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I’ve had a hard time scrapping much since school got out, what with DH not being home much & the boys underfoot constantly & then going on vacation twice. But this week I was able to sit down and get some work done. For complete credits & more layouts please visit my gallery at SSD .

People say that when they head out on vacation. “We just want to get away from it all.” and usually they have an image like this in their mind and this Look at all the bucolic nothingness! The lack of people! The lack of cars! The lack of stuff in general! Here is the problem. Those are my views every single day All. I am already away from it. It’s reason #6 on the long list of Reasons Why Stacey Hates Camping . Not only am I even FURTHER away from it all when we go camping, I lose what little connection I have with it all because there is no internet when camping. I’m not regularly surrounded by enough all to want to give up the small amount I have of it. When I go on vacation I want to get near it all. I want lots of restaurants, shopping places and activities within 5 minutes of me. I want to be paralyzed by the overwhelming choice available to me. I accept this means crowds & traffic, but that is the price of having it all nearby. Its not a price I a

Have I shared Havoc’s latest hair cut with you?  I don’t think I have. It was all his idea. My contribution was to drive him there & pay for it. And to put it off for as long as possible Obviously we couldn’t get it done until AFTER the family photos in Wheeling. And it had to wait until after we had been to the beach because we have so very few beach photos & the scrapper in me didn’t want the hair detracting from the beach setting. He wanted an Airbender type hair cut, or a mohawk if the arrow was too difficult. Obviously, given that it isn’t a straight arrow it was sort of a challenge. He’s never watched the Avatar Airbender cartoon series. Nor has he expressed any interest in seeing the movie. He just thought the hair was cool. And I thought “Its just hair. Its the most expendable & constantly renewing part of the body.” And I thought “He’s 7. It’ll be cute. Colored mohawks are sort of a right of passage for the 6-8 year old male set locally” And I

Until they go back to school. We are nearing the proverbial wall of togetherness. The point where you have had all you can take of your loved ones, those people you wanted to spend time with at the start of this vacation, those people you now wish would go somewhere ANYWHERE for a few hours & leave you the eff alone in the glorious silence. DH took the boys into town Saturday for lunch & then met up with some friends who have a membership at the Rec Club for swimming. They were gone about 3 hours & I think that was the first time I have been childless in all of July. Usually he takes them into town most Saturdays but between our two long weekend vacations and his working 16 hour days there have not been many Saturdays available. I expect this feeling to hit towards the end of summer, the last 10 days of summer vacation usually find us all over spending time with one another & eagerly looking forward to being with other people for a change. It’s early this year a

  It’s been 95-108 here during the day. There is not enough money in the world to get me to turn my oven on. I think we have had sandwiches and raw veggies for dinner nearly every night, except when we had taquitos cooked in the microwave.     The living room is a mess. It’s always a mess. I could sweep 3x a day and there would still be stuff to sweep up. The kids are in and out of it all day long so it hardly seems worth the effort to clean it until they go back to school.       I got a Kindle for my birthday!!!! I bought Tony Bourdain’s latest book, Murder Most Royal by Jean Plaidy and Terry Pratchett’s The Last Continent. So far I have read Plaidy & am about a third of the way through Pratchett.       Actually it is a phrase – gnomic utterances. They are saying that are mysterious and often incomprehensible yet seemingly wise.  I can think of a couple people I can apply this to, we’ll have to see how the week shapes up   The last few weeks have

I missed weekly winners last week because I was at the beach with no laptop & no Nikon but I did get some decent photos with my phone and my old point & shoot. We were at  the beach around 8am so the lighting was difficult to work with   Be sure to visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom for more Weekly Winners Thanks for stopping by!

We had a great time at Rehoboth Beach & were bummed we only had 2 nights there. Next year I think we may try for 4 nights or so. A whole 6 nights might be a bit much just from a sand & sun point. My SILs rented a house a couple blocks from the beach. It was a 70 year old bungalow style house that had been updated a bit. Lovely hardwood floors everywhere. A very nice place but like nearly all house rentals you have to bring everything but plates. Sheets, towels, toilet paper, food are all on you & guess who’s husband failed to mention the sheets & towels thing until we were sitting on the front porch of the house waiting for his sisters to arrive with the key? Yeah. We brought food. I had foreseen that, but we bring food everywhere we go so it’s not really an issue. I’d wondered about the linens but since nothing had been said & nothing was on the rental website I figured sheets were provided. Apparently my SIL sent DH an email on July 7 reminding him abou

43 years ago I made my somewhat drowsy entrance into the world.  Apparently I was a ‘good baby’, meaning I slept a lot. I wish I could still sleep a lot. For my birthday I want my insomnia to go away & never ever come back. Since that will never happen, in lieu of that I will take a Kindle. Since that will never happen either, I’ll take stuffing myself with sushi. But that may not happen either for financial reasons so how about 3 hours alone with a book? Anyone? I did get a rather nice present yesterday & wasn’t even aware of it until DH told me about it. Apparently, this really good looking, really buff lifeguard was checking me out big time while we packing up to leave the beach. DH said he first though the guy was just looking around & stopped on us because we’re by his chair & we’re packing up but the longer he watched the more apparent it became that the man was eyeing me up appreciatively. So I feel all sexy now that some 20 year old guy thought

We’re headed for our second mini vacation this weekend! We’re going to the beach. We’ve never been to the beach. Not ‘to the beach’ as the destination. My folks live a few miles from the beach in FL & every couple of years we manage to actually sit on sand and get in waves for a couple hours during our visit. But we’ve never gone anywhere where the beach is the whole point of going. We’re not beach people you see. I can certainly see the attraction of a beach if you are a beach type person – sun, sand, surf. But I need shade & sand gets everywhere (and when you are a girl, everywhere is just that, EVERYWHERE. Getting sand out of your everywhere is a PITA). That doesn’t mean I am anti-beach, just that it would never occur to me to arrange a vacation there. A few days at a beach (with lots of SPF) is a nice change. It is one of my SIL’s 50th birthday this month & to celebrate she rented a house for a week and invited all her siblings & their families to visit. Las

The fun thing about Google maps, or the really freaking annoying thing about Google maps, depending on how you look at it, is they never seem to send us the same way twice. I make the drive from our house to my hometown once a year. I’ve been making it since 1992, and from this area specifically since 1996. So I know how to get to Wheeling. I66,to I81, to I68, to I79, to I70, with a few assorted cut offs here & there to shave a little time off the trip. It takes 5.5 to 6 hours depending on tractors, coal trucks and general traffic conditions. But my new phone has Google maps supported navigation & just because I could I put in my start & end point & asked it to tell me how to get there. It cut out 3 of the interstates and had us on US40 for most of the drive. Before there were interstates there was US40. Interstates were built to remove most of the traffic from the often 2 lane road that winds through the mountains and a bunch of tiny towns, which saves trav

We’re visiting my hometown for a few days. It’s my parents 45th wedding anniversary this week and as a present my brother & I are getting them a giant portrait of our entire family – all 11 people. So we spent a couple hours up at Oglebay getting group and individual family photos taken. While my brother’s family was getting theirs done the rest of us passed around my camera. I took this one DH took this one Havoc took this one Mayhem took this one (we’re all worried he’ll drop the camera) My sons & their cousins, waiting for the grown ups to sort out where the next group photo would be. oh, over there Then we went to their house to swim My parents Everyone slept soundly that night For more Weekly Winners please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom . Thanks for stopping by!

One of the reasons I am no fan of travel is that I have bad hotel karma. I always end up with the room by the ice & vending machines, or the elevators, or the side entrance from the parking lot, or with a bed that as a huge dip in the middle, or the a/c that sounds like a freight train charging through the room whenever it kicks on, or with the neighbors who watch TV loudly until 3 am, or end up on a fold out couch bed with a mattress that is mere millimeters thick over hard metal bars. Hotel pillows are terrible, soft, flat things & I hate them. They are too flat to lay on one pillow but piling two of them makes the pillow too high. So I have to travel with my own pillow. Plus I travel with children who wake at the crack of dawn. When I was a child I traveled with adults who woke at the crack of dawn. Does no one I am related to by blood understand that humans are meant to stay in bed until at least 7am, 8am preferably? Oh. And I have insomnia, which makes sleep unde

I left my home town at 18 for college. I left the whole state at 25 for a job. That was 18 years ago My parents forget sometimes just how long it has been since I spent more than a week in Wheeling . Sure, once upon a time I was not only able to follow directions that included landmarks that hadn’t existed since 1973 but often used those landmarks myself when giving others directions. But I mostly left in 1985 & really left in 1992. Things have been built since I left. Some of those things have also ceased to exist. Some of them I have never seen even though they still exist. Some of them had the same name as other things that used to exist in a different location. “Down by the old Reisbecks building” Possibly this refers to the office/department store one down town but that is usually followed by “You remember, where Mr Dale had his office.” So maybe it refers to the short lived grocery store of the same name, which I think is in a different part of town, but I can

Ear infection Iffy internet connection. Pool that needs to be scrubbed before being refilled Packing before a trip Tracking down people I need to call Errands that need to be run before we leave Chores that need completed Three new books arriving today DH once again working until 10pm Wordy, interesting blog posts are unlikely this week.   I tried to do this as haikus for some reason or other. Like a part of my high school brain suddenly reemerged from Sister Joan’s English class and panicked – Must write haiku assignment!!! Because I cannot think of a single reason why my current brain would think haiku writing was a good idea. I can’t write a haiku to save my life. I considered breaking up those sentences and calling it free verse Pool, that needs scrubbed before refilling. Because that is as close as I get to poetry, but I figured that would just look confusing. The heat must be affecting my brain for me to be thinking about poetry. Even in th

We have nectarines blossoming Flowers Fixing a flat And Batman visited For more weekly winners please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom . Thanks for stopping by!