Sorry I've been MIA lately. My in-laws are here from Michigan so we've been spending all day with them and then I drug myself up so I can sleep with this dang hand-ache at night, so I'm not spending much time with the laptop these past few days. We're pretty much joined at the hip, so I hope I didn't hurt it's feelings...
Last weekend, Secret Agent Man and I went for a drive in the Country. We like to do that as much as we can. We are always hoping we find that perfect parcel for real cheap, I think. Mostly we just like to drive, listen to the iPod and chat about the random crap that pops into our heads.
This time we went south and west of town a little. We thought we'd drive maybe an hour but ended up driving around for about 2 and 1/2! We remembered to bring the camera this time, and I have been playing around with some of the pictures we took. I wish that we had a better camera, which we will soon, but there were 3 hawks playing around that I would have loved to get pictures of. By the time I got my little point-and-shoot out and aimed at the birdies, one had flown away. I got a couple shots of the 2 left, but I just couldn't zoom in enough. Oh well. Maybe next time! :)
Anyway, here's a couple I've done some Photoshop Actions on.
We had an awful winter here.
Secret Agent Man would disagree, but he's crazy. He loves snow. Deep snow. I don't know why, we don't ski. Or ice skate. Or luge. We don't even really get out in it at all, unless we have to. But he likes it. And he likes to shovel the driveway. (I know, the man is crazy!)
Anyway, we had more snow here than I care to ever have again. We had Record Snow. It was even in the news! At one point I think we had 4 ft of snow on the ground. We left on vacation before it started snowing in December and when we got back 5 days later we had 3 ft of the crap in the driveway. Our neighbors were beginning to think they needed to call the cops because our driveway still was not shoveled.(Seriously. We had messages on our answering machine and everything, because usually our driveway is the first one shoveled on the street. Did I mention that crazy guy S.A.M. loves to shovel the driveway?)
After we got home we got more snow! In the middle of all of that, the 911 center (where I work) lost power and our computers AND phones bit it, so we had to drive to our "backup" center. (Do you know not all 911 centers have backup? How crazy is that? What the heck do they do when stuff goes south, which with computers happens a LOT?!? "Thank you for calling 911. Please solve your emergency on your own since our phones are not working right now and we don't know when they will be working again for the foreseeable future. If you are fighting, stop it right now and go to your rooms! If you are bleeding, put a band aid on it and please try your call again." Whatever.) Our backup center is about a half hour north of our usual base of operations, but in 4 feet of snow is about an hour and a half away! And in the dark. In a blizzard! It was fun. (Anybody know the HTML for sarcasm?)
Mostly I got really tired of the gray. Everything was gray. The sky. The trees. The streets. The yard. This was my yard at one point:
This was my yard at another (towards the end of winter):
This is my yard now:
I would trade 4 feet of irises for 4 feet of snow any day!
p.s. Anyone want an iris? Seriously, they are 4 feet tall and taking over my yard!
I have no kids.Which suits me fine, although our folks may disagree...I do enjoy, however, tales of my brother's kids.
This brother shall be referred to as Bro #2 (he is the younger of my two brothers).He has 3 kids, Zeke, Evelyn and Finn.
Zeke and Evelyn are quite the little characters. I'm sure Finn will be also, but as of yet he is not talking much.
My folks (or Grandma and Grandpa, for the purposes of this post) are visiting this weekend. This little anecdote comes to me via my mom (Grandma). This will show you how funny these kids are.First let me preface by saying my brother and his wife are pretty straightforward with their kids. They don't talk baby talk to them and pretty much tell them the way it is.For instance, when Zeke was -oh - about 3 or maybe just 4 years old, he told my mom that she was a girl because she had a 'gina, and boys don't have 'gina's, they have a penis.Ha! I can only imagine my mom about had a stroke!And when Zeke's momma was preggers for the 2nd time he pretty much knew all about it except for one thing that confused him, which was why couldn't his mom have a dinosaur? He finally figured he could settle for a little sister.
Any-who, apparently yesterday when the grandparents were visiting, Evelyn was playing with her baby doll. She decided that the baby was hungry so she went to get the doll and "give her the boob". (This is what Bro #2 and my sister in law says when their real baby is hungry - that he wants "the boob.")She then proceeded to lift her shirt and pretend to nurse. At some point she must have decided that wasn't working because she told Grandma she didn't have enough boob and could Grandma try? My mom, being pretty game for a grandma, obliged by then pretending to nurse the baby doll.At this point, Zeke came along and saw what was going on and gave Grandma a funny look and said, "Grandma...can old girls nurse babies?"I'm pretty sure my mom just about lost it before she told him that yes, sometimes they can.Kids!
I often wonder at these so-called "reality" shows, very few of which I will watch, with the exception of The Amazing Race from time to time. Hubs and I keep saying we could do that if we could lose 50 lbs and manage the time off from work...which all comes down to a big "yah, right." Oh well, we can dream.Anyway, usually I think that the shows are heavily edited to make people look their worst. And/or the people have been told to be on their worst behavior, to scream and yell and throw things at every possible opportunity. Or cry. Or get drunk. Or whatever.So I don't really watch reality shows. (Um. Except "Rock of Love" sometimes, guilty pleasure kind of thing, because I just can't believe that a bunch of women can/would act that way on TV! Must be all the silicone leaking into their brains. But I gotta tell ya, even if I was a siliconed hoochey mama, I wouldn't go anywhere near Brett Michaels after seeing him with these skanks! )A-N-Y-W-A-Y...back to my original track here.I found out a dear old friend of mine from high school was on Wife Swap this past Friday. I had to work so I recorded it and watched it last night with the Hubs.I thought it was more odd than anything. One woman was portrayed as being a total flake, the other as a total control freak. But if you watch carefully you will see that Flake has a heart the size of Texas and made some really good points to the kids and dad of the other family and was really trying to make them see that they needed to spend more time on the kids and not just money.
And Control Freak has a really good sense of humor she may not show very often - I mean, this martial arts mom dressed up in, basically, drag to go sing to a bunch of old people and was laughing about it. Plus she seemed genuinely concerned about them being so far in debt. I feel bad that both families were portrayed so negatively. It's gotta hurt. They are obviously from very different worlds, but there was really nothing inherently wrong with either of them. I wouldn't choose to live like either one of them, but that's just not my "reality". Anyway, I hope they both managed to take away something constructive. I hope Jackie learns to keep her house clean and I hope that Myra learns to relax a little with her kids. I suspect, however, that for it do any real good, they would have to spend no less than 6 months in each others houses. But it sounds like maybe Phil now has a job (good) and Charles finally got to spend a little quality time with his kids for a change (even better). And the Pirate party was really cool.This picture has nothin' to do with nothin' but I like it. Dad took it at the beach by their house in December when the tide was high. Of course, I had to go and mess with it... :)
