What Not to Write

So I haven't posted in three days. My goal is to post every day. I run through uninspired times.

I've been quite a scatterbrain lately. Yesterday, I put Nathan's coffee in the fridge. I also forgot to put my bread dough in the oven and the loaves fell. Last night I forgot to do some image editing for Mom, even though all evening I was practically looking right at the note I wrote to remind myself. And now, I can't seem to think of anything to post except to tell you that we're having some fantastic fall weather after a couple weeks of icy coldness. But if you wanted to hear about that, you'd check AccuWeather.

I won't bother to tell you about my last minute efforts to defrost a very frozen turkey for a Harvest/Reformation potluck dinner at church. How often are you supposed to change the water? Every three days? Yeah, that's what I thought.

I won't write about how my upstairs storage room still looks like a bomb went off in there, and then try to convice you that it's progress. I wrote about that before.

I won't tell you that I'm posting right now when I should be making supper. I also won't tell you it's 6:00 and I don't even know what supper is.

I can't post pictures of Jonah's Halloween costume like every other Mommy-blogger is posting today, because, well, Jonah doesn't have one. So that makes for boring blogging for sure. (Note to self: Next year come up with Reformation Day costume so we can have fun, too.) Maybe we'll pop some popcorn and watch the Luther movie.

I don't think I can stand to write about the three large, adorable puppies that someone dumped off near out house, causing me to have to call animal control and keep my chickens locked up all day yesterday. They were awfully cute and I reeeeeeally wanted to keep one... Here's hoping they all get adopted.

I really shouldn't rant about how much I hate seeing the stooopid (and money wasting) Halloween "decorations" in people's yards. Ick. Why is this misused "holiday" so popular?

Also, I won't rant about how sick I am of PEOPLE HANDING MY THREE-YEAR OLD CANDY. Why do Americans structure their holidays around legal adictive poisons? Don't answer that, I already know.

So instead, I'll post a picture of Jonah on his mountain:




Okay, maybe two:




And I'll head off to whip up some Spaghetti Carbonara.

None Sense

Jonah: "I say 'hi' to pilots! And to Loretta. I just say 'hi!' and 'hi, Pilot!' And that's for 'ding, dong! ding, dong! For belling at church. And bells say 'doooong'."

Me: "Bells ring. Ring the bell!"

J: "No... There aren't any rings! Just bells! They don't ring. Bells are for belling way up high in the church. But only mermaids. Mermaids bell. Oh, yeah.... yeah, they ring. Mermaids ring. And they have burps! In their mouth, they have burps."

Me: "Mermaids do?"

J: "Yeah. And nice water. And I'm a f-f-f-fuss pot. A pus fo... no, a fup- fffffuss pot. No, no, YOU are a fffffuss fot... ffffuss pot. And I am the owner. Can you do some things? But maybe later. When it's morning, I will tell you questions. It's on Saturday. And when I was a monkey, I climbed waaaay up up up high."




Come again?

Embarrassing to the Point of Distraction

I honestly don't know what to say about this, and I almost can't even stand to post this, but I'm going to forge ahead for the sake of... humor. And embarrassment. And all other honorable subjects.

Deep breath.

I'm still working away at cleaning out the Crap That's Stored in Boxes Upstairs. My experience yesterday (I feel so freeeee!) along with archive trolling over at Unclutterer has empowered me to forge ahead with the sorting and disposing of extraneous memorabilia. I want it under control! I had completely forgotten about most of the stuff in those boxes. I'm not getting rid of everything, just the calendars that I apparently saved from every year since I was six (I plead insanity) and the fair books from every year since I started 4-H (ditto) and the name tags from every year at camp and every birthday card ever along with all sorts of other various paper crap. I can't believe I was such a packrat. But once in a while, I find a real gem in there. Something that brings back hilarious memories of my happy and very dorky childhood. Along with old diaries and attempts at poetry (which make me laugh at my silliness... but who knows? Maybe I'll look back at this blog in twenty years and feel the same way...) -- I found these pictures, in frames.

These pictures made me squeal. I just had to share them.





Oh my...

I'm the one in the red dress. Three of my brothers are in there, too-- Kris is the one with the big beard, Neal has the mustache and Seth with the tongue sticking out.

Weren't we cute?

Or something.

(Aside-- There are all kinds of things I could say about this, but I'll just let the photos stand as they are. The gist of it is that our tiny little parochial school (which I often didn't like so well, but now I think was awesome-- funny how things change, no?) put on a short play at the end of each year for a few years. They were very amateur in the realm of school plays, but we worked hard and had SO MUCH FUN!)

Then there's the creme de la creme, the zenith of zany...




Um.

Ack!

I do have to say-- Our costumes were awesome. Also--notice my cute little sister (bottom, center). Is she not adorable? She was so cute I could eat her.

But... but. Loraine and me... with all our teenage weirdness and feme fatale poses. Aiee.

Yeah.

My chunky glasses are very chic and really complete the look, wouldn't you say?

E-hem. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

I Think the County Fair Just Threw Up on My Livingroom Rug

And it's really kind of disgusting.

For real.

I got back into my decluttering project that I wrote about before and have worked at on and off since. I'm taking a dear friend's advice in my method of tackling a very... erm... delicate portion of this job.

My childhood 4-H awards.



I've tried ignoring them... they don't go away. They don't take up any less space. And they just don't shut up about my competitive strains.

But I was saving them for posterity, right? Nathan said, "Well, would you want to paw through and deal with all this stuff if it were your Mom's?" Mmm... nah. But maybe my Grandma's! It would be Cool Old History Stuff then. "So you're gonna save them until you die?" he reasonably asked. Right. Point taken.

And anyway, look... I am showing it to posterity.




And that little Posterity is having a blast playing with all that stuff. He's currently wrapping the "aminals" in "blankets" and putting them to sleep.

He pointed to this stick in this Handsome Gold-colored Plastic Showman's hand and said, "That thing right there is a Killer. For killing."



Oookay. Moving on.

He made the chickens and rabbits talk.



He called the goat a "sheep". And asked about her "milking things."


He's been rearranging them and playing imaginative things with them all afternoon.

I Googled around for a while, trying to find a use for these paraphernalia. Among the ideas I came across were "make Christmas tree ornamets" (ooooh... classy. We can pretend the little men with sticks are shepherds...) and "make a ribbon quilt" (and then...??? Put it on my bed?).Nothing reasonable has presented itself.

So after I got up the guts and carried it all downstairs laid it all out and gagged just a little, I began following my friend's advice. She advised me to "Take a picture!"

And then... throw it away.

The venerable Posterity will have a record, and I will have some space back.

This (and another like it) are probably the only things I will keep:




Are you ready to see the most disgusting photo?

Brace yourself.

It's... well... intense.









Aiee. Now I'll just take a couple shots of whatever hard liquor is sitting in my pantry... and grab a black (extra large) trash bag.

Break Dancing

This is the funny little dance that Jonah does every time the word "no" exits my lips. Every. Time. How can something so funny be so exasperating?

Well, It's Surely No Secret

This short (tall?) post is quite pithy in it's brevity and levity. (huh?) The division of humanity, summed up by three-year-olds.

(Mary P. writes one of my favorite blogs. She runs a small daycare and blogs about it and I love her childcare philosophy (and accompanying sense of humor).)

Horse Power

I have to be discreet taking pictures of our Amish neighbors. I always wish I could take more, but they don't appreciate it very much, so I only take pictures from a distance or from behind. This morning, Nathan was getting some help with grading our driveway after the new ditches and culverts have been installed. The road commission dumped gravel and kinda flattened it out a little, but it was pretty rough. When heavy equipment fails, try horses!

Bright Lights

For the last couple of years, I've grown Swiss Chard in my garden. It's easy, prolific, and it doesn't bolt as soon as the days start getting warm enough to enjoy like spinach and lettuce tend to. The taste is tender and delicious, with a mild beet-green flavor. If given enough space to grow, it gets gigantic-- dinosaur food.

I use the leaves in salads as well as adding them into soups and sauces and well, just about everything. We're aren't really "pile of steamed greens" type of people, but they're delicious that way, too, especially with a cream sauce.

This year, I tried a new variety, "Bright Lights". There is ever color under the sun in this mix! It's just gorgeous! I went out a picked a bunch of it to freeze for winter time. I just can't get over the riot of color on my countertop!

I can't help but share some pictures, even though they don't do the color justice. It sort of makes me wish for a good camera to properly capture the colors. (Actually, I really should get out my paints...) Here I've done my best with my point-n-shoot and Gimp:

From the Past

Jonah has developed a habit of pulling my photo albums off the shelf and pouring over them for hours. Once in a great while, he's unbelievably easy to entertain...

So he gets these out and turns pages, looking at all the people. I remind him occasionally to be careful with the pages. In the recent ones, he recognizes people, and in the older ones, he's completely unwilling to believe that the baby-faced guy with no beard is his Daddy...

So today, he found Nathan's old photo album from his childhood. I haven't looked at this in a very long time and I seem to remember giving up in despair last time I tried. I'm a little bit particular about chronology, see, and he certainly wasn't when he put this album together. I think he just stuffed a pile of pictures into a book in whatever order they happened to be in.

I just can't handle that.

Today, I happened to glance over while Jonah was looking and I saw this picture:



Oh, aren't they adorable all in their school uniforms, catching snowflakes on their tongues! That's Nathan, second from the left, flanked by his big sisters, I think. I imagine the cute little red-head is a school mate.

Then on the same page, I saw an old picture that has... JONAH in it! I'm sure that must be him... I'd know his sweet little face anywhere--



Time travel?? I guess not. Jonah's just a chip off the old block, that's all. Nathan was the cutest kid EVER. I guess he must be a little older than Jonah in this picture. The bespectacled kids are his older brother and sisters and I'm not sure who the other kids are. Oh, the cuteness!!

Then there was this one:



Yes, Nathan has always had a bit of a temper... I'm not sure who the other kids are, but I think the two littlest kids in the front are his younger siblings. Maybe his parents are reading and will chime in in the comments?

I love looking at old pictures...

Thieves Would Weep

I've spent the whole morning rearranging my living room. Wheee!! It's about time, is all I can say. It's still somewhat temporary, of course, but at least now it feels more like a living room.

You know, I'm really beginning to despise that word-- "temporary." It seems like every project that we do is temporary in some way or other. Finishing the current project is always hinging on finishing something else which can't be started until something else is finished. See? My temporary kitchen that I used for two years is a prime example. As another instance, we used flat paint on the walls in the living room because eventually, in re-siding the outside of the house, there will be studs pulled which, as I have learned, ruins walls. So the walls will need to be fixed which means they will need to be sanded, and flat paint is sandable. Flat paint looks terrific when you first get it on. But you can only admire it for 3.78 minutes before it looks like the front of my three-year-old's shirt. Everything sticks to flat paint, you see, and it doesn't come off. Oh sure, I washed the walls today, little good that it did. It was more about my feeling better about life in general, except it didn't work because when I got done, quel surprise? The walls were still scuzzy.

Do you see whence my waryness flows?

So here are pictures of the living room as we have lived in it for the last two years, complete with the TEMPORARY kitchen. (And please forgive the poor photos throughout this post. I hate taking indoor pictures with a crumby camera. But it's better than my trying to explain it, right? "Oh yeah, the couch is over there and the wood stove here... can you picture it?")















Oh the clutter! The ugly! It hurts.

That door next to the kitchen range led to what is now the REAL kitchen. Also note all of my very creatve storage. Ugh. Makes me claustrophobic all over again.

So here it is now, after moving into the real kitchen a month and a half ago and moving the stove across the room. And a whole lot of cleaning.





That tall cabinet is what stored all my dishes and appliances in the temporary kitchen. After cleaning it out, I had grand dreams of making it an art supply cabinet. Hahaha. How we all did laugh. It is now full of the things I canned over the summer, with the overflow stacked around in various nooks and crannies.

Don't we own a lot of fine furniture? Very expensive, I assure you.

I can't think of a single piece of furniture that we've ever bought. And it shows. But at least I've been able to repurpose things and/or make them look decent (well, somewhat). Like that couch. I love that couch. It is the most comfortable couch in existence. That was given to Nathan before we were married. When we got engaged, I visited him in Indianna and when I saw that couch (back when it was beige instead of red) in his appartment, I thought, "Someday, we will have children who will daily pile all those pillows on the floor and make me insane." And I was right! Well, about a "child" anyway. Sadly, the jury's still out on the "children" thing.




The Mexican rug on the wall is hanging over the electrical panel. Classy, I know. And that black circle on the wall? Is where the chimney used to through. It's now stuffed with a black trash bag. Extra classy.





We have this unique decorating style that involves bundles of electrical wires poking through the wall. We wrapped them in green tape for that special little touch. There's another one behind the desk. Oh, and on that desk (which was free and is in need of some well-placed nails and glue) I will put my sewing maching so that I don't have to go spelunking in my closet to find it when Nathan rips his jeans.

That big rug on the floor is a nice thick, wool one that was given to me by a friend who got it from a neighbor who is a carpet cleaner and cleaned it well after he got it from someone who's basement flooded, soaking the rug. (Still following me?) I'm positive that it weighs no less than nine hundred pounds. I'm not even exaggerating. You should have heard the grunting and groaning as I heaved it down the stairs and unrolled it.




And this is the "Veiw of Multiple Doorways". I count six.

I'm really feeling like this room needs a couple more chairs and maybe a coffee table to finish it up. Problem is, I don't have any well-off friends who give away cool furniture. (Note to self: Make friends. Rich ones.)

And hopefully, most of the stuff in this picture will be moved to the mudroom (through that pretty door), where it all belongs. It is TEMPORARY, pending the "finishing" of the mudroom. Gah!

Oh! And just look at our ground-breaking art nouveau-- Fire Brick Sculputre. It's the hottest new thing:

We haven't decided what to call this particular piece. I usually prefer to title it, "Raffamuffaschniggafrigga" and Nathan calls it "But I might need them someday!"

Here endeth this historical tour of my living room.



(Yes, Mom, I know. The kitchen tour is coming. Someday.)

Oh! The Digging!

There's a hole in the ground right out side my kitchen door..
There's a hole in the ground right outside my kitchen dooooor!
There's a hole! There's a hole...
There's a hole right outside my kitchen door!

There's a backhoe bucket in the hole right outside my kitchen door...
There's a backhoe bucket in the hole right outside my kitchen doooooor!
There's a bucket! There's a bucket...
There's a backhoe bucket in the hole right outside my kitchen door!

There's some dirt in the bucket in the hole right outside my kitchen door...
There's some dirt in the bucket in the hole right outside my kitchen doooooor!
There's some dirt! A lot of dirt...
There's some dirt in the bucket in the hole right outside my kitchen door!


There's a chicken in the dirt from the bucket in the hole right outside my kitchen door...
There's chicken in the dirt from the bucket in the hole right outside my kitchen doooooor!
There's a chicken! There's a chicken ...
There's chicken in the dirt from the bucket in the hole right outside my kitchen door!

How's That?

I've been doing some preschool with Jonah. He really loves it, though I admit to being a little bored with it. I can't vary the routine at all because then he has a fit thinking that we missed something. It's just his age-- everything must be predictable.

Also, he's in a controlling stage, so he wants to dictate anything and everything in our lives. Not that he gets to. Lets just say there's a lot of fit-throwing around here these days.

So this morning he said, "For school today, I want to do 'Buh- Wabbit.'" (for the record, we're on the letter 'G', going in order, and he doesn't get to pick.)

"Rabbit doesn't start with a 'buh'. It starts with 'rrrruh'. It's 'ruh-rrrrabbit.'"

"Yeah, rrrrrr-wabbit!"

Of Ants and Worms

Done, done, not done, done. Not done. Not done.

Did you ever read The Once and Future King by T.H. White? I loved that book...

Yes, I was one of those. Nerdy. Bookworm. Glasses and all. I was the kid with a book (usually a moldy oldy) in my backpack. Reading every spare minute. I love to read. I don't seem to have so much time for it lately. With the induction of a little person to my house, my attention span went the way of... um... half my spoons and every single pen and pencil. I still read a lot, but I read blogs, magazines, articles, newsletters. Blurbs. Everywhere. I somehow lost my ability to really read a novel. I miss that. I miss getting completely lost in a good long rambling story. The long rambling ones are my favorite. That way, when I'm really into the story, it doesn't end too soon. I like books that just go on and on following a persons life. Sigh. Those are the goods.

And that up there was something of a rabbit trail, but I will make it back around to my original point in a minute. First, on the note of reading books, above, I just wanted to say that I just finished a whole book today that was so fun. If you're lucky and the planets align and I don't go wandering down any more paths frequented by furry cottontails, I'll be posting a book report tomorrow.

Now, back to my original point... The Once and Future King. (Wait... this is not my point yet, but I'll get there.) Nathan also loves this book, and we make frequent refference to it in our daily lives. Okay, maybe not that frequent... But if one of us mentions done, done, not done-- we both know, or make up, the meaning. Yeah, I married a nerd, too. (Uh... still not the point here) But our interestes in books were different-- I read historical fiction and Jane Austen and other classics and he read SciFi and Tolkien and Marvel Comics. However, we did both read The Once and Future King and loved it.

I think my very favorite part in that book is when Wort (the young King Arthur) gets turned into an ant by Merlin. The ants have a communication system composed entirely of something resembling the words "done" and "not done". Well, it makes sense, really. They work. All the time. So all they have to worry about is whether a job is "done" or "not done". It was a fascinating concept to my 11 year old self!

So at the end of the day (or week or whenever) I look over my mental list of things I would like to have accomplished and I think, "Not done, done, done, not done, done." It seems like, however, there's an aweful lot of "not done" going on. (And, hey! Here's my original point.) I lament that I am not more productive. I am creative and ambitious, no? I "can do" lots of things! I just... don't. I have all these things I'm interested in, but I find myself only doing what I have to do. And when I know or read about people who do so many things (Okay, so the book I just read was about Julia Child. Talk about accomlplished.) I wonder, now why can't I have that kind of drive? To persue just a few of my myriad half-developed skills? Why can't I pick something? I mean, seriously, I have a gazillion things that I like to and can do. But I guess I'm not passionate about any of them, so they slide. I feel great when I do complete a project, so where's my energy to do projects all the time? I guess I'd just rather read a story to my little bookworm-in-training. And then we'll go bake some muffins.

Alas, I seem to be doomed to be a "Jane of all trades but master of none" and I should just get used to it. I need to at least put some energy toward finishing a few projects that I've started. Like a few web design projects that are taking over and making hash of my entire consciousness. Or a pile of sewing projects. And maybe I can just get a few sketches into my watercolor book...

I was trying to figure out what my biggest "time-waster" is. Where does my time go that I could otherwise be using to Accomplish Things? Um... reading. (Look! I made a circle in this strange rambling post!) Yeah, I read too much. I thought I didn't have time to read, but I guess I don't have time because I read!

And in my mind, this post is taking on other dimentions, delving into the psychology (and psycosis) of the reading/accomplishing cycle and it's starting to scare me. I think I'll call that "not done" and end it here.

Done, done, not done, not done, done, not done...

Raccoon!

I've never cared much for raccoons... they can be such nuisances... My earliest experiences with them included coons that would rip open my rabbit hutch in the night and eat my furry pets. I was only 8, and an animal lover, so this was traumatic for me. They did the same things with my ducklings, and I was the one to discover the massacre in the pole barn one morning. They would go down into the root cellar and eat everything in sight, including the contents of canning jars after they pushed them on the floor and broke them open.

Dad started livetrapping them and giving them to a crazy old guy down the road who ate them. "Them coons is gooood eatin'!" he would say. After 9 or so, he got his fill and refused to "dispose" of any more coons for us.

In later years, they were well known around our house for cleaning out the plum trees and blueberry bushes by night, as well as stealing chickens.

No, I've never cared much for raccoons.

When we were on our honeymoon, we camped somewhere on the Olympic Penninsula of Washington and we had coons visiting our campsite. I was throwing rocks and them up in the trees trying to get them to find someone else to bug. It didn't work and I seem to recall something about a bag of bread flying into the lake, but I had nothing to do with that.

I have a great aunt and uncle who has had many pet raccoons and Aunt C. insists that they make great pets! Nathan and I stayed with them shortly after we were married and on our way to the Midwest and we did enjoy watching the pet raccoons, but I remain skeptical. Uncle C. would laugh and affectionately call them "WAAAAAAAAAAAcoon!"

So now that's what we say when we talk about raccoons: "WAAAAAAAAAAcoon!"

But I still don't like them much.

Today, however, I found a waccoon that I can get along with a little better:







He came home from Story Time with me and I think I'll keep him.

Banana Beef

I found some chuck "steak" in the recesses of my freezer the other day, so I thawed it out today and proceeded to try to figure out what to do with it. We can't just throw steak on the grill an eat a big hunk of meat. Much as I would love to do that, I'm far too stingy with my meat for that kind of thing, other than as a very occasional special treat. So I have to figure out a way to make it go for about 4 meals (there are two very giant steaks here, so there's enough to go around. With leftovers, it may well be 6 meals.)

Flipping through my beloved Joy of Cooking brought me to Beef Bourgiugnon. Mmmm... Alas, I realized it was too late to start making it tonight. So I settled on Beef Paprikash with brown rice and squash for tonight. And... hmm.... yes, Beef Bourgiugnon for tomorrow night-- AND I'll even follow the recipe AND I decided to start it today so it will get the full benefit of the marinade. "Thinking ahead" I belive it's called. What will they think of next?

(Please note: I do not always cook like this. In fact, it seems rare sometimes. Now that I think of it, we've had potato salad for supper the last three nights. I'm noticing that creativity of cooking is directly related to the current state of my hormones. Totally. Appologies to my male family members for mentioning "hormones" here. Try to purge your minds and do the best you can at getting on with your lives.)

Where was I? Ah, beef. So I started chopping. As usual, I had help. "Jonah, please go get me a brown onion."

"A purple onion?"

"Noooo... I need a brown onion."

"Okay." He troted off. After a minute, he returned, "We have no banana ice cream today."

"No banana ice cream?"

"No banana ice cream."

"Well. It is a very good thing I did not ask for banana ice cream. I asked for a brown onion."

"Okay!"

Eventually, I got my onion and everything was happily combined and well soaked in red wine and fresh herbs, awaiting it's cooking tomorrow.

In anticipation of the meal, I got out this wonderful garage-sale find:

This dutch oven for which I paid 2 whole dollars made my entire garage-saling season. Le Creuset it ain't, but it'll do, rust notwithstanding. So I got it all srubbed and oiled and I'm excited to put it to use tomorrow. (Wow... I'm looking forward to cooking supper. Tomorrow. Cool. I've been having difficulty with lack of inspiration lately...)

A certain sister-in-law of mine has been perpetuating the myth that a dutch oven is the same as a stock pot. "Au contraire" my dear SIL-- they have become erroneously synonymous in recent years, but they are not the same. A dutch oven is what you see above (which, as you can also see, is very much not a stock pot)-- heavy, wide, usually cast iron or enameled cast iron with a heavy, tight-fitting lid. They can be used on the stove or in the oven. I have long yearned for this piece of equipment... (more specifially, for a red enameled one...) and this will be quite useful and I'm going to give it a good trial run tomorrow.

And now my poor writing skills do not know where they are going with this. I wrote this whole post as a guise for the "banana ice cream" conversation and to show it off my dutch oven. So here I will end, with all my disjointedness, and go off to work on tonight's supper.

I'm Afraid it's Kinda Like Crack

70%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

This cannot be good.

Loss and Missed Oportunities

We got home today, after being Gone All Day, and pulled into a driveway that looks like this:



But it didn't look like that when we left.

They've been ditching our road, so I knew they'd get to us sooner or later, but when I saw that they were DONE when we gone home today, I thought, "Dang! We missed it!" I mean, hello? I have a 3 1/2 year old obsessed with heavy equipment and we were NOT HOME the whole time they were right outside our door. Dang.

That brushy pile you see in the photo above is all that's left of a lovely ash tree that had the unfortunate misluck of being too close to the road. Very sad. I don't seem to be able to find a picture of it to show you all, but believe me that it was very lovely.

I am slightly relieved, however, because I kinda knew that one would meet it's end, but I was very afraid that this one would, too:




We have these beautiful maples in our yard, that one being the most shapely. It seems to have suffered only the loss of a few branches, which is sad enough.

And my poor ash tree has only it's feet left in the ground:



And the tree itself is going on to it's afterlife as firewood.




Oh, but look what we have gained!




Dirt! A whole mountain of it! I may not see my son again for several years.



Maybe that will make up for his missing out on the road construction/tree destruction.

Mommas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys...

I've been trying to get my thoughts together with something compelling and inspirational to post. Wait... I've not really ever done that, exactly. Okay, perhaps something mildly interesting. I often compose posts while doing dishes (if I'm by myself). But lately, I've been too distracted with the gorgeous indian summer we're having and all the work therein. Also, all the work I don't want to be doing, like designing the pile-up of websites I have to be working on. But I'm not doing that, see "indian summer" above. See also, "guilt" and "lazyness".

So when I'm doing dishes, all I get are harpies and lunatics and schizoids in my head and the result is random and pointless and disjointed. Not worth posting. Kinda like this one that I'm writing.

I'm struck lately by how much testosterone is swirling around this house these days. My husband introduced our son to G.I. Joes today. I'm not sure if it was on Hulu or where he found it, but they watched an episode in all it's caroonish violence and die-hard heroism. Jonah is 3 1/2 and did I mention he's currently fascinated with guns and machines and even death? So just what he needs to be seeing is cartoon musclemen jumping out of crashing planes (they never die or get hurt) and shooting and punching each other. Grrrrrreat. And then there's all the backhoeing and dirt digging and hammering and nailing on the part of both my husband and my son. Oh, and guns. Don't forget the guns.

Don't get me wrong, I love it when my husband does all these manly things. So... manly, wheee! But what about my baby? My little, baby boy? Who's little. And a baby.

Well, he's not a baby. And getting bigger, fast. He's in the buisness of becoming a man, thus the guns and machines and digging.

I've been reading my brother's blog where he likes to talk about horsepower and crushing snakes with his boots and buzzing around on various machines and adventures in the jungle and such. And I realize-- this is where my "baby" is heading.

So, I'll buckle down and have fun with some boyhood. My Dad is so good at satisfying the need for danger by teaching how to be dangerous safely. We'll try to take that example and run with it. I'll just cover my eyes sometimes as a preventative to cardiac arrest.

Anyway, for now, my baby still likes to snuggle with his Mommy...

And to tell the truth, I want boys. Lots of them. Bring on the testosterone! And the digging! Plenty of digging!

But maybe someday I'll also have a little girl who wants to play dress-up and learn to sew.

All Manly and Stuff

Boys...



Will be boys...



...and still boys...




...will be boys...




...who will eventually...

Turn into men.

They Even Make Your Breakfast!

Remember when you were a kid and you wanted a puppy... or a kitten... or heck, even a woolly bear caterpillar?

Here's what we give our kid for a pet.

"Here, sweetie! You can pet it if you can catch it!"

Our Theme Song

Random Thoughts on Two Minutes

1. Nathan is tearing off the side of the house. So that we can have a warmer winter. Boo and yay, respectively.






2. Someone is itching for trouble. Heh, heh. Get it? Itching? I crack myself up. Not really.






3. We have too many cats. They're not even ours. The adopted us. All my life, I've wanted a farm. Not a commercial farm --shudder at the thought-- no, just a hobby farm. Room for lots of critters. But what do I get? A flippin' cat farm. Arg. They're always under my feet, begging for more food and "may we please come in and live with you in your house where we will eat every thing in sight?"






4. No thoughts here. Just cuteness.




5. When you pick apples across the road, make sure to check for poison oak before you go rumaging around in the grass looking for good apples. Also, again with the too many cats.