Jen FitzGerald's Blog, page 19

National Cereal Day

Image courtesy of IMGBIN.

 

After National Sons Day, which I mentioned last week, National Cereal Day, might be my second favorite "national" day of something.

If you've been around these parts for a while, you probably know how much I LOVE LOVE LOVE cereal. I've been a consumer of cereal since I was a little little girl. That's a long long time. :0)

Of course, I don't eat it as much these days as I used to since it's full of sugar--yes even the "healthy" ones are carb-based and carbs=sugar eventually.

We do keep a box of Cheerios in the cabinet at all times as DH likes to snack on them and occasionally he'll get on a breakfast kick, and Cheerios are the easy go-to. I, too, will occasionally break down and have a bowl as a treat. But Cheerios are not my "favorite" and so it's easy to resist the lure of cereal on a regular basis.

When I walk down the cereal aisle, I'm constantly flabbergasted by the sheer amount of cereal flavors / themes. And not in a good way. I have to think there are more than 100 varieties of cereal, most of it sugary unhealthy crap. And I say that as a huge fan of the sugary unhealthy crap. lol.

Most of my dismay comes from the question -- do we really need so many choices of anything--much less sugary unhealthy breakfast food? In every aisle, there's probably (at least) 50% more options than we really need of any given type of product.

But we're here to talk about breakfast cereal, and my faves all revolve around chocolate.

If I were going to spend a week eating nothing but cereal (a girl can dream, right?), these would be my choices:

Frosted Flakes, eaten with chocolate milkCorn Pops, eaten with chocolate milkCocoa Krispies, eaten with regular milkFrosted Mini Wheats, eaten with either kind of milk, but probably chocolateRaisin Nut Bran, eaten with regular milk

What about you? Are you a fan of cereal? What are your favorites?

National Sons Day

Mark your calendar for tomorrow--March 4th. If you have a son, that is. :0) It's National Sons Day.

Sadly, I haven't seen my sonshine for a few years... BUT!

He's coming for a visit in a couple of weeks and I'm super excited.

The Brown-Eyed Girl is coming too, so I'll have all my babies here for a few days. I'm thrilled, to say the least, but back to the son in this post...

We could have been scrolling for quite some time with the sheer number of pictures I have shared of Sonshine over the years, but I'll narrow it to just a few. Of course, I'll be getting some new ones for my collection, which I'll definitely be sharing. :0)

That boy--I tell you. One of the few loves of my life. He's ornery and stubborn and prone to fish tales. He's a self-proclaimed *$$hole. But he's mine and I love him to the moon and back.

Can't wait to see him.

And you have a great week.

Before & After

It's not much, to be honest...I didn't do any work, DD did. And also no major changes were made--just an addition to our kitchen as we prepare for my mom's arrival. We were just getting by with the amount of food storage space we have, cabinet wise. But adding another person along with the additional stores required has pushed the need for some additional space into the "must address" category up from "would be nice."

To that end, I bought a little cabinet. And we went from this...

To this...

It's not quite as tall as I pictured it, despite, yes, having the dimensions...

And there's still no food in it, because deciding what to move around does take some thought. And I have to take all the space into consideration. Do I want to re-arrange everything? What would work best in the free-standing cabinet versus what would work best remaining in the installed cabinetry.

It'll be a bit like Tetris, which I love and was rather good at back in the day when I played it a lot. :0)

I am slowly crossing things off the "Prep For Mom" to-do list.

Have a super week...

Figuring Out How to Use my Planner

Which sounds more ridiculous than it really is. Maybe, lol.

Some of it has to do with Personality Strengths and how our minds are wired. Some folks just don't need planners at all, some prefer electronic versions. There is no right or wrong -- just what works for you.

Last year I had a planner... I hardly used it, but I didn't experience the "nope, not for me thought" that some folks in my Strengths Facebook group would say they had.

Sometime in November, I ordered another planner similar in layout as last years and definitely by the same company for that reason.

After a little pondering and a little trial and error, I figured out how to utilize the pages to keep track of stuff.

It's a lot of writing when I need to transition from one week to the next, but that's okay because that means I'm less likely to forget certain things.

I'm sure the details and the process will evolve as the weeks and months go by, but for now, things are working, and I'm happy to have been able to consolidate a lot of information into one place and keep track of what I need to do and what I've done.

Are you a planner user or do they give you hives when the rubber meets the road?

Miscellaneous Monday ~ Hockey Edition

Sidney Crosby Reaches 500 Goals

My favorite player, Sidney Crosby, became only the 46th player in NHL history (over 100 years), to score 500 goals in his career. Quite a feat considering there are some 700+ players in the NHL in any given year. He'd have had at least 100 more if not for "work stoppages" and close to a year of not playing due to concussions.

Image from the NHL on Instagram.

* * * * *

Jake Oettinger ~ Personal Puzzle

Check out this little puzzle--made just for me by DD. The subject there is our young Dallas Stars goalie when he competed on behalf of the USA at the World Juniors Championship back in 2018.

I'm hoping for another puzzle featuring another favorite player of mine, but I might have to flat out ask for that one. This one was a surprise. :0)

* * * * *

A Little Help From Our Friends

Marc-Andre Fleury is another goalie in the NHL. I've been a huge fan of his pretty much since I got into hockey. One of his fun little quirks is the appreciation he shows the goal posts and crossbar for helping him out on the ice. I tested this and it should work. You'll have to click the little arrow on right side of each image/clip to see the next.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by NHL (@nhl)

If it doesn't work, click over and cycle through this short amalgamation of video clips. (No Instagram login / account needed.)

Have a great week...

Understanding My Personality by Strength

 

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Gallup divvies up Personality Strengths into categories, which we'll get to in a moment.

For those of you just now getting blog posts via email, go here for the context of Strengths and how I found them, and then come back...

Clifton Strengths are divided up into "Themes" as follows:

Executing (purple strand)

Influencing (orange strand)

Relationship Building (blue strand)

Strategic Thinking (green strand)

Looking at my full strand above, all my Influencing strands are low (#19 and lower). For those of you who know me well, does it make sense that none my Influencing Strengths rank high at all?

My top ten / top eighteen Strengths are a just about equal mix of the other three, but break out like this:

Relationship Building (blue) 7, Executing (purple) 6, & Strategic Thinking (green) 5.

The actual top ten, which are the ones Becca says to lean into the most, are as equal as can be for an even number (4, 3, 3).

I'm gonna share all of my Strengths eventually, but for now I'm share my very lowest Strength at #34 and that's Achiever.

What? Wait!

I know, right? Crazy! Because, again, if you know me, I tend to get a lot done, but that's because of the four Executing Strengths I have in my top ten.

If you're intrigued by Clifton's Strengths, you can visit their site for more information. It's really quite fascinating.

There's more to come on this, so stay tuned. :0)

Have a super day and rest of your week.

A Night of Romance

It's not what you think, lol.

Picture taken by the husband of the lady in purple who is the only one not an author.

She is, however, part of a group that promotes Texas authors and she wanted the picture, but she graciously allowed us all to grab it.

Anywho...

For the last handful of years, the Hurst Public Library hosts an event called "A Night of Romance." Almost a dozen of my writer group peeps have attended over the years and I was invited a few years ago as well.

While I'm not traveling to conferences for the next couple of years, I'm happy to participate in anything local.

So that event was held this past Friday. A good time was had by all. Sadly the number of authors in attendance was way lower than in years past. One has a new career and was unable to attend. One has moved out of state. As for the rest, I'm not sure. Lingering COVID fears / hangovers maybe? Next year, I'll have to remember to share the opportunity with my writers group as soon as I get the email from the coordinator.

Here's my table...

This year there was also belly dancing!

Just FYI, belly dancing is not for skinny women with no hips. :0) Kudos to these women.

I don't get a lot of purchases at this thing, partially because I don't have physical books, which I might have to work on for next year. Maybe have one or two books ONLY in physical form, but also because it seems like a lot of the visitors are much older women who don't read m/m romance or are women with their other halves, neither of whom are interested. And I get it. It's a bit of a niche genre.

I also think the fact that it is mm romance needs to be more obvious as well. Maybe I need a new table runner that includes "author of MM romance" or one that bears my tag line...

Lots of time to ponder and prepare.

This year I also participated in the panel. There were four of us and we just answered general questions. Thankfully the questions were sent in advance to I could percolate my answers ahead of time.

If you'd like to watch the panel, click here.

I had fun as always and am looking forward to next year already. If you're in the local area, maybe you can stop by.

Have a great week.

Super Bowl Ads

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

The Super Bowl is a few short days away.

Despite living in the state of Texas where football rules from "tiny mites" (ages 5-7) to pro--Texas is the home of America's team (the Dallas Cowboys), dontcha know?--I hate football. Always have, always will, but it's become a thing that companies and organizations unveil their best and brightest advertisements during the Super Bowl. Why not? Annually, it's the most watched programming on television.

Today, we're going back in history. Way back. In 1984, I was two years shy of graduating from high school!

One of the big ads that year? One that arguably changed the world? One that changed the nature of commercials, most especially Super Bowl commercials...

It's called "1984" and it introduced the Apple Macintosh personal computer. It introduced the notion that PCs weren't just for big companies and big government.

It was sandwiched in between ads for other PCs from Radio Shack, Atari, and IBM!

And here we are thirty-eight years later, and just about every one carries a personal computer on their person, maybe two or three of them, with Apple leading the charge with its iPhones, iPads, and Apple watches.

Personal computers of the portable variety seem to rule most lives.

Ever since that fateful Sunday in January of '84, there's an annual susseration across America about the upcoming Super Bowl commercials. I was more aware of it when I was younger because my mom was a TV watcher and as a young adult because of my job and the company I kept.

That's not been the case for many years, however, because I'm not much of a TV watcher and, as mentioned, not a football fan. Even when I do watch TV, I rarely watch commercials. Have they permeated to certain streaming platforms? Yes. Do I pay attention to them? Not at all, except to occasionally ponder how dumb a particular commercial is and wonder how it made it to the air.

In case you couldn't tell, I'm not swayed by advertising--not very often anyways--and certainly not by TV advertisements.

Do you look forward to the Super Bowl Commercial hype & offerings each year?

Do you have a favorite or one that stands out for you?

Have a great a weekend and enjoy the game if you plan on watching...

National Pizza Day!

Image from IMGBIN

February 9th is the day--order or buy or make your favorite pizza pie and celebrate!

If we're talking frozen pizza, my favorite brand is Red Baron and the standard purchase for the fam is thin crust pepperoni.

If we're talking delivery, it's Pizza Hut all the way, baby. I don't know that I have a favorite per se, but I enjoy toppings that the rest of the family hates--olives and bell peppers. I enjoy red onions (keep the yellow, keep the white, blech), which DH will eat, but DD won't. I also like jalapenos which neither enjoy on pizza. One other topping I enjoy is a cherry pepper. The fam are not fans of those either.

So if I'm ordering a pizza and get all or half to outfit as I so choose, I go for ham, green or black olives, and red onions. Occasionally, if I'm feeling spicy, I like a jalapeno and chicken with BBQ sauce pizza.

I've tried cauliflower crust, which isn't bad at all. It's time and labor intensive to make, but it tastes fine. I haven't tried too many pre-made ones because they're too expensive.

What's your favorite kind of pizza?

National Tater Tot Day

Image courtesy Wikipedia.

Who doesn't love a crispy golden brown (orange??) Tater Tot? I prefer them over fries most of the time, especially when they're cooked to perfection. Slather them with ketchup and YUM!

So, Tater Tots were invented back in the early 50s by Ore-Ida when they trying to reduce food waste, namely leftover potato slivers. Tater Tots were the end result. The name itself is now also trademarked, of course.

Not sure when the day was founded to celebrate these tasty treats, but February 2nd is now that day. So go buy some Tots and enjoy.

Viva la Tot!