Friday, December 30, 2011

9 Things We Learned This Week (blogging, movies, reading,news, gifts, sports, health)


Funniest Christmas Present

Over at Mr. Puddy Merry Christmas and Happy New Year post, he demonstrated playing with his new toy: video games for cats on his iPuddy! It's hilarious! Now even our pets will have to work at staying active and not becoming addicted to video games!

Number Pad Does More Than Just Numbers

By holding down the ALT key and typing in numbers on the number pad at the right of the computer keyboard, you can get a whole lot of different special characters, symbols and even letters! See a whole list of ASCII Code List for Numpad Characters at CHEXED. Here are a few I might use: ♥ (alt-3), § (alt-21, Section sign), ► (alt-16), ♫ (alt-14).

Kindness In the News

Last Saturday in the PLAIN DEALER I read some 'Layaway angels" people who actually paid off individual layaway accounts that were full of toys to help out families they didn't even know. I thought that was so wonderful!

One guy at the Walmart in Cleveland Heights paid off $1,000 layaway account and bought $1,000 worth of $50 gift cards, gave them to his school age children to hand them out randomly to customers throughout the store! I love it! What a generous and wonderful thing to do and to allow the children to experience the joy of giving as well! As if that wasn't enough, the guy came back and paid off $1,700 of the store's layaway accounts.



Jerome Simpson

I never knew who Jerome Simpson was until his amazing flip touchdown that I saw him do in last Saturday's Bengals football game. If you didn't see it yet, even if you aren't a football fan you have to see this amazing show of athleticism! Check out my post: Wow! Most Amazing TD I Ever Saw!

Twitter Changes


Over at Social Media Examiner I learned about 5 Twitter changes and How to Make the Most of Them: Navigation, brand pages, embedded tweets, TweetDeck, and iPhone and Android apps for Twitter.

Boosting Your Metabolism

Over at my old friend's blog, "Think Like P.T. (physical therapist)" in her post Losing Weight Safely I learned these five ways to increase my metabolism:

1. Wake up early and eat breakfast early.
2. Exercise early in the day. Exercise multiple times in the day.
3. Do weight training in addition to cardio.
4. Move around a lot! Start having a more active lifestyle. Think of ways to add activity into your routine.
5. Eat small amounts throughout the day (4-6 small meals instead of 3 large ones)

Movies

Both the movie WAR HORSE and WE BOUGHT A ZOO are very good and is based on a true story! We liked them both and our reviews will be up early next week. Both are worth seeing!

Reading

Gerard read 157 books and Karen read 106 this year. Lots of great reads! I wish I had started reading sooner. I found out I can read on the treadmill easily using my Kindle!

My Best Posts Of 2011

Thanks to the Best of 2011 Blog Hop over at "A Pause on the Path," I discovered that based on number of comments and views, my best posts for 2011 were:

Right Where We Belong: What Are You Going To Do--Clean A Trash Can? with 21 comments and 111 views. (Our post with 25 comments and 425 views was one I re-posted from 2009 so don't think that counts, but it was A Letter to Mom Because I Can't Write Poems.

My Funny Dad, Harry"My Cat From Hell" is Entertaining and Educational with 539 views and 12 comments!

Grab A Book From Our StackA Stolen Life by Jaycee Dugard with 106 views.

Always Looking Up7 Ways to Respect Your Husband with 260 votes!

(The thumbnails below are for The Best of 2011 Blog Hop--Hope you will visit some and even link up yours.  I liked going through seeing which ones were most popular.)

One more thing: I got my Christmas At Our House post updated a bit late yesterday to include my neighbor surprise re-gifting idea so if you visited before 5:00 p.m., you might want to check it out.

H A P P Y   N E W   Y E A R   E V E R Y O N E !


Share this:

8 comments:

Lin said...

We just went to see War Horse last night and I have to tell you, I was emotionally exhausted after that movie. It was good--in a Sophie's Choice/Schindler's List kinda way, but it was very hard for me to watch. We all came home drained. I liked it, but gees, it was not a good let's-go-out-as-a-family-to-the-show kinda movie.

Kris said...

I had never thought to count the number of books I read in a year. That's an interesting idea. My daughter had to count them in November as they had a challenge to read 27 books in one month. That turned out to be quite a challenge for 2nd graders as only she and one other girl in her class were able to complete it.

BeadedTail said...

I don't think I can handle watching the movie War Horse. I don't do well with movies, books or TV shows involving animals. We had "Layaway Angels" around here too and I think it's wonderful for people to help out others like that.

The iPuddy was so funny! We just love Mr. Puddy!

Mary said...

Wow, y'all read a lot of books this past year! War Horse & We Bought a Zoo are on our list!

Claudya Martinez said...

I always use alt 0241 to get ñ, that's the only one I have memorized. Happy New Year!

Traci Marie Wolf said...

I was super excited when I found ♫ because I'm always posting lyrics on my facebook.

That's really awesome that the Kindle can be used easily on the treadmill. I'm such a slow reader lately. I wish I could focus to read more.

I really want to see War Horse. I'm on the fence about We Bought A Zoo.

Marg said...

WE sure do want to wish you a very Happy and Healthy New year.
I don't think we want to see that movie either, War Horse. I like the happy movies. Have a great week end.

qandlequeen said...

Can't wait to see both of those movies. My daughter saw War Horse yesterday and agreed it was fabulous.

Post a Comment