It is hard to believe that we are closing the book on January 2010 already!
Happy birthday to all the January birth dates, I know Angelica will be celebrating her special day on Sunday, Happy Birthday Angelica!
January was just plain full of activities.
I graduated from my Certified Public Manager's course on January 15, 2010. We gave our final presentations at a conference at Drake on that day. Caroline came down the night before and a bunch of our classmates went out to dinner with spouses and had a good time.
Our group did a presentation on container gardens and providing accessibility to fresh produce, and providing a booklet for distribution at workforce development centers for people to pick up and learn about this growing trend.
Stephen spent a weekend at the Winnebago Scout camp where we went sledding, cross country skiing and doing crafts and sleeping overnight in a cabin
Philomena is doing well in her dance, and I took her to see the Broadway show ANNIE right before Christmas.
Daniel performed in the Corn Belt conference honor band last Thursday, he did well at that.
Caroline, Daniel and I joined a fitness center this month. It is called AnyTime Fitness. They just opened up in Clear Lake, but they have fitness centers all over. They give you a FOB to allow access into the facility and it is open 24 hours. So you can go in and exercise on your time and schedule. They have real nice equipment and good security. They have cameras all around with a well lighted parking lot, and they have security necklaces that you can wear when you leave at night so if something is not right you press the button and 911 is activated. No one gets in without a FOB and no one can tailgate behind a person because of a counter and camera on the door. It beeps when two people go through the door, so when the door is open and two people walk through the open door the counter catches that and the camera records it, flags it, and the owners checks all those occurrences. Your FOB has your info on it so it records who opened the door. Everybody has to use their FOB to get in. So I go in, the door shuts and then Caroline goes in. You can utilize any of the other AnyTime facilities with your FOB. But the best thing is! that all the treadmills, ellipticals, bicycles, stair machines have individual flat screen TV's on them. So when your exercising you can plug your head phones in to watch and listen to your favorite cable TV Show. Yes, they do have EWTN. Spending an hour on the Elliptical machine watching the "
Bourne Ultimatum" made my 60 minute cardio exercise go by pretty fast. We are enjoying this activity and I was surprised that my blood pressure has dropped even lower in the short week we have started. You can google AnyTime Fitness and find a location near you, they are in Iowa City and Burlington. I can say for Clear Lake there are people of all ages and levels of fitness utilizing this facility. The owner of this place wants to have people feel comfortable exercising there and not feel intimidated exercising next to someone that may be more or less fit than you. I would recommend to check this fitness center out, or at least some health program, or at least think about your health, or at least contemplate what you plan on doing with it. All I know is that I was getting more sluggish as the years progressed. Enough said on that issue.
This week we had to replace the starter motors in both vehicles the Ford and Trailblazer. Actually we had to replace the starter in the Trailblazer twice in less than a 24 hour period. The Ford was having difficulty starting like the battery was dead, but we put a brand new battery in it before Christmas. They hooked the Ford up to a tester and replicated the problem and found a weak starter.
The Trailblazer was different, it would not start at all. so it had to be towed, since we have an extended warranty on the Trailblazer it went to the Chevy garage, where it was diagnosed as a bad starter motor, and the extended warranty covered that replacement so it did not cost us a dime to get that one fixed. So we picked up the Trailblazer Friday morning at 10:30 AM, By 10:30 PM that night when Caroline climbed in to go home from Perkins the Trailblazer did not start. So the Trailblazer spent the night at Perkins and Saturday morning it got towed back to the Chevy Dealership, where it was diagnosed as a second bad starter motor. That did not cost us a dime either. Hopefully this organ transplant will hold and not be rejected.
I started my next class for my masters program last Friday. It is called research analysis. We get to learn and understand all these research surveys, etc. like all these Gallup polls, etc.
Philomena is selling Girl Scout Cookies if any one is interested in some.
Happy birthday to all the upcoming February birthdays!
This post is getting rather long so I will sign off.
Well I hope everybody is staying warm, but enjoying the winter weather.
posted by Randy
