When I was visiting OnStar headquarters last month, the cutest factoid I heard was that OnStar tracks Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. (And I heard LOTS of cute factoids. Okay, lots of factoids: not necessarily cute ones. But this one is. For real.) I just received the details on this a couple of days ago and wanted to share it with you, so my Christmas-celebrating readers can do this. (This post is not sponsored: it’s just so CUTE I had to share!) OnStar is, for the fifth year, teaming up with the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). Each year, NORAD conducts a special mission on December 24 – following…
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I’d Like To Thank The Academy (And Mari)
Back in the Golden Age of blogging (2008-09ish), blog awards were flying around like toasters on a screensaver in the early ’90s. It wasn’t unusual to be awarded multiple times in a month for being crafty, friendly, prolific, just plain awesome, or a myriad of other traits. The awards all “required” that, in order to accept them, you had to pass them on via tagging other bloggers and then jump through a series of hoops in a blog post. Awards made for great blog fodder and, after fulfilling the requirements on each one, we used to post them proudly in our sidebars. Over the past couple of years, I haven’t…
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I Do My Best Thinking In The Shower…
…which is why a post full of random thoughts I’ve had while waiting to board a plane in San Diego is bound to disappoint. Sorry. We had a great trip overall, with the exception of our luggage being MIA from the time we arrived in San Diego until 11:30 that night (1:30 a.m Chicago time, oy!) and after we dropped a couple hundred bucks on replacement toiletries and clothing, just in case. We returned that stuff when our luggage was delivered to us, except the toothbrushes, toothpaste, and Jim’s new jeans from the Gap because wowzers! A woman sitting across from me is hacking up a lung. She probably shouldn’t…
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Sunday Smatterings
I just made that title up. Well, I make up all of my titles, but typically I will think about it for hours and often will have a title in mind before I even sit down to type out the post. Anyway, this one just shot out of my brain and through my fingers, into my computer and onto the screen. And I hate it. But it stays. *** My feet are in Chicagoland again, at least temporarily, and I’m ready to dive into my regular work/workout/taking care of things around the house schedule. This weekend has been great for easing in: yesterday Jim and I did our workouts in…
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Shells, Sea Glass And Colones
I told Liz that, while in New Jersey, I wanted to take a side trip down the shore to the Seaside Heights area, which was hit the hardest last year by Superstorm Sandy. She and I headed down there this morning and took a long stroll on the boardwalk. The businesses that are still intact on the boardwalk (there are lots of them!) are closed for the season and we were two of just a handful of people out there, not counting all of the construction workers who were fixing everything. As quiet as it was, I was able to imagine a bustling, noisy, funnel cake-smelling amusement area thanks to…
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I’m Giving Away Wine Charms, Just In Time For The Holidays!
You know how you have the entire family over and you want to make sure nobody drinks from your glass of wine so you pull out the box of those clunky wine charms with the rings on them but then you get annoyed because they clink around and make too much noise and also you want to use your new stemless glasses that your sister-in-law brought you as a hostess gift and you realize that your old wine charms won’t work because there’s nothing to hang them around? I have just the solution for that kind of problem. I received an email a few months back from a local woman…
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Life Rule #1073: You Can’t Choose Your Own Nickname.
As J got settled in at school, he began talking more and more about the new friends he was making. He gets along very well with both of his roommates–what a relief!–as well as the three guys across the hall and so many others both on his floor and in his classes. A few weeks into the semester we started hearing about various nicknames they were bestowing on each other, and J was hoping he’d get a good one. In discussing the topic with Jim and me, the three of us agreed that “T-bone” would be a great nickname. If you’re a “Seinfeld” fan, you get it. We said, “Yeah!…
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Odds and Ends
I just have a bunch of bits and pieces (odds and ends, whatever) that I wanted to get out there because I’ve been all over the place this week, so I decided to post a “Brain Dump” (as my sistuh-from-anuthuh-mutha calls it) today. This could also technically be a Friday Fragments post (as Mrs. 4444 has done for years every Friday), but I’m not linking up over there because I don’t have the time to go read the posts by all of the other participants and I don’t want to be unfair. (But YOU could! Go! Do it!) So anyway, here we go. Yesterday’s post, a note to the Zumba…
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Evolution
With BlogHer 2013* coming up next week, I’ve been thinking a lot about the different facets of my blogging “career”. BlogHer 2009 in Chicago was my first conference (though I had been blogging since 2007), and back then, even though I’ve always been the same person online as in real life, my online identity looked like this: Remember that? I love that picture. I used the six-year-old me as my avatar from 2007 until 2011, and truth be told, I was a little scared of changing it. Change is good, though, so I did. I haven’t looked back since! (Well, until now.) If you don’t remember the six-year-old me, you…
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Roxanne
I spent a couple of minutes chatting with a very sweet woman with whom Roxie and I crossed paths during our walk yesterday. She was (I’d guess) in her sixties and shared stories about the three beagles who were a part of her family over the years. She asked for Roxie’s name and talked to her sweetly as other beagle lovers tend to do, only jumping a little bit when Roxie let out her blood-curdling howl of hello. It was clear she had heard that before, and she wasn’t phased. She scratched behind Roxie’s ears and petted her vigorously as Roxie’s tail wagged so vigorously her entire body swayed back…