Air Popcorn Popper

I came across this picture in my internet browsing and I immediately thought of an unfortunate experience I had with one when I was young.
We used to air pop our popcorn all of the time in one of these sweet babies. I liked to watch the kernels expand into the fluffiness, so to get the best view I was sitting on the counter looking into the machine. For some reason I was sitting there in my underwear....anyway, a rogue kernel popped out of the thing and went into my underwear! It was red hot and horrible! I survived and I learned to get over the experience, and still eat popcorn.

A friend's personal story

Joe mentioned to me this morning that he had started reading Lissa Lander's novella that she posted online with an author tool, you can check it out here: www.authonomy.com/ViewBook.aspx?bookid=1375 She is hoping people can back the book so that it will make it to the editor's desk at HarperCollins - I borrowed her picture from flickr cause it's awesome.

I decided to check it out, and see about supporting a friend. I read the prologue and hoped that my workload would be light today at work so that I could finish reading her book. Luckily, it was meant to be, I just finished the book. I think I read it for about 6 hours with a few work related interruptions and a 30 minute lunch break :)

If you are interested, I'm sure Lissa wouldn't mind you reading and backing her book.

I have to admit, it was hard to read something that is so personal, and so closely protected for so many years. I almost cried several times, and I think the only thing that stopped me from letting the tears out was that I was at work. I had to look at the ceiling, hoping that the tears would drain back into the ducts and take my mind off the story for a minute.

After reading it all, I'm so happy for Lissa, Kris, and Rosie; I'm happy they have each other. I'm happy they can grow together and that they love each other so much.

Twitter is to IM as Blog is to Email

Listen: I once read an article from an economist stating that emails were wasted keystrokes. This was at the beginning the Blog era. At the time it was common to receive form emails sent out to numerous people, or party invites forwarded from friend to friend. The argument was that sending individual emails was a waste of time and energy. If you had something going on in your life then you could post it to a Weblog and move on.

Emailing is all well and good. If you want to send a private message or question, email's a fine option.

I like chatting. It's good to know if I want a more immediate response to a question I can pull up the chatter and if my contact is online I can ask it. In the past, programs like AIM had an option to invite multiple people to chat. MSN had a similar feature. This was fun for collaborating on certain things, just like a conference call on a cell phone.

Enter Twitter and micro-blogging. There are other options out there, I'm not familiar with them though. Twitter is based on similar ideas of text messaging, you can only post 140 characters at a time, it's meant for small messages. Now that most of my friends and I are following each other's feeds it's a Permachat Blogette.

It's awesome to check the feed in the morning and see what everyone was doing last night, it's awesome to read complaints as the day goes on. Have something funny to say? A new word you just coined?

Permachat blogette!

You're invited to sign up at twitter.com and add us,



MrGrigg

EmilyGrigg

You can tweet and receive on your cellphone, email, direct, or side programs like Twhirl. Get with it!

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Tent = camping

Here's our new tent! We've decided that we want to try camping. Some of our friends are into it and have asked us to go at the end of the month. We'll see how we take to camping, maybe it will become a new hobby<

We also justified the purchase of the tent and some other camping gear because it can be considered part of our emergency preparedness stuff! We still need to work on our food storage, but at least we're getting started. Also, the tent was really inexpensive; we found it at Sam's club for a really good price considering the size. It was pretty easy to put up, awesome color coded poles and the bag has wheels which is great for transporting, since it's way heavy. Apparently the tent can sleep 8, so I guess if we have 6 kids, we'll be set!

Touring Gainesville

Joe and I decided we wanted to start doing some local touring, take advantage of what is close by. On Saturday (8/30) we drove towards Gainesville (which is where our church is). We tried to go to Lake Lanier Islands Resort http://www.lakelanierislands.com/, but unfortunately you can't tour the resort without paying their parking fee. We decided to do that another day, but we were able to see a resorty side to Lake Lanier that we hadn't yet witnessed. It was pretty awesome. Unfortunately the lake is still low.

Part of the reason for touring Gainesville was to eat at Schlotzsky's Deli! We pass it every time we drive to church, so I've been craving it. It was a poorly kept location though, all of the tables were dirty and the floor needed some sweeping. The sandwich was OK, but Joe said Hode baked better bread :)

After eating we found Poultry Park! It is an awesome monument to poultry and eating poultry. It's a bizarre tiny park, but I guess it makes sense since Gainesville is the poultry capital of the world! I posted pictures of the plaques on the monument, they were totally weird and worth a read.

notice the awesome chicken at the top of the spire

The importance of poultry to you

Gainesville: cradle of Georgia's poultry industry

Poultry's importance to Georgia's economy

Right down the street from Poultry Park is Downtown Square, apparently it provides an "entertaining and vibrant Downtown life!" for Gainesville. It was cute-ish, but I couldn't describe it as vibrant.

http://www.gainesville.org/, it's an aerial view of the square.

They did have a strange scale model of the solar system around the square that was interesting. You could walk around the square and check out facts about the various planets in the solar system.

here we are in the Sun

There also was this monument to Confederate soldiers, which I have to admit, looking at the monument while a non-white guy was sitting nearby made me feel a little weird.

On the way home we decided that since we were out we would hit the Hoschton scarecrow festival; apparently they set a new Guinness World Record http://www.scarecrowstampede.com/. They were cute and bizarre.

As you can see, the church decided to make a nativity with scarecrows, a little weird.

Then we hit the Braselton cemetery. I had been wanting to drive into it, because it has these awesome stones at the entrance, which makes me think that it's going to be old and awesome. It wasn't quite as exciting as I was hoping, but it was a really nice setting.

Here's the Braselton Heritage & Visitor's Center, the pictures doesn't really show how run down it looks in person.


I like this weird town that we live in. Although living in a big city like London was more of my plan when moving away from Utah, living in a small town is a fun alternative. Braselton is close enough to Atlanta that if we wanted to do something "big city" we can, but I like living where there's variety; we have million dollar houses, regular houses, and shanties all in the same town! Braselton will work for us for a few years.