Wednesday Hodgepodge

1. Are you ready for new? Is 2016 likely to be very different than 2015? Do you want it to be?

I am ready for new. In some ways 2016 will be very different from 2015, and that makes me very happy. In other ways I'm hoping a lot of the things from 2015 will be carried over into our new year.

2. January 6th is National Technology Day. Currently, what is your single biggest struggle or frustration when it comes to technology?

Currently my biggest frustration with technology is that when I want to open a new tab in my browser it automatically takes it to my homepage instead of showing the most visited sites like it used to for years. I have tried everything I can think of to get rid of it, but nothing is working.

3. It's that time again...time for Lake Superior University to present a list of words (or phrases) they'd like to see banished (for over-use, mis-use, and general uselessness) in 2016. You can read more about the decision making process here, but this year's top vote getters are-

So (at the start of every single sentence), conversation (as in hotly debated topics where we're invited to 'join the conversation'), problematic, stakeholder, price point, secret sauce, break the Internet, walk it back, presser, manspreading (common in larger cities where some men take up the entire bus or train seat by sitting wide), vape, giving me life (refers to anything that may excite a person or make them laugh), and physicality

Which of these words/phrases would you most like to see banished from everyday speech and why? Is there a word not on the list you'd like to add?

Most of these don't bother me, and I am guilty of using "so" at the beginning of paragraphs when I change the subject in an email. I'll have to try to stop that, I guess.
 

4. Share one of your current health related goals.

Be more active.

5. Gray is currently a popular color in home decor, paint, wardrobes, hair, wedding party attire, and more. Are you a fan? Do you have the color in some variation in your home or wardrobe?  Gray hair, the old gray mare, gray matter, gray area...which gray idiom can you most relate to right now?

I like gray a lot. I have several different shades of gray skirts that I like wearing, but other than that there isn't much of anything gray in our home or wardrobes.

Gray hair is the idiom I most relate to right now.

6. Certain foods are considered 'lucky' if eaten on New Year's Eve or New Year's Day. Cooked greens to bring economic fortune, black-eyed peas or lentils also symbolize money, pork which symbolizes progress, fish for good luck, and if you're in Spain 12 grapes at the stroke of midnight. Did you eat any lucky foods on the first day of the year? Is that a tradition in your home? Of the foods listed, which most appeals to you?

We don't have any food traditions for New Year's.

Of the foods listed the fish and pork sound the best to me. I like grapes as well, but not at midnight.

7. What's the single biggest time waster in your life and what, if anything, will you do about it this year?

Probably Facebook. I have been backing away from it some, and hope to wean myself off even more. Working on it day by day.

8.  Insert your own random thought here.

Today is the 12th day of Christmas. A holiday known among the Amish as "Old Christmas", one that begins solemnly with fasting until noon and then the afternoons are spent visiting friends, enjoying lots of good food, and bidding farewell to the holiday season. Tonight however is viewed by many as a scary night when all kinds of evil spirits are out and about.

We no longer observe it in any way, and I only happened to think of it when I saw the date this morning.