Dr. Seuss is Loose in My House

I read a Dr. Seuss book yesterday: The Big Green Book of Beginner Books.  Six books for the price of one and I had never read those stories before.  They had me laughing out loud.  I love puns and word plays and alliteration and rhymes and repetition and silliness.  Probably especially silliness

It was a wacky Wednesday for me yesterday.  I was depressed and hyper at the same time as I fought to control my work computer which fights dirty.  The story Wacky Wednesday had nothing on my day.

I Am Not Going to Get Up Today! could be me almost any day of the week.  Except Saturday and Sunday.

My spirits were buoyed by Great Day for Up! I should read it every morning before I get out of bed. 
If I get out of bed.

Do you hear what I hear?

As if the little voices inside my head aren't annoying enough, this afternoon they started using a rather unsavory street accent.  I don't know what street it was, but I think it was from somewhere in the London slums, circa mid-1800's.  I couldn't understand a thing they said.

Probably better off that way.

Learning about Learning

I learned something today which I should have learned several years ago.  In 2009, YouTube launched an educational tool called YouTube EDU , "a volunteer project sparked by a group of employees who wanted to find a better way to collect and highlight all the great educational content being uploaded to YouTube by colleges and universities" (an excerpt from the YouTube blog March 2009).

I am frequently searching for on-line educational material and while I had found some videos on YouTube, I had not found any mention of YouTube EDU.  I stumbled across it today while Googling iTunes University.   (Slightly off topic - have you noticed how you can often learn about something you weren't expecting to learn about while you were trying to learn about something else?)

They have something for everybody.  Here are some examples:

Universities and Colleges:

• Want to listen to an MIT lecture on physics (and who doesn't!) try MIT 8.01 Physics I: Classical Mechanics
• What about a Harvard lecture on murder?  try Justice: What's The Right Thing To Do? Episode 01 "THE MORAL SIDE OF MURDER"  Professor Michael Sandel is a good lecturer.
• Or perhaps you would prefer lectures and courses from Yale, Università Bocconi, Carnegie Mellon, The Open University, or Cambridge University

 K - 12:

• Need help with your math homework? Explore videos from several sources such as Math TV.  The instructor made learning differential equations easy.
• Sesame Street  has 1,076 videos.  SuperSillySongs  features 65 super silly songs. KidsTV123 has103 cute videos.
• There are 22 lectures on Japanese culture and a course on learning to speak Japanese.

and Lifelong Learners (that would be me):

• Dream of flying like a bird?  Check out this video about a robot that flies like a bird by flapping its wings.
• Want to hear what others are talking about? Watch TED Talks .
• National Geographic has 2,999 fascinating videos about the ocean, the Arctic, photography, cooking, nature, history, drugs, and almost anything else you can name.  The Secret History of the Bra yielded surprising information.  Did you know that women were asked to stop wearing corsets during WWI and that this measured saved enough steel to make 2 battleships?  That's a lot of corsets!

Baby, It's cold outside!

Winter has only been flirting with Indiana for the past month.  Last week it moved in and settled down to stay for a while. 

I don't like winter very well any more. 
For one thing, it's cold. 
For another, I'm too old to play in the snow, but not so old I don't have to drive in it.

How's it going?

Well, here we are well into the second week of 2012.  Let's see how I'm doing with my new year resolutions:

• Lose weight - I've gained 4 1/2 pounds
• Bake my own bread - I bought a loaf of berry bread from the bakery
• Make more money - I won a free ticket playing the lottery last week
• Quit my job - I've daydreamed about how I'd quit my job
• Do more housework - HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
• Develop my hobbies - if my hobby was getting out of housework, I've developed it to perfection.

One out of six isn't bad.

Resolutions

Did you make any new year's resolutions? 

I like to make at least one resolution to improve me or the world every year.  Unfortunately, I don't keep them. 

This year will be different.  I say that every year.  It doesn't make any difference.  I still don't keep them.

This is my 2012 list of resolutions:

• Lose weight
• Bake my own bread
• Make more money
• Quit my job
• Do more housework
• Develop my hobbies

I only plan to keep every other one. 

Some years my only resolution is to not make any resolutions. That's one I usually keep.