Tales of a Shoebox Princess

Early this morning, before the sun was even sort of up, I went out to the van to hit the gym for some early morning exercise (I joined a club at the beginning of the year. I am not thin yet. I am blaming the club). The garage was pitch black, even though the garage door was open to the driveway, but I thought "Meh, I don't feel like turning on the garage light. I know my way to the car door and that way I won't have to turn the light off later." So I stepped into the garage. And promptly bumped into a box with a big squishy sleeping bag on it, which rolled to the side and bumped into something else. That bump triggered a tinkly musical noise...a music box. I don't recollect a music box in the garage. I wasn't familiar with the tune. I am familiar with horror movies though, and this seemed like the perfect opening to one. So I hustled my buns to Vanna White (the vehicle, who was NO help at all) and squealed the tires out of the garage. After I exercise...

We got our missionary emails today and that leaves JUST ONE MORE FROM EJ. Only one more mission email EVER from him! And at that time, he will probably be finished with normal missionary work because it will be Pday and he will most likely be going to the mission office and staying there until Tues morning when his flight leaves. HIS FLIGHT TO MINNEAPOLIS! I went to the dentist today (not the one that I work for) and got my teeth cleaned. I like going to my local dentist because the hygienist and the dentist spend the whole time telling me how great my teeth are. It's a half-an-hour love-fest. Today we added another hygienist to the party, because my regular one had carpal tunnel surgery. Whenever I need a self-esteem boost, I get my teeth cleaned. I can hardly leave without feeling like I've won a beauty pageant. Anyway, yes, my teeth are still beautiful, but I was worried about one thing: they like to take my blood pressure. I was concerned because certain members of my f...

I got a Samsung mini-tablet for my birthday, and with it came a very lovely white charging cord. The best thing about this charging cord is that it's fast. It juices up my phone and the tablet much faster than any of the other cords I have hanging around the house. Servo has recently discovered this cord and likes nothing better than to chew on it. I keep it in my room and over the last two days, if I forget to shut my bedroom door for any length of time, I'll go in my room and find Servo with the cord in his mouth. This makes me very angry. Magic likes to come in our room too, but all he does is hide out under the bed and lick himself. So, now I have to be better at remembering to put the cord in a drawer when it isn't being used, and I have to remember to shut the bedroom door. Magic will have to find somewhere else to lick himself and Servo will have to stay out of my way for a while. In other news, I made the mistake of taking Hayley out for driving practice y...

1. A song sung by Petula Clark 2. which is included in a Reader's Digest songbook which belongs to my mother 3. which I learned to play on the piano 4. I even memorized it and can still play it 5. and it's a place where I ALWAYS get lost. Always. Even when I have the Tele-Nav app on my phone guiding me. I had to drive the kids to Meta-Con on the second day we went (on the first day, I convinced Jim that he had to drive us even though he wasn't attending. Jim is remarkably easy to convince to drive me anywhere). I know I tend to get lost downtown so I made sure I had the Tele-Nav on. Jim even pulled up the route on google maps and showed me where to go. When he drove, he went a different route so I couldn't use memory of Saturday's drive to help me (plus, I wasn't paying attention). I was doing just fine on the drive until I was 500 feet from the parking ramp. I could see it! The problem was I saw it too late and I missed the turn.  And got lost. Af...

This morning we were up early. Jim wanted to leave the house by 7:15 a.m. because of rush hour traffic and because we wanted Paul to be at the airport 2 hours before his flight, which was scheduled to leave at 9:55 a.m. But leaving early didn't happen. Some people are slow to get going, and Elder Evans 2.0 is one of them (I hope the CCM--Spanish for MTC--in Lima whips him into shape). We made sure he had his passport (after the scare on Monday, I felt like I should carry it around with me at all times but I didn't. I put it in a file box where I keep valuables) and he made sure he looked and smelled good. My stomach was churning as the minutes ticked by. I resisted the urge to nag and yell. Instead I sat on the couch and stared at my plants on the piano bench. Matt and Hayley came with us, and finally we were all ready to go at 7:50 a.m. Much later than anticipated. My stomach knottified further. Traffic was bad, but Jim was driving so I just had to make sure I didn...

The power was out for 24 hours over the weekend. I counted us lucky though--if Jim hadn't been so obsessed with the sump pump, we probably would have flooded and not had a generator to keep us from losing the food in the fridge and freezer. Within seconds of the loss of power, Jim was downstairs hovering over the sump pump. Within a few minutes, he was bailing water out of it. We scrambled to help, but it ended up being mostly a Jim/Paul effort. After an hour, I was dispatched to the hardware store in search of a generator. But alas, I came away empty handed. We managed to find someone who had one and we borrowed it. Joe M came with two missionaries to help him lift it out of his van. They got it all hooked up and Paul could stop bailing (Jim had emerged from the sump pump to help Joe). The generator powered the fridge, the sump pump, a lamp, a fan, and any phone chargers we wanted to use. We're going to have to invest in one. They are totally rad. Saturday, the power was...

Stupid tooth #15. It broke today while I was eating dinner. A split second before it gave way, I had a flash of foresight: "Your tooth is going to break...right......NOW." And then it did. I knew it was coming. The tooth has been whining for nearly two years. Cold beverages irritated it, and just last Christmas Eve, I believe the final spiral descent into breakage happened when I chewed a tasty mushroom. Why a mushroom and not when I chew ice (Mike has told me in a superior voice that I deserve a broken tooth for chewing ice)? I don't know. Want to see the chip? Ignore the chapped hands in the picture. It's a pretty significant portion--pretty much the entire mesial buccal (or MB as we like to say in the dental biz) cusp--of #15. The 25-year-old amalgam filling in that tooth is still in the tooth, but I wonder if that will have to be taken out when I get the tooth crowned? NOTICE: Incoming whine. Mike, don't read this. It feels funny now. I'm afr...

This is a story from the wedding. It is 100% true. Most of you have probably heard the story, but I'm going to tell it anyway. Sunday morning of our Utah trip was spent slowly getting ready for church. Daylight Savings had kicked in so we were up early with plenty of time to spare before we had to head over to the Tanner Building on BYU campus for Paul's ordination in his priesthood class.  As we were getting ready, Jim grabbed the suit bag for the suit he brought, which he was going to wear both to church and to the wedding and reception. He bought the suit a few months before and had the pants tailored to fit. He unzipped the suitbag and eased the suit coat out. Then he reached in for the suit pants. But he couldn't find them.  "I think I left my pants in Minnesota," he said with a perplexed look on his face. He was so sure he had packed them.  No suit pants anywhere. All he could find were jeans. We still had an hour before we had to be at the church ...

Scout camp looks fun. Jim took a few pictures during his short stay at Many Point with Matt, and I wish YW camp when I was a teenager was more like scout camp. In fact, I wish YW camp NOW was more like scout camp. Matt makes his wilderness survival shelter He has to sleep in this shelter for one night.  Granted, I might not want to sleep out in a shelter I made myself unless I was able to make it spider-proof, but I would love to have had to MAKE a shelter at camp. Sticks and I got along pretty well when I was a kid. My mom always said kids don't need toys, all they need are sticks and dirt and they'll have plenty of fun. Matt gets ready to kayak I suppose I didn't need scout camp to tool around on a lake in a small paddle-powered watercraft. Julie, Jenni and I went out in mom's canoe on Lake Minnewashta plenty of times so I do feel I fulfilled the "spend time paddling around a body of water" aspect of scouting. There are more adventures to ...

I dread the children getting sick, for so many reasons--I don't like surprises, it throws a wrench into my plans, I don't know how to deal with it because I don't know how to fix whatever is wrong with them, and when I do take them to the doctor, most of the time even the doctors never say with certainty what the problem is. They waffle for a bit with "well it could be" and "probably" "we think ..." Why don't kids come with little flash-drive type ports? That way, I could press their nose or something and out would pop (preferably from an orifice not already associated with input or output) a little diagnosis. "More carrots" or "Lots of rest, warning: child will vomit three times in the next 5 hours" or "dysplastic mole; please remove within next 6 months" or even "swelling on knee due to trauma suffered while child was trying to do 'the worm' on a cement sidewalk, despite his recollection that h...

Jim came in from moving the truck out of the driveway so I could drive to seminary, and he said, "It's foggy out." I thought, yeah yeah. Fog. Whatever. So I got in my van and started down the road to the church. I drove along and drove along (no that's not a typo, it's my love of fairy tales peeking through. As in whenever we told stories to each other, there was always and phrase, "she went along and went along" meaning she walked for a time) I did note that the fog was more foggy than usual. But I was seeing other cars and I could see stoplights so I was fine. I drove for a bit more and saw a stoplight ahead. I thought to myself because no one else was in the car and I don't have to vocalize to talk to myself, "Ah. Here is the stoplight at county road 5. I will turn right here." As I pulled up to the stoplight to turn, I looked around and I almost screamed. I was not at county road 5, I was a mile farther up the road. I saw the ba...

The puns, they keep coming. We have decided that once EJ is gone, we are dismantling Paul's loft bed. Permanently. If there ever comes a time when we have 3 boys living in the house again, it will be time to kick at least 2 of them out. While this won't rival the Great Room Metamorphosis of last summer (or whenever we redid the sewing room--it might have been done twice), and for sure it will not be able to lick the toes of the Great Room Switch of 2008, it will be a big enough project to rearrange the boys' room and clear out EJ's junk. There probably won't be much rearranging because the bunkbed is going to stay in the room and remain in its current position. But we're definitely going to be cleaning out stuff. EJ has already started the process of boxing up his stuff to put in the garage rafters. He found a mylar bag which contained a 72-hour meal kit for emergency preparedness. I thought it was perhaps 3 years old, but when EJ opened it up (he aske...

So all of you know that EJ is going to leave us and preach the gospel in Tijuana. He's pretty excited. I can't fathom it because I have NEVER wanted to serve a mission. Talking to people I don't know is difficult enough to do without having the added burden of sharing a religious message. I tend to laugh too much, talk to fast and too high, and agree to whatever the stranger is saying just so I can get out of the conversation faster. EJ doesn't seem to see it that way. In fact, yesterday he went TRACTING with the missionaries in our ward to practice his door approach. We didn't hear much about it afterward until one of the elders told Jim this: He said, "Did Jimmy tell you about tracting yesterday? It was so cool. He gave the message and then asked if the lady wanted to hear more about it. The lady goes 'sure!' It was funny because then Jimmy didn't know what to do next so I had to take over." EJ had been anticipating failure--he had ...

One of the perks of my job is that I have a sewing machine in my office. If I'm facing my desk and I want to get a bit of sewing done, all I have to do is swivel in my wonderful office chair and say the magic word and my office chair turns into a sewing chair and I am seated at my machine. I haven't done much sewing until Monday, when I began on EJ's Halloween costume. He had gone to the local Renaissance Festival twice this season and wanted his costume to be like the clothes he saw at the Ren Fest. (Honestly, I don't know what he needs a costume for; he certainly isn't going trick-or-treating. But I actually kind of wanted to sew and this seemed like a perfectly legitimate excuse to exercise my sewing muscles). I got some muslin and a peasant shirt pattern and got to it. Unfortunately, on Monday, my ring finger on my left hand was in a tetchy mood and picked a fight with the sewing machine needle. The machine chunk-chunk-chunked to a halt and I had to extrac...

Our lawn is conspiring against me. It has joined forces with THE ENEMY. After walking across our yard--a yard that has until now seemed friendly to us--Jim found a wannabe-ninja tick on his shoe, no doubt trying to assassinate my poor defenseless husband. If its mission had been successful, I'm sure the heartless marauder would have come after me. I will now be spending the rest of the summer safely inside my house. I am contemplating the addition of several clean rooms for persons entering the house where they will strip down to their skivvies and submit themselves to several body scans to make sure we as a household are not infiltrated by the shadowy murderous forces of Dermacentor variabilis .

Possible subtitle "How to really screw up on the organ and still be asked to play" I was asked to sub for the regular organist yesterday (well in advance. I couldn't rely on the "not enough time to practice" excuse). It was ward conference, so the head honchos were in town too. And I totally messed up the first song. It was a song I can't play very well (219 Because I Have Been Given Much--Katie, I SO needed your skillz with that song yesterday) so I decided to take advantage of the autoplay on the organ, i.e. the organ was going to play itself. How could I screw up a song the organ was going to play by itself, you ask? Oh, I found a way. The introduction went fine, but I thought perhaps it was too fast. So I was going to slow down the tempo on the autoplay. But I didn't push the "quick menu" button to take me to the tempo/volume menu first. (Which, I learned, you have to do first) I just turned the knob that I thought would slow it down. Ins...

(the guitar, not the fish) Two Hayley-related items from yesterday: Mouth surgery. I like to say it this way because it makes the procedure sound much more intense than it really was. The oral surgeon cut open gum tissue above tooth #11 (which has stubbornly refused to come out to play with Hayley's other teeth), exposing it so that the orthodontist will be able to attach machinery that will pull #11 (aka Evelyn) down and force it to join the other teeth as an operable member of Hayley's permanent dentition. Hayley chose local anesthesia, which was a good thing for the rest of the day. She was coherent, possessing a fully functioning (for a teenage girl) brain. She was intrigued by the numbness of the local, and she spent the next hour or so poking her nose and lips and saying "I can't feel them." (and she talked funny) Now, most parents, when scheduling oral surgery, would pick a day devoid of any other responsibilities for Hayley, but whoever scheduled Hayle...

I'm just checking in to say that I was sick all weekend, and I'm still not at full functional capability, but I did go to seminary and work today and I have to go grocery shopping. This week is going to be a bugger of a week. I'm working 9 hours (not including seminary) Wednesday and Thursday and 8 (again not including seminary) hours on Friday. So if I don't post much this week, that's why. (fortunately I have all of Wednesday's seminary lesson prepared and half of Thursday's)(Band trip meeting Tuesday, and St. Patty's day dinner on Thursday)(Hayley leaves Friday afternoon)(Just blogging about the week is wearing me out!)(Woe to me!)(must put on a happy face and jump right in to the hecticity)(I can do this) Smiles, everyone! Smiles! PS to my mother: Thanks for the leftovers. I hope your cake was edible. What did you think of the "caterpillar" on it? Hayley and Matt had fun with the fondant. Picture of your birthday cake later. Although I kno...

I really shouldn't say yes to things anymore, except for sub jobs. When I say "why yes, I will do that" or "I would like to volunteer to do this," I get phone calls asking me to work 7 hour shifts on top of my 2 hour morning shift and teaching seminary. And then I have to make the chicken salad for the craft group tomorrow at the last minute and I don't even know if I have time to go to the grocery store beforehand and actually GET the supplies needed. And forget about dinner for tonight. Bleagh. I was able to postpone a shopping trip (scheduled for today) for a craft project for next week for work til Friday, so I was able to come home for a few minutes and print out some materials I need for the Braille activity that I'm in charge of tomorrow. So my head is not so poundy-thuddy. (But maybe your eyes are after reading my convoluted sentence structure) If you were expecting some great blog content, I'm sorry to disappoint. If you want something i...

If only what I saw today were as sweet as candy... For the love of decency, please people, COVER UP YOUR MIDSECTIONS! Especially if you are (like me) blessed with an overabundance of cubic acreage above the belt. PLEASE. Especially if you are at work. I have no idea what the face of this person looked like, she who broke all laws of human decorum by letting her gelatinous flab hang out, because every time I looked at her all I could see was TUMMY. I will have nightmares tonight, or at least those anxiety dreams where all I'm wearing is a bath towel and an oven mitt. Then I'm going to work tomorrow wearing my nightgown under my clothing and it will be tucked into the tops of my socks and buttoned securely up to my neck. Note to thin people: this applies to you too. Even though you may not have the fleshy equivalent of a giant rubbery cauliflower applied to your abdomen, I do not want to have visual access to your navel lint. Thank you for putting up with my prejudices.