Tales of a Shoebox Princess

In a good way. I was actually motivated to do housework. I also actually had time to do it. I had the whole day yesterday to get things accomplished. Too bad my quadriceps felt like dogs had shredded them, thanks to an overzealous personal trainer who "just wanted to see where I was at fitness-wise." Never trust personal trainers! after three sets of walking lunges, I wanted to chop my legs off. And then his. (I signed up at a little fitness club and with the sign-up I got two free sessions with a personal trainer. First they get you to sign up, then they try to kill you for free) But I kept going--squat/jumps, squats on a half-ball thing, a wall sit, and then the trainer said, "Last one, burpees." I said, "Nope. I'm not going to do them." I would have put my foot down, but everything from my hips downward seemed to be possessed by Jell-O. So anyway, my legs hurt. But I did housework anyway. In 15 minute increments. I love the 15 minute plan. I set...

Jim's eyes are much better. Much much better. I can see the whites of his eyes now, and there is only a little faint pink tint to them. He's feeling much better too. He still gets tired at the end of the day, but hopefully with the Thanksgiving break he'll get some rest. I'm trying to be philosophical about having nearly 48 hours of precious vacation time lost to an illness, but part of me is whiny and wants to go back to make up for lost time. I don't blame Jim at all, mind you. I'm glad his episode was temporary and not, like, Ebola. Next time, though, we will not take a red-eye flight, because Jim literally wound up with red eyes. I'm very grateful that there was help when I needed it, from the EMTs, the hospital staff, and the branch president and his wife from church down in Marathon. I'm glad that Jim was not hurt by the fall (I have myself to thank for that--pat on my own back there for being 2 feet away at the precise moment of the first attack...

I keep thinking that I'm going to update Paul's countdown daily, but it hasn't happened that way. There is too much to do. Like right now, I'm making icing. Just a sec while I pour in another cup of powdered sugar. K I'm back. This is batch one of the icing. I still need 2 more batches. And I need 2 or 3 more batches of ground beef cooked. Maybe another block of cheese grated. All this for Paul's farewell. You're coming, I hope? Anyway, since I don't blog like I used to, I'm going to offer up some pictures. Just a few. And I'll probably blog even less when Paul leaves, mostly because I'll be keeping up two missionary blogs for a while. Here Paul eats a Juicy Lucy. It was his request to eat a Juicy Lucy. He got to go to the 5-8 Club again today for lunch with Jim, Granddaddy, and Matt. This picture is not associated with Paul in any way. It's just a picture of Lemmy. It looks like the crockpot is on, but it wasn't plu...

Last night Jim and I lay in bed watching a movie (and because I love parentheticals, I will now digress)(Yes, we have a TV in the bedroom,, which means we have 2 TVs! We are now living in the 1980s! Matt once came home from school with news of a group activity he participated in where he found out he was the ONLY kid in the classroom who had 1 TV in the house; more often than not there were 4 or 5 in his classmates' households. Woe was us, he was convinced). Anyway, it was a dumb movie from the 80s (I'm going with an 80s theme perhaps?) called Peggy Sue Got Married which starred some fake teeth and a very silly voice (both via Nicolas Cage) and featured lots of gray and pastel yellow costuming and 80s-style 50s big hair (see if you can work that one out). I wouldn't even mention having watched the movie but for one thing. There is a scene where Peggy Sue and her boyfriend are in his car parked by a body of water and they are talking about having sex. As they get furth...

1. When you have a big meeting in the evening, and you need photos, it's best not to wait until 3:30 p.m. to ask your mother where the pictures (from the project back in July that the meeting is about) are in the computer and how to print them. Especially when the mother has to pick up two other children from school right at 3:30 and she is still technically at work. And also especially since you slept in until 11:30 a.m. and have been piddling around since getting out of bed. 2. When your mother comes to pick you up from school and asks, "How was your jazz band performance this morning?", know that your knowledge and understanding of standard word usage, a.k.a. "proper grammar," and the situation you are in, a.k.a. in the van with your mother who is a "grammar nazi,"will dictate that you do not answer "we did good" unless you mean that you and the rest of the jazz band members went about doing charitable acts and performing service to thos...

Let's get in the ol' time machine and travel back to last Sunday. Why? Because that's what I'm gonna blog about today. Nevermind that I did not actually witness what I'm blogging about. The reason I was not in attendance at this particular event was that I went and signed myself for a work-related conference the next day without consulting my calendar. When I realized that I would be traveling to attend the conference when Paul's Cross Country end-of-the-year banquet was scheduled, verily, I was distraught. Jim went to the banquet with Paul, under strict orders to take photographs and keep me posted on all goings on so that I could feel like I wasn't such a loser mom. I also knew that one of the other parents would be taking pictures so in case Jim forgot or couldn't figure out how to use my camera, I could still be assured of seeing some form of printed evidence of Paul at a banquet. So to pictures. Here is the CC senior boys table. One of the guy...

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...

I took Hayley to the eye doctor today (luckily they have late appointments on Tuesdays so I could take her after I finished work). I'm always a bit nervous going to the eye doctor. You wouldn't think I'd be nervous because #1 this appointment was for Hayley and not for me, and #2 even if the appointment was for me, I actually enjoy getting my eyes examined, except for the part where the dr puts the drops in to dilate my pupils. And that isn't so annoying since I had dilated eyes for 8 years when I was a kid, so I am used to it. What makes me nervous about going to the eye doctor is the person who we have to deal with to purchase eyewear, both contacts and glasses. Whenever I go in, I get the largish woman with weirdly dyed hair and severe glasses. She looks like she was once a goth, but as she has neared her middle age (and she is probably close to my age, and maybe she's younger by a few years), she toned the look down a bit, but only just enough so she could g...

Yesterday, I took Matt shopping for some new summer clothes. He has grown over the past year, which is good. So he is actually growing, albeit slowly. So we walked into Kohl's and then into the boys section. I told him to find some shorts to try on. He found a rack of gym shorts and pulled a red pair off the rack and said that he'd like to try these ones on. We grabbed a few other things to try on, a couple more pairs of shorts, a pair of pants, and some shirts. I steered him toward the fitting rooms and told him to try one thing on at a time and to come out to show me how whatever he tried on fit. So he did. The first thing he tried on was the red pair of shorts. They looked a little small, so I took them from Matt and went to find a larger pair while he tried on the next item. I found the rack of shorts but alas, they did not have the red ones in a size bigger. So I grabbed a navy pair of the same style, and a red pair of a different style, both in the correct size. I broug...

I cannot find my favorite black skirt! I put it in the laundry and it disappeared! I cannot find my low heeled black strappy shoes! I lost my black slip, but Hayley found it in a pile of her clean clothes. My theory is that the washing machine and the dryer have magical abilities and very slight mischievous streaks. I'm not just going on evidence of a missing skirt and a misfiled slip (I don't think the machines had anything to do with the disappearance of the shoes--that can only be explained by poltergeists), but on the unexplained appearance of a pair of socks (?) made out of floral polar fleece (seriously, they are kinda weird looking) and another pair of pink and white socks. Hayley swears these foot coverings are not hers and nor do they belong to the only female sleepover participant (Hayley's friend Gabby) we have had this year. There is also the matter of the appearance of a pair of huge brown Vans (skateboarder shoes). I think I might know to whom they belong. ...

I'm going to make lasagna for dinner tonight and I will be making a second one to put in the freezer, just like I did with the chicken divan yesterday. Hayley didn't seem to quite grasp the concept of freezer dinners. She kept asking when we were going to eat the second divan casserole. I said I didn't know. Then she asked, "Then why do you have it?" Me: "To save for a busy day." H: "Why not just order pizza?" Me: "Because I want to save pizza ordering for Saturdays." H: "But you have more time to cook on Saturday." Me: "I don't want to cook on Saturday" H: "Then order pizza." Me: "Go away." We also have the same type of roundabout discussions regarding wearing leg warmers and shorts in wintertime (or early springtime), only I'm the puzzled one--Why have leg warmers when you can just wear socks and longer pants? Hayley: "Because I want to wear shorts..." And then I had...

This post is in no way a cry for help. I am not at the end of my rope. I do not complain of serious issues that threaten my well-being on this blog. This the place where I whine superficially about superficial things or I post stuff that if my children had said it, I would tell them 1) chill, 2) wah (in my most sarcastic voice), or 3) if you would like to complain, please complain to the cats because I don't have time to hear it. Or I post about the kids. I've been working outside the home since September and I still can't seem to get a schedule down. I've had a tough time adapting to being gone part of the day. It's taken me 7 months to finally realize that I can do only three things per day. 1) Seminary and all that pertains unto it, 2) work, and 3) make dinner. And sometimes, only two of those things. Today, because I did not fall into a sleep-deprived coma as I did yesterday and the day before, I was able to make dinner. Hooray for me! Not only that.... get th...

I was all geared up to post pictures of inside the new Target Field. Pictures taken FROM FIELD LEVEL. Pictures of the locker room, of the complicated guts of the place. But it had to snow yesterday. It had to snow so hard that bus drivers, who usually can deal with anything because they have to deal with 70+ rowdy disrespectful annoying school-age children every single day TWICE (and sometimes more), were afraid to take to the road. The field trip I was supposed to go on with work was canceled. I was very sad. Then I got sent home from work six hours early and I perked right up. And my sewing machine and I had some quality time together. But I didn't take pictures of that, so all you get today is a bunch of words.

In theory, girl children are fun, cute, pink, enamored of dressing up and looking glamorous, and full of squeals. In reality, they try to wear this to church: which causes their mothers to do the squealing and not from seeing teen heartthrobs with their shirts off. I must concede that there is a minute amount of pink on the dress. I still made her change.

Celly is not dead. Jim resuscitated it. But now I don't trust celly anymore. It'll play dead now whenever it wants to just to frustrate me. And the children continue to frustrate. Last night when I got home from another late shift sub job, Jim informed me that Paul had informed him that there was a band concert that night. Grrr. Not that I grrr at band concerts, but I do grrrrr at children who forget to tell me of things I want to attend. The rug of a relaxing evening was pulled out from under my tired feet. Actually, I had to go grocery shopping--that was my original plan--but that was scuttled. And now we need milk and I don't have time today to shop. I'm only blogging now because I have an interlude of a few minutes between work and another appointment. Dinner tonight? Whatever Jim can scrounge up because I will be working AGAIN this afternoon (sixth school day afternoon/early evening in a row--the money is nice, but when do I go grocery shopping?) I keep sayi...

There was no bloodcurdling scream, just a simple refusal to wake back up after being put to sleep while I had a screening in radiology (routine checkup). How do I cope without my celly? Yes, I called it "celly" (uncapitalized). Although now I call it "dead." The only theory I have regarding its untimely death is that it saw me shirtless for my exam and then it committed suicide so it wouldn't have the horrible memory etched in its tiny little sim card brain. At least it didn't take pictures. RIP celly.

Ten things I should be doing instead of taking a nap 1. Getting to bed earlier so I can survive a day without a nap 2. Why do I not like naps? First of all, I dream unpleasant dreams of people at work telling me that I'm doing everything wrong, and the kids at work telling me they don't like me. 3. I HAVE to clean my counters. I tried sleepwalking so I could nap AND clean at the same time, but so far, multitasking like that hasn't worked. 4. The cats have been shredding any paper that has been left unsecured. They must miss me petting them. I can't pet them while asleep (see multitasking in #3). 5. I wake up groggy and confused and say yes to things that people ask me to do that I have no business saying "yes" to. 6. I almost make myself late to the second shift at work that I have committed to because of a sick co-worker 7. I start to hate the phone because it wakes me up. 8. I feel like a preschooler having to take naps all the time to make it through the d...

It's Saturday, I slept in a little bit. I got up, I had breakfast. After breakfast, I decided to check the status of the pudding I made last night (and ate some of). No one else was interested in it last night so I was thinking there would be plenty to use as a good Cheerios chaser. So I open the door to the fridge. I see the pudding bowl. I take it out. I look in the bowl. Someone had cleaned out the pudding leaving only a spoon-sized glob at the bottom of the bowl. No, I'm not mad that whoever ate it ate it (well, yes I am actually. I wanted that pudding). I'm mad that he or she ate only enough to leave that little smidgen of something that meant he or she technically didn't have to put the bowl in the sink (which, by the way would have required MUCH less work than opening the fridge door, leaning over, squishing the moldifying mushrooms out of the way and setting the bowl in the cleared space) because there was still "some" left in the bowl. And the firs...

Things I must remember for next Christmas: 1. When mysterious people fill the van up with balloons on Christmas Eve, it's best to empty the van out that day instead of leaving it for Christmas day when you are already late to a gathering. 2. Set an alarm to go off at 11 p.m. or so if you lie down on the couch to watch a movie on Christmas eve so that you won't wake up in the wee hours of the morning and put all the presents out when you are super tired. 3. Make a treasure map of all the places you have hidden presents so you aren't stumbling around the house in the middle of the night, saying, "Where in the Grapes of Wrath did I hide that stupid (insert name of particular gift here)!!" 4. Leave yourself a note to remind you of where you put the treasure map. 5. Because you WILL lose it. 6. Remember to pack the paper plates when going to Mom's for a Christmas gathering. 7. And the cookies. Please double check the container to make sure you have COOKIES and not ...

How to play "Go Germs, Go!" (for K-5th graders): Depending on the number of children playing, there will be 4-7 "taggers." Each tagger has a ball which they will throw at the other kids--the "germs." The germs line up on one side of the gym against the wall. The taggers wait on the other side. Taggers must stay on that half and not cross the middle line until all the kids have made it to the other side or been tagged out. The taggers yell "Go germs, go!" and the germs then try to run to the other side of the gym without getting hit by a ball thrown by a tagger. If you get hit by a ball, you must sit out the rest of the game on a side wall of the gym. Most importantly, you must complain loudly and ferociously to the supervising staff members that the game is unfair and the taggers are all ganging up on you and they can't go after you three times in a row and it's not fair and he didn't hit me and I was safe and all the taggers are 5th...