Thursday Thirteen #21: 13 Things We Don't Do Much Anymore

13 Things We Really Don't Do Much Anymore

1. Wait an hour for a baked potato to cook in the oven



2. Call “Weather”

3. Call “Information”

4. Re-fold a road map (thank you Mapquest!)


5. Get “Trip Ticks” from AAA (thank you again Mapquest!)

6. Shop from catalogs (Can you say "Ebay?")

7. Make sure I have enough cash in my purse on Friday before the bank closes

8. Go to drive-in movies

9. Get up to turn the dial to change the channel on the TV

10. Dial a rotary phone

11. Let the kids ride in the back of a pickup truck




12. Send the ten-year-old to the corner store to buy cigarettes for their parents (Did anyone else's mom and dad do this?)

13. Buy penny candy that actually costs a penny

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Wordless Wednesday: February 6, 2008

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Wordless Wednesday: January 23, 2008

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Buried in White Stuff

Twelve inches.


That's right.


It was at LEAST that much.


I honestly think it was more.


Appeared more like a monster fifteen inches to me.


Utterly buried in white stuff.



Snow, of course.

What did you think I was talking about?


And we had to go over the river...

And through the woods to Grandma's again...

Which was an interesting experience, now that we live in a rural area. They don't plow dirt roads.

They barely plow the paved ones.

Even when we got into the closest "major city"...


We saw several cars stuck in the ditch on the way there.

But we, luckily, weren't one of them. Lots of tractors out plowing their driveways. Michael was jealous. He had to use the snowblower. But it was better than a shovel!





We made it to Grandma's and back again without incident.

And it was a truly lovely drive...

Blizzard!

And I don't mean the Dairy Queen kind.

We actually have a real live blizzard warning in effect for our county. Is that cool, or what? I wouldn't be saying that if this wasn't a Sunday, I suppose, but it's kind of nice to be out here in the middle of nowhere with all this snow around. And since I don't have to shovel it (yay for husbands!) or even go out in it...

The weather outside is frightful.

But the fire is so delightful.

And since we've no place to go.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

This is the normal amount of snow we usually get. Three to four inches or so at a time. But this picture is just the blowing snow on the porch, which is under an overhang!

This is actually how much snow we have.

Cars? We have cars?

The kids playing in our backyard.

OOF!

PULL!

Long way to go!

Hi Mom!

The wind is swaying the trees like twigs, gusting up to 50 mph.

And what would a blizzard-y day be without hot chocolate and mom's homemade cookies?

Nine more days until Christmas... the kids are counting down... Maybe we'll have a white one after all!

Operation Decoration

I forgot how much drama and work it is to put up a real Christmas tree - quite a balancing act!

But the decorating is finally DONE. We had two ornament casualties during the process, and the cat has tried to climb the tree once already. The dog, on the other hand, keeps mistaking the Christmas tree stand for a toilet bowl and drinking the water.

Can I take a nap until Christmas now?

New Job

Michael told his employer yesterday that he's taking a new job. It's officially official, so now I can blog about it. Woot!

Strangely, we moved out here in order for him to be closer to work. He has about a six mile drive at this point. The new job is twenty miles from here - but that's still nowhere near the fifty miles he was driving before we moved.

But because the money is much better, and the benefits are, too, and the opportunity just sort of fell into his lap, it was just too hard to turn it down. Plus the stress level where he's working now is getting to be too much. The cap on his groups is twelve, but they're putting 18-20 people in there, which nearly doubles his paperwork.

Paperwork is the worst part of his job.

I hate change... but I'm hoping this is going to be a good one. I don't see any drawbacks to it yet, aside from the longer drive, and that's very do-able. He may have to work some evenings, but they're very flexible. He could even work four days a week instead of five, if he wanted to.

He's really leaving his current employer in the lurch. They've had a huge turnover there, and Michael is one of their best therapists. I know they're going to miss him and regret losing him. His supervisor said, "I'll see if management wants to meet the offer." We'll see. I doubt they will.

I know Michael will miss the people, and even the clients. Working with addicts has been really rewarding for him, and he's exceptionally good at it. The new job won't be inpatient treatment - he'll be seeing outpatient clients, dealing with substance abuse, yes, but a lot of other issues as well.

As much as I hate change, I can't see the negative to this. Let's hope that holds out. *crossing fingers* It really does seem too good to be true. And we all know what they say about things that are too good to be true...

I'm just gonna tell my inner cynic to take a freaking vacation and enjoy the ride, okay? Okay, then. Here we go...

Funny Sunday Morning

I bought cereal for the fourteen-year-old who was visiting this weekend, and the littles are on a sugar high.

Zoe insisted: "I want the frog cereal breakfast!"

Michael: "You mean, Sugar Smacks?"

"They're not called Sugar Smacks anymore." I laughed. "They're Honey Smacks."

"Smart marketing move on their part."

"I want Smacks! I want Smacks!"

Michael: "You know, Daddy once won a prize drawing the Sugar Smacks frog."

Dmitri perks up. "Do you still have it?"

Michael laughs. "I don't have any drawings left from when I was a kid, except the ones grandma kept. I don't think she hung onto that one."

"No, not the drawing, the prize!" Zoe insists, understanding her brother's question better than any of us.

"No, sweetie, I don't think Daddy still has his froggie decoder ring."

Dmitri stands up and squeals: "Mom, look! I found a dime with Jesus on it!"

"Ummmm..." Squinting down at the Canadian dime, I reply, "Not exactly, honey. That's Queen Elizabeth."

Dustbin Blues

The worst thing about having kids?

I can handle dirty diapers, crayons on the walls, broken keepsakes, peanut butter in the VCR, apple juice all over the keyboard...

But the thing I hate most... is germs.

I've been sick more since the beginning of September (when the kids, coincidentally, started school) than I was all of last year! That's a year's worth of illness packed into three months. What do I have to look forward to for the next seven, I wonder?

Right now, it's strep throat. Yay me. *sigh* A hundred and two degree fever, an all-over body ache and a throat that's on fire. Don't ya wanna be me? Just in time for the weekend, too. Perfect.

Yesterday, I was a cleaning maniac. Today, I'm Cameron in Ferris Bueller... "I'm dying...!"

"When Cameron was in Egypt's land... let our Cameron go..."

Michael made me tea (Constant Comment, my favorite) and toast and brought me aspirin. Looks like I'm going to spend the day in bed. Which, really, isn't necessarily a bad thing, when I think about it. Would be nice to catch up on sleep.

"You're not dying, you just can't think of anything better to do!"

Well, he's got a point. What do I have to do? Hm... so much for those Christmas decorations. Oh well, there's always next weekend.

Besides, I'm still recovering from the annual room cleaning fiasco. Four hours of cleaning, sorting, holding up tiny pieces of plastic and asking, "What's this to?... Do you have that toy anymore?... Isn't that the one you buried in the sand at the old house and then forgot where you buried it?"

What did I discover? Here's the top ten:

1. Six marbles to the chinese checkers game. Glued into the underside of Legos. I didn't, however, find the actual Krazy Glue. Yet.

2. Seven socks that I've been looking for forever tied in knots and made into a "rope" hanging from Zoe's dollhouse bedroom window (which faces the wall - no wonder I didn't see it!) Apparently, she did it during "fire safety week" at school.

3. A naked Fairytopia Barbie with two amputated feet (dog victim, I believe, from the markings) but Michael said, "She's still hot."

4. Zoe had the paper punch, two pairs of scissors, the stapler and four rolls of tape. It took me fifteen minutes to vaccum all of the "confetti" she'd made out of her school library book. I wonder how much I'm going to have to pay to replace, "Miss Spider's Sunny Patch Friends"?

5. Eight dollars and twenty-nine cents in change.

6. Four spoons, a very bent and deformed fork, and lots of peanut butter sandwich cracker wrappers.

7. The dog's leash (I wondered where that was!)

8. A line of McDonald's french fries along the baseboard behind the dresser leading up to a peach pit. It was like the perfect ant-highway!

9. A bottle of nail polish. Red. Thankfully, they couldn't get the top off.

10. Two pairs of tweezers, a slew of bandaids put on various stuffed animals, and last but not least, and empty contact case. I'm pretty sure they DID have contacts in them at one point.

Okay, I have a date with Ferris Bueller, a box of Kleenex, and a down comforter. G'nite!

I'm Going In...

Today is the annual cleaning of the kids' rooms and clearing out old toys to make way for new ones at Christmas. I hate this day. Almost more than I hate going to the dentist for a root canal. Not only do I get to find all sorts of things I certainly would have enjoyed staying in denial about - like silly putty embedded into the rug, a child's name written thirty times behind the toybox, or one (yes, just one--where's the other one? "I don't know...") of my grandmother's earrings--I also have to deal with the plaintive cries of children begging, "No! Don't throw that away!"

I don't understand why toy makers insist on making toys with such small parts for children. Or why my mother-in-law insists on buying them. When they were babies, I made a rule: no plastic or noisy/electronic toys. It worked great for the first three or four years. We had wooden cars and cloth dolls and a wooden kitchen set and lots of Haba and Melissa and Doug toys. It was a Waldorf/Montessori heaven.

Then, the kids got old enough to start asking for the things they saw on TV. And while I limited TV watching, they still managed to find stuff they wanted--and told grandma all about it. She couldn't resist, of course, and suddenly I had plastic Transformers and Dora the Explorer toys coming out of my ears. Great. Just great.

I'm almost glad that this whole lead-toys thing has come about, because now I have a wonderful excuse to reinstate my rule. "No plastic or electronic/noisy toys!" Not that Melissa and Doug stuff or Haba stuff isn't made in China. It actually is, sadly enough. But the good news is they do frequent inspections of their plants and guarantee their toys. And while I'd rather invest in local toymakers if I could, I'm happy to point grandma to lead-free toys that won't clutter up the kids' rooms so much and make strange, ghost-like noises at two in the morning when the batteries start running out.

So I'm off to brave the wilds of the childrens' rooms to discover disasters no mother should ever have to face, I'm sure. I have a feeling I may find the Krazy Glue that came up missing last week. And the two packs of cherry Kool-Aid that mysteriously disappeared. Wish me luck... I'm going in!

Thanksgiving Meme

Sandy tagged me for Thanksgiving... oh right, like I didn't have enough to do making the orange-pumpkin cheesecake, pumpkin bread, orange chocolate coconut carrot cake and the peanut butter fudge!?

Oops, I'm supposed to be thankful... right. Okay, okay. Attitude adjustment coming up!

Since she stipulated that we couldn't include our husband and kids (would I have included them? Hmmm... after Michael's tantrum this morning that I must have "done something" with the envelope he'd left on the microwave which he later found in his car... and the two littles who have torn up my perfectly clean house in just ONE day home from school... gee, I dunno!) I'll have to come up with three OTHER things to be thankful for...

1. The television broke at my in-laws. Just in time for me not to have to deal with football watchers on Thanksgiving. Woot!

2. I'm not putting up the tree the day after tomorrow, like we usually do. Why? Because a friend has offered to let us go to their Christmas tree farm and cut our own. I'll have a real tree in my livingroom, right next to the fireplace, for the first time since I was a little girl. I'm so excited!

3. Monday is the one year anniversary of Deanna's death. She was one of my best friends, and I miss her a lot, but I'm grateful I had her in my life. (Well I had to have one good, serious one ;)

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! May your day be filled with the sound of television parades, football (if you like that sort of thing) and a tremendous tryptohan-induced coma that includes unbuttoning at least the first button on your pants!

Thursday Thirteen #10: 13 Turkeys

13 Turkeys

1. Turkey (the country)

2. Wild Turkey

3. Jive Turkey
4. Golden Turkey Awards
5. Going Cold Turkey
6. Fried Turkey

7. Turkey Jerky

8. Turkey Vulture

9. Turkey Trot (Dance made popular in the 1900’s)
10. WKRP’s famous Turkey Drop (I thought turkeys could fly!)
11. Bowling Turkey: 3 strikes in a row

12. Turkey Shoot
13. And my favorite... Thanksgiving Turkey!



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Happy Thanksgiving!