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Staring Martha & Common Sense with heckling by The Insecurities. We have a July 4th party every year, on or about July 4th. This year it’s the 2nd because the 4th is a Monday. Naturally Martha has delusions of grandeur. This year it will be different - 50 guests, handmade theme décor in the yard, fun theme goodie bags for the kids, a large spread of color coordinated food & drink for people to enjoy, hours of fun in the sparkling clean swimming pool and lots of different age appropriate games for everyone to play. Common Sense just shakes its head and The Insecurities are so overwhelmed with material they don’t know where to begin heckling. I mean my god Martha! I bought a $3 flag tee shirt at Wal mart to wear! What more do you want? Martha always has delusions of party grandeur & is always sadly disappointed by reality. But Martha is resilient, she never gives up home that someday I will channel the Goddess of Home - Martha Stewart herself. And when I hit the l

This is from May 2004. Havoc and his swimming puddle. He’d been wanting to play in water outside & I had been having him splashing in large plastic bins of water. But they are not built to withstand that sort of pressure, or they were actually needed to hold other stuff so as a solution it wasn’t working. DH came home from work one day and said “Look I found one of those blow up ring pools really cheap” It had no size on the bag but Havoc was only 19 months old so I figured it would be fine. We both thought probably it would be a foot deep. Yeah, no. It was about 2 feet across It was about 3 inches deep & that only because I dug out a bowl shaped area in the gravel for it to sit in. Havoc had a lot of fun with it though, using the hose to fill it up, adding bubble stuff, splashing around, scooping bubble water on his baby brother (then 4 months old) & then refilling the puddle. The following year we bought a 6 foot wide one, then in 2007 we got a 12 foot

Because I am in heavy book reading mode this month I thought I’d participate in the Teaser Tuesday meme over at MizB’s Should Be Reading . It’s a simple premise, open the book you are reading at random & share two teaser sentences, no spoilers. I’m currently re-reading yet another Regency romance, this one by modern author Stephanie Laurens (because I felt like exploring the fine line between masterful man & manipulative bastard. Seriously, at the end of this month I’ll have enough material for a master’s thesis on What Makes a Romantic Hero Romantic – Changing Perceptions Through Time. Now if I can only find the right English Lit program) This one is the 3rd in her 8 volume Bastion Club series, called A Lady of His Own. My random sentences: “She did her best to provide the right foil for Charles’ machinations; it didn’t truly matter which of them Nicholas decided to trust. If he ever did; despite Charles’ best efforts, Nicholas remained tight lipped.” pg 248

A few weeks ago I got a bit testy with some shelves in my bathroom closet. Due to the stoner builders. This weekend I tackled another bathroom issue. It seemed such a straightforward idea at the time. That is why there is no before photo. All I wanted to do was replace a cheap white plastic over the toilet shelving unit, that was collapsing under the weight of a basket of towels, with a slightly more expensive metal shelving unit. Who knew there would NEED to be a before photo?!?! How hard can it be to replace something existing with something just like it? The blog fodder potential never even crossed my mind! *sigh* I never learn. Mom, probably you should just stop reading now. Because not only am I about to share photos of my toilet with the whole of the interwebs, I am also going to share photos of the dusty, hardly ever cleaned area in the corner behind my toilet. This is the replacement shelves (bought at Wal Mart on date night Friday. Do we know how to h

apologies if you saw a couple of these earlier this week Havoc asked me to dye his hair for summer Gas prices last week. And look! A Big Gulp coming soon! Civilization comes to the boonies. Also, we are at last getting rid of our double stroller, but not before the stuffed animals got one last ride around the yard. For more Weekly Winners please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom . Thanks for stopping by!

Havoc again wanted to do something dramatic with his hair for summer. I talked him out of shaving his head except for a spiked mohawk. It grows out uneven. That’s my whole problem with it really, the uneven growing & subsequent haircuts that look weird for months. So instead he went with wild semi permanent color instead. The beauty of wild hair color is, if you get sick of it, BUUUZZZ and it’s gone. This is why Mayhem was against the idea of all over wild hair color. Mayhem LOVES his curls & refuses to get them cut. (Which is actually working out well for the tangle issue now that I have prevailed on my husband to let it grow long enough the tight curls are longer & more relaxed. DH’s issues with the long hair are solely related to the tangles & the endless whining that accompany brushing Mayhem’s hair. DH had a 17 inch long braid when he cut his long hair off in 2006) So Mayhem went with having his favorite curl dyed blue temporarily. He twirls his favor

The kids are out of school for summer. I go to the gym 3 days a week for about 50 minutes. So I have two choices, not go to the gym at all for 2 months or paying huge sums for 2 months of ‘unlimited’ childcare.  It’s not really unlimited, just 2 hours a day  but you can go every day. They did away with the ‘buy a block of childcare to use as needed’ option they had last year. Not going to the gym is not really an option. First, I have to pay membership dues whether I go or not so it’s a waste of money. Second, I like food & work out so I can eat the food I want, so it’s a waste of waist. If I pay the huge childcare fee I feel obligated to go at least 4 times a week & stay at least 90 minutes, or I am not getting my money’s worth. Knowing me this actually means I will just feel more guilty than usual as I lay in bed in the morning skipping the gym. Enter Dr Sleep with unexpected motivation. After looking over my sleep chart yesterday during our appointment she co

I’ve gotten wrapped up in books by two different authors. One is Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series, which I am busily rereading before the new one comes out tomorrow. I feel obligated to reread entire series when a new book in it comes out. This is quite an undertaking with authors like Evanovich because the new book is #17 & that does not include the 4 between the numbers books. The problem with rereading 16 books in a series in a row is that things that are only mildly annoying in a single book get quite annoying in bulk. There really is no good reason for Stephanie to end up covered in food quite so often if you ask me. It gets old fast. And that bit with the hot dog costume at the end of #15 serves no purpose at all, it’s not even that funny. Plus continuity errors are far more striking. Quick! What is the name of Morelli’s aunt? Depends on which book you read. Mostly it’s Rose, but it’s also Ruth & Rosa. What’s the name of Stephanie’s parents’ neighbor?

Mayhem was unhappy I insisted he eat some of the meal he was ‘starving’ for before letting him go play He wanted to go play with these lightsabers I had made They were very popular My latest manicure For more weekly winners please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom Thanks for stopping by!

Last Sunday DH offered to watch some friends of ours kids while the wife practiced her motorcycle skills with her husband. She’d bought DH old bike a few weeks ago & completed a motorcycle class just before that but hasn’t quite worked herself up to riding on the road yet. He took all 4 kids to lunch & the park, then she offered to take all 4 of them to the pool. What with one thing & another it was 5:30pm before they left for the pool & she said they’d stay until it closed at 8pm. That left DH and I with nearly 3 hours on alone time. Know what we did? No, sorry to disappoint. We had other things in mind. Namely jettisoning the nutritious meal we’d had planned for the whole family in favor of total junk for ourselves. Possibly, having stuffed ourselves with chips & Oreos we might have gotten to other things but instead we ended up on a 4 store quest for kettle corn that ended up in Wal Mart and naturally took nearly the whole 3 hours. Kettle corn is popcor

It was 1985, their thoughts were short & so was their hair. On the left, with the cigarette in his mouth is my husband’s best friend Max. I believe he was home from a 2 year stint in the Army & this was the summer before he started college. On the right, with the cheesy 70s porn star mustache, laughing his fool head off because they’d been smoking funny things, is, gods help me, my future husband. Who,  by the way, had gotten rid of the mustache by the time I met him 4 years after this photo. This pair of 20 year old stoners would eventually become responsible family men & contributing members of society, but at the time of this photo, you’d never guess it.

I decided to bite the bullet & try an online storage & backup plan this past week. I have 200GBs of stuff to upload.  After 5 days 16GBs have been uploaded. That means it’ll only be a mere… um…5 goes into 16 3 and some times, so 3ish GBs a day…into 200GBs…. um…let me get the calculator… 62 days give or take, and I have a 15 day free trial so… I’ll never be able to tell for free if it works. I have to pay for 2 months before I even get the darn stuff uploaded. Oh, and my ISP? has a 6BG a month up/down limit at our pricing tier (no unlimited tier at all) & you incur MASSIVE overage charges if you go over it. Which I have done already. But they are cutting me some slack on the overages charges on account of I am a MASSIVE pain in the butt about my signal strength, towers vs poles & that guy down the road who is tying up all the bandwidth downloading po.rn ( which I know because I got a new tech support guy on the phone one time & he was talking to himself

Please note the *probably*. I went from 18 photo ideas in January to 12 photo ideas by the end of May.  Theoretically I should be down to about 7 by August. But hope springs eternal! 1. My husband (yes ladies, he cooks as well as shoots over the heads of bears) 2. Havoc (helping Daddy cook) 3. Mayhem (reading while others cook, like his mom) 4 & 5 The dinos & nailpolish. Not often seen together, but I think they match wonderfully. 6. Legos 7. Myself 8. My book pile 9. The clones and 10. The cats (this is Smoke, who recently stayed away for 5 days & is now grounded & not allowed out of the house for a month) This post inspired by Shimelle’s  10 Things Blogged on the 10th for everyone in her Beyond Blogging for Scrapbookers. Please stop by shimelle.com for more posts.

School is out or about to be out all across the country & all across the blogosphere parents are posting about all the things their kids will be doing instead of sitting inside in front of the tv or computer. So I feel I ought to post something as well. Except it was 102 degrees yesterday and today it was 90 by 10am and my kids were & currently are playing Wii Lego Clone Wars and I don’t see myself encouraging that changing much. See, its hot as hell out there & if I’m not going to make *myself* go outside, I cannot morally make *them* go outside and their only other option inside, apart from the tv, is to play games that seem to involve shouting “MOM HE’S DOING X!!!” over and over. And I am against those sorts of games. Out here in the boonies we don’t have waterparks or fun indoor playgrounds where they could spend hours in wholesome physical activities. There are no local open swimming pools, just two members only pools that insist you pay 12 months a year to g

Historic peace accord signed this weekend Now I just hope the dinos can come to some sort of agreement with the bounty hunters & then the summer will be quiet. At least among the toys.

I decided it was time to finally clean out the closet in the master bathroom. After all, I have already cleaned out the oil & vinegar cupboard, the pantry, the fridge & the freezer. The junk room needs cleaned but is a multi day project. Mostly though Havoc had a wart & I knew I bought some Compound W in the past year but couldn’t find it in the closet. No clue why. The plan was to empty all the shelves, slide out the bottom one, slide in a plastic drawer unit, throw out the expired stuff & restock the drawers & the shelves. Sounds straightforward right? And in anyone else’s house probably it would have been.  But this house was built by stoners. This is the underside of one of the shelves A sliding bracket. Clever. Keeps the shelf from being accidentally bumped out of place & provides support for the whole shelf. Except… Yep. The door frame blocks the end of the shelf slide, so you cannot actually remove the shelves AT ALL. Unless