Palin got Pranked!

Here's their official website.
http://www.justiciers.tv/

And here's the transcript that was printed in The Globe & Mail.

100 Push-Ups

I've taken the hundred pushup challenge. I read about it a few months ago but decided to wait until things quieted down a bit so I could commit to doing it. I started tonight with day one at the 5 push up level. My lower body strength is decent with running and biking but my upper body can definitely use some work and this seemed like a fun way to do it. Who doesn't want to say that they can do 100 push ups. If you're intersted in taking the challenge with me here's where you can get the info, one hundred pushups.

Blog Action Day - Poverty

I heard about BAD through reading Leo's blog at Zen Habits.
The concept of the day is to blog about the topic of the year, in an attempt to reach the most people possible, this years topic is poverty. I think everyone is aware that there are lots of people living in poverty throughout the world, but did you know that 4 out of 10 children in the States face serious economic challenges?

I'm pretty broke right now, I don't feel like I can make any monetary donations to any causes at this time. So I came up with a couple of other things that I could do, some based on the list on the Blog Action Day site 88 Ways to DO something about Poverty.

• I signed the petition "Stand Up, Take Action" at The ONE Campaign
• I played Free Rice and donated rice to the United Nations World Food Program
• I visited The Hunger Site to donate cups of staple food, I also bookmarked it to remind myself to go there every day.
  
• I added the Women Rock application to Facebook
  
• I've got a bag of clothes I'm dropping off tomorrow to a Planet Aid box
• I'm teaching Intro. to Sociology this semester and teaching others about poverty and how it effects women and minorities.

What are YOU doing?

Fall Fest

USA has a fall fest/barn party every year. There's food games, and most fun of all there is a theme with costumes. This years theme was famous people. We always wait til the night before or the day of and then go rummaging through our closet trying to find something, or making a quick trip to the drug store to get make up, wigs, accessories. This year was no different. Andrew went as Paul Bunyan and I went as Calamity Jane. We thought about taking Sam to be the Blue Ox :)




Other famous people include Abraham Lincoln, Alfalfa, John McCain.

Happy Birthday

Today is your day of all days… Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.
- Dr. Seuss

"If you'd never been born, well what would you be?
You might be a fish! Or a toad in a tree!
You might be a door knob! Or three baked potatoes!
You might be a bag full of hard green tomatoes!
Or worse than all that... why, you might be a
WASN'T!
A Wasn't has no fun at all. No, he doesn't.
A Wasn't just isn't. He just isn't present.
But you... you ARE YOU! And now, isn't that pleasant!"
-- Dr. Seuss, from Happy Birthday To You!

On the Radio

I'm on the local Suicide Prevention Taskforce and we sponsor different community events trying to bring awareness about depression and suicide. Today we had organized a depression screening from 11-4 at the community college as it was National Depression Screening Day. To bring more awareness about who we are, what we do, resources available in the community and to promote the screening we were asked to come speak on the morning show at one of the local radio stations. Bart and Terri Wasilenko, who are the co-directors of the local chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, and I were the three guests on the show. I was a bit nervous but it turned out to be really fun, I'd do it again. The screening went really well at the college, we are working with the student development office to come back and do it again, and try to start earlier in the morning as most students are done with classes and gone come 3:00.

Ditz

Against my better judgement I watched the VP debate tonight. I like Joe Biden even more, and can't believe how stupid Sarah Palin is. I thought Tina Fey was playing it up during the parodies and making fun of Palin when she played cutesy, but no, Palin really does that. She got snide and WINKED to the audience during one of her answers!! This is NOT your final question of the beauty contest, this is for the second in command of a COUNTRY! I really don't like her, she's nothing more than a pretty face.
If you haven't seen the Saturday Night Live clips check them out, they are very humorous.

Saturday Night Live: Sarah Palin vs. Hilary Clinton


Saturday Night Live: Sarah Palin and Katie Couric

Senior Survival '08

Every year the Senior Class goes on a "survival weekend" at the beginning of the year to bond together. This year Andrew is one of the Senior Class sponsors so I tagged along for the weekend. I missed the first day due to work, which also happened to be the day that Andrew broke his nose playing Ultimate Frisbee. His nose and face was still looking pretty bad when I arrived a few hours later and I didn't even think to get some pictures of it. But here are a few of my favourites from the weekend. The trip was to the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon.

Pennsylvania Grand Canyon


Lookout


Waterfall Excursion


Self Portrait


Senior Class of 2009

Finger Lakes Triathlon

After spending two days at Caprine Outing we went and did a triathlon Sunday morning!
We both did ok considering we hadn't done much training. As Andrew often says, we didn't die :)

You can see some pictures of me here and Andrew here, and our friend Tim here, courtesy of Brightroom Photography.

The Finger Lakes Triathlon supports the Mary M. Gooley Hemophilia Center. We've done this race for a number of years. It was actually my first triathlon and is still one of my favourites. The course is straightforward and well marked. The only complaint I have ever had about this race is it has the worst spectators. They just stand there, if you get a clap you're doing well. Very unlike the other local races that have specatators that clap, cheer, yell, set up extra water stations, hoses if it's hot, cow bells, air horns etc.

Caprine Outing

I don't have any pictures to go with this post but here's the summary of what we did this weekend (Sept. 19-20).
Every other year Cornell sponsors a Caprine Outing. They rent out a girl scout camp and people sign up to come for the weekend to participate in all-about-goat workshops. The first night we had a potluck dinner with all kinds of goat products cooked in. The workshop we participated in was on different goat dairy setups presented by Carol Delaney from University of Vermont. The biggest thing I took away from her presentations was the best information is in French and from Quebec and France, with Quebec having a very strong up and coming industry that is trying lots of new things.
The next day we participated in a bunch of different workshops on nutrition, pasture management, parasite management (worms are REALLY interesting!) and a few other things (they had other more "fun" workshops like how to make goats milk fudge, a variety of cheeses, soap making, goat packing, felting etc). We ended the day by taking an intensive artificial insemination class. It was pretty interesting and now we know how to do it, we just haven't decided if we're going to invest in all the equipment yet. Maybe when we get a bit bigger.

The Pinery

We finally got together with the gang for a big camping trip in Ontario at The Pinery. It was a really nice campground and I think we should meet there again and try for better weather. We got rained on most of the weekend, luckily we had lots of tarps and made a tarp village to be able to hang out and play games. Not such great weather for camp fires. Andrew and I picked up Deb on the way and were the first to get there, we wandered down at the beach for a bit.

Saturday it rained most of the day so we went to the nature center, watched a movie on wolves and now we've all decided that we want to go camping next time in Algonquin park and try to see wolves, or at least hear them. Then David shared that is where his cottage is, so we're going to forgo camping and go there, "thanks David" :). We found some great mittens that Erika and David modeled for us. These are so you can walk in the cold with your sweetie and still hold hands.

Saturday night we decided we were not going to let the rain deter us any longer and off to the beach we went.

The water was VERY cold.

Extremities were tingling.

Andrew and Corey...being Andrew and Corey.

The remainder of our tarp village. The other tarp over the picnic table on the left was already taken down.

Oh and how could I forget, we had an extra visitor most of the weekend. He first appeared right around when Erika and Joe arrived. Joe said, "I think a cat just brushed up against me." We all kind of laughed at him, and then Erika started yelling "Get off me" from the back seat of the truck. It wasn't a cat, but a raccoon trying to climb up her leg and into the truck. He hung out at our campsite most of the weekend, randomly showing up underneath someones chair. We tried to scare him off, chase him off, throw stuff at him, finally squirting him with water did the trick. But then he got his revenge by getting into the cooler and pulling out the sausage package and dragging it into the woods and eating them, WHILE WE WERE ALL STILL SITTING THERE!!! Some how he got into the cooler in silence and dragged it out, because we made sure to put the coolers in the trunk at night once we knew he was around.
[Photo courtesy of Joe Frey]

Quebec- 400 Ans cont.

Jardin Jeanne d'Arc

L'assemblée nationale

La fontaine de Tourny

Kim & Jaime Kate

Andrew & Kim

Quebec- 400 Ans

Ma ville préférée

La Capitole

L'artiste

La nouvelle france

Place Royale

Les Balcons

Quebec - 400 Ans & Le Chemin qui Marche

We spent a long weekend in Quebec City in August, unfortunately it wasn't long enough. None of us wanted to leave come Sunday and we ended up getting home pretty late Sunday night, poor Deb had to drive even further to get home and get to work Monday morning. There was a lot going on for the 400 year anniversary, we went to a lot of celebration events and also to some old favourites.


We went to a concert titled "Le Chemin qui marche" (the walking road), named such because they shuttled us to the port and then had to walk to the outdoor stage on the beach along the St.Lawrence River. The night started out with a tribute to the river, as the river is what brought the explorers and established the city. The tribute was marvelous with performers, acrobats, pyro- and hydro- technics, and fireworks.

The rest of the night I have to admit that it wasn't a concert I would have normally gone to but I had so much fun. DJ Champion started off the night, then BranVan 3000 came on, and then at 2:00 the headliner, Moby took the stage. He was amazing, as was DJ Champion, I was a little disappointed by BranVan, they just didn't have the charisma that I expected from them. Moby ended around 3:00 and we headed out, but there was another DJ that played until 5!

The "screen" they had on stage was a big ball. Was very cool to see stuff projected on it through out the night. Not only the performers on stage but they made it look like a big disco ball too.

Deb & Kim with Moby right behind us!

Beginning of August '08

I've been riding Dakota a lot more this summer. My neighbour and her friends go to Otter Creek a couple times a year and they invited me to go along this summer since I now have a horse that is a reliable trail mount and will trailer. We left bright and early Friday morning and didn't come back until late Sunday afternoon.
The trails are really nice, Friday after setting up camp we rode to a restaurant, had lunch and rode back to camp. Trailside, (aka Buck's Place) mostly serves the trail riders (horses in the summer, snowmobilers in the winter).

Horse Butts

Horse Heads (Dakota is all the way down on the end)

The campground has standing stalls for horses with water spickets right by the stalls. There is sand for the bedding. The expectation is you will clean out your standing stall at the end of your stay, putting the manure in their manure pit, and replenish the sand you took out. Rakes, shovels, wheelbarrows and sand are all supplied for free. The people campsites have flat areas for tents, a few have enough space to pull a trailer into, most people park on the edge of the drive-through area and there are fire pits with grills. There is no electricity, but there is running water and flush toilets, there are also some porta-potties available closer to the camping area if you don't feel like making the short hike to the flush toilets in the middle of the night.

On the road between here and there, there's a large wind farm. I have never seen so many windmills. There were hundreds of them. Whenever I thought we'd passed the last ones we'd go around a corner or over a hill and there would be more. It was kind of creepy since it was such a cloudy day and came out of no where.

End of July '08

Corey, Diana, & Ava came for a visit. It was their first time staying at the new house. We had a fun weekend eating out, cooking, and exploring a few new (creamery for ice cream) and old favourites (Taughanock Falls). Here's some pictures from the weekend. Sorry Guys, the Van Dance Party Video didn't turn out real well, my camera's video capabilities aren't the greatest.

Taughanock Falls

Diana, Corey & Ava

Andrew & I

A few days after they left Mark and Jolene came and spent the night on their way to Quebec. I didn't take any pictures while they were here so these were stolen from Jolene...Thanks Jolene.

Mark and Jolene beating us at Cranium.

Mark being goat tortured by Andrew & Ella

Mark & Jolene in Quebec City