Summer Olympics

I love the Olympics.

I remember the first time knowing that the Olympics were going on. It was 1992, and it was during the Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain. My mom watched them quite a lot, and I remember her telling me that the Olympics only happened once every four years, so I should definitely watch them. I'm sure I watched more than a few events at the time. Of course I could recognize the American flag, and I absolutely loved being able to cheer on my country. I think that was the time that I also fell in love with gymnastics.

I think it was that year that they did the switch from hold the Olympics only once every four years to once every two years. I remember being at a Mexican restaurant with my family and discussing with my mom and brother how much better it would be that way.

Anyway, the point is, OLYMPICS! We bought a TV antenna so we could get reception on our TV in order to watch the Olympics.

On Friday night we stayed up until 4:30 on Saturday morning watching the Opening Ceremonies. We thought they were wonderful and mostly worth staying up for. (Actually, we pulled out our couch bed and contemplated just sleeping there instead of moving to the actual bed. It was an awful lot like a slumber party, so that was entertaining!)

We were told the coverage here would be quite bad, but I've found that it's been excellent. Unlike the American coverage, which is very American-centric, the New Zealand coverage is not Kiwi-centric. This is partly because there just aren't as many Kiwi athletes who are likely to win their events as there are American athletes who are likely to win their events. Of course, that is expected from a country of only four million people, as opposed to America's three hundred million.

With all that said, I think it really frees up the Kiwi broadcasters to show whatever events with whatever participants they want. In some ways it is frustrating because I am not really interested in who will win the basketball game between Iran and Russia. At the same time, I think it really gives me a feel for the entirety of the Olympic games instead of it being, "Wow! America is the best at EVERYTHING! See? America rules! Go America!" The Olympics are supposed to be about celebrating international competition, and the Kiwi coverage does that nicely.

That's not to say that I want America to lose. I really, really, want America to get more medals than China. Because I'm pretty sure that by "One World. One Dream." they mean "China's World. China's Dream." I'm just a little leery of China taking over the world.

Butterfly Day

Are you familiar with my friend, Angela? She is awesome. A far better writer than I am, which, frankly, doesn't say a lot. Today we had an activity at the Otago Museum. (As you may recall, I went there a couple of weeks ago with Makereta, but I only took pictures of the toilet seat.) The museum has a really cool butterfly exhibit going on, so we went there for our branch Relief Society Enrichment meeting. Good times.

I would write about it, but Ange has done a far better job than I could ever hope to do. Complete with loads of pictures. (In case you were thinking of NOT going, I will let you in on a little secret- her post is done in Seuss style. Like I said, Ange is awesome).

Problems Solved-ish

Mucho lots of thanks to Kayla and Erin! I still don't think the colors quite suit me, but at least they look decent. Right? Don't they look decent?
As far as my bullet point concerns, I have the solutions. As Kayla mentioned, I just needed to upload a photo for my header and fix it in the settings as she instructed on my previous post. Easy enough.

Now, with the problem of my words being right up against my margins. For that, there was a solution! Erin mentioned playing around with the coding and putting in numbers and just kind of figuring out how things changed when I put in different numbers. I tried that, and I tried, and I tried, but I just couldn't figure out where to change things. Long story short, the necessary code is:

margin-left: 2px;
margin-right: 2px;

Just put that in anywhere that it talks about the header or the body of the text. Truthfully, I put it in LOADS of places so now none of my words press right up against the edges of the boxes they are in. And now I can sleep better knowing that. If you want bigger margins, just put in bigger pixel sizes.

The color scheme. Eh, I'll keep playing with it. Actually, changing the boxes behind the text is one of the easier parts of the process.

The problem with the date line not going straight into the post.... Eh. I just can't be bothered to figure that out. If anyone knows, please let me know. It's really not as frustrating to me as those other things I whined about.

I'm really glad I learned how to do this. HTML really is basic stuff, and I've felt for quite some time that I need to get a grasp on some of the essential things. While I'm certain that I will never need to code anything in my lifetime, it is nice to at least have some basic design ideas. And I like that my blog design is not shared by any other bloggers. Probably.

New Look

I've been wanting to change my blog design for some time, and I finally have. Only problem is that it looks awful. I wish I knew HTML. I also wish I had an eye for design.

Here are my main complaints:

• I don't want the title to be in the center of the header box. I want it to be in the bottom left corner, but I can't figure out how to move it.
• In my side bars, I want there to be more room in the boxes on the left. The titles of the widgets are right up against the edge of the purple boxes.
• The color scheme. I like the background. I like the purple with the background. I like my picture with the background. But I do not like my picture with the purple. And any other colors didn't really thrill me either. I generally prefer bright and dark colors and rather dislike pastels, but I am torn because I really want to use the photo in the header.
• I wan the little purple box that the date is in to mesh with the purple box that the post is in. Only I'm pretty sure I don't want purple boxes at all. Gah.

Any help? Any suggestions of color combos? I know that I could go to a website that would give me a design, but those designs don't really thrill me, and almost all of them have a very scrapbooky feel that isn't really me.

Feel free to comment with suggestions or offers to help.

Review: Cream of Pumpkin Soup

This week for Whip It Up, I had a little help from Eric who suggested I try to make a pumpkin soup like we had in a restaurant once. The particular soup we had was technically a butternut squash soup, and it would be best described as liquid pumpkin pie. That may sound odd, but it was divine, and Eric's been wanting some more ever since.

I tried a recipe for butternut squash soup once, but it wasn't really what we were hoping, so I went with this recipe for this go-round. It was a hit! In fact, Eric said it was one of the best things I've ever made. And now let's get the necessary three questions answered:

1. The recipe was very easy to follow.
2. The dish tasted great!
3. I will definitely be making this soup again. And again. And again.

I did alter the recipes a little bit by adding some brown sugar to the soup and using fresh pumpkin. I do not have a food processor or blender here (I miss my kitchen supplies in Utah!), so I cooked the pumpkin in chicken broth, then I drained the broth and mashed the pumpkin. Then I added the broth back and stirred quite a bit to fix the consistency. Because I don't have a blender or food processor, the onions weren't processed, and that was the weak point of the soup.

As I made the soup I kept tasting it, and I was really, really doubtful about it until I added the cream at the end. It is really, really crucial to add the cream to finish off the soup.

Also, as you may notice on the recipe, it calls for some brown sugar and cinnamon croutons. I considered not bothering to make the croutons, and I'm so glad that I ignored that thought. The croutons were DIVINE! And, not only were they easy to make and exceptionally yummy, I am now eager to make my own croutons for salads in the future. No more boxed croutons for us!

My new loves

Not too long ago I was lamenting the fact that it is sometimes difficult to come by audio-books. Many libraries have at least a small collection, but it varies from library to library. I know there are places online where you can buy audio-books, but the problem with that is the buying part. If I'm going to buy a book, I want it in my hand, with the ability to turn pages, read passages over and over, tuck it snuggly in my purse for boarding the aircraft and to cuddle with in bed. I only buy tangible books.

I love audio-books for car-rides, for listening to while I do housework (as opposed to the radio or music on my mp3 player), and most importantly, for listening to while I do tedious work on a computer.

As I lamented the lack of audio-books in this world, I thought that it would be a pretty cool project for folks to work together to create audio-books for works that are in the public domain. That is, there are lots of books out there that can be re-printed in any form because they were published so long ago. (I think the law in the U.S. is 75 years.) People could volunteer to read books aloud, and then those files could be held by some large database so folks like me could listen online or download the mp3 files.

Then that thought left and didn't come back until Thursday. And it came to me that such a project probably did exist, and if I used Google properly, I would find it. A quick search for "free audio books" led me to LibriVox.org, which is exactly the project I just described. LibriVox, which means "Book Voice" is really awesome. I started listening to The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde last week, but I wasn't really crazy about the guy's voice and the book wasn't as captivating as I wanted it to be.

Then, this week, I was listening to NPR and they did a quick piece on the one hundredth anniversary of Anne of Green Gables. The lightbulb went off in my head. I jumped over to LibriVox, found the files and began listening. I'm on Chapter 9 so far, and I can't wait to read more.

I'll write a full post about it once I'm done. Suffice it to say I love LibriVox. I love Google. And I love NPR.