Steelers Wedding Cake

You would need to be an amazing football couple to have any team logo for your wedding cake.

Butterfinger Coffee

There's a new coffee machine at one of our sites. I prefer my warm beverage to be hot chocolate and not to be from a machine so I cannot comment on the taste, but I can't think of a way that butterfingers and coffee could be combined as a tasty beverage.

Cold Facts

It's been a long, tough winter. With over a month to go before spring, it was sad to hear a local radio station proclaim this winter is the third worst in northeast Ohio for days where the high was 10 degrees or below.

Because there isn't much to do beyond looking at the weather stats and hoping for better days ahead, I noticed in January and February for northeast Ohio, all of the record coldest days have been recorded in my lifetime. :0

But wait, there are 18 days in January and February where the warmest days were recorded before I was born. Um, there's something wrong with this data. There's no reason for these 18 days to be stuck with 50+ year old records. I think we are owed some warm days so we can re-write these records.

Warmest and coldest days for northeast Ohio during January

Warmest and coldest days for northeast Ohio during February

There's one thing to be said for weather this cold. Walkin' on water is a whole lot easier. ;-)

Cool Yule Gift

I have a significant number of record albums (remember, I'm old). Years ago, my old turntable had issues with a grounding problem and was humming when the unit was on. The unpleasant hum coupled with a couple of cats who would jump from a nearby bookcase onto the turntable so they could attack the spinning vinyl really put a damper on listening to old music. I started noticing turntables a few years ago that were designed to plug into your computer so you can digitize the albums. This was a very exciting idea for me except these turntables were always sold at places where electronics show up on the shelves just before Thanksgiving and are gone by New Years (think Macy's and Kohls). Whenever I saw these, I would check the on-line reviews which were generally very bad.

As we looked to upgrade our television from the 1995 Panasonic we purchased when the Cleveland Indians used to have a major league team, I made rare appearances in a couple of electronics "superstores". While in one, I noticed they were selling multiple turntable models. My curiosity led me to the display where I spotted a Sony model with USB capabilities. The on-line reviews were very good so I wrote my letter to Santa. I must have been good this year since look what showed up under the tree.

It works! Really well! The software had a learning curve, but is very useful. As an added bonus, the USB Sony also has capabilities to be plugged into the stereo for listening to the records as the were meant to be played. No more hum. Just lots of great music. :)

Happy New Year

Having a Holiday in the middle of the week just means there's two Mondays.

Holiday Traditions

We were saddened recently when our player ate our VHS copy(yeah we're old) of Rudolph . It wasn't so much the loss of the tape which we've since replaced with a DVD. What we are really going to miss is the rest of the content on the tape. Our VHS tape was a copy from a network broadcast in 1994. We were able to date it from a Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman ad for an episode. Funny, Jane Seymour has morphed from commercials for her TV show to hawking jewelry. She's still a Christmas staple.

It was, and is, rare when neither of us is traveling at the broadcast time. We taped it so we could watch it together. The network broadcast was a video montage of the past. It was especially memorable for 7-Up commercials at a time when 7-Up actually had a market share. It had these gooey Ronald McDonald commercials made with normal-sized children, and ads for a healthy JC Penney. We will miss the extra footage from our past. At least we can still enjoy Rudolph each year and wonder how our parents ever thought the show portrayed Santa in a positive light. It is an amazing way to show children of today that bullying not only existed in the 60's, but was encouraged if you were a reindeer or an elf.

Dr. Who Christmas

The Tardis landed on our tree for the holidays. No sighting of the doctor yet. We're just hoping the Daleks don't show to roast a few chestnuts.