Awesome Giveaway Post Edited

The author asked me to edit my post about the giveaway so you can get entered into the contest by posting on my blog!!

In conjunction with the release of Pumpkin Roll the author, Josi S. Kilpack, and the publisher, Shadow Mountain, are sponsoring a contest for a new iPad. To enter, leave a comment in the comment section of this blog before November 1, 2011. Winners will be announced and notified November 3^rd 2011.  For additional ways to enter, go to www.josiskilpack.com.

Awesome Giveaway: iPad and Book

Check it out!

Goodreads

I just added a widget to the blog to show what I am currently reading.  It is done through Goodreads.com.  I think it's a pretty awesome website that allows you to track the books that you have read, what you're currently reading, and what you want to read.  If you click on one of the books shown in the widget, it will take you to my review of it.  If you click on the name of the website at the bottom, it will take you to my profile on Goodreads, so you can add me as a friend and we can share book reviews and ideas with each other!  If you've never tried out Goodreads, I highly recommend it!

Thanks, Lori, for putting this widget on your blog and giving me the idea!

Smirk Giveaway

I am entering this giveaway, and I'm spreading the word in order to get more chances to win!  Ironic, isn't it?  :D

Radio West

Back in July, I was listening to NPR while I was on my way to the library.  This was in Utah, so I was listening to a KUER radio show called “Radio West.”  It’s hosted by Doug Fabrizio, who is the executive producer of the show.  Dave loves to make fun of this show because of some of the recurring themes that Doug likes to explore, but I really enjoy listening to it because I think that it brings up a lot of interesting issues that deal specifically with Utah life.

Anyway, that day it was being guest hosted by Jennifer Napier-Pearce.  The topic of the show really caught my attention that day because it was about corporal punishment, and not just any corporal punishment, but flogging!

The writer who Jennifer was interviewing, Peter Moskos, wrote a book called In Defense of Flogging.  And he was saying that because our prison system is so messed up, we would get better results and take on fewer difficulties if we reformed the law system to include an option for corporal punishment.  The criminal could either take jail/prison time, or they could choose to be flogged.

Honestly, I was pretty astounded.  My reaction was that this sounded partially like a really crazy idea from someone who likes to hurt people, and partially like a joke.  When they asked listeners to call in with their reactions, I decided to call and let them know my opinion.

I compared the book to Jonathon Swift’s A Modest Proposal.  I said that while he may be serious about his proposal, I thought that the most that it could do would be to promote interest in some other, more moderate reform of our prison system. 

He responded by saying that he hoped people did take his book literally and that flogging really did become an option.  He thought it was a good idea to propose and he wanted to be taken seriously.  I may have made him mad!  But it was a fun experience to call in and have my opinion taken and responded to.  If you want to hear the interview you can find it here.  Go to minute 16:38 to hear my comment and his response.  And, as a small disclaimor, I said that Swift wrote A Modest Proposal in the 1800s, but it was really the 1700s.  :D

Something else fun happened that day.  When I went in to the library, I went to a table to set up my computer to get to work.  There was a stack of books on the table.  It looked as if someone were doing research and had left their stack of books on the table so they could go find more related books.  I happened to glance at some of the titles on the books, and I was surprised to find out that they were all about corporal punishment (in the context of parenting).  I had a good little laugh to myself about the coincidence.

So what do you think about corporal punishment?  In parenting or in the criminal justice system?  And have any of you read Peter Mosko’s In Defense of Flogging?  Or books that talk about corporal punishment in parenting?  I’m going to reserve finalizing my opinion until I can get a chance to read it, but my initial reaction is what I’ve stated above: I just don’t think that it’s a rational solution that Americans can take seriously in the context of reforming the criminal justice system.  However, I do agree with the premise that we do need reform, and I hope that this book brings about more awareness to the issue.

Random Stuff

Yeah, that's an attractive title.

1. Dave and I bought a set of sheets today.  One of the sheets will be the back of a quilt that we're making.  The other sheet will be part of our awesome Halloween costumes!  We're running a Halloween 5K (The Monster Dash!  Isn't that an awesome name?) and we're going to have capes and masks.  Pictures will be forthcoming.

2. I started a new blog.  It's inspired by my cousin's photo blog.  She posts a picture a day.  I am so not a photographer, so I am going to be posting a scripture insight a day.  I am starting with the Book of Mormon, but I think that I'll probably branch out to other books of scripture as my personal scripture study changes.

Quick, there's a woman!

Today in the grocery store, I was working my way down the isles to find everything that we needed for this week.  I had selected all of our produce, bread, and cereal.  The things that I had left were the meat and the dairy.

I decided to do the dairy first because I like to keep meat separate from my other groceries for as long as possible.  I know: they're packaged so they won't get meat stuff on my other food, and having it in the cart for 1 minute isn't going to cause less contamination than 5 minutes.  But still, I wanted to get the meat last.

I went to the dairy section and got milk, butter, and sour cream.  To get to the sour cream I had to go around a man who was standing in front of the fridge talking on his cell phone.  He moved back for me, and it was no big deal.  As I was putting the sour cream in my cart and started to walk away, he quickly got off the phone and said, "Excuse me.  Could I ask you a question?"

I said "Sure" and he said, "Where is the fat free sour cream?"

I was kind of laughing to myself because he was standing right in front of it.  I said, "It's in the fridge right there."  He asked, "How can you tell which one's fat free?"

I knew thing because I had just been debating whether or not to get fat free or reduced fat.  I know that fat free is really better for you.  But sour cream just doesn't taste like sour cream without a little fat.  I got the reduced fat, which is in the blue container.  So I told him that the fat free sour cream was in the green container.  And I added, "It says 'fat free' underneath the words 'sour cream.'"

He seemed a little chagrined that he had missed it.  He then admitted that he hadn't been able to find it and had called someone at home to help him figure it out.  Whoever she was, she had instructed him to find a woman in the store to help him figure out which container was fat free.  No wonder he got off the phone so fast!  He saw his chance for help and needed to take it!

This reminded me a lot of my dad.  He would go do grocery shopping for my mom, and he has learned that it's better to call and make sure that he gets the right things.  It kind of made my afternoon!

Confessions

Those of you who read our post on Scrabble and thought we had some cool words should know...we were playing 9-tile Scrabble. So...yeah, basically we're bowling with the bumper lanes when it comes to our Scrabble play. But, to explain why: sometimes we just don't have time to play 7-tile Scrabble and we want to get a game in anyway, so we cheat. We're not really that clever.

We're sorry and we won't do it again.

La-La-La-Laundry!

When Dave and I moved to Pahrump, we were feeling pretty good about all of the grown-up things that we'd already done.  He had his first full-time job.  I was done with all of my Master's classes.  We were renting our own place and paying for utilities.  We owned a piano and our own bed.  So, yeah, we were feeling like adults.

But, through an unfortunate experience, we've taken one more step recently to become even more adult-like.

Here's the sich: Here in Pahrump, we found two different laundomats.  We planned to use laundromats for a while and save up money for a washer and dryer at some point in the distant future.  And actually, we only used the laundromat for washing, anyway, since the air outside is so warm that it seemed silly to pay for a dryer to do what the air would do!  We hung our clothes on the fence in our backyard.  So we figured that this would be a good way to save money.  Yay!

Here's a picture of the laundromat that we used.  Yes, use-d, in the past tense.

It turns out that even though this is the nice-looking, clean laundromat with plenty of machines, the service here is terrible.  In the next few paragraphs, I'm going to give the story.  If you don't care to hear a lot of whining and complaining (and the story of some real abuse!), then just know that we decided never to go there again and skip down to the next picture.

There was one evening that Dave and I decided to pop in and do some laundry.  It was probably 7:02pm.  When we approached the door of the laundromat, a woman told us that they closed at 7pm.  This surprised us because the sign on the door said that they were open until 9pm.  When we asked about that, they said that the last customer is let in at 7pm so that they would be done with washing and drying by 9pm.

This seemed pretty reasonable.  But we explained that we only wanted to use the washer, since we would dry our clothes at home, and asked if they would make an exception for us.  The woman reluctantly allowed us in.  She said that we needed to have our laundry done by the time they closed.  We thought "No problem" since it takes about 20 minutes to do a load and we could put all of our loads in at the same time.

Dave and I put in the laundry to wash, Dave sat down to wait for the laundry to be done, and I got in the car to go to the grocery store, since we needed to do our grocery shopping that night too.  When I left, the harassment started.  The woman asked Dave where I had gone and he told her that I was going grocery shopping.  She was mad because she thought that I would take a long time at the store and that that would keep us in the laundromat late.  Dave was confused by this because he knew that we would definitely be out of there before it closed at 9pm, and he said so.  She responded by saying that they were closing at 8pm.  Apparently, when there are no customers there after 8pm, she closes early (because they don't let any new customers in after 7pm) and she doesn't get paid for that last hour of work.  Of course she overlooked the fact that Dave WAS a customer and that if he happened to stay later, he would in fact still have a right to be there.  But he only had to wait for the loads of laundry to be done, so he again said that he would be out of there before 8pm.

At this point she had been rude enough.  The only thing that I can think of to explain her behavior is that she didn't want to wait until even a little past 8pm, since she wouldn't get paid for that hour.  But she was so rude about it.  Then she walked by our machines and made loud exclamations.  Apparently, we hadn't closed one of our machines all of the way, and so it hadn't started when the other one did.  It would take another 20 minutes to finish its load.  The woman swore and was making a big deal out of it, even though it was still more than 20 minutes before 8pm.

Needless to say, when I showed up at the laundromat again, Dave was fuming.  We waited just a few more minutes and got our laundry out and into the car.  We were driving away at least 5 minutes before 8pm, and we knew that we would never come back.

Fortunately, when we decided on a place to rent, we chose one that had hook-ups for a washer and dryer, even though we weren't planning on buying them for a while.

That Saturday we went to the Home Depot and bought a washer (still no dryer because of the reasons mentioned above).  We had to wait about a week and a half for it to be delivered, because we bought it over Labor Day weekend and the Home Depot had a lot of deliveries to make.  Here is a picture of it running its first wash!

And here are some videos demonstrating some of its awesome features!  (Can you tell that we are so proud of our new baby?)

For those of you curious about our drying procedure, here are pictures of the fence drying method.  The one bad thing about this method is that the clothes start out like this:

And end up like this:

It is really windy here in Pahrump.  So that kind of creates a problem in keeping the clothes clean when they are drying.  To take care of that, Dave installed these handy-dandy clotheslines in our garage.  The garage gets almost as warm as it does outside, so the clothes still dry pretty fast.

We are also getting a lot of things from my parents as they are cleaning out their house in preparation for this mission, either to keep or to babysit for two years.  So we also have a dryer on its way that we are going to babysit for my parents while they are gone.  So when it's cold in the winter (or when we have clothes we want dry in a hurry) we may use that to dry our clothes instead.