A Tabbie Hoffman Easter!

Tab wanted y'all to see his eggs that he decorated tonight!  It's his first Easter and he was a little nervous but I think he did a great job!!

That blue one in the middle with the smudge was his daddy's idea.  Larry suggested that I put a little butter on Tabbie's paw and then press his paw onto the egg before I dunked it.  It worked!  Kitty paw print!

One, Two, THREE!

Tabbie Hoffman and I play this little game every night.  It's called our 1-2-3 Game.  

I say, really slowly, "Onnnnne.  Twooooooo." and then "THREE!" real fast and on three, I toss the throw pillow that's on the bed up in the air and he jumps up and tries to grab it. 

Oh my God, y'all.  It is hysterical.  I have been trying to get a good picture of him doing it.  This is the best one so far.  It was tonight.

It's super hard to take a picture while you're throwing a pillow and I know it's super blurry but LOOK at it.  He is so high in the air.  Bwahahahahaha!  

Straight mess that boy is.

You can't beat a swap meet!

We went on a class field trip today!  Nope, we are not too old for that.  Apparently.  :)  Mr. Leland came up with the BEST idea for us to go to the Auto Fest and Swap Meet at the Perry fairgrounds today to look for old CB radios and just old radios in general.  It is our Communications class, after all.  Have I mentioned how awesome Mr. Leland is???

We had a blast!  We got there at noon and stayed until 2:30 or so.  I took lots of pictures!  There were old cars, old collectibles, old car parts and, oh yeah, funnel cakes.

Here are Christy and Tasha with their little boys, Jacob and Quick.

 Andy found the first CB radio!

And I found an old wooden Coke crate!

And this!  I want an old Coke machine cooler to use as a freezer for my back porch (when I get a back porch.)  This one was $850 as is.  It would've taken another $5,000 to restore it, I'm sure.  I joked that we're gonna have to get past the furloughs before we make a commitment like that.  Ha!

Here's Mr. Leland checking out the electrical stuff.  Of course.  :)  And Andy on the phone.  He's got a baby girl due any. minute.  Gotta stay connected!

We all loved this find!  Real, honest-to-God metal Tonka trucks.  Ahhhhh, those were the good old days.

I just loved this HUGE Gulf gas sign!

The cars were amazing!

And so were the sausages!  

I got mine with onions, peppers and lots of mustard.  Yum!!

We're everywhere!  We're everywhere!  :)

This car had a "Panty Dropper" sticker on the hood.  What the what?

We just had the best time!  The weather was perfect and the company was even better.  AND I got sunburned!  It felt great after all that cold wind we've had lately.  So I don't mind at all being a little pink.  It is my favorite color, after all.

Like a lion

It seems when I gave up Facebook for Lent, I also gave up blogging!  That was not intentional.  Larry and I have had quite the whirlwind month.  Lots of wind and crazy hair-blowing, that's for sure.  We are still on target but nothing ever happens fast enough, you know?  I'll just be glad to see this March GO.

I got out of my Antennas and Transmission Lines class with a 94.  I wasn't happy with that but it's still an A!  Seriously, though, that mess is hard.   

Yes.  Hard.  And mess.








We started our Microwaves and Radar class yesterday.  One more to go!  Fiber Optics and then I'm blowing that popsicle stand!  I will be finished with the electronics program!!  A little over three years to the date that I started.  It's been a long road but one that lead me to a job that I love.  I'm pretty crazy about that F-15, if y'all haven't heard.

It's actually spring and it's still cold.  I've been calling that blankety-blank groundhog a big fat liar cootie head for three days and NOW they're saying that he (that Southern gentleman, Punxsutawney Phil, is the one we go by) projected six more weeks of winter but they "misread his message".  Ya think??  Really, though, with the effects of global warming as severe as they are, can we really depend on what a rodent has to say?

Ami and Brian had a tree move in with them during that bad storm earlier this month.  Thank God only the house was damaged.  It could have been so much worse.  God had His hand on them that night!

So, yeah.  March has pretty much sucked.  Sunday is Easter and I am SO much looking forward to it!  I'm going to sunrise service for the first time in my life and I can't wait.  Then it's hamburgers, hot dogs and an egg hunt with the family.  

And then April will be here!!  Yay!!

A fool for the spool

Tabbie Hoffman has half the cat aisle at PetSmart at his disposal but all he wants to play with is this empty thread spool.  And this is where it usually winds up, in the foyer closet next to my vacuum cleaner.  Either there or in the pantry.  There's a gap just wide enough at the bottom of those two doors for it to roll right in.  Then he lays there all pitiful with his whole leg up under there trying to get it.  Yes, I've tried stuffing towels in the gaps.  He pulls the towels out.  I always know where to look when the spool is not around.  Sometimes I'll ask him, "where's your spool?" and he'll take me right to it.  He's too smart for me.  

He even plays fetch with it!  He'll bring it to me in bed in the mornings and want me to throw it.  He'll go get it and bring it back.  Like a dog would do.  We do this for hours some mornings.  Imagine how well that goes over with somebody who cherishes her sleep and works until midnight.  Yeah.  Sometimes I throw it really, really hard.  :)

 

 It's mine, my own, my pressssssshus.

I'm just throwing this picture in because it is freakin' hilarious!!  This is how he watches TV.  He sits on his butt in that chair.  We were watching "Life of Pi" this afternoon and I glanced over and sure enough, he was sitting there like this.  I'm absolutely crazy about this cat!
 

Circuits, furloughs and diets, oh my!

I finished up my Advanced Circuit Analysis class and moved right on into Advanced Modulation last week.  Advanced Modulation is all about analog-to-digital circuits and digital-to-analog circuits.  I'll admit that I've had more than a little confusion with this new class than I did with the last but I'll get it.  Having a good teacher makes it easier and we do have a good teacher.  He's probably mid-to-late seventies but I can honestly say he's the coolest teacher I've ever had in my life.  He has LIVED and has lots of stories to tell and knowledge to share.  We adore him.

Yesterday we built a pulse amplitude modulation circuit.  A PAM.  This is mine.  It basically digitizes an analog sine wave.   

This is how the signal looks on the oscilloscope.  Yeah, I did that.  Totally cool stuff, yo. 

Complex circuit building can be stressful.  It helps to have a cool teacher.  It also helps to have footage of 70's Allman Brothers concerts playing while you're doing the tedious work of building said complex circuits.  :)






They told us at work a couple of weeks ago to prepare ourselves for the furloughs that are coming as a result of the sequester.  They really won't affect me, as I have been "furloughed" since New Year's Eve.  I went part time when I went back to school so I'm good.  I've heard so much griping and fussing about these furloughs and how "I'm gonna lose my house" and "I'm gonna lose my truck".  Dude.  If you are going to lose your house because you're losing ONE DAY A WEEK'S pay, you have TOO MUCH HOUSE.  So many of my coworkers have gotten so used to working 12-hour days and racking up all that overtime that they honestly don't know how they're going to get by on 32 hours a week.  I've been working at the base for a year come the 12th of this month and I can already tell you that there is a lot of fat that can be trimmed out there.  An ungodly amount of waste goes on out there and that includes supplies as well as manpower.  Call me a traitor, I don't care.  I'm just not your typical government employee.  I don't spend hours chit-chatting, leaning on my tool box and wasting time.  I do what I know how to do (which is becoming a LOT!) and what I don't know, I work with someone who does.  I work.  

I don't have much of a weight-loss update.  I've been teetering between 18 and 20 pounds for two weeks now!  I've hit my first plateau and since I've been doing this losing weight thing since my jeans were acid-washed and had zippers on the legs, I know that I have to bump up the exercise.  I lost these twenty pounds virtually with no exercise, unless you count climbing up on top of an F-15 and back down again fifteen times a day as exercise (and I do!).  I took my fitness leave one night last week and walked on the running track.  The nice, bouncy, rubber running track that's absolute heaven on your ankles and joints.  It just got dark on me too fast.  I cannot wait for the time to change and the days to get longer and warmer.  I will walk that track for days.

Things are rocking on pretty smoothly for me these days.  I go to school, go to work, go to sleep and then do it all again the next day.  Two more months until I graduate and things can get back to normal.  Whatever that is.  :)

The past is obdurate...

...but it CAN be changed.  At least if you're Stephen King.  I just finished 11/22/63 and all I can say about it is WOW.  I am a huge SK fan.  I haven't read everything he's written but I've read most.  And for forever and a day, my favorite book by him has been Lisey's Story.  I think that has changed now.

11/22/63 is about a time traveler who goes back to try to save the life of President John F. Kennedy.  I've always wanted to do that!  I have always said that if I was ever able to time travel, I would first go back to 1975 and save Larry from that life he was living and then together, we would go back and save President Kennedy.  No lie.  I'm a big Kennedy fan, too, and have always been super interested in his assassination and all the conspiracy theories that go along with it.  I don't believe Oswald was the only one there shootin' that day.  Just sayin'.  Besides, I am also a huge X-Files fan and every good X-Filian knows that it was the bullet fired from the grassy knoll by the Cigarette Smoking Man that actually killed President Kennedy.  :)

So, when my favorite author writes a book about one of my favorite topics, what's a girl to do?

I read it.  It took a month.  It's a huge book, quite the commitment but well worth the time.  It's 842 pages plus a seven-page Afterword by Mr. King himself PLUS nine more pages of songs and recipes from the book.  Waaaaay cool, SK.

I LOVE THIS BOOK!  I am so very impressed with the phenomenal amount of research that had to go into it to provide us with that kind of detailed storytelling.  He really outdid himself this time.  Larry read it first and we both agree that this is the best book Stephen King has ever written.  It's amazing.  Not your typical SK book although there is an element or three of horror there.  After all, that's what he do.

I don't want to spoil it for you in case you want to read it (and I suggest you do!) but I will say that I wasn't exactly thrilled with the ending.  I told Larry I was going to send SK a note, a tweet, something, telling him I was gonna pull a Misery on him, kidnap him and hold up with him in an old farmhouse and make him rewrite that ending or I was gonna break his ankles (although she cut his foot off in the book...ouch!).  :)

I'm a little sad that I'm done with it.  I invested a lot of time, mostly on my breaks at work, reading this story and getting attached to the characters that I feel like I've lost some old friends now.  Weird.   

My favorite line? 

“Life turns on a dime. Sometimes towards us, but more often it spins away, flirting and flashing as it goes.  So long, honey, it was good while it lasted, wasn’t it?” 

Well played, SK, well played.