I really hope my taste comes back today, but it’s not tasting (or smelling) too good. Sigh.

I could lose so much weight if I could switch my taste buds on and off. Somebody needs to do some research on that!

Why is the Bachelor/Bachelorette so popular? I don’t think any of the 15 or so bachelors ever married the final rose. One bachelorette married and had a kid. Yet they promote these shows with a ring in the “or.” And then seven million or so people watch and are “addicted.” I think the addiction is the catfights between the women for the guy. Everybody loves catfights…and tears. This show really makes women look bad (maybe men, too, but most of the time it’s one guy with 25 girls fighting over him and then each other.) Blah.

I rent – therefore I don’t have to do anything. I’m also mystified at the actions of my new renter neighbor. The “landlord” (haven’t seen her in months) played games with her ex-husband during their divorce. She ended up taking the house from him, refused to settle for a lower price, and now I have to deal with people who don’t care about the property, which also seems to include her. I still am picking up leaves she refused to rake from her tree. I end up picking up the renters’ junk that they drop on the street in front of my house. I end up picking up used napkins and paper plates from the animal-ripped garbage bag that they leave on the deck. I end up picking up Christmas tree debries that the wind blows over to me since they can’t take their tree, which is now a skeleton, out to the garbage can.

Sanitation workers do not make special trips into yards to grab all the garbage thrown out the back door. If I ever acted like that, my parents would disown me in two seconds flat. Just because someone is a renter doesn’t mean they aren’t suppose to be courteous of their neighbors and be sanitary. Now I have to hope we don’t get rats and continue to be the housemaid.

Arthur Foote’s Suite for Strings is awesome music. (Thought I should end on a positive note.)

I’ve actually done a few things this year that mean a classic Christmas to me, unlike the past few years. It’s not Christmas unless I hear “A Christmas Festival” by Leroy Anderson. I not only heard it on CD, but I also caught it on my favorite Syracuse classical station, WCNY (11 years going on 12 listening!) As mentioned before on this lovely experiment, this piece is seared into my brain from my father playing the original Boston Pops 1960 or so recording every year with great fanfare. It was not Christmas in my house until he brought up that record (which got increasingly scratchy from continual use) from his basement lair, started playing it, and then “conducted” it. It’s a uniquely Farrell tradition that I never intend to let slide.

Then, for the first time in probably around five years or so, I went up to Milwaukee with my violinist friend Nina and heard her play in the Milwaukee Ballet Orchestra for their annual Nutcracker production. The ballet has tinkered with the plot a little, adding clowns that aren’t usually there to entertain the kids, but it still was nice to actually sit down and see the ballet with their great sets. The Milwaukee Ballet has always been stellar and the dancers did not disappoint. Even their acting is first rate.

And now I once again have the full ballet on CD (I accidentally threw out my previous CD  - horrors!), which I am listening to right now with a glass of somewhat flat but still tasty rose sparkling wine.

Christmas’s aren’t the same since I became an adult orphan, but keeping some traditions alive and doing what I appreciate keep it purposeful.

Where are they?! I’m still 10 (mentally, anyway.) I still love them, and I want to hear them! I’m sure I can whip up a temper tantrum like I had when I was 10 (and 11 and 12 and…)

Ok – next best thing: The Barking Dogs!

I’ve been browsing online since 1995. I still remember my buddy from work, Tommy, who asked if I wanted him to install Netscape on my work computer. I’d heard about the World Wide Web for a few years and by the time he came by my cubicle, I was curious and said, “Yes, Tommy, please install it!” I remember how cool I thought it was when he first installed it. All these sites! I think cnn.com might have been the first one I looked at. I do remember continually looking at the “What’s New” section on the Netscape homepage and wasting lots of time ping-ponging around between sites, and searching for other ones that I might like. 

I assembled a page about 10 years ago of all the pages I viewed every day and hyperlinked them into an email I could access anywhere at anytime. I didn’t have home Internet access at the time and I needed a portable bookmark page. I just used an updated email page version today! I’ve got bookmarked pages in my Chrome browser, but fried hard drives can fry a bookmark page real quick. Then Yahoo and AT&T (my lovely Internet provider) created rss feed pages and I played with that and settled on a few feeds that cascaded various site headlines onto one page. I just used that today, too.

Through these means, I’ve assembled my browsing routine, which includes five major newspapers from different states and a different country and breaking news coverage from the Chicago Tribune. I also check out some ancestral newspapers that are listed at hometownnews.com, which includes most small papers in the country by state. That adds six more papers. Yep, I’m a news junkie that likes broad geographic coverage.

I started reading the New York Times a few years ago when it was included as a rss-feed choice. I’ve been lucky enough to have read it for free for the past nine months and now the piper has emailed that it wants to be paid. The next day, the Chicago Sun-Times, which was one of my first Netscape sites back in about 1996, informed its readers that the next day, it was time to pay for access.

Even though I knew this trend was occurring, I was still rattled. I had to take a giant step back and reassess everything. Free is slowly going away and maybe it should. There are employees behind all these sites providing the news that I get to read. They have to be paid and site advertising usually doesn’t pay enough to pay them. Most newspapers just wanted to get their content online to build awareness and traffic and didn’t really think too much in 1996 or 1997 about the future consequences of giving away news for free. If the model is changing, we all have to change with it and consider what content has the most value. Am I willing to become a digital subscriber to all these newspapers? Unfortunately, I can’t afford that, especially when I see that many of them are basing rates on home-delivery rates (which just doubled for me within the past month.) All I can say is that one newspaper may have value to me and the other may not.

The Times are a-changing (haha) and I’ve got adjust (Plus, Amazon’s probably going to be charging state sales tax next year! Better start wrapping my head around that one now…)

Pam’s brain

If there’s no blogging going on, that means there are no ideas or thoughts rolling around in my head. Or it means I haven’t gotten out of daily autodrive to discover the ideas or thoughts that are hiding in my head. Probably more of the latter right now. Hopefully, there are still a few in there.

So, as usual, please stand by…

Watch Mad Men DVDs. Just rewatched the pilot episode and creator commentary. My, how far we’ve come since 2007! Fun to watch from all I’ve learned in the past four seasons. I’m going to keep going until I get to the end of season four so I’m ready for #5 in March.

Enjoy a Kirkland Golden Margarita. Costco has continued to knock down the price a dollar on this lovely beverage – maybe because it’s off season. I have now bought a second bottle and am enjoying a glass of it now (probably explains a few things about this post…)

Listen to George Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F. Not heard as much as Rhapsody in Blue or An American in Paris. Very jazzy and with a broad sound. This piece has been maturing to my ear more and more as time goes on…

I’ve been too busy raking leaves for the past few weeks to have ideas or thoughts other than I cannot wait for the d&$* tree next to me to not have any more leaves on it! I’ve got seven full 30 gallon bags sitting in the garage right now – they’ll be put out very shortly for the garbage people who are coming in about two hours. I think the running bag total now is 10 It would also be nice if my neighbor who now has tenants since she can’t sell her house would come over here and rake her d$*@ leaves so they stop blowing over onto my property! (This will turn into an epic rant if I don’t stop now!)

And now I get to be homeowner – hear me roar (see June 13) again as the gutter cleaning phase is about to begin. My ladder nemesis awaits in the garage. The backyard tree is looking hungry for ladder. Let the ladder games begin…

Evening update: Only a few sticks came down from the backyard tree. I won over the ladder 90% of the time, but the ladder foiled me when I wanted it to collapse and it wouldn’t budge. Swear words, unfortunately, were uttered…