Who needs sleep? I do!

I guess I shouldn't have been ringing my own bell about posting so much last post, because I went and let a whole ten, (er eleven, almost twelve in 9 minutes) days go by with nary a word. Well, I have a good reason. I've been busy. Yeah. Busy.

We went to Durango for a five day mini-vacation and to host a family reunion. Remember? The reunion was fun and we had a pretty darn good time except that Mimi kindly shared a nasty little gastro-intestinal virus with every member of my extended family. I so wanted to blame the church nursery for this one, but alas, I think it is shopping-cart related. I seem to remember her chewing on a seat belt in a Wal-mart cart the day before we left...(go ahead, go throw-up just thinking about it, I'll wait right here. Better? Me either.) Seriously, why did God make children with mouths? We should just be able to plug them into a wall and recharge them...AI anyone?? Ok, maybe not, but still, the day I forget my shopping cart cover is the day that she rides in a cart infected with the worst strain of stomach flu known to the human race? And then mouths it!? Oh yeah, she was feeling it too, and it wasn't pretty. We all got to enjoy how poorly she felt, right before we all succumbed to it. It isn't surprising that people are so freaked out about avian bird flu, this stuff can move!

(Look how innocent and adorable she looks, who could guess that she is a carrier!?)

So, the long short of it is that while I have been home for three days, I am still only feeling about 89%, so I have nothing, nothing to report on any front. Except the insomnia front. Yep, I can;t sleep, this is night number two. I am not good with out sleep, so this must end, and end now. I suppose that if I really wanted to tire myself out, I could clean house, but then I wouldn't be able to post on my blog...priorities!

5

I must be on some kind of blog roll this week, because this is the fifth day in a row that I'm posting. It is because Rae made me an awesome schedule that gives me more time to do the things that I actually like doing...like blogging.



Yesterday, in the afternoon whilst Mimi was napping, Jack and I were hanging out in the living room. I was knitting the raffle sock and he was playing with his trains when he suddenly stopped and watched me knit for a few stitches and then told me that he could knit. "Really?", I asked and he came over and "helped" me knit a row. Then he lost interest and went back to the trains. Fast forward a few hours and I'm in the kitchen making dinner (see below) and he is again playing in the living room. Then he says "See mommy, I can knit your sock." Uh, what!? Not what a person wants to hear when they are nearly halfway through the foot of someone else's sock. I ran into the living room and he was indeed holding my sock and working the needles. Of course, he wasn't really knitting, and he had only lost a few stitches, so no harm was done. I asked him if he wanted to knit with his own needles and he was so excited. So here he is doing his best to cast on. After a while, he moved on to simply stabbing rice checks with the needle. Good boy.

I don't usually do much gourmet cooking in this house, but yesterday I made my own version of the Black and Tan soup from Lady Falconburg's in Durango. It consists of black bean soup and beer and cheese soup served together in the same bowl. I It is one of my all time favorite meals and I was really craving it, so here it is. (Sort of)We couldn't use the beer because of Jack's wheat allergy, so he got rice with his soup. He also cannot abide any type of bean, and I have long since stopped trying to make him eat them (even though they are a major staple in this house), so he just went with the beer-less cheese soup. Mimi, on the other hand, loves beans more than any other food, so she ate her weight in beans and barely touched the cheese soup. J and I both ate it all and it was darn good. Not quite as good as Falconburg's, but good anyway. The biggest challenge that I have for cooking is that I can't use wheat or corn, so it is hard to thicken stuff. I tried potato starch, and it does an ok job, but nothing really compares to the old processed, all-purpose white flour.

Anyway, you would think that after eating out of a bread bowl, there would be little clean up...not hardly. Here is what I got to do after dinner...Well, not all by myself, J helped, because he's awesome.

The Real Reason We Have Three Kids...

Turns out, the more kids you have, the more chores you can delegate to them...right now, Jackson is upstairs refinishing the hardwood.

Ant Bully?

You decide...

Since early spring, I have had ants in my kitchen. At first it was one or two here and there, then they picked up numbers, and by now, I see and remove about fifty or more ants a day. I vacuum them, I sweep them, I sprinkle cinnamon on their trail to confound them and drive them away. And it is always the same story, they are gone long enough to make me think I've won, then as soon as the vacuum is up, the broom is hung and the cinnamon is back in the cupboard, they are back. For a while, I thought that I was really making progress against them, but they had actually made progress against me. They went underground and would seemingly appear out of thin air to cart off all the crumbs that accumulate in a house with two toddlers. Normally, its not my style to wage war on anything, least of all small harmless pests, but they make me feel like my house is dirtier than it usually is (and their sheer numbers are frankly alarming me, we've all seen A Bug's Life, for heaven's sake!)) so "my live and let live" attitude changed today. They slipped up and led me to their entrance. They are amazingly smart, for something no bigger than a flea. They have devised a system of getting around the kitchen and dining room unnoticed. I had suspected they were getting in near the front door, but couldn't ever find a definitive start point to trace them back to. Today, after eating breakfast, I came down to recharge my precious, er, I mean my iPod, and when I went back to the kitchen to do dishes, I found about a hundred ants flocking to a piece of pancake with syrup on it. It was a good sized piece, otherwise, I don't think they would have been so careless to blow their cover. But blow it they did. I was patient. I waited while they loaded up their little ant jaws and made a line back to the baseboard, which has about a 2 cm gap between it and the floor, (and which is how they've been getting around by the way). It was easy then. They ran back to their entrance, I just watched the ones with pancakes, they were all going the same direction, right to the door...then, out came the vacuum, and the big guns, the caulking gun, that is. Yup, I sealed up their entry point, I even pulled back the carpet in the corner and filled the gap there. I don't want to get too haughty, but I really think that is the end of my ant problem. Time will tell.

As promised, here are some pictures of the raffle sock. Just your basic sock pattern, nothing too exciting since it is for a raffle, so I am happy enough to make them and since I have no idea who it will go to, I don't even have to put any kind of thought into them.

Sync or Swim

This whole iPod thing is pretty consuming...I spent a whole afternoon arranging playlists and downloading every last cd in our collection onto the computer today. The kids ran wild through the house while I marveled at the sheer amount of work that it took to figure it all out and get it all onto my little nano. It seems that while we were all being wooed by Bill Gates, the folks at Mac were conceiving of ways to incapacitate the entire world by making us while away hours a day downloading music. Genius, I tell you, genius! For years, I have labored under the delusion that Mac computers were made for really nerdy people who only cared about seeing things in black and white and who had freakishly small hands. (I am still not convinced that they don't all have small hands, it seems like my some-what large hands just stumble all over those keyboards.) But the scales have been removed from my eyes. Anyone who can figure out how to fit five hundred songs on a little radio the size of a matchbox car can't be bad, can they?

Anyway, I finally got all my music onto iTunes and then the ones that I wanted onto the ipod (I actually had to prioritize because I had so much music, weird, I guess all those cd's were hidden under the eleventymillion Disney movies in the entertainment center), and then I happily knit about five rows on my raffle sock. It was nice to actually have something going on in my ears while I was knitting, something other than screaming kids that is. I'll have to post some pictures tomorrow (of the sock, not the screaming kids).

Nano Nano

(Nanoo Nanoo... Love that show...)
Well, I got it, I got my ipod nano.

Now if I can figure out how the spank to take off all the songs that I didn't want on it when I plugged it in, I'll be happy...for the moment that is. Then I want a Bose SoundDock to go with it. Those ain't cheap baby, so J is going to have to tie a lot more of these to pay for it!

*^/+rant~"rave*/talkstoo^much

The older that I get, the more weird things that I worry about. Seriously, things like thyroid function, and cholesterol and retirement. Things that ten years ago were a distant, unbelievable possibility are creeping up and becoming reality. Some of the things that I've worried about in the last months: will I grow older gracefully, or will I dye, tighten and suction into my middle ages? Are those blondish highlights or is my hair turning white? Am I too old to wear shorts? Am I the "too old to wear shorts" lady? Where did all this flab under my arms come from? I thought those were up here not too long ago. Is 8:00 too early for bed? How did a hair grow that long in that spot without me noticing?...The saddest part about this all is that I'm only thirty, I know, a thousand years ago I would have been considered elderly, but still, I'm still young-ish. I guess I know why no one took me seriously when I was twenty, they were all jealous, they were all just jealous thirty-somethings realizing that they were never going to be twenty again. That is why thirty somethings make it their mission to make young people feel useless and stupid. It sure happened to me a lot. Now I know why, they're young and beautiful and they all think I'm old! Ah, irony is a cruel mistress, youth really is wasted on the young. And if I'm this cynical at thirty, I can't imagine how I'll feel at sixty.
But enough of that. I'm not that old, and most of that is just jesting anyway. Mostly...

We went to the rancho again last week, after watching fireworks in Castle Rock. I started a sock for the raffle at my family reunion on the way to NM. I can't believe how fast the straight knitting goes, that angel's rest sock will never be done. I know that now. And I went ahead and broke "rule #2". I bought a new set of #2 needles so that I didn't have to try and take angel's rest out and find my spot later. It seemed to me that when I read the comments on that post, there was a sort of frown on the purchase by my spousal unit. I was willing to overlook it and buy them anyway, that is why I called it rule #2. When I told J that I broke rule # 2, he asked me if I ate in the shower. Just a thought, but if you are planning on spending the rest of your life with someone, you might want to discuss what they think is really important. I wonder what his rule #1 is...

Ok, they have changed the format of blogger and it is beginning to annoy me. I can handle the autosave, even though it makes me look down and lose my place about once a minute because the button changes colors (those of you who don't have a blog won't know what I'm talking about, but bear with me here). Then, they moved all the icons to the other side of the screen, annoying again, but I think I'll be able to adjust. The thing that is really irking me is when I put in a link, it adds all the computer language to my text now. And I can't see what the link is until I preview it. This may seem little, but if I accidentally remove one tiny bit, the link won't link. I hate stuff like that. They also changed the spell check to turn the whole screen blue. What is going on! Why wasn't I consulted? Maybe this has something to do with it:

My blog is worth $0.00.
How much is your blog worth?

Of course, to me my blog is priceless, because it is like writing my own fan mail, but still, how can I expect the whole world to appreciate my genius...I am, after all a feeble old woman, right??

Let's not point fingers...

You Are a Pinky

You are fiercely independent, and possibly downright weird. A great communicator, you can get along with almost anyone. You are kind and sympathetic. You support all your friends - and love them for who they are. You get along well with: The Ring Finger Stay away from: The Thumb

What Finger Are You?

I'm not sure that I like being the finger that I could most easily live without...but whatever. What are you? I am afraid that J might be a thumb, but I guess I'd better find out, just so that I can justify our next big fight..."If you weren't being such a THUMB, we could work this out!"
**Posted much later** It turns out that J is a pinky too, now there is one pinky I KNOW I couldn't live without!