A Prize!

I got another blog prize!!
Thanks Katy!!!

You might think, "Wow...a readers digest condensed book...what a treasure."
It IS a real treasure! Plus it can hold a real treasure.

It's one of those fancy book safes!! You know you see them in the movies and they usually hold a gun or something. Well now I have one.
I hope no one reading my blog sneaks into my house and finds this book on my self...because they'll know exactly what it is.

...and it's still snowing

(it's a ruler if you couldn't tell)

Needless to say I'm kind of glad I'm test driving a 4-wheel drive tank this weekend.

(not literally...it's a limited 2007 dodge nitro, but it feels like a tank)

Pride Comes Before The Silver

WARNING:
This blog may show a side of me you may not know exists. A vengeful, unforgiving, callow, malicious, obsessive,

austere

side of 'the Tacy', heretofore only made manifest to a select unfortunate few.

Continue at your own risk!

I LOVE the Olympics.

(I couldn't just type "love" because that would be false, I LOVE the Olympics)

I LOVE both the summer and the winter Olympics, neither one could take top rank in my book of LOVE.

In the winter I especially love mens figure skating. My favorite male figure skater (up until he retired in 2003) was Alexei Yagudin.

He is from Russia and he was amazing.

Alexei had a rival who really didn't like him. Alexei shared mutual feelings for this guy. His name was (and still is) Evgeni Plushenko (said with disdain).

I've heard people say, "Who is your favorite football team?" and I've heard people respond, "Whoever is playing against BYU."

Every since Alexei (sexy Alexei I used to call him) retired my response to, "Who is your favorite figure skater?" would be, "Whoever is competing against Plushenko (said with contempt)."

Plushenko (said with malevolence) is, in a word, pompous.

He thinks he can do anything, and he can do it ten times better than anyone else.

Don't get me wrong, Plushenko (said with rancor) is an amazing skater. He can land a quad with amazing precision (not as good as Timothy Gable, the quad king, but that is a different post). And he really knows how to entertain a crowd, but what really bothers me is that he is so stinkin arrogant about it. There isn't a humble bone in his body.

I haven't kept up on figure skating too much lately, but I knew going into these Olympics, Plushenko, (said with disgust) had come out of retirement just to prove he could win two gold medals in a row (arrogant? I think so!).

After short programs he was in the lead, but not by much.

In an interview he mocked his competition by saying "If the Olympic champion doesn't know how to jump a quad, I don't know...Now it's not men's figure skating, now it's dancing."

Poking at the fact that Evan Lysacek had decided to not put a quad in his routine.

Plushenko (said with hostility) was the final long program skater, and when he finished his routine he held up two fingers, his arrogant way of saying, "look at me, I just won the gold again."

Well pride cometh before the fall Mr. Plushenko (said with cheek)!

He just wasn't good enough to get the gold twice in a row.

Ha! You Lose!!

(I fully understand that this post makes me no better than Plushenko (said with malice) but I just so happy that he lost I had to post something)

(ps: can I also publicly state that I think Johnny Weir was robbed in his long program scores, not that any of my readers care, but I just had to say it)

When I Grow Up...

... I want to live here:

Blame it on the Holiday

I'm sure everyone has heard the Tennyson poem ending:

'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

But is it true?

Is it really better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all?

Considering I've never been in love and therefore have never lost love I can not profess to be an authority on love and loss, but the upcoming holiday has planted seeds of cynicism in my mind.

After all...over half of all marriages end in divorce these days.

Thinking it over in my mind I keep telling myself that it would be better to have never loved than to have lost a love, but that seems so cynical.

But I don't think Tennyson was necessarily talking about marriage.

For example, I love my dog.

Nothing makes me happier than picking my dog up from the vet. Seeing him wag his tail and jump into my arms as though he thought he'd lost me forever and I'd come back gives me the best feelings. It is moments like that that I know he loves me too.

Nubbins is getting old, and I know he'll die someday, so when he does die will all the good times we had be for naught because we can never have them again? Of course not!

The same can apply to a human to human relationship.

Relationships are like fires. Fires have to have fuel. All relationships are fueled with good times. The relationships that end poorly just stopped being fueled. So should you never have started the fire in the first place? Of course not!

Even if your fire is extinguished by no fault of your own, I'd argue it is still better to have felt the warmth of a fire then to have been cold forever.

I don't think any amount of bad experiences in a relationship could make up for the lessons learned in actually having the relationship.

So I guess in my mind Tennyson is right:

'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

Cake and Birthdays

I posted a while ago that I was in a cake class and I never posted anything else, so here are some pictures.

The first class we all made rainbow cakes. I didn't get a really good picture because I was trying to get a picture of the border around the bottom.

Jessie's rainbow cake.

I can't take credit for the cupcakes above...I believe Jessie did the star one, and my mom did the flowers.I was 100% anti-clown when we went into the class but after learning how to make it I think it is really cute!

That is the cake part, now for the birthday part!
In my family we are very avid birthday celebrators. I know some people who just let their birthday roll around and they may have a cake or something but that is it. That doesn't work in my family, birthdays are a time to celebrate.

Because I love geocaching, my mom and my sister spent hours making me a geocaching birthday scavenger hunt. I got a set of coordinates that led me to someone who had another set of coordinates for me.
It was lots of fun!
At the end I got a new laptop (which I really needed because my old one, beside being ancient, was missing keys) and a purple dinosaur cake Jessie made using the skills we learned in class.
She did an amazing job!
Today is Nathan's birthday, and the theme for his birthday was "perpetual kid!"
So I used the skills I learned in class and made him a lego cake.
Sorry for the long post....and the lack of fun content.