It looks like you could put them in anything and nobody would notice!

Oh, and here's the latest shot of my baby... :)

 

Evidently she has some fuzzy hair and HUGE cheeks!

Way Back When Wednesday - Molecular Models and Safety Goggles

Taking a break from Korea stories, this Way Back When Wednesday comes from way back in my high school chemistry class.

I took my one and only Chemistry class during my sophomore year in high school.  Honestly, I hated the class.  The subject just didn't make any sense to me; I couldn't visualize it, and that's big for me.  But fortunately, I had an excellent teacher and my best friend, Cortney, was in the class with me, too.  We probably had too much fun in that class.

My least favorite part--or one of my least favorite parts--of Chemistry class was wearing the big safety goggles.  You know, the plastic ones with sharp-ish edges and the nasty elastic band around the back?  Yeah, those ones.  I hated them because they always left deep, red marks on my face, and I was paranoid that the elastic would leave a big dent in my hair.  My hair is curly and flattens easily so it was a valid concern.

I would follow the rules and put the goggles on for the labs, but I would remove them as soon as I could.  I'd also step back, take them off, and check my hair and face periodically if the lab went for the whole hour.

One day, our teacher announced that we'd be doing another lab in class BUT we wouldn't have to wear goggles because we were working with molecular model kits.  We probably wouldn't be needing the goggles because there was little to no risk of getting something in our eyes.  Hooray!  I had no idea what a molecular model was, and I don't remember getting much out of it, but I was happy to not be wearing the goggles.

So Cortney and I paired up as lab partners to work on our models.  It must not have taken us very long because I mostly remember making other kinds of models out of the kits.  And we were having fun!  At one point, Cortney made a horse and was attempting to show me it's realistic movements by bouncing it up and down when all of a sudden a part of it came flying off and hit me square in the forehead!

It didn't hurt very much but we were both so surprised and we got the giggles... majorly!  But we held it together enough that the whole situation wouldn't have been noticeable had we not been sitting in the front row!  So of course our teacher saw what happened, but she just laughed and made some funny comment about how maybe not all of the students could get by without wearing goggles.

Images courtesy of Home Depot and Peter Murray-Rust via Wikipedia.org

Top Ten Tuesday - Favorite Games

This week will be quick and easy, but fun!  This week's top ten in no particular order is...

 

My Favorite Games

1. Yahtzee Free For All.  Much more fun than regular Yahtzee.  There are cards (with the regular Yahtzee combinations) and chips for you to go for, and you can steal your opponents' cards too!
   
   
2. Carcassonne.  A great tile laying game.  Derek and I love to play this one, but have had some trouble finding others who love it just as much as we do.  I think it might because there are a million pieces and it's really complicated at first.   Maybe someday...
   
   
3. Blokus Duo.  I've played regular Blokus and got really confused with the size of the board and number of different colors in the game.  Blokus Duo only has two players--and therefore two colors--and a cute mini board.  It's fun and relatively quick.
   
   
4. 5 Crown, Sets and Runs, Mormon Bridge...  These are all games that we play with Rook cards which makes it easier.  Bring one set of cards and you've got three or more games! (Note to reader: the link for Mormon Bridge goes to a page on Wikipedia with some profanity.  Evidently most people have given this game some colorful names!  But the instructions and rule variations are excellent.  Just don't scroll down to "alternative names."  You'll be sorry!)
   
   
5. Othello.  I stink at this game... unless I'm playing the computer on it's least intelligent mode.  Then I kick butt!
   
   
6. Alchemy.  This is one of those solo, wasting-time-on-the-computer games.  I love it!
   
   
7. Backgammon.  Again, I stink at this game too... unless I'm playing the computer on it's least intelligent mode. 
   
   
8. Scrabble.  This game was a life saver in Korea.  Most all of our students either loved this game, or at least preferred it to studying.  I used it all the time as a bribe.  And since we were in the English words mode, Derek and I would often play it at home, too!
   
   
9. Mario Party.  I am a Mario super fan!  Mario Party on the Wii is one of my favorites because it's so cute and a fun boardgame with tons of fun mini-games!
   
   
10. Guitar Hero/Rockband 2.  I don't think I need to explain this one.  Anybody who's played either of these games love them!!!  Derek and I are so excited because we just unlocked all the songs on each game.
    

PS:  I want to add a shout-out to boardgamegeek.com!  I got most of my references through them and found that they have great ratings, suggestions, and summaries of almost any game!  Check them out!

Gah!

Gah!  I just looked at my Baby Counter widget, and I only have 62 more days until my September 24th due date!!!

Does anyone have any advice for what I should be doing these last couple of months?  I feel so unprepared!

Friday Finds: A Link Round-up

I haven't been as good at posting as I would have liked to be this week.  AND I didn't collect any interesting finds throughout the week either!  All I have are two from this morning.


Contest on CoffeeShope Free PS/PSE Actions!  This woman is amazing!  She makes so many cool actions for free!  This week she's doing a contest.  She'll do a random drawing and pick one or two lucky people for a custom ready-for-the-web action.  It will resize, sharpen, and add your custom watermark to your pictures!  Awesome!  I hope I win!

Akizo Designs, Digital Scrapbooking from Japan.  This girl has some good freebies every now and then.  Most of the website is in Japanese, but she does have the important stuff like, "download here," in English.  Even though I don't read Japanese very well, I was happy that this foreign blog was in Japanese.  At least that way somebody in our house can read it.  There are quite a few French digi-scrapping sites out there!

My first real digital page!

Way Back When Wednesday - Don't Waste Waste!

I've posted about the trash woes we had in Korea before. This is just one specific story that we think is just hilarious!

One evening, Derek was taking out the trash.  We were at the point in our stay in Korea that we knew that we weren't disposing our trash correctly, but didn't quite know the right way.  We were still putting everything together in one bag.  As Derek was walking down the street to the trash pile (our apartment building didn't have enough space around it to have an area for trash nearby), he noticed a couple of men standing near the trash, pointing and talking.

He knew immediately they were trash inspectors.  They were there either because someone had complained about the "organization" of trash, or because they were trying to figure out a better place for the trash.  Either way, it was a problem because Derek was carrying two bags of overflowing, "unorganized" trash.  They had seen him so he couldn't turn back or try and walk past nonchalantly.  So he decided the best thing to do was walk right up, throw the bags on the pile and hope they wouldn't notice anything.

It didn't work.  Being foreigners, we were always scrutinized in everything we did.  Throwing away trash was no different.  The two men saw at once that Derek was throwing out bags that had food, paper, plastic, glass, AND cans (all of which should be separted)!  The two men being older Koreans, didn't quite know what to do with a foreigner.  Their English wasn't that great, and they had no idea that Derek was pretty proficient in Korean.  They started gesturing and mouthing words convinced that Derek would eventually understand them and fix the problem.

After a confusing minute or two, Derek had enough of the weird game of charades, so he turned to them and in Korean said something like, "do you have no sound?"  The English translation sounds pretty weird, but the two shocked Korean men understood immediately that Derek spoke at least some Korean so they tried to tell him what the problem was in Korean. 

The problem with talking to many Koreans in Korean is that they don't simplify the language for foreigners.  At least, they didn't for us.  Derek did pretty well with Korean, but there's a lot he didn't understand. 

Pretty soon, the three of them realized that they weren't really getting anywhere with gestures or Korean, so the two trash inspectors tried some English.  What they came out with was "Don't waste, waste!  Don't waste waste!" as they pointed to the trash bags Derek had just thrown.  He took it to mean what he already suspected, separate your trash so that you don't waste the recyclable goods by contaminating them with the old food.

He smiled and said something like, "Ok, I'll do that next time."  I guess the trash inspectors were pleased with that answer because the conversation ended there and we weren't fined for our trash violation! :D



PS: Here's another English teacher's experience with the Korean trash system.