May 2006 Archives

I don't usually make soup for myself, but decided to try my hand at making some homemade concoction. One thing I've learned - use less ingredients! I had no recipe - just an idea of what I wanted in my soup: elbow macaroni, diced carrots, celery, and tomatoes, beans and chunk turkey from a can I found in my cupboards. This soup can surely feed an army! Guess what I'm having for lunch tomorrow and dinner for the next few days?

I got bit by my aunt and uncle's tiny dog last weekend on the back of my leg. It left a nasty looking bruise. The bruise in the pic is from 4 days ago. Doesn't it look like a heart?

I was just in Green Bay last weekend visiting family and had a chance to stop by my cousin Dave's house to take a peek at their newborn baby girl, Sophia. She's not even a month old. She has long fingers...perfect for the piano. And older brother Jonathan is such a ball of energy. Oh they're so cute!

The Social Security administration has published the top 10 baby names for 2005 on their site. The site also provides popular names by birth year and popularity of a name by ranking. My name ranked 10th in the year I was born and has steadily dropped to 74 for 2005. No surprise. It shot up to the top 10 quite suddenly in 1966. I wonder why.

Ok, I knew you can do some really neat things in Photoshop, but this is amazing! Roll your mouse over the images to see the before picture. It's kind of freaky and makes you wonder how those stars really look like before their photos were touched up in Photoshop.

Someone emailed me pics of this artist's work a long time ago and I came across it again online today. He does an amazing job with the trompe-l'oeil effect and I wonder how he does it. When viewed at the right angle, his work appears 3-D. The second to the last photo on the page shows you how it would look like if viewed from the wrong angle, which really makes me wonder..."how does he draw like that??"

Yesterday as I was waiting to get my oil changed, I leafed through a Newsweek magazine and came across an interesting article on the youth of China in big cities and their carefree spending on western trends. These 15-35 year olds have been dubbed "Chuppies," short for Chinese yuppies. Ugh...another awful term formed by the fashionable trend of combining two words into one like "Bennifer" and "Brangelina." Although those are names of famous stars, but still you get the point.

I just heard on the news the other day that funds for Medicare were projected to run out by 2018 and Social Security by 2040. These revised projections show funds going dry sooner than expected. If you're in your 20s like me, Social Security will go empty just short of your retirement age. It seems that we'll be getting the short end of the stick, but depending on the government for your future financial wellbeing is riskier than investing in the stock market.

Here's an interesting site (www.thefutureofretirement.com) that provides findings on people's attitudes on retirement in a number of countries around the world. The site provides charts and graphs as well as insights to what people plan to do in their retirement years, how they view older people, what concerns they have when they retire and how they plan on funding their retirement.