I Believe the Children Are Our Future

I get to go see this guy tomorrow with my daughter's first grade class - wish you ALL could come with me!

What a glorious day it'll be when we all feel this way about each child!

NaBloPoMo

Oh. my. gosh.
I succumbed to peer pressure from Mrs. G and signed up to participate in NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month) - where you write a post for your blog EVERY DAY for the month of November. So here I am "cheating" already with a lame post, and it's only the first day!

I Put the S.O.S. in Bossy

HELP!!! I am in need of a massive Bossy intervention!

Because, my house is all...(trust me - this bathroom is off-white; any illusion of color is merely reflection off the floor)

And Bossy's is NOT.

The ONE spot of color in my house is the girls' bathroom, and I agonized a full six months over the soundness of painting this small inconsequential room the EXACT color the shower curtain packaging recommended!!
I figured, now that your web re-design project is over, and your daily poverty party is well underway, you might need a new project to occupy your time - and boy would this occupy some time.

I'm desperate; I'm tired of off-white; and at this point, I'm open to ANY and all suggestions, especially from people with gorgeous kitchens, warm comfy living rooms, cute bathrooms, similar child-induced-chaos issues, or even just great hair.

Just keep in mind that any color for the living room, dining room, kitchen, family room, breakfast area must match the floor - gorgeous "burnt sienna" concrete "tile".

Stuck

Well... I went and got a song stuck in my OWN head, but it seems rather appropriate (and strangely comforting), so I thought I'd share it with you. ENJOY!


[With thanks to Mary Alice for re-planting it in my head months ago.]

The Times, They Are A-Changin'

There's so much talk of change, and now even events that have us reflecting (I hope) on things we've just routinely accepted. So I thought I'd jump on this whole "change" bandwagon, embrace the spirit of the age and... get a haircut! (baby steps...)

Though my original hairstyle was highly versatile:

I'm really enjoying the new look:

What have you changed lately? (meaningful or superficial)

Yet Another Sign of the Apocolypse

Ride with me for a moment... My girls have reached a stage (12 & 9) where life revolves around the radio - just waiting for those favorite songs to play (the pop ones they play at least twice a day EVERY day). When riding around town, I usually defer to them on choice of station, but I'm not lax in my Mom duty of throwing an occasional eye-rolling, especially when the shrieky, giggley, "OMG! my favorite song!" songs come on. So we're riding home, listening to THEIR station, when I hear a few familiar notes, and loudly proclaim, "I can't believe it! They're actually playing some GOOD music for a change!!" and I crank the volume. Only...

I think I'm getting ready to hear a great song by one of my all time favorite bands, The Clash:


But what I get instead, almost immediately, another shrieky, giggley, OMG! pop song:

OOPS!!

O.K., so I did, in fact, jinx myself. The computer worked for all of ONE day, then fried again for the week. I think we may have FINALLY addressed the root cause (a dying/dead battery on the motherboard), but I am NOT gonna get too excited yet. We'll see tomorrow if we're still in business.

AAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!

Dead computer again!!
Hopefully this time it's just a software glitch.
Send good vibes my way, please.

Uuggh!!

Today I'm treating the house (most especially my bedroom) for fleas - gross.But all I kept thinking was, "At least it's not bed bugs."

Catching Up

Well, I'm back from 10 fun-filled relaxing (and, yes, hot) days with my sister and her family in Texas (post forthcoming), and catching up on email, blogs, facebook, etc... and I discover that I've been tagged with a meme by foolery. So here goes:

1. What is your favorite quotable line from a movie?
My husband and I quote movies ALOT, but the most invoked has to be: about every third line from Dumb and Dumber including (but not limited to)
"Good bye my loooooove!"
"Our pets' heads are fallin' off!"
"There's no jobs in this town."
"Hello, 'Flo'..."
"I'm gonna go with my instincts on this one."
"You're hands are freethzing!"
"I'll stay here at the bar and put out the vibe."
"So you're saying there's a chance."
"I desperately want to make love to a school boy!"
(somebody stop me!)

2. Who is the most famous person you've talked to?

Lynn Swann

He ate at a restaurant where I waitressed in Raleigh, NC. I wasn't his server, but I marched on up to his table and got his autograph for my Mom, who's a HUGE fan of his. He was immensely kind and patient with me, and a genuinely decent person - it was a great experience.

3. How many bags/boxes of potato or corn chips are consumed in your house per month?
We're also not big chips eaters, but if the question had been about mini white powdered sugar donuts...
4. What foreign food dish so you prepare from scratch and serve?
It'd be easier to count the "traditionally American" meals I prepare. I'm a BIG fan of international foods, the legacy of being vegetarian for so long.
5. What is your favorite section at the supermarket?
Produce - because it's just so dern purty.

6. What was your high school team's mascot and what were your school colors?
We were (are) the Jacksonville Eagles and our colors - blue and gold.

Have fun!!

Some close friends of mine (6, to be exact)[not pictured: the littlest-cutest one!]

have headed up north for a college tour (sound like anyone we know?)
So, I thought I'd share with them some of the highlights of Bossy's tour of New England Starbuck's colleges, just for fun. The easiest way I figured to do that was share them here, so they can read them while on the road.
Bossy shared some guidelines and then went to: GWU, Yale/Harvard, Tufts/Amherst/Williams/Cornell, NYU. Here's her summation of NY.

The Harvest

So... what do you do in a family of five when this is the sum total of the blueberry harvest from your garden?!
You hurry up and divide it before Dad gets home from work!

This Just In...

So, two weeks ago, my computer melted - actually, just one of the USB port cables did, but the whole computer "died". Luckily, one of my friends loaned me an old laptop, say "Hi!"

so I could at least get on-line to order some new computer parts and check a few blogs. But for some reason, this snarky little computer wouldn't even let me view my blog, much less post to it. I have my "new" old computer back finally, so I thought I'd catch you up on what you missed during the down time.

We were visited by royalty (happens frequently), this time by the Queen of (and I kid you not) "Chenaeiouyrda" [that's pronounced chi-na-ra, sort of]
Went to the local Rescue Squad open house and got to pretend we had broken our leg at a football game!
Got dressed up to go worship and eat a fantastic meal
at the local Hindu temple.
Celebrated a birthday - OMG Faith is 12!!(and, yes, that IS a chemistry set she's so excited to receive;
apparently my "nerd gene" is dominant - YES!!!!!)

Had a homemade brownie & lemonade stand
...and ate some profits
...and donated a snack to the renovation efforts at a
neighborhood arts camp.
FINALLY cleaned some space in the garage to unleash our creative spirit.
I missed Mrs. G's open house (boo hoo), though I did bake some bread for the event (actually cheated and bought "par-baked" bread from Whole Foods and just gave it the last 12 minutes of baking for crispiness).
Had a great time eating watermelon at the Race Unity Picnic.
Went to an AMAZING gospel choir concert and got spiritually refreshed (I'm still floating!)
Had a momenatry lapse of sanity and adopted two guinea pigs - whaaaa!!

Hope you're having a fantastic summer too!!

Oh Yeah!!

Hey Mrs. G, look what I went out and bought today!!

HELP!!!

My computer "melted" Sat. night!! I'm borrowing a friend's laptop to pay our bills and order the replacement parts for the computer - other than that, I won't be on-line much this week. I'll catch up with everyone's blogs this weekend (I hope).

Pruning

Today I earned my keep by pruning the overgrown
"bush"(?!) on the corner of our deck.

I also learned that I am, in fact, my father's daughter(pile 2 of clippings - yes, I got a little carried away;
apparently, it's genetic)

Freestylin'... R-R-R-Random

While walking the dogs the other day, I spotted this in the grass and oddly enough, my mouth started watering. No, I'm not on the "starvation diet" - it was one of those forgotten memories from my youth that suddenly came flooding back. You see, I spent some time in the Air Force after high school. Don't believe me? Oooo... scary, huh?!! (Mrs. G, I hope you managed to escape that particular haircut.) One of my favorite Air Force experiences was S.E.R.E. training, which involves:
S. = Survival (how to live off the land)
E. = Evasion (how to avoid being captured in enemy territory)
R. = Resistance (not divulging secrets when they imprison you)
E. = Escape (yeah, right)

For "Survival", we learned cool stuff like: making a tent out of your rain poncho, how to kill and eat rabbits, finding and boiling water when you have NOTHING, the amazing taste of slowly "grilled" (over a lighter or match!) crickets and grasshoppers, figuring out where the heck you are, and, the one that triggered this whole thing, how heavenly it feels to come upon a wild strawberry when you've been subsisting on crickets and grasses for a couple of days!


p.s. the span of time between the Prom photo and the knife photo -
4 months, WOW!

Rhetorical Question - Memorial Day Edition

What lengths would YOU go to
to retrieve a 35¢ balsa airplane off your sister's roof?

And how LONG would you spend contemplating it?

What Was I Thinking?!

My postings of late, while never very consistent, have been minimal at best. And it's not for lack of material to write about (sorry Foolery). I have a small notebook I keep with at least 15 good ideas of stuff (nonsense and in-depth) that I could share. But for some reason, when I sit down at the computer, all I can manage are a few quotes and photos here and there. I'm not sure if it's laziness or fear of putting myself out there or equal parts of both - whatever it is, I need to get over it quickly, because I foolishly (pun intended) promised Foolery I'd share one of these posts that I have in my head this week. So now, not only do I have to motivate myself to type/think, I have to clean my kitchen before I can even write the silly post!

p.s. Happy Earth Day!!