{"id":9357,"date":"2025-02-24T20:25:56","date_gmt":"2025-02-24T19:25:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lizardek.com\/blog\/?p=9357"},"modified":"2025-02-24T20:30:44","modified_gmt":"2025-02-24T19:30:44","slug":"spectacular","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/lizardek.com\/blog\/index.php\/2025\/02\/24\/spectacular\/","title":{"rendered":"SPECTACULAR!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Two compliments today, how nice! One was for the second presention I fixed up for an American colleague. She was equally ebullient about the first one, but this one (which was only 15 slides, an easy-peasy one for me) she called &#8220;spectacular&#8221;! \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n<p>And tonight I called to activate a new member of the AIC, an older (than me) man who moved here a year ago to be with his long-distance Swedish girlfriend. He told me I did a great job of giving him info and thought it was awesome that someone called him and talked to him so well and so quickly. <\/p>\n<p>So, good day for compliments! Makes writing my daily good things list easy, too.<\/p>\n<p>Had a compliment yesterday from Martin as well, that my latest crossword was a fun one. It took him longer than 30 minutes, even, so double-good, haha!<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a busy week, despite Anders being gone again. I had a massage today after work, and tomorrow is our AIC monthly meeting which will be bowling. I won&#8217;t actually bowl because of my knees, but am going anyway because we have the board meeting beforehand, and I&#8217;m driving Lisel there and back, so I&#8217;ll stay to cheer everyone on. On Wednesday, I&#8217;m going into Lund after work to take my watch to a repair place and to sell (hopefully) the rest of our record albums at a music store that buys and sells vinyl. If they won&#8217;t take them, I will go around the corner and donate them to Erikshj\u00e4lpen. Thursday is book group, Friday I have an AIC lunch (and Anders comes home) and Saturday is another AIC activity: Sip and Paint (by Numbers). <\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s the first time for this activity and I find it hilarious. I wasn&#8217;t going to go, because I was being an artistic snob, and thinking, drrr, I can paint without having to paint BY NUMBERS. And I don&#8217;t drink, so the usual sipping (wine) wasn&#8217;t appealing but then I thought, what the hell. I used to love paint-by-number kits when I was a kid. There was something very soothing about them. <\/p>\n<p>I even stole quarters from the pachinko game at my aunt and uncle&#8217;s house one summer when we were visiting my mom&#8217;s family in Detroit, when I was a kid, just so I could go buy another kit. It was one of the only times in my life I ever stole something (and the only time it was money), and of course I got caught and had to confess and pay it all back. Humiliating, but it didn&#8217;t break my love of paint-by-numbers. I can&#8217;t remember if my sister was an accomplice or if it was just me. It was my idea for sure. I figured they&#8217;d never miss a few dollars worth of quarters when they had so many in that stupid game! \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n<p>ANYWAY, my criminal past is far behind me. I spent a little time looking at the (disturbingly many) online sites that offer paint-by-number kits, and because I didn&#8217;t want 1) to spend a lot of money on this and 2) to end up with a huge paint-by-number painting that I have no place to hang and will probably just get rid of at some point, because DUH PAINT BY NUMBERS, I ended up buying two small ones. I couldn&#8217;t decide which I liked best, and I suspect this activity will happen at least one more time, so I&#8217;ll just save the other one for that. It&#8217;s small enough to be able to paint in the few hours we&#8217;ll have, and colorful enough to be satisfying. I got them a week ago, but didn&#8217;t open them. I don&#8217;t know which is which. One is a geometric cat and one is a foursquare image of block flowers. I&#8217;ll just grab one to take with me on Saturday and be surprised by whichever one it happens to be. <\/p>\n<p>Paint by Numbers seem to have the same kind of appeal as coloring books. I read somewhere a while ago that adult coloring books, which have inexplicably flourished in the last 10 or so years, are a sure sign of the end times. \ud83d\ude00 No argument here. <\/p>\n<p>Maybe I&#8217;ll take my last little can of Vernors with me to &#8220;sip&#8221;&#8230;though in that case I&#8217;ll probably need to bring some ice since there&#8217;s no guarantee the hostess will have ice. She&#8217;s British, and they don&#8217;t do ice much. I&#8217;ve been saving it since November when mom and Sarah brought 6 of the mini cans for Martin, Karin, and I. Karin actually tried to wangle it out of me when she was here last, arguing that since I was going to the States soon, I should be okay with her drinking it. HA. NO WAY CHILD. Vernors isn&#8217;t a thing in the Carolinas so if I want any, I&#8217;ll probably need to order them online when I&#8217;m there. <\/p>\n<p>Mood: contented<br \/>\nMusic: Howie Day\u2014Be There<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Two compliments today, how nice! One was for the second presention I fixed up for an American colleague. She was equally ebullient about the first one, but this one (which was only 15 slides, an easy-peasy one for me) she called &#8220;spectacular&#8221;! \ud83d\ude00 And tonight I called to activate a new member of the AIC, an older (than me) man who moved here a year ago to be with his long-distance Swedish girlfriend. He told me I did a great job of giving him info and thought it was awesome that someone called him and talked to him so well&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7845,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[4,22,14],"class_list":["post-9357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-beinglizardek","tag-calendargirl","tag-goodthings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lizardek.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lizardek.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lizardek.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lizardek.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lizardek.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9357"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/lizardek.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9357\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9361,"href":"http:\/\/lizardek.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9357\/revisions\/9361"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lizardek.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lizardek.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lizardek.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lizardek.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}