Testing, Testing 123

Yay Blogger...You make me happy. I was trying to figure out how to upload videos to vimeo because I wanted to add them to my blog and someone at blogger read my mind. This is from the other week when we went to Denver and rode the little train in a circle. I wanted to put a better video on, but it keeps getting to the end of uploading it and then says there is a problem, so this will do for a test run.

no clever title.

I envy the knitting blogger who actually makes an attempt to knit. I haven't been doing much of that lately. My angels rest socks are languishing on the needles for the second month in a row. The raffle socks weren't finished in time for the raffle and they have been cast aside only 55% done. Nothing in the queue has even been cast on or looked over or thought about since the weather turned so beastly hot that I can hardly move, let alone knit. I haven;t even blogged about knitting in over a month. Then...then, I went down to Holly Berry house and picked up a pair of turbo-knits to try enticing the sleeping knitter out of me. Nothing will wake a sleeping monster like the promise knitting at mock speed on the turbo knits. I love all my turbo knits, and I wanted a pair to make baby hats. So I bought them for the greater good, otherwise, I will not get my knitting mojo back until first snow. I also pulled out the Itty Bitty Hats book. I cast on for the upside down daisy hat because I have a friend who has a little girl due in September. So, that is what I am doing, knitting. And it is good.

I also read a book. I forgot to sing the glories of HP7 over a month ago, when I walked right into Sam's and bought it with out any ado. I thought there would be fist fighting and name calling, but no, I just picked it up off a stack that was larger than a small Zigarat and brought it home and read the whole book in about a day and a half. It was good, no, great. She is an amazing storyteller, and you either love her or you could care less. You know where I stand. But the book I just finished is Life of Pi. Uhhh, this book is haunting me. The author claims that it will make you believe in God. Well, I already do believe in God, what it made me more willing to believe in is vegetarianism. It was a great story though, and even though I already picked up another book (a lighter affair by one of those British authors that everyone loves), I can't get Life of Pi out of my head....

We went to a company picnic the other day and everyone had enormous fun. The kids really loved the rides and especially the miniature golf. I enjoyed spending the day out of my house and not having to pay for all the fun that was being had. Here a few parting shots to keep the grandmother happy! Happy Monday.

outlaw mimi
B in the "race" car

Bumper boats
The little tiny train
B, Jack and I on the scrambler. ( you can't see jack, but he is squished in between B and I and he loved every second of it.)

Dear Laundry Fairy,

In the past, I have complained about you and the response has been somewhat minimal and short lived, so I will now put my complaints in writing, addressed directly to you, which my therapist has advised.

Laundry Fairy, There are ups and downs in every relationship, I know this, I'm married for heaven's sake, but lately there seem to be more downs than ups. Often, you do a great job and I may have taken that for granted. I realize that you are not in a payed position, that I am allotted one laundry fairy in my life time. According to Wikipedia, my life expectancy is about 74 years. That means that we have approximately 43 years left together, and it disconcerts me that I will have to live with your un-laundry-like behavior for all those years. We must commit to working on our problems before another 30 years go by.

I think it might be helpful to give you a few pointers that may make our laundry-marriage more satisfying:

1. It is not helpful if you repeatedly move clean folded and separated clothes from the bed (staging area) to a basket or the floor, (or open suitcase as I found it this morning). What is helpful is placing each pile into the drawer that it belongs in. That would help.

2. Taking all the clean laundry out of the dryer and throwing it anywhere with out folding it makes life harder. It is better not to move dry laundry at all, unless you can fold it and place it neatly in baskets.

3. Anything that is labeled 100% linen or Rayon or cotton that seems to fit me shouldn't ever be moved into the dryer. It shrinks and I can't wear it anymore, and it forces my husband to have to spend more money on my clothes. This is money that could be spent on fishing and eating out, if you would quit ruining my clothes.

4. Laundry baskets are for carrying clean or dirty laundry from one place to another. If your passage to anywhere in our home is obscured by a laundry basket full of clothes, it is customary for laundry fairies to pick up said basket and deposit it in the proper place.

5. If my husband is out of any piece of clothing, it is your responsibility to alert me to this. Then I can remedy the situation. If you wait until he is searching for his socks at 6:00 in the morning, it is too late.

6. If you notice that my husband is out of any piece of clothing and you are anywhere in the vicinity of a laundry device, perhaps you can place the laundry into the washer so that it will then be ready for the dryer.

7. If you move laundry from the washer into the dryer, please refer to suggestion (read RULE) #3. If you move laundry out of the dryer, please refer to suggestion (read RULE here too) #2.

Thank you Laundry Fairy, I know that if we try to work this out we will all be much happier, because anyone who lives with me knows that when I am mad at the laundry fairy, no one gets to be happy!

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.