miscellaneous miscellaneous

Just got done looking through a friend's pictures from her missions trip to Peru. They had a great opportunity to help out in a school, and work on building a church high in the mountains (about 2 miles up!). Plus ... apparently ... wear some nifty local swirly skirts. :)

I discovered at my condo board meeting Monday night that there's another signer on the board. We were discussing how many years a board member's term is, and another lady and I held up the sign-language #3 (thumb, and first two fingers ... the common way of holding up the middle three fingers is the sign language letter "w"). We both noticed, and I'm hoping to get a chance to ask her about it some time soon. She's already caught my attention by talking about missions trips, so I think it would be great fun to get to know her!

Working out continues to go well -- we've got treadmills in the basement now, so I have a date with one every weekday morning at 5:00, and my regular workout after work. Going to exercising twice a day seems to have been quite helpful.

My brother and sister-in-law had an exciting week last week - they won a Christian radio station's contest to have a free kitchen make-over. It was great fun listening to the announcement on the radio over the internet. If I could post audio files here, I'd let you hear it ... she was quite excited!

Hmmm ... and about Bible study ... not happening much right now. It needs to happen. I got some books from the library, and checked out too many at once, so I've been spending time devouring them to get them back by the due date. (ridiculous excuse ... I know ... however, it's the truth!) My pick of the bunch is called Kicked, Bitten and Scratched -- it's about a college program for animal trainers. I always love getting inside a career that's totally different from mine - and this was a fascinating read.

The fellowship to which my church belongs (I.F.C.A.) is having a cruise in February. They are discounting the interior cabins, and it's almost down to what I would be willing to pay. So I'm considering it. I've never been on a cruise before, and it might be fun! Particularly so, since it's church-related, so the drinking/gambling aspect won't be present. And the fact that it's in Feburary (a gloomy, depressing month, if ever I saw one) is a draw as well!

I also want to speak a word in praise of a great new Access add-in I bought for work. It's called DBPix, and it has performed miracles. Access allows pictures to be inserted in the database, but it's got a bug called "image bloat" that causes the database size to expand exponentially with every picture inserted. (mine was up to 1.3 gig in size). This add-in ties right into Access, and fixes the image bloat problem, as well as giving more options in working with the pictures. My database is now down to 14 mg., and I am a MOST satisfied customer.

OK - back to work for this girl!