Add to the to-do list

30 Places to Eat in Virginia ... road trip!

How we speak

This is such an interesting study: 22 maps showing the differences in the way we say things throughout the United States. I've always found it so interesting how we all live in the same country, but region to region we can be so different.

Here are ALL of the 122 maps!

Mood boosting books

Here's a list of mood boosting books. “It is hoped those with ‘mild to moderate’ mental health conditions will try out the idea before turning to prescription drugs — many of which can have unpleasant side effects,” The Daily Mail explains.

Sounds good to me. And I have Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman, which I can highly recommend.

My daily online routine

I have a few website that I go to each day at work. Firefox has an add-on called Morning Coffee that I highly recommend. It keeps up with the sites you visit on particular days and each day you load your morning coffee and it opens all your tabs for you.

Groupon and Living Social are daily tabs that I check because you never know when you might stumble across a great deal. I also check Indexed every weekday.

xkcd updates on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

On Monday, I also read The Chapel Chronicles, a webcomic written and drawn by a teenage girl. It has such wit and humor. Her talent is remarkable. Also on Monday, I go to the Richland County Freegal website for my three free songs each week. The library is contracted with Sony and you can download three songs a week with your library card. That turns out to be 15 free cds worth of music a year.

Tuesday is an odd day. Some of the sites that update weekly are loaded on Tuesday because it is a slower day at work. That is when I check on Axe Cop, The Guild, The Conjurers, and The Zombie Years.

Friday is Bearmageddon day, a webcomic done by the artist who draws Axe Cop. Nothing like ending the week with mutant bears rebelling against mankind.

My breakfast reading includes the following comics: Overboard, Non Sequitur, Dog Eat Doug, Lio, Mutts, and Simon's Cat, (and Foxtrot on Sundays).

It's all about starting your day off right. I used to have a bookmark folder with each site in it that I would load each day, but the Morning Coffee add-on does make it much easier. Now if I only drank coffee...

Just a few links

Every now and then I need to dump a list of links that I need to come back to, and Facebook is such a terrible place for that...

Heroes for My Daughter ... Although I do not have a daughter, I know several little girls who probably need this book.

I'm the one that's cool ... The Guild is at it again in all their Felicia Day inspired wonderfulness! (Video, too.)

How to sharpen pencils ... Yes, there is an art to it.

Links to look at later

Sometimes you just find links to pages that you want to spend more time on...

http://danmeth.com/post/15296838533/xmascards
http://danmeth.com/tagged/popculturalcharts
http://www.geekosystem.com/category/theres-a-map-for-that/

Lost in t-shirt land

Every now and then I get on a website and can't get away. This has happened with the threadless t-shirt website. I have been going through page after page of t-shirts. This isn't your typical snarky t-shirt website. These are smart, well designed shirts. And some are just so cool. I like the Middle Earth There And Back Again shirt, which shows the path of Lord of the Rings as a subway map. Very smart. The Leaping Dolphins badminton club t-shirt is wonderful, using the shuttlecock as the sunset. Then there's the Lazy Bones and Thunder Crabs (although I wish it was football and not rugby). I could link and link and link. They have some great Zombie, Muppets and Doctor Who shirts too. Just search and enjoy.

Oh, I have to add this one too. Love is Love. Wonderful...

And this one too, because Jeni likes giraffes...

Like I said, I could go on and on. Check out this Pacman shirt.

Shaped eggs

I'm adding heart-shaped eggs to my list of fun things to try. Or maybe a cube or pyramid.

They're getting the band back together

The creative team behind the original Sandman series, Neil Gaiman, Sam Kieth and Mike Dringenberg are doing a story in Hero Comics 2011 coming out in June. I don't really buy comics anymore. I won Tori Amos' Comic Book Tattoo a while back at a silent charity auction but really haven't had the time to sit down and enjoy it. I wanted to get Axe Cop's mini-series, but missed it so I'm waiting for the trade paperback/graphic novel version. But I may have to pick up Hero. I've always enjoyed Sam Kieth's work, and I think that Mike Dringenberg complements him so well, And well, Neil Gaiman goes without saying. So I borrowed a frame of this preview image for my desktop wallpaper for right now. No better reminder than that to make sure I pick this one up.

Etsy shop to revisit

Jeni loves browsing Etsy. It's a good way to spend hours upon hours. I like Strange Studios, Lisa Snellings' Poppet Planet site. She also has a blog here, and more poppet stuff here.

Vital moms

Another website to come back to: Vital Moms

Flu vaccine article

This is an interesting piece on the effectiveness of the flu vaccine. Get through his first section section where he vents about the fact that vaccine producers won't do evidence-based research. He has a valid point, but he needs to move more to the meat, which is the Cochrane Collaboration, which is heading toward becoming the gold standard in studies on health care. This is where the facts come out -- that the flu vaccine is effective, at best, 1 out of every 100 people, and that it does not help prevent transmission of the disease. Interesting. Yet as a society we continue to inject this over and over again, faithfully doing what the poster at the grocery store tells me to do.

And while I'm linking to articles, here's a good one on exercise and nutrition.

Appliances

Memo to self: Remember to go to www.homeeverything.com/

Dr. Horrible

I'm not sure if I've linked to this, but I'm doing it again. "With my freeze ray I will stop the world!" I love Dr. Horrible!

Photo light tent

Jeni likes taking pictures of the food she cooks. She was posting it all on her food blog before she started at the theatre and her time disappeared. But we've often talked about making a photo light tent/box. This DYI looks so easy and practical. I think this is something we can actually do fairly easily, with a lot of items we already have. Now ... just to find some time.

Historical markers

I always see the historical markers around town, and have always wondered where they all are, or what they all say (especially the ones you drive by too quickly). Now I have a link to them all!

Hectic start to November

November is starting off pretty hectic. Jeni is producing Same Time, Next Year at Workshop Theatre and it opens on Friday. She's also doing props, and anything else they need, while also serving her role as interim director of the theatre. So right now she's spending more time there than home.

We got so busy that on Halloween we didn't even get a chance to carve our pumpkins, and that's a big deal. But things'll have to slow down eventually. But we did have about 50 trick-or-treaters, so that was nice. Just not as many Tootsie Rolls left over as I would have liked.

The treadmill and I haven't connected lately. It's been about a week and a half since I was on it last. It's my fault, although I'd like to share the blame with the treadmill somehow. I had the best intentions this morning, but the time change has somehow managed to make me MORE tired instead of giving me more rest. Go figure.

I taught a juggling class tonight for an improv group at Workshop. The female lead in the show teaches the class, but had rehearsal tonight so I stepped in. There were about 12 or 14 kids there, in a warm tight space (oh, the smell of sweaty kids). There were a handful who really showed potential. I'd love to get them in a smaller group and teach them some cool stuff. I pushed their skill levels, teaching them a lot of partner tricks. There was a lot they couldn't do, but I wanted them to have at least attempted the throws with me there so they had some kind of muscle memory of the pattern. Hopefully I'll be able to work with them again soon.

I looked up the old Star Wars Holiday Special online today. It was one of those things that came on when I was a kid, but then as I got older I somehow convinced myself that I had made the whole thing up. So I'm happy to see it resurface online like everything else does -- even if it looks a lot worse than I could have ever imagined.

A reference to the Star Wars Holiday Special was made on one of the comics on this page, but not this really cool one here. I have to say, I can't imagine the work that went into this one. (This is the one that referenced the holiday special.)

OK, this post is getting way too long now, and I'm not really saying much, so I'll end it here.

(OK, I wanted to post something else here that was funny, so I could end it here instead, but had nothing funny to post, so instead you get the concept of a funny-haha.)

Hot air balloon launch

These are some pretty amazing pictures over on Flickr.

The Fourth Plinth webstream

I saw on the Flickr blog a post about the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. The plinth is usualy reserved for statues, but is currently empty. So there is a project where, for one hour, 24 hours a day, for the next 100 days, a person will be standing in place of the statue. Sort of live art. There's a live webstream so you can see what's going on at any time. Apparently they had 22,419 applicants for the 2400 available spots. Poor guy right now is standing in the rain, but his hour is just about up...

Volcano eruption viewed from space

The astronauts aboard the International Space Station captured a picture of a volcano erupting. It is pretty amazing. This link came from the Space Weather website.