~★~♥~♥~★~ El Morno! ♥~★~★~♥
April 17, 2012

★~ Today’s Quote:  “He respects Owl, because you can’t help respecting anybody who can spell TUESDAY, even if he doesn’t spell it right.” A. A. Milne quotes

★~Blah Blah Blah Day:

Blah Blah Blah is a gem of a phrase!  Blah Blah Blah can be used to express a multitude of emotions: Sad blah: I am feeling so sad and BLAH today, Disgusted blah: I just cannot believe that she wore those shoes with that dress–so BLAH, Tuning out Blah: The word cloud over a teen’s head when you are speaking to them: BLAH blah BLAH, BLAH, BlAh. Today is the day to go forth and use Blah…but please don’t be all blah blah about it!

★~ National Haiku Poetry Day:

April is National Poetry Month, and cushioned near the center of the month is the haiku.

National Haiku Poetry Day “is a celebration of the genre of haiku, a kind of poetry whose origins date back a millennium in Japan; and more specifically, of English-language haiku, which has now been written for more than a century,” according to The Haiku Foundation. Try writing your own haiku with five syllables in line one, seven syllables in line two, and five syllables in line three.

Haikus are easy

But sometimes they don’t make sense

Refrigerator

★~Cheeseball Day:

How do you spell it anyway—cheese ball or cheeseball or cheese-ball? Ok-I have made an executive Odd decision I am going with the one-word  spelling: cheeseball. To continue, there seems to be two main types of cheeseballs.  I will discuss both types, but unfortunately, I think the intent of this day is to celebrate the baseball sized, nut covered, soft cheese wad that people bring to holidays parties or as hostess gifts.  For example: Aunt Margaret sends them a cheeseball and they recycle it by bringing it to the office party or as a hostess gift to your party. The type of cheeseballs that deserve to be celebrated are those crunchy, cheesy, bite-sized balls of bright orange goodness, the airy snacks loved by both children and adults alike.  I say throw caution to the wind and just celebrate whichever cheeseball makes you say, “cheese!”

★~ Today In History:

♥~ 1629 – Horses were first imported into the colonies by theMassachusetts Bay Colony on this day.

♥~ 1810 – Pineapple cheese was patented by Lewis M. Norton. Mr. Norton lived nowhere near pineapples. He was from Troy, PA. Pineapple cheese… Yummy!

♥~ 1953 – One of the most famous home runs in baseball history was whacked by New York Yankees slugger Mickey Mantle on this day. ‘The Mick’ hit a 565-foot homer in Griffith Stadium in Washington, DC.

♥~ 1964 – An American icon was born on this day. A sexy, fast, lightweight little pony debuted at the 1964 World’s Fair.  Ford’s affordable car,  the Mustang, instantly delighted Americans of all ages. Named after the renowned World War II fighter aircraft, the Mustang was “designed to be designed by you.” This meant that you could buy the coupe or convertible with your choice of a six-cylinder engine with 101 horsepower, a 164 horsepower V-8, or a 210 horsepower V-8 engine. Did you want three-speed, four-speed or automatic transmission? Maybe you preferred front bucket seats or the front bench-style seat. Whatever your choice, your $2,368 bought you a spiffy new car with wall-to-wall carpeting, floor-mounted shifter and full headliner. Mustangs rolled off the assembly line by the thousands, breaking all industry records. More than 22,000 orders were taken on the first day.  Mustang Sally captured the hearts of a generation and is still riding high.

♥~ 1971 – Joy to the World, by Three Dog Night, made it to the top of the pop music charts on this day. The song was number one for six weeks. Now that’s a hit!

♥~ 1985 – The U.S. Postal Service unveiled its new 22-cent LOVE stamp. In a clever promotion, the USPS used the set of ABC-TV’s The Love Boat as a backdrop. The stamp went on to become one of the most popular ever offered by the postal service.

♥~1986 – Larry McMurtry won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Lonesome Dove

★~ Born Today:

♥~ 1918 – William Holden (Beedle Jr.) Academy Award-winning actor: Stalag 17 [1953], Love is a Many-Splendored Thing, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Born Yesterday, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, Casino Royale, The Moon is Blue, Network, Picnic, Sunset Boulevard, The Towering Inferno, The World of Suzie Wong;

♥~  1965 – William Mapother, Actor (“Lost”)

♥~ 1970 – Redman, Rapper, actor

♥~ 1974 – Victoria ‘Posh’ Addams singer: group: The Spice Girls: 2 Become 1, Wanna Be, Spice Up Your Lives, Let Love Lead the Way, Wasting My Time, Oxygen

★~ Did You Know:

♥~ There are over 2000 different varieties of cheese!

♥~ Non-pasteurized cheeses are legal in the US as long as they’re more than 60 days old:

♥~ Traditional mozzarella (mozzarella di bufala) is made from water buffalo milk: I thought it was just a name, but it’s not. Apparently, there are some big water buffalo farms in California

♥~ Pizza Hut uses about 300 million pounds of cheese per year.

♥~ Founded in 1882, the Crowley Cheese Factory in Healdville, Vermont, is the nation’s oldest cheese maker still in operation.

♥~ The top five cheese producers in the United States are Wisconsin (more than 2.4 billion pounds annually), California (2.1 billion pounds), Idaho (770.6 million pounds), New York (666.8 million pounds), and Minnesota (629.3 million pounds). These states account for 72 percent of the country’s cheese production

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Question: What do you call cheese that isn’t yours?

Answer: Nacho Cheese!

I find cheese balls confusing. What exactly are they trying to be? Why the ball shape? Is this supposed to be a lame attempt at being festive, of saying, “Hey, I am a cheese ball and I belong at your party”? That is so cheesy! Guests have no idea what is under the nuts until they spread it on their cracker, and once it’s on your cracker you are committed to eating it or coughing it into a napkin and then walking around with a wadded-up, gross napkin in your hand. Let’s all agree to just serve straightforward, honest, upfront chunks of real cheese on a nice tray, with crackers, at our parties from this day forth. ‘K?

Jimmy, who has cleaned my carpets from back in the days when I inherited a house with beautiful white carpeting, offered me a deal I could not refuse. When we replaced most of our carpeting with tile, we left the wood flooring in our foyer and between our downstairs bedrooms. In retrospect, it was a mistake; the wood floors needed to be sanded and stained, and it would have been so easy just to tile that area when we tiled the rest of the house. I am pretty sure Joe talked me into keeping the wood floors with the promise he would sand them and stain them. Ha. Anyway, Jimmy wants to learn to sand and stain floors and needed some practice, and I have wood floors that need to be sanded and stained…so he offered to do the job for the price of materials. I took the offer and he started work yesterday. The sanding is a mess and there is dust everywhere, but the floor already looks a hundred times better with just the first staining completed. The floors will be done today and I can’t wait to see the final results. I find it so interesting how one project leads to another when you are a homeowner….I was just going to clean one closet a week ago and now I am painting bedrooms and having floors redone. Well, you know what Mr. Hoppie, Cole’s old cello teacher, used to say: “Getting started is the hardest part, but once you get started—watch out!”

My sweet mother ankle is mostly healed and her doctor set her FREE—She is off to dog school today with her favorite Doberman. Life is good once again in New Mexico!

♥

Note: We celebrated National Stress Awareness Day on April 16 because that is when it showed up on most Odd Holiday calendars. However, I just found out that Stress Awareness Day always follows Tax Day. This year, April 15th (Tax Day) fell on Sunday; when tax day falls on the weekend it is  moved to the next business day (April 16), this moved  Stress Awareness day forward to April 17.  El Morno, did not get the memo, so we celebrated on April 16th which is when it was last year. Let’s make this easy, shall we? If you are looking for National Stress Awareness Day–Click here. Deep Breath.