Viva Las Vegas!

During winter break from school, my husband, Scott and I went to Las Vegas for a week. We planned this kind of at the last minute and chose the perfect week to go. It was bitterly cold at home and perfect 50 to 60 degree days in Vegas. We had talked about going there a few times in the past, but never really made an effort to go. With air and hotel prices at bargain basement levels, we jumped at the chance to go. We are not gamblers, nor did we go there just to gamble. Sight-seeing and buffets were our primary goals, and we excelled at both.

We didn't anticipate, however, the amount of walking that entails a visit to Vegas. The "strip" isn't that long, only about 7 miles or so, but the hotels and casinos are so BIG that walking from one end to the other can take as long as a half hour. We also chose not to rent a car, so we took the bus, a double-decker known as The Deuce. When getting on The Deuce, a recorded message was broadcast at an ear splitting level that informed you to HAVE FUN! RIDE THE DEUCE! By the end of the week, we were mimicking it perfectly. It was more frugal that the taxis, which are really expensive.

We saw two shows, Louie Anderson and Mac King. Both were very good and we recommend going to them if you find yourself out that way. We wanted to see Penn & Teller, and had planned to go on Thursday night, but the guide book we had was incorrect in its listing and they are off on Thursdays and Fridays. So much for making a plan. We also used the half-price ticket booths, and that turned out well for us.

I got to go horseback riding in the Red Rock Canyon, which was something that I had wanted to do for years. Not necessarily the Red Rock Mountains, but originally the Grand Canyon. Red Rock was closer, less expensive, and a much smaller group. There were only five of us and it was a really "personal" tour. We didn't ride in the canyon, but followed the mountain up and down and rode along the canyon rim. I've never been nervous riding a horse before, but had a brief glimmer of it when I realized that if she wanted to, my horse, September, could have flipped me into the abyss without a second thought we were so close to the edge. One slip on a stone and that would have been the end of happy trails for me.

We went to five buffets while there. The Belliagio, Harrah's, Tropicana, and two others that were not so good and I can't remember their names. The buffet at the Belliagio was by far the best, and although pricey at $35 each, was well worth it. Go hungry and be prepared to eat. It is a huge buffet and has delicacies from around the world on it. Heavily influenced with seafood, my favorite was the lobster ravioli and Scott's was the African Blue Nose fish. Outstanding.

While we didn't do a lot of gambling, it was surprising how fast the week went. We had a beautiful hotel room at The Signature at MGM. It was on the penthouse floor, 30 stories up. A balcony and a great view to boot. There is a considerable amount of construction going on, and it seems like each casino keeps trying to out-do the one before it.

All in all, a fun trip and a great break from the dreary Wisconsin winter.

And the secret is.....

Spoiler warning: I'm discussing the book "The Secret" and giving away the secret. If you want to find out for yourself, read no further. You have been warned.







I just finished, or well almost finished, the book "The Secret" by Rhonda Byrne. I had heard a few people here and there talking about it, and finally decided to read this book and discover how I could make everything I want happen, happen. The secret is the law of attraction. And in her book, Ms. Byrne has interviewed several experts on the secret. They all state the same thing. If you truly believe what you want to happen, you will transmit that to the Universe and the Universe will give you what you want. The book states that we are all transmission towers and that the Universe "hears" us and then gives us what we want. So, if you are in a bad mood, bad things will happen. If you are in a good mood, good things will happen. As I was reading, I began to wonder if at the end of the book, there was a gotcha! line coming along. So, I did something I NEVER do. I skipped ahead to the end of the book. Nope, the interviewees believe that if you feel good, are a positive thinker, and can really convince yourself that what you really want IS what you really want, you will get it.

I'm a skeptical person, and I freely admit that. Life experience and years of practical jokes and not so practical jokes have taught me that you can't take everything you experience with your senses for real. Especially when the husband tells you stories about earwigs. To have someone then tell you that you just need to think positive and feel happy and you will be positive and happy leaves me with the feeling that someone has been heavily medicated. Same with wanting money or wealth. If you imagine yourself living in wealth, you will get your wish. If you want to be fabulously beautiful, you just have to think and believe that you are. I guess somehow, faeries or gremlins will somehow transform you while you sleep and you will wake up with whatever vision you want yourself to be. While this is all good and wonderful, I began to wonder what would happen if someone REALLY wanted an enemy dead, or disgraced, or ruined in some way. Would it happen? The book only addresses how negative feelings impact you, not if you can transmit negative thoughts to that annoying neighbor's dog barking at 2am.

I read all the summaries and skipped the last 1/3 of the book because I could no longer stand the exclamation points, the Stuart Smiley like text and the trite way of how we should deal with life. If this utopia described in the book is possible just by the power of positive thinking, does that mean that there is also a doppelganger version that accounts for all the bad things that happen in the world? Good and Evil are as old as time itself and are found everywhere. But wouldn't the majority of the human race want good? Shouldn't we have a very small percentage of people that can't help themselves and want bad? The question then becomes do we really have so many people in the world that want bad? Crime, disease, corruption, war, poverty, slavery, apathy, deceit, disgrace, hate, rage, could all be eliminated just by thinking happy thoughts. The book states that love is the most powerful feeling you can experience or transmit. If you could live in a perpetual state of feeling love, you would never know unhappiness. It was at this point I stopped reading the book, because while I don't disagree that love is a very powerful emotion, it is impossible to live in a perpetual state of that blissful, flower-child sentiment from the 60's. Just watching the evening news will put a dent in anyone's love-o-meter.

The idea of the book is wonderful. If you could really pull this off, there would be no mental illness. I would say it is a safe bet that if you ask most people who suffer from say, depression, that they could cure their depression just by feeling happy, they would. In fact, there are probably many of them that have tried to help themselves just by doing that very same thing. "Maybe if I just put on a happy face....." Maybe they should be thinking that they should fix the chemical imbalance in their brains? Do you have to be that specific for the secret to work? "Oh, I know my serotonin levels are normal today!" And *POOF* depression cured? Could we really put the medical business out of business? Do we bring on our cancers ourselves by our negative thinking that we are going to get cancer?

So, I guess the only real thing I believe from this book is the money part. I got the book from the library, but I know there are many people who bought this book and went to see the movie that was based on it. I guess the author must really have wanted wealth because she found a way to make that happy thought come true.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everyone!

Behavior vs. Fans

Thanks for the picture Scott!


In earlier posts, I've used sports as a comparison to other subjects and not always in the best light. I'm not anti-sports, or think we should pursue more loftier, intellectual goals in life and I'd like to prove it here. Growing up, my immediate family consisted of myself, my sister, and my mom and dad. Typical family, but poor dad usually ended up watching the Sunday football game by himself or with his family who quickly grew bored and heckled the TV with cliches about stupid football players and then left the room before the first quarter was over. Dad tried many times to explain the game to us, and without us having an interest in football, it just wasn't doing any good and he'd usually give up. His favorite teams were the Packers and the Cowboys, and I could never understand how he could have two favorite teams when there was always so much rivalry going on and it was pretty clear that you couldn't have two favorite teams. When the two played each other, we always teased him about which team he was going to cheer for. He never got mad about our teasing him, probably because we'd only be in the room for 10 minutes before leaving to pursue more loftier goals.

As the years passed and when I was a teenager, it just never entered my world. I was busy with school, friends, homework, band, reading, and other teenager stuff that usually didn't include football. I should note, however, that when I was a teenager, there was no cable TV and only one TV in my house. In fact, cable TV was only a few years old and we didn't even have the cable in the ground in our area. So, it was pretty much JUST the Sunday games that were allowed in our area. And, there were no 24 hour channels devoted to football, let alone sports in general. We watched the ABC Wide World of Sports (THE AGONY OF DEFEAT!) and if there wasn't anything good on that, it was usually a Sunday afternoon movie or wrestling on channel 18 (out of Milwaukee).

When I met, and eventually married my husband Scott, I inherited by marriage the subject of football once again. He is a life-long Cowboys fan, and so I too, became a Cowboys fan. It wasn't that hard, really, because I had already been exposed to the team in a favorable light through my dad. But, this was the Cowboys of the 90's, with Troy, Michael, and Emmitt. Not a hard team to dislike, and I quickly became a fan of Emmitt Smith. I also realized that I liked watching football, and as an adult could understand the game and realize what all the fuss was about. Over several years, I've gained a pretty good understanding of the game, can recognize the hand signals the refs use (before they tell us), and have even gone to two Packers games (against the Cowboys, of course). Something, when I was a kid I thought I'd never do as I couldn't stand the amount of time devoted to a football game. I wish I could report that the Packers game going experience was fun, but each time was a complete disillusionment of my interaction with the Packers fans.

The first game was the match-up at Lambeau on 10/24/2004, with a Cowboys loss. This was my first professional game and my first game at the legendary Lambeau. (From my years in high school pep band, I'd been to four years of high school football and basketball games and a few UW-Madison college games.) For years I had been told by local media that the Green Bay fans are the BEST! fans in the world, even if you are cheering for the opposing team. Both my husband and I expected a fair amount of teasing, but nothing like the treatment we actually did get. We didn't realize that everyone is crammed into that stadium like sardines. It looks much bigger on TV. When one person stood up in our row, we all had to stand up because we couldn't move independently. The Packers fans behind us took great delight in ramming their knees into our backs and being so obnoxious to us that I was more than ready to go WAY before the game ended. With it being a Packers win, this game (even though I thought differently at the time) ended up being the "good" experience of the two games I've been to. Our second game was this year, on 9/21/2008 and was a Cowboys win.

It's important to note that the amount of alcohol consumed was a bit shocking to me. I don't know if everyone who was drinking at that game wasn't driving, but if they were, Brown county could easily be so wealthy off of the DUI tickets that they would never need to get Federal money again. I also understand that we are a drinking state, and I don't care if they do drink, but the driving afterwards and the complete lack of common sense and courtesy was appalling. Again, we expected a fair amount of good-natured teasing, but we didn't expect to be assaulted and called derogatory names that I won't print here. It was flag day at Lambeau, so you can guess at what became the instrument of assault. As the Packers began their descent into loss, the mood of the drunken crowd around us also spiraled into loss. I won't go into every detail of what happened to us, but here's a list of the bigger things:

Scott was poked in the head with several flags shoved together
The old guy next to me tried on several occasions to break my ribs by ramming his elbow into my side
Vile and obscene names and language hurled at us and at BOTH teams
Under the pretense of flag waving, hit in the head with flags
Given the "bird" by exiting sore loser fans

I could go on, but I'm not going to. I was most shocked by the parents of a tween girl who were using such language as to make a sailor blush. Words that are not even used in R rated movies. The mother was the person who was using several flags together to poke at Scott. How do you explain to your bully child what they did was wrong when the parents are setting the example? The behavior was appalling especially since their child was with them, and there were other children in attendance too. The vile language of several people around us I consider abusive to use around children but seemed to have no affect on the "adults" who were hurling such words around. I have heard on countless occasions that the Packers are a family organization, and how the fans are part of that family and have been coming to games for generations. Well, I guess I know where the children get that education on being sore losers and bad hosts and grow up to uphold the family tradition.

While I don't think I'll be going to another Lambeau game again, I still enjoy watching football at home. I set out at the beginning of this blog to prove that I'm not "anti-sports" and I think that if I can still enjoy the Sunday game even after the bad Lambeau experiences that's a pretty good indication. I know there were many reasons why we received the treatment we did, and none of them are good reasons. But it wasn't the players fault. It had nothing to do with the actual game of football. As with anything else in life, it breaks down to individuals behaving in either a good way or a bad way. And that is my point. It doesn't matter what activity you might engage in. If you are the type of person prone to closed-mindedness and bad manners, the addition of alcohol will accentuate those traits. And that, is what I guess I really don't like about sports. Healthy competition and team pride taken to such levels that like anything else once taken too far and in such extremes becomes distasteful. I guess I would say that I'm not anti-sports, but anti badly-behaved fan.

Snow day

I object to the term white trash. I have heard this term used often, usually describing a part of society that is Caucasian, not necessarily poor, but usually is, and having clothing, decorating, cars, and housing choices that for some reason people not "in" this category find the need to separate themselves from. Like the distant cousin no one in the family wants to talk about in public, but gossips greatly in private. Yet, when I was home on a snow day this last Tuesday (December 9th, 2008), and as I was scanning the satellite viewing choices, I found a plethora of shows devoted to the subject. I didn't actually find any titled White Trash, but Mobile Home Disasters and Pimp My Trailer were two I did run across. I'm not going into detail about either show, but I fail to understand why these shows hold anyone's attention.

One of my main problems with the term white trash is the fact that you cannot apply any other ethnicity in place of white and get away with it. You will instantly be labeled bigot or its kinder sounding term of prejudiced. Can you just imagine the uproar over the term black trash? Or red trash? Or yellow trash? Somehow, those terms are wrong, yet white trash is accepted in society without a blink about the inappropriateness of using skin color to describe a segment of society. Or is it the term trash? Why do we accept trash as a way and a word to label people? My husband challenged me to think of a different term, and without using established prejudiced words; I can't. Has the term white, in reference to people, become the general kick-around, you-can-make-fun-of-without-repercussion term? Is it because of history? That somehow the current Caucasian group has to pay for the sins of their fathers? But then why aren't ALL Caucasian people referred to as white trash? And, it doesn't explain why some other Caucasian people use the term. Usually quite frequently, with laughter, sarcasm, and sometimes general embarrassment.

In the last decade or so, the message has been loud and clear that we should not judge people for their lifestyle choices. Whether it's significant others, or where we live, the cars we drive, the money we spend and what we spend it on; it doesn't matter. We are being taught not to judge lest we be judged. Yet something that is not a choice (skin color) is being used as a way to dismiss and ridicule large numbers of people. Enough so that various television stations create and maintain shows devoted to the term and its trappings. Is an entire mobile home park any different that an entire apartment complex? Or a gated subdivision? Or your local village, city, or country road? All have large numbers of people living there, all have financial differences running to gambit from poor to rich, all have people who have different views of life and how you should live it, all have different tastes in lawn decorations, and all have to get along to have peace. Yet all have people who could be considered "trash" using today's definitions. Why is the cash poor family living in a McMansion they can't afford and have to file bankruptcy different from the cash poor family living in a mobile home they can't afford and have to file for bankruptcy? Why is the mobile home family considered "trash" and the McMansion family just down on their luck and need a handout from the taxpayers to stay in their McMansion instead of suffering the horror of living in a mobile home and becoming "trash"?

This isn't a new term. My other problem with the term is that it has been applied to me while I was growing up. I grew up living in various mobile homes and with the exception of 9 months at an apartment complex when I was 4, lived in one until the age of 22. I was called white trash and trailer trash for most of my grade, middle, and high school years. I'll be the first to admit that living in a mobile home is a little different than living in a "traditional" home, especially from the 70's and 80's. Construction usually wasn't as top quality as today's standards and not having a basement or attic has some unique issues with appliances. As a side note, however, I have noticed in recent years that many new "traditional" homes now have utility rooms on the main living floors. Mobile homes have had these since their creation. Coincidence? I used to think I objected to the term white trash because it was hurled at me so many times that I was just sensitive to it. But that's not completely it. After thinking about this for years, I just don't understand the disparity between skin color and living arrangements. And then, why the term trash? In it's strictest sense, the term trash is something that you throw away, discard, and have no use for. Why do we accept that a whole segment of society is throw away, discardable, and are useless? If that was applied to any other ethnicity, the outrage would inspire riots.

Is it human nature to find someone one considers less than oneself and belittle it? And, if that is human nature, how can we ever expect to find some measure of peace between us?

Miss blogging

After many weeks of not doing a blog, I realized that I kind of miss it. So, I thought I'd type one out this morning as I have a pause in homework, house chores, and other stuff demanding my attention. I am half way through this semester and am taking two classes, Math 105 and Psy 201. I want to talk about my psy class as that is an online class. I've never taken an online class before, and I'm finding it more frustrating than a traditional class. I feel disconnected to my classmates, teacher, and the material. I understand that I'm teaching myself basically, and I guess that could be said for most classes, but it still feels wrong somehow to pay tuition and teach myself. And, why is the online class more expensive than a traditional class? It is extra per credit and an administration fee is also paid on top of that. There's no real explanation why this is so, and without a teacher in front of me lecturing a class room, I'm not sure WHY it costs more. I get the feeling that the printed material is the same from semester to semester, so class prep time is really cut down once the initial work is done. I also found out there are three professors who are part of the online psy classes, so I'm not really sure who is teaching and answering questions.

It is convenient though. There is a schedule we have to keep within the week with deadlines, but when we do our homework is up to us. We usually have to read our textbooks and class notes on the weekend, do an assignment some time through the week, take a quiz by Friday, and start all over the next weekend. There are two exams throughout the semester that are proctored and a final exam that is proctored at the end of the semester. But, if I need to take my quiz at midnight, I can. Or post my homework before I go to work in the morning, I can. I guess what it boils down to for me, is whether or not the extra money is worth being able to post my homework at 5am? It's also convenient if someone has constraints on attending class. If you have child care issues or work schedule issues for example, this might be the only way you can get your degree. I just don't think they are for me. There will be classes I have or want to take in the future that are only offered online, and I also think it is the way Universities will offer most classes in the future, so I better get used to the idea and practice.

I just never thought I would like a math class better than something else.

I saw my Eng 102 professor in the school parking lot the other day and he asked me if I was able to do any writing. I answered a little essay work with my psy class, but otherwise, no. It was then I realized that I do miss writing and my blog came to mind. He was the one that got me (and the class) started on blogging as part of a requirement for class. It is a good outlet to try and keep up writing skills and to hone turning random thoughts into (hopefully) something intelligent to say.

I guess I'll be back to write some more stuff here and there, when time and chores permit. I'm not sure if anyone will read this, but that's ok. It isn't much different with my online class and I don't get graded here.

See ya....

Wow, that was a fast semester....

Although it didn't seem like it at times, I can't believe how fast this semester went. Sure, the bad winter really made me question why I wanted to go out every night for classes, but I'm glad I did now. The blowing and drifting snow and black ice on Hwy 28 all seem like a distant memory now. So, what did I learn? Well, in my math class I got a really good refresher of algebra and now move on to 105 and hope that I can cope with that. In my English class I learned several techniques I hope will make the rest of college and my writing life beyond competent and coherent.

I have many more semesters to go through before I'm done, and going part time doesn't help either, but I hope the rest of them go as quickly as this one did. I'm guessing that it's because I enjoyed the classes as the reason why it seemed to go so fast. Yes, I know time is constant and doesn't speed up or slow down depending on our current enjoyment status.

As a non-traditional student, and also having gone to college right out of high school, I can compare the two situations and realize how different I am now than I was back then. However, it seemed to me that when I was in classes way back when, it didn't seem to go as fast. Maybe it's because I had several situations I was dealing with that made college not a priority in my life then. Much to my regret now, but I'm working on correcting that.

So, this is my last blog for school, and I'm not sure if I will continue to blog. Well, maybe not every week. I do like the format and a few years ago my husband had suggested to me that I should start one. I'm not sure if he was just tired of my babbling on at him or if he really thought I'd enjoy it. Maybe both? Anyway, it was fun to pick topics and see what discussions came out of them. I enjoyed reading my classmates blogs too.

So, thanks everyone for reading and leaving comments. I wish you all luck with your future classes and will probably see you around campus.


blog for the week of May 12th