Monday Menu

another week, another menu.

Monday: pot roast
Tuesday: chicken with cream pan sauce
Wednesday: Spagetti
Thursday: BBQ beef sandwiches and potato salad
Friday: ??? (I'm hoping to squeeze in a date with my sweetie)

Saturday morning I leave for a vacation with my sisters. Steve and the kids stay here. I'm really looking forward to the trip. This is the first time my sisters and I have done a get a way like this and I don't see when we will do it again. This one will involve a day trip to the OR. coast as well.

The Best Kind of Hand-me-downs

This yellow dress is my yellow dress. My mother made it for me when I was a toddler. The flowers around the bottom are all hand cross stitched. (you can tell I was born in the 70's can't you?)

Libby is the fourth little girl to wear this dress. I have pictures of Sarah and Marilla in it also. Somewhere there is a picture of me in it as well. I love that connection.

Catching Up

So, yeah. I haven't written in a while. Life got kind of busy. Steve was gone to a conference for three days and it just so happened to be three days that got very busy for me. Before that we were working on the house and buying cars.

Plural. We bought two. I now drive every day a beautiful 2005 Grand Caravan. Navy Blue. it was a good deal, so we splurged a bit. Steve drives a 2001 Buick Regal. Grandpa Brown. Yes, I tease him about driving a grandpa car. We were looking for a compact that got great gas milage when we found that one. It actually gets 30mpg, so it's respectable and better than the van he was driving.

I was going to post pictures of the new van, but I haven't taken any yet. I'm quite proud of it though. It's so nice to drive in a pretty car every day rather than a beater. The car I had been driving around was a 1990 caravan (no grand) in gun metal gray peeling paint that had be spray painted to keep the rust off. The paint didn't quite match. It was paid for, however, and that counts for a lot in this house.

In other news, I've been crafty. I finally finished Rilla's stocking:

If you click on the picture, you should get a big version that will let you see details. This silly thing took hours, and let me tell you, by the end I was done, done, done. I'm beginning to think that cross stitch stockings are my own personal form of self torture.

So of course I needed to do something just for fun:

This is a placemat purse, and yes, that means it was made with a placemat. I added ribbon (that does match in real life) and seed beads. The Seed beads and the beaded handle I bought already strung together so don't go getting too impressed. ;) It only took a couple of hours to put it together including the hand sewing of the seed beads onto the purse. I have another one I'm going to work on this afternoon. These suckers are fun. I may have to set up an Etsy shop to sell them just so I have an excuse to make them.

Little Blue Box

This little blue box:

see that messy desk underneath it? that's proof that it's mine. UPS dropped it off for me yesterday afternoon and it sat there posed and pretty all afternoon. I did get that little giddy feeling seeing a blue box in my house.

Steve saved for nearly two months to buy this for me. He saw it at Christmas time when finances were getting tight. Oh, you want to know what was in it? Just this:

Pretty huh? It looks even better on. It's from Tiffany's Frank Gehry collection. Steve knows I love Gehry's architecture. He says it's to represent all the things he knows I dream about and that he would love to get for me but can't right now.

I love my husband. He did good.

Summer Vacation

we figured out our summer vacation plans this morning. Yes, those plans were made because of the Harry Potter book 7 release announcement. My oldest sister is even more into HP than I am (shocking I know) and we made plans with the last book that we would go to the last party together. I'm so excited! We'll go early in the week and have fun putzing around the porland/vancouver area, seeing the zoo and Omsi and finish up with the HP party.

So if you are going to be at Powell's bookstore in Portland, OR for the release party, say hi. ;)

Artists in Residance

Libby draws people now:

all over on every piece of paper she can find. big blob. two arms. two eyes. varrying numbers of legs. So close, yet so far.

Rilla took up taping "decorations" around the house, colored and cut out pieces of paper in random places. Steve gave her a notebook and told her it was her "art book." Rilla has now taken up collage art and my walls are safe. She likes to tape in found objects, aka candy wrappers and stray pieces of paper. It still surprises me to think of Rilla as inheriting my crafty/creative side. I don't know why. I just didn't think of her as the one who would. I'm changing my perceptions though so as not to add to her therapy fodder further.

We would all like to think ourselves unique

But unfortuantly, statistics have shown that our name isn't. I've been faced with that reality since a small child. It's sort of a joke to me actually. Now I can make my total genericness completely official:

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 4,201 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

My only comfort is that Steve is one of 7,284 and is therefore even more generic than I am.

Although, I'm starting to wonder if giving my youngest a name shared by over one million other women was a good idea.

Grapes

I have grape juice in my house. Lots of it. 20 quarts. I processed 7 quarts of juice. I also bought six boxes of pectin to make jelly. I've never made grape jelly or cooked jelly of any kind, so I'm a bit nervous. It should be interesting to say the least. I always put off my Holly Homemaker stuff to late and the stores are sold out of canning lids. I have to hunt some down today.

Write More Please

When I write I say things I don't say outloud. These conversations I have with my blog are not conversations I usually have with anyone else, so I guess you could say you can see in my head a bit when you read these entries. I don't very often have anything intresting to say. I'm not funny or terribly clever and I definitely won't ever get the views that Finslippy gets (google her. she's good).

But I'm not doing this for the views.

It's like thinking outloud. You know, how when you are shopping in the grocery store and you are standing there looking at the soups and the woman next to you starts talking. "ok. so where did they hide the cream of mushrooms . . . not there . . . I hate it when they move stuff around . . . ok . . . found it . . . man, prices are going up . . . now I need . . . rice . . . ." and then she wanders off pushing her cart and you look to see if her clothes all match and that she's not sporting a Blanche DuBois-like vague look, following behind to be sure she doesn't say something about depending on the kindness of strangers. Yeah. That was probably me.

And that's what I find facinating about blogs, not the whole crazy woman at Walmart thing, but the thinking outloud thing. Blogging weakens that filter we have on our brains, the one that keeps things in that should be said. Which is how I'm managing to get the point of my entry here. All this is to say: Steve, please write in yours more. I love reading your thinking.

If you haven't read his blog, the link is to the right. He says things in ways I never would have thought to say them. He also says things that we never say face to face, even though we often stay up an extra hour just talking after we've turned out the light at night. There are things that are easier to type to a blank page than say outloud, so that's how we say them. But these are things I want to know. So blog, would ya?

Oh and it's good writing practice, Mr. Songwriter. ;)

You Know You are a SAHM When:

-You can recognize a new episode of Barney after 15 seconds.

-Nap time is a ritual that must not be interfered with for any reason.

-Library reading hour is your big outing for the week.

-Walmart with kids is considered "fun."

The Dangers of Trying to Be Too Cute

Sarah and I bought the same shoe style at the beginning of the year. We wear different sizes, but they look alike.

This morning she left the house in my shoes.

You would think she would have noticed that they were three sizes too big.

No Labor Day Plans Here

Steve is a Physical Therapist Assistant at a nursing home. Ooops. sorry, long term care center. This means almost all his patients are quite old. It also means he's never guaranteed a holiday off. Since none of his patients are actually going anywhere, you would think that a break of one day from thearpy wouldn't be a big deal, but Medicare doesn't seem to think so. It is written to not allow holidays.

And all that means in my life is we spend about two weeks before the monday holidays reminding family and friends that Steve will be working that day. Now ask me if it's fun to have your husband work on Christmas. Luckily they arrange things so he only works a couple of hours every three years. Which makes me luckier than the average policeman's wife. Oh and my husband has no chance of getting shot at, so there's that too.

See how easy it is to think positively?

stealing my brother's story

but he doesn't have a blog, so I hope he forgives me. He did tell it better than I will.

My brother is on the fire department for a very small town. It's all volunteer except for the fire chief. So he's sitting home yesterday morning with his call radio on and it starts crackling.

"dispatch, we have a potential dynamite threat at a yard sale."

long pause.

"call the fire department!" They did and my brother was called out along with rural fire and every fire department for sixty miles around and two bomb threat units from larger cities.
so yeah. there was dynamite at a yard sale. Two and a half sticks. Over sixty years old. Apparently this makes dynamite very unstable. So does the completely corroded metal between the blasting caps and the nitro.

So the fire department shows up and they start trying to evacuate people and no one wants to leave. The police department had to threaten them with jail to get them to get out of their houses and get out of the area already. There were fire fighters and bomb sniffing dogs all over the place. The big city sent a news crew who filmed as long as they could before they had to go to make the five o'clock news. (it's five o'clock news here on Sunday.)

The dynamite was brought to the yard sale by a family that lives several miles out of town. They decided to participate in a multifamily sale so they had gone out to the barn, loaded up all the old stuff, and brought it in to town packed in the back of a pick up. It was hidden in a Korean War era back pack and they had no idea it was even there.

So they finally get the civilians cleared out enough to do something. My brother made a sled out of plywood for the dynamite to be pulled to the middle of the street on. Apparently, you don't want to carry around unstable dynamite close to your body. huh. who'd of thunk?

They separated the blasting caps from the sticks and proceeded to make a nitro bonfire. My learning something new yesterday was discovering you can burn nitro glycerin without it exploding. The blasting caps were set in a sandbag bunker (just a small thing) and set off with plastic explosives. Just a little bit. The bomb squad was explaining how they were going to do it and said the sand should absorb most of the explosion. It shouldn't been too big anyway. So he suits up in his hazmat suit and carefully carries the blasting caps in front of him at arms length, slowly scooting forward a bit at a time. He places the caps, gives them wide berth and sets them off.

BOOM! huge explosion. Sand blasts straight up thirty feet. Everyone is looking just a bit dazed and the hazmat guy says "that was a bit bigger than I expected."

So ended the Big Event of the Year for my hometown. It will be a story for everyone for a long time. You might hear it in person sometime, after all, who can resist telling about the time there was dynamite sold at a yard sale.

Dream Dating

A: I had a dream last night that Johnny Depp propositioned me and I turned him down. Aren't you impressed by my faithfulness?

S: that depends. Which Johnny? Pirate's Johnny? Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Johnny?

A: Peter Pan Johnny.

S: ooooh. well then I am impressed.

Summer Hits

and I mean that quite literally. Summer always hits me between the eyes. I don't see it coming. I'm happily enjoying the beauty of late spring, the flowers, the weather, the bird song, and then BOOM! it's the last week of May and my peace is at an end.

Summer is in full swing in Bedlam. We have been doing baseball/softball/t-ball (which I always call baseball and woe betide the nitpicky child who knows what I mean and still chooses to correct me when everyone is yelling and three people need to be in three different places involving a sport of some kind at the same time.) We have a few weeks left of _____ball. The kids are enjoying it but then we don't take sports seriously around here.

We also have a pool pass. I'm still using it in the mornings, but there are times when I think life would have been easier if we had bought an individual pass instead of a family pass. This moring we went to swim lessons, then to lunch at the park and then back to the pool for free swim. By the time we were done I was done. I'm almost ready to start ingesting caffine just to get me through the summer.

So does Mountain Dew taste as bad as cola? ;)

Musings while folding laundry

Wanna know my favorite thing about summer?

Sandals.

I hate folding socks.

The singing starts early

Libby has started singing. Her favorite song is Bob the Builder. You can't recognize more than two words in the entire song, but she's got the tune down pat. If I knew how to embed sound files I would do that for you all. Everyone needs to have their heart melt a bit once a day.

Why Every Woman In the World Needs a Digital Camera

this, my friends, is worth the price of the digital camera:



this is also why men who's wives have blogs, should really refrain from wearing their daughter's birthday tiara.

(oh, the chicken suit was for a Cub Scout den meeting.)

Fashionista Wanna-bes

Knee high boots were so cool when I was a teen. They were also expensive and I was expected to buy all my own shoes. I never had a pair. I think I was a bit scared of them. They were the ultimate cool person shoe. They had to be worn with just the right outfit or you looked like an idiot. I still wanted them, I was just too chicken to do it.

So last fall, Steve and I were at Wally's and they had a pair of knee high boots in the perfect color and just my size (which is rare at discount places because I wear a wide.) I did not want this latest reincarnation of the fashion to pass me by. I love them. I wear them quite a bit. A couple of weeks ago when I was wearing them Sarah asked if she could have a pair like mine.

Of course!

So Saturday when we were at Wally's buying her jeans, we found boots on clearance in her size. And wouldn't you know it, they had them in Rilla's size too.

Don't we look cute?

Gotta Love Costco

We're standing in the baking aisle at Costco discussing which bag of chocolate chips to buy, the 3lb bag or the 10lb bag. I reached for the 10lb bag.

"Are you sure . . . " and Steve trailes off.

"You weren't about to ask me if I was sure if I could use 10lbs of chocolate chips were you?" I respond incredulously.

That's just a silly question. Any woman who can write a five paragraph essay on cookie baking can most definitely use 10lbs of chocolate chips. I thought he knew me better than that.