Ooh, Look...

My blog list is pretty far flung, and it's hard to keep up with all the blogs I'd like to visit. But I try.

If you want to see something lovely and transporting, click HERE and follow me down one of my favorite rabbit holes.

I'm staring out my window at too much snow, and we have freezing rain on the way, so this link made me smile.

:)

A Wickedly Cold Adventure

My daughter and I took a mini vacation into the city to see Wicked and visit the Adler Planetarium. It was awesome.
Here is the view of the sunset from our hotel window.

Waiting in line outside for the show. It was crazy cold, minus twenty with the wind chill. Wicked was very well done and we loved every minute of it.

The next day was much better, mid twenties, milder winds. We walked all over.

After many years of driving by, I finally got to walk among Agora, by Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz whose her art draws on her fear of crowds, which she once described as "brainless organisms acting on command, worshiping on command and hating on command". The picture doesn't do them justice as there are 106 of them. People either love or hate them, but I am very moved by their commentary on mindless masses and their role in history.

It was a lovely winter walk through the museum campus on the lakefront.

The skyline reflected on the lake ice was so pretty. Pity it was too chilly to enjoy longer.

My girl.

Our destination was the Adler Planetarium. My daughter went for a school trip earlier this year and wanted to go back. I hadn't been in years and was happy to go. It was mind boggling, watching the sky shows, seeing all the satellite orbits around our earth, zooming in to see earth from space and zooming out into the known universe. I got a little motion sickness from the sky show, but it was worth it. We saw almost everything there and practically had the place to ourselves.

One of the Planetarium flight crew took this picture for us. I am definitely shrinking.

When we were leaving, the staff was getting ready for an important guest to arrive. We saw her limo and body guards, but even in these crazy shoes Lady Gaga was shorter than the SUV that brought her. We did see the back of her coat though. Does that count as a celebrity sighting?

It was a nice thought that she wanted to geek out on space and science stuff, too, but it turns out that she was just there for a photo shoot. Oh well. 

Our trip was a grand adventure, and my daughter is a wonderful travel companion. 

But I have to admit that aside from the lovely Christmas decorations and lights, Chicago is a lot more fun to visit in warmer weather.

Hope your week has had it's share of grand adventures.

Hello Google Docs!

Wow. A few weeks ago I got on an agitated cleaning bin and have filled my garage with donations, I've rearranged, cleared out a ton of clutter...... and entropy is happening to me again, but I made progress and I'm motivated to make more.

My mantra is put it away, give it away, throw it away.  And if it is broken or worn, replace it.

I got new entryway rugs at a hell of a bargain, and it is amazing how dingy things got after almost two decades, and how you can really get used to things that should have been thrown out years ago.

My favorite replace was getting rid of my mismatched, barely functional toaster. I bought a sleek four slot model that made family breakfast so much easier, with bagel and defrost settings that haven't burnt anything yet. And it looks great on the counter.  I decided that this new toaster was going to change my life. Here I come functionality, simplicity, ease of use.

Well I'll see how great a change that toaster gets me. But this week, I know I found something that will change my life.

Google Docs.

My daughter has been using them all year at school. For the first year in five or six years, we no longer scramble for usb drives or external media to shuffle school papers, or worry that the document will be lost or jumbled in email. That by it's self is priceless. But wait - there's more.

As a Windows Office user since the the early 90's I've been frustrated with every new version that I have to relearn where all the functions I use have hidden this time. I knew Office and Excel inside out in the 3.1 version and after Vista and Windows 7 versions are done with me, I can barely make a table without staring at little picture icons for half an hour. I spend more time on help looking for things that have moved or been hidden or my favorite, removed than I spend on the actual documents I make.

Enter Google Docs. You don't need external software, just internet and Google. The document interface is functional, simple and it looks great, just like my toaster. Creating a document is as simple as this blogger template, I just didn't know there was an app. I asked my daughter to show me how it works last night - total training time less than two minutes. The Google docs icon looks like a recycling triangle, and once I clicked that and found the create button, I was good to go.

But wait - there's more. Google docs is updated every keystroke. So if like me, your computers periodically glitch out or your creaky fingers hit the wrong key and you lose something, that can't happen on google docs.

I have stopped using my old Office products, because Google docs is a quantum leap into the product I didn't know I needed. It is my word processor and hard drive in the cloud. It will seem silly to me that I ever had to hunt through my documents on multiple devices to find something I needed. It will please me endlessly to stop finding new ways to despise the ever changing and increasingly troubled Microsoft products.

Google Calendar simplified scheduling our lives in ways I couldn't have imagined. Youtube, Blogger, Kindle Cloud Drive, Google Search, I love them all.  I am going to let Google whisk me into the future.

Google Docs. This will change my life for the better. I'm sure of it.

Amanda Palmer Monday

Because, why not? I adore Amanda and her Ted Talk. She is a rare human being.




I also could watch her sing Dear Daily Mail all day. Yes, she gets naked, for all the right reasons.




Enjoy.

Oh, and can you imagine how perfect a couple she and Neil Gaiman must be? :)
Thanks Elizabeth for reminding me about Amanda today.

a dog in the fog

I took over a hundred pictures and thought over a hundred thoughts these past two days walking in the fog. Maybe I'll blog it all down if I can find the time.

Strange, strange weather and arctic frigid cold is bearing down. I'm hunkering down, like I do.