Now, Nobody can say I’m terribly satisfied being bored with most men (who isn’t?) and not be lying. However, I’m not unhappy about it, either. I merely mention it on the blogosphere as a delicious detail setting up the story I will shortly unravel!

Last Monday I was walking the dog, Stacey, pondering about joining Great Expectations Dallas. Today, I sit to you as a fully satisfied member of the matchmaking service. For real, I am. Its very comfortable and full of nice people! If you’ve been paying attention, you may be wondering, “You got some ’splainin to do, Lucy!”

So, I saw this Great Expectations Dating site and felt encouraged. They’re for the serious singles who think dating isn’t a game.

‘Cause I’d never enjoyed or even tolerated what a lot of singles have christened “Dating.” I got it more than you know. Every night people nagg, “Are you two serious yet?” and “Please tell me you two are dating.”

“Ugh, and double ugh.” I reply, and playfully so. “Not after that last blind date you set me up on.”

“Whatever doofus,” they level with me. “That’s just an excuse for your cynicism.”

That’s just my best friend (she’s the best) (hehe) Sandy McCarthy. She pours common sense to my mind to set me straight. People you can trust for fresh advice. She made a good point, and I thank her for it.

Back to the meaning of this post. As I browsed from thousands of quality singles for my first Great Expectations date, a revelation hit me deep. For the longest time, I hadn’t held too many literal great expectations for dating and myself in the serendipitous path of being alive. Being single isn’t so bad, only with healthy optimism. Having great expectations works terrifically in dating.

~Denise Rodriguez

Networked sports wagering world wide web sites are mainly regulated through the agency of 3 federations. These are OSGA (the Offshore Gaming Association), the IGC (Interactive Gaming Council) and finally the Fidelity Trust Gaming Association FTGA.

The OSGA is a non-partisan bureau which audits the current overseas betting trade with the duty to also provide bettors an avenue to quickly pick out reliable sites to play games of destiny with. The association aims to champion the legal rights of gamblers, additionally they don’t demand any association charges. The agency is a proficient not to mention unprejudiced third party company that voices objective points of view, indicated by your assessments, unprejudiced investigation, discussions, industry insider tips and in addition supplies inside gossip.

The IGC are a non-profit-making agency. The organization has been set up to allow an arena for concerned individuals to talk through questions and also to further collective concerns in the international interactive gaming profession, in an effort to establish equitable and level headed industry instructions and habits which aim to raise end user trust in internet based wagering commodities and functions, and to be of service as the trade’s universal procedure guardian and in addition the IGC supplies an info base.

The IGC have made a distinction for upholding trustworthiness, equity and also sincerity because of the lofty moral code it displays, and its appeal to businesses of principled practise. The IGC regulates offshore gambling by means of utilising a particular 10 step set of protocols and in addition bills gambling websites fees to show their logo. Disillusioned gamblers may, should they want to, disclose any of their divergences of opinion to the IGC.

Okla. St..s Ford gets $9.1M over 7 years

The Fidelity Trust Gaming Association has been set up in an effort to compose a benchmark to improve the standards of online sports gaming internet sites. The Interactive Gaming Council understand that by conducting business solely with reputable companies, they are able to shape an alliance of the most sportsmanlike and most expert online gaming businesses world-wide. So, in brief these are councils which supervise the transactions exercised by internet based gambling and which should hopefully work to take the edge off some of the uneasiness experienced by skeptics. Internet gaming internet sites are totally free from risk, due to the fact that individual data aren’t submitted and in addition the compensation not to mention the odds are always equivalent to an orthodox Vegas-type wager. These web sites eliminate travel costs, but retain the fundamental atmosphere, but today you may wager in your own home.

There will be times when an anchored ship in the US Military needs to move fast and go after a rapidly increasing situation and task which must be accomplished immediately. If the anchors are deployed then they need a capacity to drop the rest of the chain and leave the anchor there. With a backup anchor on-board.

The anchor, which is left will be fitted with an RFID homing tracking device and it can be retrieved at a later date by specially fitted UUV underwater unmanned vehicle. The UUV will pick up the chain via a cable it attaches and bring that cable up to the ship which will then hoist the cable and anchor chain up until which time the actual anchor clears the ocean bottom.

Perhaps a study should be to determine how much time could be saved if the anchor system retrieval was not an issue? Could the ship, which was already running, move fast and be gone saving ten minutes or more? If so, ten minutes in a high stress situation could be of major value indeed.

There maybe other uses for this technology for other vessels and uses and an RFID retrieval system makes sense for anyone involved in UUV or ROVs also. In fact there are many ways this technology can be used for other things that can also become a huge concern. So we need to be thinking here and consider all this in 2006.

“Lance Winslow” - Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; http://www.WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs/

A Huge amount of players every week decide to use identical numbers; invariably these are birthdays, which in some lotteries can only cover a part of any potential lotto selections.

Is it Possible to decrypt the code utilizing your own particular strategy or rely on a lotto syndicate to decide them for you? We unrealistically believe that if we don’t do something or maybe do it the wrong way that something bad might happen, in this event; if we miss doing our numbers that week they are certain to come up!

Being the one to decide on those lottery winning numbers is of course something each and every committed lottery player wants to do and as human beings, we possess an innate bias against anything that’s random, we like some form of control and patterns that make sense to us.

So your lotto number comes up more often; that does not mean to say it will come up again! It’s practically impossible to pick any set of numbers that are more or less likely to win. All lotteries are a game of chance and each and every lottery number picked is just at random. So the upshot is - no number is more random than another.

If you take a look at the rules of probability, as one lottery number is picked the likelihood of your selected number going to be drawn afterwards is slightly increased because the possible selection is reduced.

Applying the same numbers would mean you will have to play 135,000 times to even receive an evens chance of winning. Unfortunately, to win the lotto jackpot you just have just about a 1 in 14 million chance of being prosperous; yet we all reckon it could be us. Does that sound like a good prospect; would you be luckier joining up to a lottery syndicate?

If you decide on the same lotto numbers every week, remember they are however random lottery numbers and you stand just as much a prospect of winning with those same numbers as with a lucky dip option. All The Same, if you use birthday numbers in a lotto draw your prospects of winning the lottery jackpot still stay the same but then, also your chance of keeping the lotto jackpot to yourself is dramatically reduced because so many other players use birthday numbers in their choices.

YMT is able to provide quality vacations and bargain prices because buy so many cruises and tours that they are able to get the best prices”and pass them along to their customers. But low prices dont mean low quality. Every YMT vacation is carefully planned and designed to make travel as carefree as possible for the vacationer. Another great advantage: YMT customers meet vital, interesting people, just like themselves. Invitees enjoy their vacations and also make lifelong friends along the way.

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Few experiences offers the pageantry and excitement of a paradepromenade, and Californias Rose Parade reigns supreme! Add a Your Man Tours tour of the magicalcharming Golden West that includes Las Vegas and you havetake an amazing American holiday youll recall forever

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Around Australia, we adore our horse racing and we thought we’d unfold Australia’s largest & most popular carnival, Its’ Melbourne Spring Festival. Relax back & be entertained as we guide you through Melbourne’s biggest race in Australia, featuring Victoria’s stars of Melbourne’s Turf & of course the breeders and jockeys in the forefront of this breathtaking industry. This is the best time for punters to acquire their money’s worth.

Once we eventually get over Derby Day & by god it’s an enormous day, we prepare ourselves for the day that stops a nation, The Melbourne Cup. Ever since the inception of the race, the stories of Archer being walked down from Sydney to compete the Cup and who won the first two runnings of it to boot, Aussies have been engrossed. Victorian’s even have a public holiday to celebrate!

The love affair which was Makybe Diva and the Australian residents was something to be admired. Makybe Diva was why individuals went to the track. To win three Melbourne Cups in progression is something else which we possibly won’t ever be repeated again. What about the surprised Aussies got when Dermot Weld came away and took the Trophy home to Ireland in ‘93 with Vintage Crop. Or possibly when he did it again in ‘02 with Media Puzzle. What about Sheila Laxon conquering with Ethereal, or maybe the acclaimed Might & Power and Doriemus photo finish. The rain poured down back in ‘74 & Van Der Hum swam home.

And then maybe there was Bart. JB Cummings. The Cup’s King. The man who has trained the Melbourne Cup hero a lazy 11 times. With horses such as Light Fingers, Galilee, Think Big (twice), Hyperno, Let’s Elope and Saintly triumphanting for him in the past. Back in 2008 punters & bookies alike were praying Viewed could do it for the Cup Kings and accomplish that lazy eleven a decent dozen over the mantle & who would have though the soon to be eighty year old would really achieve it. Well finished Bart, you are really the king of the Turf.

We will also not forget the hot water Luca Cumani & second place winner Bauer landed in after it was disclosed the horse acquired shockwave therapy, illegal within 7 days of the Melbourne Cup. The stir was phenomenal, particularly after it was revealed an RVL elected vet supervised the therapy. With so many TAB and online sports betting websites in Australia, punters can easily place their bets.

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The downstairs classrooms of my Catholic grade school were each painted a different color. All the walls were the same uneven stucco, a bump here or there calling out to me to run my hand over them. Sometimes in the rush to line up for morning prayers, an overzealous classmate would push me into the wall and a sharp stucco glob would jab me in the arm. The classrooms of the lower grades downstairs were each painted a primary color. The first grade classroom was the garish yellow of yield signs. The second grade room was a flat tomato red, and so on. Upstairs, where the upper grades were located, the walls were painted in soft pastels, the colors of babies rooms long forgotten.

I suppose the point was to stimulate your thoughts in the low grades, and calm you down when you reached adolescence. I was in fourth grade, one year away from that prized, magical transformation everyone thought happened the minute you set foot in the upper floor classrooms. The kids that had been downstairs with us the year earlier were now admired from afar because they became part of the “upper floor.” Last year, we played on the playground with them, sat together during mass, traded brown bag lunch items, gagged together over the snot-like tendencies of the cafeteria’s turkey gravy. But now, now they were the mythical dwellers of the second floor. They seemed surrounded by a glowing aura of maturity. How I longed to be one of them.

This was my second school year at St. Agnes. I was not Catholic, nor was any of my family. But my mother, disgusted with the state of the public system after my former elementary was decorated with used maxi pads, wrote a borderline bad-check for the first year of tuition, and plopped me down into these halls dedicated to Mary, Mother of God. I had cried for two weeks straight upon arriving. My plaid uniform was strange and itchy. I was mesmerized by the single thread of neon green that ran through the otherwise somber grey plaid. All the others kids in this school seemed to start each day with a heartfelt Our Father and Apostle’s Creed. I had no idea what they were talking about. Unaware of my two- grade higher reading level, the nun who was my teacher put me in the slow reader’s corner. This nun, when reading, pronounced the letter “a” sound in a word like “ah”, as in “Jack had ah ball.

At my old school, it was pronounced with a long sound, like “ay.” I burst into tears at my frustration over the two, and my mother was called into school for a meeting. She was called again when the nuns became unhappy about my slanted handwriting and the messy state of my cubbyhole desk. How in the world was I supposed to fit thick spelling, math, handwriting, and religion books into that little desk, anyway? My mother didn’t show for that meeting, sending a note with me instead informing the nuns of the migraine that prevented her from attending. The nuns sort of gave up on me after that.

I was always last in line as the classes queued up for Wednesday and Friday mass. We were required to line up with partners. I was consistently paired up with the only other non-Catholic in the class. Her name was Ling and she was a refugee from Cambodia. The church had taken in her family. When she and her family first came, our school held a clothing drive because Ling’s family had left Cambodia with just the clothes on their backs. Ling did not speak a word of English, and I was sure she was the only one beside me who had no idea who Art was and why he was with Our Father in Heaven.

During my first years at St. Agnes’, girls were required to cover their heads upon entering church. Some girls had lacy mantillas to wear, delicate head-doilies with bobby pins clipping it tight to their head. One girl had an antique mantilla that had been her grandmother’s when she attended St. Agnes. The girl’s name was Roberta, but everyone called her Robbie, the ultimate cool nickname. She was always picked to play Mary during the Christmas play. Her hair was long and cascaded over her shoulders under her head covering. My hair had been that long, until last year when my mother cut it off in her frustration at my lack of hair brushing diligence. My hair was now short, and my mother was always forgetting to give me back the one mantilla I had after she washed it. Sometimes when I forgot, the teacher would let me stay behind in the classroom while the others went to mass.

But my third grade teacher, appropriately named Mrs. Hunn, found it her personal duty to fill up the pews of St. Agnes with as many young minds as possible. Mrs. Hunn was small and dusty, but she was strong through the Lord, she liked to say. The two times I forgot my head covering, she made me use a Kleenex. I had to stand at the front of the class while she unfolded it and tried to make it stay on my head. It kept slipping off, so she doubled up scotch tape and stuck it to the Kleenex, then stuck it to my hair. Once she accidentally put her finger through the Kleenex and made a big hole. So, not only did I have a Kleenex on my head, but the Kleenex had a big hole, which, to me, is not really covering my head, so what’s the point?

The uniforms for St. Agnes were so thick and hard, I longed for the comfort of a burlap sack. In the hot summertime, these uniforms of boiled wool would stand on their own, regardless of having a body inside. Up until fifth grade, girls were required to wear a pinafore jumper skirt, which had a chest flap to cover up the idea of any boob potential. In fifth grade, the pinafore was shed and girls wore just a skirt and blouse. Boob potential became more a reality after fifth grade, so I never did understand the point of taking off the pinafore. The standard issue blue uniform blouses had a rounded collar and were consistently paper- thin. Repeated washings made them even more so, so by the end of the school year, girls were going around practically topless. But, in the name of modesty preservation, girls were required to wear thick white socks pulled to the knee. The only outlet for creativity was shoes. The kids expressed themselves through colored Converse high tops, or Nikes with bright swooshes.

One year, the rage was bright white Nikes with a blazing red stripe. I wanted a pair so bad. I begged for them for three months, and finally my dad took me to the store to get some. But they were sold out. Instead, he bought me a pair of cheap white canvas shoes and a red magic marker, and told me to be creative.

One year, the fashion rage was to put metal taps on the soles of your winter boots. The taps made a delicious clicking sound on the cold, waxed stone floors of St. Agnes, and during lunchtime it sounded like a symphony of percussion ringing through the halls. In our class, Robbie was the first to get taps, and the rest of us quickly followed suit. My dad tried to just stick RC Cola bottle caps into the rubber soles of my shoes, but they kept falling out at the least opportune moments. After much begging and pleading, he finally took my shoes downtown to the shoe store and had them put on real taps.

That was the same year I had Sister Mary Margaret for my homeroom teacher. She was an old nun and still wore a wimple. Sometimes you could see her hair and it was gray and stringy. She looked a lot like the Wicked Witch in the Wizard of Oz. Sister Mary Margaret was not a mean teacher, but you could tell she had been around since the first Pope John Paul. It was always considered lucky to get Sister Mary Margaret for a teacher, though, because Sister Mary Margaret had narcolepsy. She would doze off at the drop of a hat, and would sleep for a good fifteen minutes at a time. The school principal, Sister Catherine Patience, told us that we were to simply continue with our lesson until Sister Mary Margaret wakes up, or, if that were not possible, we were to get out our rosaries and have Robbie the beautiful and perfect lead the class in a round of Hail Marys.

One beautiful spring day, just as Sister Mary Margaret was starting a lesson in prepositions, her head dropped to her desk, and the snoring began. It was her longest nap yet, and the classroom became restless. When it became evident Sister Mary Margaret might be out for a while, kids got up from their desks and milled around, visiting one another. One of the most popular boys in our grade, Matt Thompson, decided to sneak along the floor under Robbie’s desk and get a peek up her uniform skirt. He was under her desk, gesturing wildly to his friends, when Robbie reacted. Her shoe, with its metal tap attached, swung up and caught Matt square on the mouth. The metal tap became lodged in his lip. He was frantically trying to get it dislodged, but Robbie thought he was only being obscene. She screamed and jerked her foot away as hard as she could, taking Matt’s upper lip with it. Blood squirted in a high arc over the room and sprayed a red mist over Sister Mary Margaret’s white wimple. Kids were yelling, Robbie was crying, and Matt lay gasping in a heap on the floor, both hands covering his massacred mouth. Sister Mary Margaret awoke with a start, surveyed the scene of blood and panic laid out before her, and promptly passed out.

For the rest of that school year, the tap and mouth incident was all anyone could talk about. It was rumored that Robbie’s parents threatened to sue Matt’s parents, and then Matt’s parents sued Robbie’s family for medical expenses. I think it would have been a great ending to the story of Matt and Robbie and the tap and the lip if they had grown up and gotten married. What a story to tell the grandkids. But I have no idea what happened to Matt and Robbie, or any one else at St. Agnes’. The following school year, my mother, disgusted with the state of Catholic schools, plopped me right back into the public school system. I never wore a uniform again.

I visited a Catholic school a few years ago when I was looking into schools for my own children. Driven, just like my mother twenty-years ago, by the sad state of the local public school. I was surprised to learn that now only one in ten families there are actually Catholic. No one covered their head during mass. Some people even wore jeans. As I kneeled down, the kneelers were cushioned and thick, unlike my brief Catholic school days when the kneelers were solid wood and extra splintery. The kids were still in uniform, but they wore navy pants and white button down shirts. I laughed to look down and notice their bright colored Converse sneakers. No taps, though. Those were probably outlawed.

It is amazing how the smell of a Catholic church never changes, no matter where you are in the world. The thick smells of incense, wax, and age. I decided to stay for the entire mass. Nothing had changed in all those years. I still looked on while the parishioners filed before me and headed to the altar to receive Holy Communion. I felt both peace and nervousness of being somewhere where I don’t belong. At first I mouthed along during the Apostle’s Creed, and then I realized that I still remembered all the words.

Copyright 2006 Carla Philpot
Editor and Guest Author for:
http://www.respectfully-pattipacifico.com

At fifty years old I felt great. The legs could do twenty miles on a bike, I could photograph four weddings on a weekend and still build a patio the next
day. Only one thing on my body was wearing out at a fast clip and that was my teeth. As I sat meekly in the dentist’s torture chair, he casually hiked his butt on the desk and gave me a choice. I could keep him filling the cavities one at a time or I could have them all pulled and get an upper.

“All?”, I squeaked. I still had fourteen teeth left in my upper jaw and I cringed at the thought of only one extraction, much less fourteen at once. He explained that it would all be done under the deadening effects of Novocain and I wouldn’t feel a thing. I would have to hide in the house only two days and the denture would be fitted immediately upon arrival. I mulled it over for two minutes and thinking that it would be great to be able to take out my teeth and scrub them up judiciously every night won me over. I said, “O.K. I’ll go for the package.

But on sale, the package was not. A specialist oral surgeon was required at a cost of three weeks salary. No wonder he had dozens of underwater photographs expensively displayed in his waiting room. Trips to Bermuda cost big bucks. I won’t go into the gory details, but one hour later, I saw in the mirror a hundred year old man, gumming his words and drooling on the floor.

Three days later, I entered our kitchen to a sympathetic wife, asking how I made out and giving me the “Let’s see your smile” bit. I grinned, she said, “Great”, and I asked, “Did you see the pflyers I made for the bulletin board?”

She said, “Pliers? I didn’t see any pliers” I said a little louder, “You know, the pfliers from Pfoodtown.”

At this point, she understood my problem and started to laugh. My new dentures didn’t quite fit properly and I couldn’t pronounce my “f’s” properly. At first I was embarrassed, but then we both had a big laugh. We laughed so hard, my stomach hurt and my eyes teared up. It’s never easy growing old.

Retired portrait photograper. What did you say?

It’s no surprise that thousands of Americans are victimized by identity theft each year. Last year more than 9,000,000 people were victims of identity theft amounting to some $45 billion dollars.

By the time the average person realizes they have become a victim of identity theft; it is much too late. By this point, the victim’s financial stability and credit rating may be impacted significantly.

What can you to to protect yourself from identity theft? Here are some useful suggestions for you…

• Place passwords on your credit card, bank, and phone accounts. Avoid using easily available information like your mother’s maiden name, your birth date, the last four digits of your SSN or your phone number, or a series of consecutive numbers.
• Secure personal information in your home, especially if you have roommates, employ outside help, or are having work done in your home.
• Use a paper shredder to shred sensitive documents before discarding them.
• Ask about information security procedures in your workplace or at businesses, doctor’s offices or other institutions that collect your personally identifying information. Find out who has access to your personal information and verify that it is handled securely. Ask about the disposal procedures for those records as well. Find out if your information will be shared with anyone else. If so, ask how your information can be kept confidential.
• Never tell anyone your personal information over the phone or send it through email, or fax. Most legitimate companies will not request this information from you via phone or any other unprotected source.
• Monitor your credit report on a monthly basis to watch for unusual activitiy. Many credit report services will alert you to such activity and even assist you in resolving issues. We have partnered with Equifax to offer you their Credit Watch product.

By following these steps you can lower your risk of becoming an identity theft victim. Being informed is the most valuable protection against identity theft.

Bryan A. Mjaanes is the owner of the successful ReviewCardOffers website - a credit card offer comparison site where you can review more than 130 credit card offers and apply online.