Jack O'lantern Time

We're a bit behind the power curve this year. The kids just got their costumes this week and I just picked some pumpkins up at the grocery store Wednesday and we carved them last night. I wanted to go to a farm and do the whole "fall thing" but time just got away from me somehow. Seems to happen more and more. sigh

But here are a few pics:

Those of you who know Robbie know that he has an aversion to touching certain things so the fact we were able to get him to scoop out some of the pumpkin "guts" was quite the accomplishment for him!

And the finished masterpieces! I tried to deter the boy from carving a big a$$ed spider but as you can see I was not successful in that endeavor! I really like the goofy face on Katie's pumpkin!

Not in Kansas anymore, Toto

We're back from our whirlwind trip back to Wichita. Today I'm working on the mountain of laundry, cleaning house and picking up the dogs from the doggy hotel. I want to be playing with our new Wii Fit that we finally found in Wichita but I'm going to get through some of the work first. Self imposed denial! If I'd done that more often I wouldn't NEED the Wii Fit!

It was great to just be with Samantha again! I know Katie and Robbie felt that too. Just hanging out with Sissy driving each other crazy! So whenever anybody back there hears Sam mentioned grad school just say "Indiana" and your check will be in the mail!

We hit Freddy's, Jimmy John's and, I should be ashamed to admit this but I'm not, I think I had a lemon-berry slush from Sonic every day we were there except the day we left! I even took a picture of the sign and one of the menu board. When I'm not feeling pressed for time I'll post a few pictures. Friday night Sam and I were with the old east crew. I laughed like I haven't laughed in such a very long time! I needed that night!

There's the condensed version of the trip, I know I'll be posting more stuff later on. Yesterday was 12 fun filled hours in the van. I don't think I slept more than 3-4 hours a night while we were there (just couldn't sleep well) and we were up early yesterday and we hit the road 5:30 am Wichita time so I spent most of the drive in an exhausted haze. Which I think in some strange way made the trip seem faster. My sense of time wasn't quite on track so that helped.

And I'll end this post with I think I have some blog-stalkers that live in my neighborhood. Which wouldn't be that bad if it wasn't probably the same people who can't seem to be bothered to talk to me at the bus stop. No idea what I did to start it all but I'm sure my "out of touch" post from last week has them buzzing again. If you don't care enough to get to know me (and I did make attempts which had me even further out of my comfort zone than the move had already place me!) then why do you care enough to search me out on the web and read what I write? No rancor intened in that statment, just an honest question. So in the interest of my children I deleted it. I don't care what people think about me, the older I get the more I don't care, but I don't want them "penalized" for it.

So now I'm off to clean my house and go pick up Miss Daisy and Miss Belle! Have a great day, y'all! And to those who will know what I'm talking about I can not get that old commercial out of my head where the kids yell "Hey Kool-aid!"

Morning conversations in my house

Now that K & R are in different schools their schedules are such that I get some alone time to gab with each one in the morning before the big yellow bus comes lumbering down the street to gobble'em up each school day. Sometimes, especially in the case of the PRETEEN (a breed all its own!), the gab sessions are full of 'tude and eye rolling and the occassional stomp stomp stomp up the stairs. Sometimes they are full of goofiness and giggling. There are those dawdling mornings where the gabbing seems to primarily consist of me saying "Have you done x, y and z yet? Well, hurry up! The bus will be here soon!" Then there are the mornings that will actually leave the child in question speechless and if you knew my children you would know how rare an occurence that is!



Yesterday morning was one of those mornings. The BOY was telling me that he had read there was a new Mario (as in Mario Brothers) game coming out and that it was the "last ever Mario game they're making". Then he says "Well Mario is OLLLLLLLLD." I looked at him and asked "So, I'M old?"

The boy: "I didn't say that!"

Me: "Well, I'm older than Mario."

The boy, chewing on his lip and looking around the room like he was trying to find an escape route marked out in neon lights, "Huh."

Gotta find the humor when you can! lol

Foilage

The pictures are from two small patches of "woods" near the house. The changing of the leaves seems to be spotty so far, meaning a couple of trees might be changing while everything else is still green or completely leafless. I just wish the pictures did the trees justice!

Irritants and joy bringers

Last night in all my gracefulness I managed to slam my arm into one side of my glasses while they were on my face and bent them out of shape. To look at them off my face they looked fine but once they were on they were definitely crooked and screwing with my vision. It's bad enough that I'm wearing progressives, have astigmatism off the charts but throw in the vision problems from the keratoconus and moving how the lenses are sitting on my face just a millimeter and we're talking major vision disruption. Everyone has something special about them, I guess crappy beyond belief vision is mine!

So add the now disrupted vision on top of an already emotional me from watching The Biggest Loser and you get a me that just needs to call it a night! I love that show but it starts trying to unearth memories and feelings I've buried over the years while I'm trying to keep them covered and I tend to get a tad shaky. Someday maybe those demons may come to full light and be dealt with but, to quote a good friend, "not today!". And a BL sidenote: There are three people on there that I do not like and want them gone! I want them all to do well and get healthier but I wish someone would throw a medicine ball at those three's heads!

So this morning after getting the kids off to school I head to the library to return a book due yesterday and then to Target for some needed items. I got to the library shortly after it opened and went to the desk to pay my fine (all of a quarter) and the woman behind the desk tells me that the first hour the library is open is a grace period so I have no fine. Well hey! A good thing to try to balance the scale against the crappy stuff!

Walking out of the library I walked through "leaf rain". I LOVE that. The colored leaves falling around you and hearing them as they scatter across the ground. It's a sound I've been missing since we don't have any big trees in our yard but I stood in the library parking lot just listening to it for a few minutes. Another drop onto the happy side of the scale!

Going into Target I remembered they had an optical center so I went in. They weren't quite open yet but the woman behind the counter listened to my story and said sure she could try to fix them for me. She managed to get them looking level on my face but they still feel "off" a tad but it's much better than it was and I can hopefully live with this until we get to KS next week and I can get my one of my former eye doctors' offices to fix them for me. She didn't charge me anything and was very sweet about the whole thing. Another drop on the happy side of the scale!

I went to CVS next to get their generic allergy meds that seem to work the best for me. I scanned my saver's card and got a coupon. Hey! It's for the exact item I came in for! They also had some bags of Halloween candy on sale plus I had coupons so I got some Snickers and M&Ms for $1 a bag after their sale price and my coupons! The neighbor across the street told me there were probably close to 200 trick or treaters last year so I've been stocking up a couple of bags at a time. And getting "good" candy for a buck a bag? Who can't be happy about that?

So I still have slightly skewed vision but it's better than last night, I didn't have to pay my whoppin' quarter fine, I got some good deals and got to hear the leaves rain!

And is there a word for "joy bringers" like there is the word "irritants"? I couldn't think of one and there should be one. Maybe it's time for me to make up another new word?!

Cardstock snob?

In an effort to try to use up my stash I started going through the paper holder with all my non-Bazzill cardstock. All those paper packs from DMD that I got half off at Hobby Lobby years ago. Can one become spoiled by cardstock? Because I was almost sneering as I felt how flimsy and oddly colored most of this stuff is. I pulled out what I need for an 8x8 album for Robbie but that was just a few primary colors (which is evidently what I used the most of before I found Bazzill because there weren't that many sheets of the colors I needed!). The rest of it is back in the paper container but in "color order" now instead of with their package buddies. I think that cardstock will be stuff that K or R can use for projects or be donated to the scout troops. Some of that stuff has to be older than Robbie is! I can't imagine using most of it myself at this point. And it's not that I have stock in Bazzill or anything but it just feels so much sturdier than the other stuff and there are so many pretty colors of it and most of them aren't the weird colors the old stuff seems to have become!

So does that make me a cardstock snob?

It's sad but there are quite a few things in my stash that I've been unearthing and thinking "WHY did I buy this?" Some of it I know I bought for a specific reason that now escapes me but other stuff I must have been heavily medicated while buying it! That's the only explanation I can come up with!

5 Guys

A public post to tell Jeanne she was right once again! (She is truly one of the wisest women I know for so many reasons!) Mark, Robbie and I went to 5 Guys for supper last night after dropping Katie off for her scouting event. Like Jeanne said, definitely not a place to go when you're thinking healthy but OMG is it good! But I've learned that the next time I'm going for the "Little Cheeseburger" instead of the regular one! I thought Robbie was going to eat up all the fries, he kept talking about how good they were as he kept shoveling them into his mouth! He even said that if 5 Guys had a play area and a "happy meal toy" that that would be his favorite place to eat. He said we should eat there every week and I told him I didn't think our arteries would like that very much!

Oh and Kel, to further the "false advertising" there were SEVEN guys working at the one we went to! LOL

My patriotic duty

This morning, only in order to do my patriotic duty and stimulate the economy, I went shopping. Hey! That's my story and I'm sticking to it! After being enabled by my eldest last night (you should ask her about the news she shared in Hobby Lobby...don't know where the girl gets it! 0:-) ) I had to go to a Hobby Lobby here and find the Core'dination Black Magic papers. It was as if Lady Liberty herself was saying "Go child, get thee to a Hobby Lobby and put money back into the economy!" (If only you could hear me humming patriotic music as I type!) AND the paper was on sale so I was doing good by my family's budget as well. Win-win for everyone! But they had some cute treble clef and music note brads that I HAD to get for all of Katie's band concert pictures! And I found Zip Dry there! I didn't know you could get Zip Dry at Hobby Lobby! I only knew of one place that I had seen it before and can't go there anymore so had no idea where I would find it but the adhesive gods shone upon me this morning and said "There it is!" (Anyone else getting worried about all the voices and personalities living inside my head?!)

Then I headed into Indy to Archiver's because last night they called me to tell me the newest Ali Edward's book had come in. They only got enough copies in to cover the requests so I had 48 hours to look at it and buy it if I wanted it. So I grabbed that and some more ribbon for a secret project I'm working on. Since I was just wandering around in there yesterday I didn't let myself look at anything else. I'm helping the economy but still have to be fiscally responsible you know since *I* won't be getting a multi billion dollar bail out!

Then I picked Mark up at work and we went to Panera for lunch where I ate healthfully! I picked the veggie soup over the broccoli cheese soup just for the health factor. And I picked an apple over chips or bread as my side to go along with my soup and Turkey Artichoke sandwich.

So I've stimulated the economy AND made smart choices. Pin a gold star on me! Now you all know these smart choices won't continue right?! 'Cause there's still the "GIMME CHOCOLATE" voice living in my head too!

Big-a**ed spider!!!

I went downstairs to the kitchen after my last posting with the dogs traisping along with me. Belle started swatting at something on the floor (as best as a dog can swat!) and then I saw IT. One humongous, big-a**ed spider! I used a word that I don't normally use and then using Samantha's spider killing techniques grabbed the Mr. Clean and sprayed him until he was stunned and then I could use a shoe (Mark's of course, not mine!) and squished him. When you can HEAR the spider go "splat" you know it's one honkin' big spider! (Insert picture of me shuddering!)

So let me share the word with the Indiana bugs and rodents like I did with the Kansas ones, "Stay outside and I'll leave you be but cross over the threshhold into my house and you MUST DIE!"