Su Doku

OK.. My sister-in-law Shirley and Anna have gotten me hooked on Su Doku. It's a simple game of logic. Here's what a basic puzzle looks like:



The basic point of the game is to fill in all the spaces with the numbers 1 - 9. All 9 numbers must be used in each row (vertically and horizontally) and each block of 9 numbers must contain all of the numbers 1 - 9. Here's the answer to the puzzle above:




So, Anna got me 2 Su Doku puzzle books for my birthday. One book is mild and the other is spicy. The mild ones are fun and easy. The spicy ones make me want to pull my hair out. Here's one example that seems to be deceptively simple on the surface, but took me a long time to solve:



Print it out and try to solve it....

Hope's First Post

As a big first grader, Hope has been learning to write. She does a composition every day, which basically consists of writing 3-4 sentences all on her own, complete with capital letters and proper punctuation. We usually have to help her correct a few misspellings and punctuation errors, but she's doing great do far. She has a real interest in computers, so for fun, I let her type an extra composition now and again. She typed one today and asked me to post it to my blog. So, here it is, Hope's first blog post: (cut and pasted from Notepad to Blogger by Dad)

Today I play with My dady.and I play with My siser Tori.and
I play with My pet penelope and she licked my hands.
and I play with my momy.The end.

Telephones and Line Dot Line

Years ago, one of my nieces used to call Tator Tot Hotdish "Line Dot Line". It took my sister a while to figure out what she was talking about. To this day, we still call Tator Tot Hotdish "Line Dot Line", at least at our house.

So, the other night it was time to put Tori to bed, and, as usual she suddenly had a hunger attack and needed a snack. When we asked her what she wanted she told us "Telephones". She proceeded to go to the fridge and show us that she wanted the leftover elbow macaroni and stewed tomatoes.

"See," she said, "I want those telephone noodles."

Hollywood People

How weird is this?

Apparently the girl who plays Ally Barone in Everybody Loves Raymond was born in Brownwood. Incidentally, her brothers play the boys in the show.

I could really care less about the show, except everyone pronounces my name incorrectly because it's spelled the same. And I get a lot of questions from people asking if I'm related to Ray. Go figure. Anyhoo, I thought it was ironic that the actors who play the kids are from Brownwood.

Also ironic is that I stumbled upon this fact whilst trying to google information on Dog tags/licenses in Brownwood, Texas. Not sure how this turned up casting information for Everybody Loves Raymond.

I did, ahem, eventually find out that I need to get a license for my dog (for a fee, of course) which will expire on December 31, at which point I can renew it for another fee.

In a somewhat related note, I noticed there are other Hollywood people from Brownwood, including the guy who was the visual effects producer for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the witch, and the wardrobe. Now that is pretty cool.

And think of it... you just wasted 2 minutes of your life reading about something that matters to almost no one. Go figure.

Close to home

I only live 30 minutes away from this guy.

I went to his show last year at the Brownwood Rattlesnake Roundup.

By the way, Dublin is also home to the orginal Dr. Pepper bottling plant. Around here, we love our Dr. Pepper.

Christmas Wish

The kids want this for Christmas. I think they've been hanging out with Anna too long.

 

New Duds

We got some new clothes to wear on Friday nights:



Oh yeah, notice the girls each have their own official Brownwood Lions cow bell. I used one the entire game and our ears were all ringing for a day or so. hehe.



Stylish, aren't I?

Dog On

We got a dog. This is Penelope, a.k.a. Princess Penelope, our "All American" dog (read: mutt).

She has some interesting habits, like taking naps in Anna's flower pot.



She's a pretty good dog, and perfect for the girls. She only weighs 9 lbs, so she isn't intimidating. She's house trained, and I think we've heard her bark 3 or 4 times in the 3 weeks we've had her.

You know you've been in Texas too long when...

Poor Hope hasn't been feeling too well the last few days. She's been running a fever off and on and just not feeling good. So, on Thursday night when I put her to bed, she knelt down to pray and said,

"Lord Jesus, I really need you to heal me because I really want to go to that football game tomorrow night."

:-)