Meet Sonya

Hello,

My name is Sonya, and I am Tiffany's new Sony Vaio laptop computer. Tiffany names all of her computers and her cars. Once she had a Dell computer named Della, and now she has a Sony computer named Sonya. I am midnight blue in color, and I am incredibly efficient. My screen is crystal clear, and I have the new Windows Vista operating system. I come with all sorts of neat features and programs. Basically, I rock! Tiffany seems like a cool person, so I'm sure we'll have many good times together.

Best Regards,
Sonya

Yes, Sonya does indeed rock! I have loved my Compaq computer (named Jaq)--we've been all over the place together. It was Jaq who helped me survive graduate school and kept me in touch with everyone while I was away from home. He is near and dear to my heart, but I'm to the point where I'm needing something a little faster. Jaq is nearing the end of his projected lifespan, so I thought that I would go ahead and invest in a Sony--which should last for a very long time. And I got a sweet deal on Sonya at Best Buy.

Today has been a fun day. Mom and I went over to Aunt Pat's house this morning to plan out the wedding cake. It is going to look (and taste) awesome! Aunt Pat makes delicious cakes, and I can't wait to see how it turns out. I could describe what it will look like, but I think I will wait and let you all be surprised. Then Mom and I discovered this fun new place to eat in Provo. It's called Sammy's, and they have great burgers and SWEET POTATO fries! (Mom and I were also very excited to discover that the Arctic Circle in PG now has sweet potato fries too--but unfortunately only for a limited time.) Sweet potato fries are my favorite food. The atmosphere at Sammy's is fun, and they are famous for their pie shakes. They literally put an entire slice of pie into each shake! (Mom and I weren't really up for one today, but maybe sometime.) I definitely recommend Sammy's as a fun place to eat.

Last night, the season premier of "The Office" was on. It was pretty dang funny. My favorite part was when the entire office crew was standing on an industrial scale (there was a weight loss competition going on among the different branches of Dunder Mifflin, so they had to weigh themselves as a group each week). Darryl declared the collective group weight to be 2,336 pounds, but then Michael told Pam to get off the scale because she wasn't going to be there during the subsequent weeks of the competition. After Pam stepped off, Darryl said, "Now you weigh 2,210 pounds." Everyone sat there calculating in their minds for a minute, and then Kevin said, "Pam, you weigh 226 pounds??!!" She said, "Hardly." Then, Holly (the new girl who had been told by Dwight that Kevin was mentally handicapped--which he isn't) said supportingly to Kevin, "Math is hard." It was so funny, but as I'm writing it, it doesn't sound as funny as it really was. :-)

Well, I'm off to bed now to rest up for the big day tomorrow--Camp Floyd Days at Camp Floyd State Park! It is the biggest day of the year at the park. We're all going to be dressed up, and there will be food, stagecoach rides, pioneer activities, and all kinds of fun things to do. I will be sure to post pictures tomorrow evening.

น่ารับประทาน

You are probably wondering what's with the title to today's blog post. It is pronounced "naa rap bpra thaan," and means, "appetizing or delicious-looking" in Thai! I cannot even begin to fathom how Lindy mastered the Thai language. I found an English to Thai translator online, and from what I can tell, the Thai language is out-of-control :-) So, though I will surely never speak Thai, I do like cooking (and especially eating) Thai food. One of my signature dishes has become Pad Thai noodles. (Lindy, are you proud of me?) Tonight we had quite a Thai feast here. I made the Pad Thai noodles--complete with peanuts sprinkled on top; Mom made the yellow curry rice; and Dad grew the cucumbers in the garden and sliced them up for dinner. It was very delicious, or as they'd say in Thailand, "a raawy maak (อร่อยมาก)!"

Today the Illinois Times printed the article about my petition!!! You can read it at: http://illinoistimes.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A8528. It's quite a funny article. The author, named Dusty Rhodes (her parents obviously have a funny sense of humor), took the liberty of embellishing a few items to make it all sound quite exciting. Like the part where she says that the petition got hacked into and redirected people to a nasty site--not really true. Ms. Rhodes told me that she had e-mailed the petition to a bunch of people, and that someone had e-mailed her back and said that the link had taken them to a very bad site. I checked into the matter, however, and didn't find any evidence to support her friend's claim. And, I haven't heard anything from anyone else, so I'm going to guess that it was never hacked into. And, the part about me presenting the petition to the Illinois General Assembly is funny (and untrue) too! All I told Dusty Rhodes was that I had sent the petition to all of the Illinois state legislators, but she made it sound a bit more exciting. My favorite part of the article, however, is where she says that Gov. Blagojevich "whacked" three million dollars from the IHPA budget. Whacked is a perfect verb to describe his actions :-)

Unfortunately the historic sites are not completely in the clear yet. As it stands right now, despite the Senate vote the other day, they are still scheduled to close on November 30. This is because:

1) Before the funding restoration bills can go into effect, Blago needs to sign them and, despite the fact that the Senate voted unanimously, Blago is already saying that he is going to amend the bills and resubmit them for another vote in November. In November, if the House and Senate don't pass the revised Blago budget bills, then it will be too late for the sites. So it's quite a pickle of a situation.

2) Even though Blago originally took $2.8 million away from IHPA, the new bills only put $2.4 million back into their budget. Maybe someone was off on their numbers?

3) One of the funding restoration bills calls for a "funding sweep" that takes money out of certain accounts and puts it in others. Unfortunately IHPA is one of the accounts that gets swept--even if they're the ones who need money! So, they are slated to lose $250,000 in the funding sweep which, when combined with the .4 million dollar cut, would still cause a lot of problems at the historic sites.

So, we'll have to just wait and see what happens within the next couple of months. Hopefully something will make it possible for the sites to stay open and everyone to keep their jobs. The whole thing is quite a slippery slope.

The elephant in my esophagus has been driven away by the pills I got at the doctor the other day, but the frog in my throat has still been hanging around. At least there will be no frogelphants! I'm glad that we found out about the problem with my esophagus when we did so that it didn't get too damaged by stomach acid. Now I just need to get rid of my cold, and I'll be good to go.

The Frogelphants

Before I launch into today's blog post, let me first say HOOOOOORAY!!!!!!! FINALLY, something good has happened in the saga of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. All is not yet completely well, but things are certainly looking more promising than they were even just last week. Today the Illinois Senate met again and voted 55-0 for one of the bills that would restore funding to the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency and the Department of Child and Family Services! Of course Blago is now very upset, and he says that the state won't have enough money to restore the funding. The State Journal-Register reported that after the bill passed, Blago "signaled right away that the measures might not spare all the cuts." But the article headline, "Lawmakers Vote to Stave Off Deep Budget Cuts," allows one to hope that things might be going in the right direction. Republican senators are afraid that Blago won't use the money like they've stipulated, but that would just be par for the course. The IHPA isn't totally in the clear until the funding actually goes through, but the situation has improved immensely in just a short amount of time.

Now, today I wrote a sequel to my new best-selling children's story, The Elephant in My Esophagus. This one is called, The Frogelphants and is once again based on actual events:




I thought the elephant in my esophagus was gone
On vacation to Thailand or Taiwan,
But how truly silly I was to assume
That he would leave so quckly and so soon!
Instead of vanishing, he went and got married--
And back into my esophagus his new bride he carried.
The bride was mentioned in something I wrote--
She's commonly known as the frog in my throat!
The married couple returned last night--
And boy, was I ever a sight!
Coughing and crying that my chest hurt real bad,
I had to wake up my poor mom and dad.
They were so nice and stayed up with me
Until I finally fell into an unrestful sleep.
And in the morning, though I felt like a jerk,
I had to call Jeri to fill in for me at work.
Mom and I then paid a visit to the doctor,
Who said I have a weak "lower esophageal sphyncter,"
And though it sounded pretty mean,
He said I can't have any more caffeine.
It seems that the elephant has been there for a while,
But didn't manifest himself until he could do it in style.
The doctor said my esophagus needs to heal,
And sent us on our way with a pile of pills.
So I'll start taking the pills in the morn
Before a bunch of little frogelphants are born!

Fabulous Fall

Happy First Day of Fall! I love fall. It's so pretty--especially here near the mountains--when the leaves start to change color. Tonight for FHE, Mom, Dad, Rich, and I went for a fun drive up Provo Canyon to see the leaves. I think that the brightest leaves are still to come, but it was still very beautiful in the canyon. We drove through Wallsburg and then up to Heber where we had a fun fall dinner at the Hub Cafe.

Today I was interviewed by the Illinois Times newspaper! One of their writers became aware of my petition and e-mailed me about writing a story on my efforts. So I sent her my phone number, and today she gave me a call. She asked me if I had ever worked at a state historic site, and I told her that I have not in Illinois, but that I am currently doing an internship at a state historic site in Utah (we had already discussed the fact that I'm a graduate student at Eastern Illinois). She wondered why I was interning in Utah, and I told her that's where I'm from. She then said, "Ooooh, I see. So, if you're from Utah, why do you care about the Illinois historic sites?" You can imagine that I had quite a lengthy answer :-) She told me that she was impressed with the petition--especially now that she knows I'm not even from Illinois--and she's going to write an article about me this week. So that was pretty cool. But what would be even cooler would be if the petition has some kind of positive effect in helping the historic sites!

Speaking of cool, check out one of the new designs for next year's special Lincoln bicentennial pennies!!! Oh, is that the Old State Capitol building I see in the background? The one that is now closed for part of the week because the governor of Illinois does not care about the history of the state? Oh, and isn't that the same building where all of the Illinois state historic site collections are stored--the collections that will have to be left unattended in a room without a properly working lock after the collections administrator is laid off? Yep, that's the building. So at least the rest of the country obviously cares about the significance of Abraham Lincoln sites in Illinois--even if the governor of the state does not.

But there is still hope that the governor's budget wrongs can be righted by the state legislature. Today they met for their "special session" to hammer out a revised ethics bill. They still didn't like the one that Blago had written, so they adjusted it and passed it this afternoon. Now, hopefully, they will vote on the budget issue tomorrow. I read today in the State Journal-Register that some Republican senators had identified $25 million tied up in pork barrel spending that could be reallocated to replace the money Blago cut from the budget. All that IHPA needs is $3 million, so hopefully, hopefully they will get it. The legislators were supposedly going to meet this afternoon to discuss a new budget plan which they could vote on within the next few days. Let's keep our fingers crossed!

The elephant in my esophagus left during the night last night, so that was good. Now we just need to get rid of the frog in my throat and whoever is hanging out up in my sinuses.

The Elephant in My Esophagus

One of my favorite childhood books was But No Elephants. It's a story about Grandma Tildy letting an elephant into her house--but he's so big that he inadvertently causes quite a few problems. It's a really cute story.

So, tonight I decided to write my own children's story about elephants. It is based on events that have transpired during the last 24 hours and is entitled The Elephant in My Esophagus. If anyone would like to illustrate my little story, I'm sure it would be a big hit.

Here goes:

Last night as I drifted off to sleep,
Into my throat did a strange something creep.
I ran to the bathroom as quick as a squirrel,
Fearful that I was about to hurl.
Nothing came out, so I drank some water,
But that strange something started feeling hotter.
There was a cold burning in my chest,
And nothing, it seemed, could quell the unrest.
"Oh no!" I thought, "No, no, no, please, . . .
Not the dreaded Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease!"
But the symptoms for GERD weren't quite right,
So as I tossed and turned all through the night,
I tried to figure out what it could be
That was, along with the really bad cold I already had, plaguing me.
When I got up in the morning I felt really terrible,
And knew that church would not be bearable.
So I stayed in my pajamas and went back to bed,
Hoping the strange something didn't spread.
Later in the morning I got online,
A name for my ailment I was trying to find.
After searching and searching to no avail,
The answer hit me like an Orca whale:
Though it may sound kind of preposterous,
I think there's an elephant in my esophagus!

What do you think? Is it a winner of a bedtime story? :-) Maybe not so much. But it does accurately convey the adventures of the last 24 hours. I really don't know what my problem is--I have these acid reflux-like episodes every now and then. My last one was on July 10 of this year, but before that it hadn't happened for about nine months. The burning sensation went away during the day, but it still kind of feels like there's something (like an elephant) camping out in my throat and chest. Hopefully I'll sleep better tonight and the strange something will be gone in the morning.