I have a new addendum to Murphy's law.
For all effort exerted to achieve a particular objective, an equal or greater negative force will arise to thwart that objective.
In my case the objective is getting to bed on time. I stopped doing several things I wanted to do last night, pushed my Christmas list back on the burner, and got to bed close to midnight - earlier than usual for me.
Then the negative force arose at 1:30 a.m. in the form of Thing 1's cold escalating suddenly into an inability to easily breathe.
I find breathing rather necessary, and require it unequivocally from my children. It's hard to argue with the "I can't breathe" problem, even at 1:30 in the morning when I had tried so hard to get to bed.
So I let Thing 1 stay home from school today. I didn't get some of my errands run because I hate to leave her home alone any longer than absolutely necessary. Unfortunately all my nagging didn't produce one nap from her, and left me even more exhausted than before. Why is that? Unless she can spontaneously eject a lung or a limb, she's going to school tomorrow.
I have sent out most of Hubby's corporate Christmas gifts today. He wanted to send something cheesy (in a good way, as in dairy cheese) and summer sausagey this year. I voted for the chocolate, like usual. Sausage and cheese requires more planning and organization, and possibly even refrigeration. The candy is an easy phone call away. Already boxed and packed for shipment. We went with the candy same as the past two years. We ordered 20 boxes. I penned the hand written sentiment from Hubby (in my weird girlish scrawl, but that will have to do since he won't be back in the country until Saturday which is well past the required shipping date), then inserted the cards, addressed, sealed, and sent 15 boxes today and am waiting for addresses for 2 more. I think 2 others have local destinations not requiring a trip to the post office. That leaves one for me, as his secretary/bookkeeper/personal assistant I believe I deserve one. I'll even write my own Christmas card.
Sincere thanks for a job well done. You're irreplaceable, you truly are. And in lieu of a huge raise, WHAT? You're not getting paid? Hmmm... well then in addition to a 100%... no, a 400% raise, I'm giving you this lovely box of caramels, English toffee, fudge, and mint cookie malt balls. Enjoy!!!
Guess who chose all their favorite things from the candy store to go into the boxes?! That's right! Which is why it is taking a profound act of will to keep me from running in and raiding what I have already determined to be my box. But there is Hawaii, and swimsuits on the beach to think about, grumble grumble grumble.
There is so much left to be done before December 25th, and a little more than a week left to do it. The race to the Christmas finish line continues.
Showing posts with label too much travel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label too much travel. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Friday, December 10, 2010
Let the Holidays Begin!
I haven't written anything for a month!
Actually I've written several but they all end up whiney and then the whiney mood passes.
We had a fabulous Thanksgiving. Ours is a multi day event, starting with dinner on Wednesday night and continuing until Saturday evening with a glorious revolving extravaganza of yummy food and playing games and a little shopping thrown in. The only dark spot was a dominance problem with the dogs, who usually all stay with my sister, since dogs are persona non grata at my folks. Her stepson's puppy was annoying all the other dogs so much her older, dominant dog seemed to feel the need to lash out at something, and it was Kelso, since he's the biggest of the little dog pack. So we had to bring him over to my parents, where out of necessity he was tolerated. Of course he did just fine, aside from a little shedding which my father politely didn't mention until asked later. The shedding is not too surprising.
Oh, I took another one that shows even MORE hair.
I just HAVE to mention that when I took him for his Rabies booster shot he had hit a whopping 83 pounds. He's 16 months old now and so has probably stopped growing. Finally.
Since then it's been life back to normal.
Thing 2 has been having some friend issues. Just when I think she's found a new one and we can relax about the whole thing, they have a falling out and she's unhappy again. This time she tells me she asked the little girl what the problem was and was told, "you have too many other friends and I'm jealous." We have tried to teach her to play with everyone, and apparently she's learned her lesson well enough to annoy other the other kids.
The countdown to Christmas has the girls very excited. Thing 1 made a list which started out as a single page but then later gained a 2nd page and eventually a fully illustrated cover.
I didn't get out all the Christmas decorations this year, it just seemed like so much work. The tree has quite a bit less of the usual flotsam and jetsam, I didn't set out any of the many nativities. When I went to put up the outside lights, I found many of them had burned fuses and bulbs. I put up what lights I could get to work, didn't want to deal with anything more than replacing a few bulbs, and called it good. So far no one has complained about the relative decrease in festive clutter. I think I'm the only one who noticed.
Hubby leaves tomorrow for a week in Paris, same as last year about this time. He'll be back next Saturday and will be home for three weeks after, during the end of which is our week in Hawaii.
That's all, nothing big or exciting.
Actually I've written several but they all end up whiney and then the whiney mood passes.
We had a fabulous Thanksgiving. Ours is a multi day event, starting with dinner on Wednesday night and continuing until Saturday evening with a glorious revolving extravaganza of yummy food and playing games and a little shopping thrown in. The only dark spot was a dominance problem with the dogs, who usually all stay with my sister, since dogs are persona non grata at my folks. Her stepson's puppy was annoying all the other dogs so much her older, dominant dog seemed to feel the need to lash out at something, and it was Kelso, since he's the biggest of the little dog pack. So we had to bring him over to my parents, where out of necessity he was tolerated. Of course he did just fine, aside from a little shedding which my father politely didn't mention until asked later. The shedding is not too surprising.
Since then it's been life back to normal.
Thing 2 has been having some friend issues. Just when I think she's found a new one and we can relax about the whole thing, they have a falling out and she's unhappy again. This time she tells me she asked the little girl what the problem was and was told, "you have too many other friends and I'm jealous." We have tried to teach her to play with everyone, and apparently she's learned her lesson well enough to annoy other the other kids.
The countdown to Christmas has the girls very excited. Thing 1 made a list which started out as a single page but then later gained a 2nd page and eventually a fully illustrated cover.
I didn't get out all the Christmas decorations this year, it just seemed like so much work. The tree has quite a bit less of the usual flotsam and jetsam, I didn't set out any of the many nativities. When I went to put up the outside lights, I found many of them had burned fuses and bulbs. I put up what lights I could get to work, didn't want to deal with anything more than replacing a few bulbs, and called it good. So far no one has complained about the relative decrease in festive clutter. I think I'm the only one who noticed.
Hubby leaves tomorrow for a week in Paris, same as last year about this time. He'll be back next Saturday and will be home for three weeks after, during the end of which is our week in Hawaii.
That's all, nothing big or exciting.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Care for a game of.....?
My girls are 23 months apart in age. I don't know if it's their nearness in age, but they usually get along swimmingly and are usually very happy playing with each other. I've seen some rather interesting activities come about as part of their play, a couple of them have reoccurred lately and I wanted to write them down.
There is one where one girl grabs the dog's pull rope, then waggles it in the air until the dog grabs it. Then the other daughter grabs the dog's tail, and they trot off to make laps around the house with one daughter pulling the dog, the other being pulled by the dog. They sing a weird little chant that sounds kind of like a limbo chant, they say "Congo, congo, Puuh-PEE! Congo, congo Puuh-PEE!" The dog loves this, by the way. They can do this until they're both panting. They call it, naturally, "Congo Puppy."
My girls have a problem in that though they usually play extremely well together, their likes are different enough that sometimes it's hard for them to figure out WHAT to play. For example, one wants to play pokemon, the other wants to play Littlest Petshops. They've found a work around activity that sometimes works, where they each play their own thing, but the two communities (for example, pet shops and pokemon) discover each other and have to learn to get along. This is called "Meetings."
Another one which usually happens when they're getting dressed in the morning; they'll pull their arms into the torso of their shirts or pajama tops, letting the sleeves dangle empty. Then they begin wildly thrashing their upper bodies back and forth like washing machine agitators on acid. Their flailing causes the empty sleeves to whip around a little, and if you can hit someone with your sleeve you have scored. I don't think this is that unusual, I seem to remember doing it as a kid. What I like about their version is what the girls call it: "Sleeve Ninjas."
_____
I was going to be landing in Germany today, had our plans not changed. Hubby skyped and said he's tired of being on the road and feeling overwhelmed and wants to come home a day early, not even staying to do a day of sightseeing. If he can get a flight, he will. My initial reaction wasn't the normal "Oh honey, that would be great! We'll be so happy to see you!" Instead I guess I looked at him a little stunned... I just couldn't imagine going to the effort and expense to come home early, avoiding the fun of looking around Nuremberg for a day. He said "Don't you want me to come home?" Well, of course, but don't you want to stay? No.
We're taking the kids to Hawaii after Christmas in exchange for the Germany trip. Maui, actually. I've never been to Hawaii and am kind of excited. We haven't had a vacation that DIDN'T involve a conference or my extended family in a long time. And all in all I think at the age my children are they'll enjoy the beaches and fun of Hawaii more than the cultural interest of Germany...
But I definitely would have stayed in Germany for an extra day.
There is one where one girl grabs the dog's pull rope, then waggles it in the air until the dog grabs it. Then the other daughter grabs the dog's tail, and they trot off to make laps around the house with one daughter pulling the dog, the other being pulled by the dog. They sing a weird little chant that sounds kind of like a limbo chant, they say "Congo, congo, Puuh-PEE! Congo, congo Puuh-PEE!" The dog loves this, by the way. They can do this until they're both panting. They call it, naturally, "Congo Puppy."
My girls have a problem in that though they usually play extremely well together, their likes are different enough that sometimes it's hard for them to figure out WHAT to play. For example, one wants to play pokemon, the other wants to play Littlest Petshops. They've found a work around activity that sometimes works, where they each play their own thing, but the two communities (for example, pet shops and pokemon) discover each other and have to learn to get along. This is called "Meetings."
Another one which usually happens when they're getting dressed in the morning; they'll pull their arms into the torso of their shirts or pajama tops, letting the sleeves dangle empty. Then they begin wildly thrashing their upper bodies back and forth like washing machine agitators on acid. Their flailing causes the empty sleeves to whip around a little, and if you can hit someone with your sleeve you have scored. I don't think this is that unusual, I seem to remember doing it as a kid. What I like about their version is what the girls call it: "Sleeve Ninjas."
_____
I was going to be landing in Germany today, had our plans not changed. Hubby skyped and said he's tired of being on the road and feeling overwhelmed and wants to come home a day early, not even staying to do a day of sightseeing. If he can get a flight, he will. My initial reaction wasn't the normal "Oh honey, that would be great! We'll be so happy to see you!" Instead I guess I looked at him a little stunned... I just couldn't imagine going to the effort and expense to come home early, avoiding the fun of looking around Nuremberg for a day. He said "Don't you want me to come home?" Well, of course, but don't you want to stay? No.
We're taking the kids to Hawaii after Christmas in exchange for the Germany trip. Maui, actually. I've never been to Hawaii and am kind of excited. We haven't had a vacation that DIDN'T involve a conference or my extended family in a long time. And all in all I think at the age my children are they'll enjoy the beaches and fun of Hawaii more than the cultural interest of Germany...
But I definitely would have stayed in Germany for an extra day.
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Scheduling is hell
Scheduling anything with Hubby is usually fraught with danger. The danger of cancellation or of having to call everyone else involved to change the date. Birthday parties, group photos, get togethers... nearly anything involving anyone beyond me, Hubby, and the girls gives me a headache and requires multiple phone calls and emails. If it's just the four of us our options are always open anyway and I know things will change dramatically at any moment. We just don't plan much of anything and as much as possible we're a seat-of-the-pants kind of bunch. That's fine. Sometimes annoying, but fine. It's when other factors, like extended family, or Delta, become involved, that I go crazy.
A couple months back Hubby got a four day contract in Nuremberg. Then there was a two day class for him to teach in Hamburg the next week. If we wanted, we could schedule them as far apart as possible, and the girls and I could come to Germany and play with him in between. If I had my top choices of where it would be cool to take the family, Bavaria would be right up there. I've been there twice, I know some fun things to do there, it's a beautiful area. Hubby's never been to Germany, I could show him around a little too. We weighed all the options. Briefly. For a couple of days. Seriously enough for me to see that if we DID decide to go, we had to renew the girls' passports. Yeah, how freaky is that? I got my first passport at 18 or something. My girls are 7 and 9 and they need theirs RENEWED, and they've actually needed them TWICE. The times they are a changin'. I digress.
We decided to go to Germany.
Then we talked about it some more for another couple weeks or so. Of course when I say "talk" I really mean "brought it up while squeezing everything of relevance into a late night phone call, or an intercontinental skype session in which one of us was trying to have dinner while the other was trying to have breakfast." That's what I meant.
After briefly discussing it a couple times, for many reasons we decided not to go.
Then Hubby talked to his contacts in Hamburg to see if he could schedule his thing there the 2nd week at the beginning of the week instead of the end, and only be gone for 7 or 8 days or so all together, instead of the full 2 weeks. They said it's too late to move the dates, so he'll be stuck alone in Germany for the full two weeks, just working at the beginning and the end.
So we decided the girls and I should go meet him. We're going. We're taking the girls to Germany!
We looked into airfare. It seemed relatively inexpensive, and we got these sweet direct to Paris flights... so we bought tickets. That's always a scary moment... the "YES DANGIT GO AHEAD AND DO IT!!! LET'S GO TO GERMANY!!!" moment. Everything is rolling toward going.
I told the girls' teachers at parent teacher conferences that we'd be leaving on November 10th after school, coming back the weekend of the 20th. We'll come get any homework assignments for them to take with us and do on the plane. It's getting closer and closer!
Then on Saturday Oct 30th I get an email from Hubby telling me his thing in Hamburg at the end of the 2nd week in Germany was canceled. Suddenly we have no real reason to have a big family vacation, with the girls missing 7 days of school, in the middle of November, right before the Thanksgiving break.
We talk. We decide to cancel, eat the change fees on the tickets and use the remaining credit to go somewhere else another time.
Hubby calls the airline to make sure it really is a $250 fee per ticket to cancel an international ticket. Yes, it is. He is shocked that it really will cost us $1000 to NOT go, in changing his ticket and cashing the girls and my tickets in for credit. He gets off the phone and doesn't cancel. We start talking about what we'd do in Germany. I start getting excited, and telling him all about Bavaria and the castles and the nutcrackers and the shopping and on and on...
We decide maybe we should go. By now it's Sunday evening.
We talk some more. We weigh our options.
By Monday we'd changed our minds again. This one is looking final. The reasons to go? The experience, the cancellation fees on the tickets. The reasons NOT to go? For me, the thousands of dollars of the expenses of this trip (in addition to the price of the tickets we have sitting on this cycle of the credit card) and the fact we'd be pulling the girls out of 7 days of school. There are quite a number of other, lesser reasons.
So we're not going. Hubby leaves Saturday for Nuremberg, and will have to change his ticket anyway to come back the following Saturday. And will enjoy having a week at home, for a change. We've told the girls to tell their teachers we will be here after all.
There. The decision is made. Final.
This is not the first time a European trip was cancelled for me... the last time I found out TWO DAYS before we were leaving that our trip to Sheffield England was off. But knowing in the back of my mind it always could fall through isn't much comfort. I'm still sort of sad... I did really want to go.
A couple months back Hubby got a four day contract in Nuremberg. Then there was a two day class for him to teach in Hamburg the next week. If we wanted, we could schedule them as far apart as possible, and the girls and I could come to Germany and play with him in between. If I had my top choices of where it would be cool to take the family, Bavaria would be right up there. I've been there twice, I know some fun things to do there, it's a beautiful area. Hubby's never been to Germany, I could show him around a little too. We weighed all the options. Briefly. For a couple of days. Seriously enough for me to see that if we DID decide to go, we had to renew the girls' passports. Yeah, how freaky is that? I got my first passport at 18 or something. My girls are 7 and 9 and they need theirs RENEWED, and they've actually needed them TWICE. The times they are a changin'. I digress.
We decided to go to Germany.
Then we talked about it some more for another couple weeks or so. Of course when I say "talk" I really mean "brought it up while squeezing everything of relevance into a late night phone call, or an intercontinental skype session in which one of us was trying to have dinner while the other was trying to have breakfast." That's what I meant.
After briefly discussing it a couple times, for many reasons we decided not to go.
Then Hubby talked to his contacts in Hamburg to see if he could schedule his thing there the 2nd week at the beginning of the week instead of the end, and only be gone for 7 or 8 days or so all together, instead of the full 2 weeks. They said it's too late to move the dates, so he'll be stuck alone in Germany for the full two weeks, just working at the beginning and the end.
So we decided the girls and I should go meet him. We're going. We're taking the girls to Germany!
We looked into airfare. It seemed relatively inexpensive, and we got these sweet direct to Paris flights... so we bought tickets. That's always a scary moment... the "YES DANGIT GO AHEAD AND DO IT!!! LET'S GO TO GERMANY!!!" moment. Everything is rolling toward going.
I told the girls' teachers at parent teacher conferences that we'd be leaving on November 10th after school, coming back the weekend of the 20th. We'll come get any homework assignments for them to take with us and do on the plane. It's getting closer and closer!
Then on Saturday Oct 30th I get an email from Hubby telling me his thing in Hamburg at the end of the 2nd week in Germany was canceled. Suddenly we have no real reason to have a big family vacation, with the girls missing 7 days of school, in the middle of November, right before the Thanksgiving break.
We talk. We decide to cancel, eat the change fees on the tickets and use the remaining credit to go somewhere else another time.
Hubby calls the airline to make sure it really is a $250 fee per ticket to cancel an international ticket. Yes, it is. He is shocked that it really will cost us $1000 to NOT go, in changing his ticket and cashing the girls and my tickets in for credit. He gets off the phone and doesn't cancel. We start talking about what we'd do in Germany. I start getting excited, and telling him all about Bavaria and the castles and the nutcrackers and the shopping and on and on...
We decide maybe we should go. By now it's Sunday evening.
We talk some more. We weigh our options.
By Monday we'd changed our minds again. This one is looking final. The reasons to go? The experience, the cancellation fees on the tickets. The reasons NOT to go? For me, the thousands of dollars of the expenses of this trip (in addition to the price of the tickets we have sitting on this cycle of the credit card) and the fact we'd be pulling the girls out of 7 days of school. There are quite a number of other, lesser reasons.
So we're not going. Hubby leaves Saturday for Nuremberg, and will have to change his ticket anyway to come back the following Saturday. And will enjoy having a week at home, for a change. We've told the girls to tell their teachers we will be here after all.
There. The decision is made. Final.
This is not the first time a European trip was cancelled for me... the last time I found out TWO DAYS before we were leaving that our trip to Sheffield England was off. But knowing in the back of my mind it always could fall through isn't much comfort. I'm still sort of sad... I did really want to go.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
$15 worth of pumpkins
I finally got the pumpkins unloaded from the car and out to the front porch.
This is $15 worth of pumpkins.
I should probably just take off my last post. Having a rant sitting there is like starting to complain and never shutting up. It's embarrassing. And I would take it down but it took me a long time to write it. So now I want to move it to the past. But I really have nothing exciting to write about.
Except that HUBBY COMES HOME tomorrow!!!
It has been working pretty well to Skype him, except that the best time to do it comes out to be during meals. We're eating breakfast while he's eating dinner and vice versa. I set the computer up at his place at the table and we kind of crowd to the opposite side and talk to him while we eat. Kind of like a sitcom where we're all crowded into camera range. He and the kids often have rather disjointed conversations... the girls get excited and have to run get things to show the camera, at extreme fuzzy close-up. There is sometimes a slight delay in the upload, or it freezes entirely and we have to come around the table to deal with technical issues, but they push through. They were having a knock-knock joke contest the other day that turned into a giggle fest on our end. I made Salmon for dinner (that no one ate but me, BTW) and Hubby kept stalling out his system by uploading full screen pictures of salmon to show us.
It will be awfully nice to have him back on this side of the planet.
I can't imagine what it's like to have your spouse in the military where they get deployed to the other side of the planet for three months or longer at a time. The longest Hubby's been gone was three weeks, and he's in no serious danger, but it's still brutal for us.
I have been volunteering Thing 1 for more clip art. I'm bucking for her to become the school newsletter clip art specialist. But it might just be for this month, we'll see.
This morning she provided the graphics for an article the principal wrote using an analogy about apples and how volunteering helps distribute the work and helps divide things up.
Thing 1 just likes having an excuse to draw something. She is very frustrated that 3rd Grade is so much less creative than 2nd was. She said her "creativity is going away." I can't let that happen, it's so much a part of who she feels like she is.
I should probably just take off my last post. Having a rant sitting there is like starting to complain and never shutting up. It's embarrassing. And I would take it down but it took me a long time to write it. So now I want to move it to the past. But I really have nothing exciting to write about.
Except that HUBBY COMES HOME tomorrow!!!
It has been working pretty well to Skype him, except that the best time to do it comes out to be during meals. We're eating breakfast while he's eating dinner and vice versa. I set the computer up at his place at the table and we kind of crowd to the opposite side and talk to him while we eat. Kind of like a sitcom where we're all crowded into camera range. He and the kids often have rather disjointed conversations... the girls get excited and have to run get things to show the camera, at extreme fuzzy close-up. There is sometimes a slight delay in the upload, or it freezes entirely and we have to come around the table to deal with technical issues, but they push through. They were having a knock-knock joke contest the other day that turned into a giggle fest on our end. I made Salmon for dinner (that no one ate but me, BTW) and Hubby kept stalling out his system by uploading full screen pictures of salmon to show us.
It will be awfully nice to have him back on this side of the planet.
I can't imagine what it's like to have your spouse in the military where they get deployed to the other side of the planet for three months or longer at a time. The longest Hubby's been gone was three weeks, and he's in no serious danger, but it's still brutal for us.
I have been volunteering Thing 1 for more clip art. I'm bucking for her to become the school newsletter clip art specialist. But it might just be for this month, we'll see.
Thing 1 just likes having an excuse to draw something. She is very frustrated that 3rd Grade is so much less creative than 2nd was. She said her "creativity is going away." I can't let that happen, it's so much a part of who she feels like she is.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Happy Campers
We are not particularly big campers. Hubby's idea of roughing it involves having to call to the front desk for an iron. (I admit to a slight exaggeration for illustrative purposes.) My father, bless his heart, took my family camping quite a bit when we were youngsters and I have backpacked and horsepacked enough to know that car camping is not really roughing it. But I'm getting lazy and soft in my old age and my daily comfort requirements are greater. What I will tolerate as roughing it is getting correspondingly less and less primitive. There is a broad range of comfort levels with a mobile home on one end (and I recognize there is a whole subset of levels there) and rolling out a blanket on the ground on the other. The differences along the scale between the two seems to be mostly a differentiation of camping equipment.
Getting the equipment for comfortable camping gets to be a substantial commitment of finances and storage space. My father accumulated a basement collection of tents, sleeping bags, backpacks, and various and sundry other items necessary to the outdoor explorer. As his own comfort needs climb higher and camping becomes less appealing he has started to purge his camping equipment and find homes for it with me and my sister. So I do have access to some decent camping equipment without the expenditure. But this equipment requires gathering, checking, remembering, and loading in the car. That's before we even pull out of the garage. That's before we even start unloading and setting up, and long before we start breaking down, loading, and driving home so we can then unload and wash and put away. On my childhood camping trips my mom and mostly my dad did the bulk of the work. Since Hubby is out of town and is working right up until the moment he climbs in the car to drive, I'll be doing all the prep work that both my parents used to do. My ideas of what are preferable leisure activities are climbing farther and farther away from the pit toilet. That luxury condo Hubby mentioned looks better and better... But the girls get so freaking excited about the whole woodsy thing. Combine this with the annual church group camp-out on Friday and there is just no avoiding some sort of outdoor experience.
About four years ago when my kids got old enough to find the idea of camping romantic and they stopped having so much baby related equipment required for an overnight stay, I gave in and started trying to fulfill their fantasy of waking up in the woods. An easy platform to do this is the church camp-out. So much is arranged for you. The activities committee finds the spot and provides the fees for the campground, they only stay one night which eliminates the question of staying on longer, and there are a bunch of well equipped veteran campers on hand who can usually loan you whatever you forget. So they are making it easy, but it's still no picnic. As I have bemoaned to my mother how much of a pain in the neck the preparations are she has exuberantly expressed her respect and admiration for the herculean effort I go to to get the girls in the woods, because she certainly wouldn't have done it without the driving force of my father. It's nice to have my own cheering section, even if she's on the other side of the phone and not actually helping me load the car.
The first year the girls and I went on the church camp-out Hubby wasn't coming in until late that night so the girls and I (actually just I) set up camp by myself. That year we borrowed one of my dad's old (and wonderful) Spring Bar tents and his old (and inadequate) sleeping bags with the flannel deer on the inside. Hubby came up the following morning to join us for breakfast and to listen to the girls tell how cold they were all night and how fun it was when we all three ended up in one big sleeping bag together.
Hubby was in town and camped with us the next year, the year I didn't borrow my father's heavy but reliable Spring Bar tent but bought a nifty easy-to-put-up nylon tent for us instead, and bought new sleeping bags for everyone. The sleeping bags were great, but the tent was a complete disaster. The zippers on our new tent popped open or wouldn't budge at all, and climbing across our battery-inflated air mattress to get through what should have been the back window of the tent (because the door was sealed shut) popped the mattress and Hubby and I slept on the ground that night. We returned the tent the next day.
The next year we didn't stay over night, just went up for dinner and then slept in our own beds. Which brings us to this year, when I thought we might be able to get away with the much less strenuous dinner-only option, but eventually just couldn't deny the excitement of the girls. We found someone to stay with the dog and didn't have any other excuses not to go, so we again borrowed one of Papa's old Spring Bar tents (my sister and I rotate storage for some of the bigger items) and we camped over. Hubby was in town, and though he didn't really have time to devote to a night in the hills, he went anyway to be with his girls.
All in all it was a good trip. We got out of town late because Hubby was working up until I practically backed the car out of the driveway without him. So we were one of the last of the group to get there, and certainly the last to set up their tent. My father's Spring Bar is wonderful, he has several smaller sizes but we borrowed the 5 man, which I can stand up in with nearly a foot of headroom. By the time we set up our tent, before we even blew up the mattresses and unpacked the sleeping bags, it was nearly full dark. We went through the dinner line just one step ahead of the clean up crew, and I went back and finished setting up the rest during the campfire songs.
Not many people camped this year, most just came up for dinner, so breakfast the next morning was pretty quiet. In fact had I known it was going to be as quiet and unplanned as it was I would have brought a gallon of milk and a box of cereal or something. The breakfast provided was a rather gourmet affair of hot chocolate and boiled crawdads in butter or cocktail sauce. Thing 1 was horrified and wouldn't come near them, but Thing 2 found them a delicacy and gobbled them up as fast as anyone would peel them for her. When we came down from the canyon we stopped at IHOP because only Thing 2 had eaten enough to consider herself fully breakfasted, and then we came home where I set about unloading the car, and Hubby went to work and ended up having to pull a nearly all-nighter in order to get ready for his flight this morning.
The girls really enjoyed it. I come home dirty and tired; no matter how comfortable the air mattress and warm the sleeping bag, there is a certain amount of tossing and turning and waking and shifting and waking and listening to the woods and making sure the girls are covered and waking up trying to ignore my bladder and finally getting up to shiver to the latrines and blundering back into the tent and getting Hubby to roll over because if one of us rolls over in the double sleeping bag, the other has to too. It's absolutely exhausting. I apologize for my major whine rant.
This Friday the girls have the day off of school. Hubby went to great lengths to rearrange a client so he could be here and we can do something together. What do the girls want to do? Go camping.
Getting the equipment for comfortable camping gets to be a substantial commitment of finances and storage space. My father accumulated a basement collection of tents, sleeping bags, backpacks, and various and sundry other items necessary to the outdoor explorer. As his own comfort needs climb higher and camping becomes less appealing he has started to purge his camping equipment and find homes for it with me and my sister. So I do have access to some decent camping equipment without the expenditure. But this equipment requires gathering, checking, remembering, and loading in the car. That's before we even pull out of the garage. That's before we even start unloading and setting up, and long before we start breaking down, loading, and driving home so we can then unload and wash and put away. On my childhood camping trips my mom and mostly my dad did the bulk of the work. Since Hubby is out of town and is working right up until the moment he climbs in the car to drive, I'll be doing all the prep work that both my parents used to do. My ideas of what are preferable leisure activities are climbing farther and farther away from the pit toilet. That luxury condo Hubby mentioned looks better and better... But the girls get so freaking excited about the whole woodsy thing. Combine this with the annual church group camp-out on Friday and there is just no avoiding some sort of outdoor experience.
About four years ago when my kids got old enough to find the idea of camping romantic and they stopped having so much baby related equipment required for an overnight stay, I gave in and started trying to fulfill their fantasy of waking up in the woods. An easy platform to do this is the church camp-out. So much is arranged for you. The activities committee finds the spot and provides the fees for the campground, they only stay one night which eliminates the question of staying on longer, and there are a bunch of well equipped veteran campers on hand who can usually loan you whatever you forget. So they are making it easy, but it's still no picnic. As I have bemoaned to my mother how much of a pain in the neck the preparations are she has exuberantly expressed her respect and admiration for the herculean effort I go to to get the girls in the woods, because she certainly wouldn't have done it without the driving force of my father. It's nice to have my own cheering section, even if she's on the other side of the phone and not actually helping me load the car.
The first year the girls and I went on the church camp-out Hubby wasn't coming in until late that night so the girls and I (actually just I) set up camp by myself. That year we borrowed one of my dad's old (and wonderful) Spring Bar tents and his old (and inadequate) sleeping bags with the flannel deer on the inside. Hubby came up the following morning to join us for breakfast and to listen to the girls tell how cold they were all night and how fun it was when we all three ended up in one big sleeping bag together.
Hubby was in town and camped with us the next year, the year I didn't borrow my father's heavy but reliable Spring Bar tent but bought a nifty easy-to-put-up nylon tent for us instead, and bought new sleeping bags for everyone. The sleeping bags were great, but the tent was a complete disaster. The zippers on our new tent popped open or wouldn't budge at all, and climbing across our battery-inflated air mattress to get through what should have been the back window of the tent (because the door was sealed shut) popped the mattress and Hubby and I slept on the ground that night. We returned the tent the next day.
The next year we didn't stay over night, just went up for dinner and then slept in our own beds. Which brings us to this year, when I thought we might be able to get away with the much less strenuous dinner-only option, but eventually just couldn't deny the excitement of the girls. We found someone to stay with the dog and didn't have any other excuses not to go, so we again borrowed one of Papa's old Spring Bar tents (my sister and I rotate storage for some of the bigger items) and we camped over. Hubby was in town, and though he didn't really have time to devote to a night in the hills, he went anyway to be with his girls.
All in all it was a good trip. We got out of town late because Hubby was working up until I practically backed the car out of the driveway without him. So we were one of the last of the group to get there, and certainly the last to set up their tent. My father's Spring Bar is wonderful, he has several smaller sizes but we borrowed the 5 man, which I can stand up in with nearly a foot of headroom. By the time we set up our tent, before we even blew up the mattresses and unpacked the sleeping bags, it was nearly full dark. We went through the dinner line just one step ahead of the clean up crew, and I went back and finished setting up the rest during the campfire songs.
Not many people camped this year, most just came up for dinner, so breakfast the next morning was pretty quiet. In fact had I known it was going to be as quiet and unplanned as it was I would have brought a gallon of milk and a box of cereal or something. The breakfast provided was a rather gourmet affair of hot chocolate and boiled crawdads in butter or cocktail sauce. Thing 1 was horrified and wouldn't come near them, but Thing 2 found them a delicacy and gobbled them up as fast as anyone would peel them for her. When we came down from the canyon we stopped at IHOP because only Thing 2 had eaten enough to consider herself fully breakfasted, and then we came home where I set about unloading the car, and Hubby went to work and ended up having to pull a nearly all-nighter in order to get ready for his flight this morning.
The girls really enjoyed it. I come home dirty and tired; no matter how comfortable the air mattress and warm the sleeping bag, there is a certain amount of tossing and turning and waking and shifting and waking and listening to the woods and making sure the girls are covered and waking up trying to ignore my bladder and finally getting up to shiver to the latrines and blundering back into the tent and getting Hubby to roll over because if one of us rolls over in the double sleeping bag, the other has to too. It's absolutely exhausting. I apologize for my major whine rant.
This Friday the girls have the day off of school. Hubby went to great lengths to rearrange a client so he could be here and we can do something together. What do the girls want to do? Go camping.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Dolphin, not Swan
We're back! And we had a great time!
Hubby was there for the Agile 2010 conference, not that it matters for my part of the story, but the conference went well for him.
First of all, turns out we were at the Disney Dolphin, not the Swan. While we're talking about this let me state that The Dolphin is not really a dolphin. It has spikes and scales and is rather un-dolphin like. Hubby thought it's more like a sturgeon.
I was told it is a Dolphin Fish, as opposed to a Dolphin. Though a Dolphin Fish has a big fin up its back...
Okay it doesn't look like either a dolphin or a sturgeon but when you say Dolphin, you don't think of that freaky big headed thing, you think of Flipper. A mammal. Smooth, squeaky clean, jumping ahead of the spray from a ship.
I think the Disney Swan and Sturgeon kind of has a nice ring to it, and certainly fits their motif better. Anyway, the Swan and Sturgeon (aka Dolphin) hotels are practically twin hotels separated by a lake and a walkway. They sort of share 5 swimming pools. The difference is at the Dolphin we were closer to the interesting pools. The pool next to the Swan is a big square pool - the one I put in my last post. The Dolphin had one of those, then a large 3 foot deep kid pool, then a volleyball pool, the waterfall pool (also pictured in my previous post) with a slide going into it, and another little pool on the other side. They're all connected by sidewalks, but the elevators right outside our room dropped us down to right by the kid pool and waterfall pool we were interested in, and it all worked beautifully.
Hubby got us a room upgrade, so we had a great big room. Sort of. The hotel room layout left us scratching our heads - so much space that could have been utilized so much more effectively. There was a big wide hallway down the side of the room... just a weird layout but it was bigger than the usual hotel room. The 2nd bed was a small uncomfortable fold-out couch which the two girls shared the first night. Since Thing 2 is a kicker and sleeps really hot and Thing 1 is always freezing, (and there was a perfect nook for it in that big room) we got a roll away bed in the corner the next night. The girls were enchanted with that and they swapped who got to sleep on the roll-away for the rest of our stay.
Hubby knows so many more people at these conferences than he knows in our home town so this was a real social event for him. Standing in line to check in or go to a restaurant or get on the bus and he has people saying hello and talking shop. I'd send him for a yogurt and not seem him for an hour. There's lots of networking with other computer conference buddies. He did blow off quite a bit of the conference to be with us, though.
A guy named David who Hubby works with sometimes has a 7 1/2 year old we'll call Thing A. David was coming to the conference and his wife is out of the country so he contacted us a couple weeks before to see if I would watch his munchkin at the conference while he was busy doing conference stuff. So my girls had someone to play with.
All six of us spent the day on Sunday at Magic Kingdom. My girls are old hands at Disney and were very excited to just fast pass Thunder Mountain and Splash Mountain, which in DisneyWorld are very conveniently located right next to each other. Thing A and her dad have never really been to a Disney park before, and she wasn't sure about some of the rides. So we split up by families and Hubby and I took our little Disney veterans on everything we could fast pass. It was all in all a good day at the Magic Kingdom.
The other big Disney day was Tuesday. In evaluating our past DisneyWorld experience we had seen that there were just a few things at the three other parks besides Magic Kingdom that really held the girls' interest. So we figured maybe we could get a park hopper and do all three of the other parks in one day. Thing A came with us while her daddy stayed at the conference. We hit the Animal Adventure to do the Safari Ride, which last time we were there was amazing, this time there weren't too many animals around.
Thing 2 had been looking forward to having her face painted.
Thing A and Thing 2 with their face paint.
We saw quite a few animals, the most memorable was this mother and baby gorilla.
We were at Animal Adventure park for 3-4 hours, then hopped a bus to the Hollywood Studios park. The only thing there for the girls, really, was the Honey I Shrunk The Kids playground and a Toy Story ride. The girls all thought the playground was great, and we let them run around there for an hour. I stayed at the playground while Hubby walked over to fast pass the Toy Story ride, and found that they weren't Fast Passing, and the line wait was an hour and a half the first time he checked, and between an hour and two hours the subsequent times he checked. No Thanks. We gathered up the kids and took them to Epcot.
The Honey I Shrunk The Kids Playground
I hadn't given Epcot enough credit. We could have spent a lot more time there. Last time it seemed that Epcot was just about food and shopping from different countries, and we spent the whole time looking for the two or three rides that are there. But this time we went through Spaceship Earth, and didn't have time for all the other things to see in the front circle, before you even get back to the countries. As expected, we ran out of time. The girls wanted to shop in Japan for Pokemon stuff, and we promised them dinner in Mexico. We hit it all kind of quick, and didn't even get over to the Aquarium part, which we've seen before and is very neat. We ended up meeting David back at the hotel at 10:30 at night or so. 3 parks with 3 little girls in 12 hours. As we rode the bus back to the hotel Thing 2 told me, "Today's been a LARGE day."
At Epcot they give the kids a paper mask on a stick that they can color. At every country there is someone from that country at a desk who will stamp the kids' masks and put a hang tag on it representing their country. The kids think this is really cool.
The girls liked Japan.
The other days we mostly spent at the pool, or letting the girls play at the hotel room. They like to get me out of their hair when they're doing their pretend play, but with me there in the room with them they were a little inhibited.
I took the girls to a restaurant that had the kids menus on viewmasters. What a clever idea!
The last night we were there David and Thing A were going to a restaurant over in the Swan where they have Disney characters come around to the tables to say hello. We joined them and saw Pluto and Goofy. The girls were tickled pink.
We were scheduled to come home Saturday evening, tonight. However, on Thursday night as we were assessing what to do with our last day we looked at reviews for Universal Studios and saw that apparently the whole world is visiting Universal Studios to see Harry Potterville. There were reports of 2 hour lines for rides, and huge lines just to get into the shops. Since we hate lines so bad, and based on our experience with Disney's Hollywood Studios that there are more shows there than rides, we decided we'll wait until the kids are a little older to do that. We could have done a Cirque du Soleil show at Downtown Disney on Friday night. David and Thing A saw one and said it was wonderful. Then Hubby told me he was leaving home on a 6:00 a.m. flight Sunday morning, and had a boatload of stuff to do to get ready for that. So instead of getting home at 8:00 p.m. on Saturday and having him pull another all-nighter on Saturday, we decided to end our fun a day early. After Hubby went to the closing keynote speech on Friday morning he called Delta and found they could get us on a plane that evening.
The girls were very disappointed to hear they wouldn't have another day at the hotel pool, but we placated them with a couple hours at the pool with Daddy while I stayed in the room and packed us up. We were out by 2:00 p.m., which meant we didn't have to pay for the hotel that night, and we caught our plane to make it back last night.
Did I mention the rainstorms every afternoon while we were in Orlando? Anything from a good sprinkle to a real gullywasher would hit at least once each day, if not two or three times a day while we were there. As we were boarding the plane they said there was a micro storm burst coming in and if we didn't get out ahead of it we'd be stuck there for a while. Apparently we made it out just in time, and landed early back home. We quickly got in and unloaded the car, fed the last two living crickets to the gecko (who did just fine and is still fat tailed and happy), and got the kids in their pajamas. As we were brushing the girls' teeth the doorbell rang and who should be standing on our doorstep but my sister, with Kelso and her dogs. She and her darling husband drove the hour and 45 minutes down to drop off the dog, then they hugged everyone and turned around to drive an hour and 45 minutes back to their house. That's a three and a half hour drive for them, just because they're sweet, completely saving us a trip to go get him. Above and beyond!
Hubby started printing last night and has had the printer going most of the morning today. I doubt if he would have gotten much sleep at all if we hadn't have come home a day early. I'm sad to have missed a day of playing, but all in all this was better. The girls are upstairs happily pretending in their room, the dog is asleep at my feet, I can blog and run some laundry, and the gecko will have dinner today. Hubby can help me move the old TV out of the new Toy Room in preparation for the friends from out of town who will get here at the end of the week, in addition to getting ready for his next trip. It's good to be home.
Hubby was there for the Agile 2010 conference, not that it matters for my part of the story, but the conference went well for him.
First of all, turns out we were at the Disney Dolphin, not the Swan. While we're talking about this let me state that The Dolphin is not really a dolphin. It has spikes and scales and is rather un-dolphin like. Hubby thought it's more like a sturgeon.
I was told it is a Dolphin Fish, as opposed to a Dolphin. Though a Dolphin Fish has a big fin up its back...
Okay it doesn't look like either a dolphin or a sturgeon but when you say Dolphin, you don't think of that freaky big headed thing, you think of Flipper. A mammal. Smooth, squeaky clean, jumping ahead of the spray from a ship. I think the Disney Swan and Sturgeon kind of has a nice ring to it, and certainly fits their motif better. Anyway, the Swan and Sturgeon (aka Dolphin) hotels are practically twin hotels separated by a lake and a walkway. They sort of share 5 swimming pools. The difference is at the Dolphin we were closer to the interesting pools. The pool next to the Swan is a big square pool - the one I put in my last post. The Dolphin had one of those, then a large 3 foot deep kid pool, then a volleyball pool, the waterfall pool (also pictured in my previous post) with a slide going into it, and another little pool on the other side. They're all connected by sidewalks, but the elevators right outside our room dropped us down to right by the kid pool and waterfall pool we were interested in, and it all worked beautifully.
Hubby got us a room upgrade, so we had a great big room. Sort of. The hotel room layout left us scratching our heads - so much space that could have been utilized so much more effectively. There was a big wide hallway down the side of the room... just a weird layout but it was bigger than the usual hotel room. The 2nd bed was a small uncomfortable fold-out couch which the two girls shared the first night. Since Thing 2 is a kicker and sleeps really hot and Thing 1 is always freezing, (and there was a perfect nook for it in that big room) we got a roll away bed in the corner the next night. The girls were enchanted with that and they swapped who got to sleep on the roll-away for the rest of our stay.
Hubby knows so many more people at these conferences than he knows in our home town so this was a real social event for him. Standing in line to check in or go to a restaurant or get on the bus and he has people saying hello and talking shop. I'd send him for a yogurt and not seem him for an hour. There's lots of networking with other computer conference buddies. He did blow off quite a bit of the conference to be with us, though.
A guy named David who Hubby works with sometimes has a 7 1/2 year old we'll call Thing A. David was coming to the conference and his wife is out of the country so he contacted us a couple weeks before to see if I would watch his munchkin at the conference while he was busy doing conference stuff. So my girls had someone to play with.
All six of us spent the day on Sunday at Magic Kingdom. My girls are old hands at Disney and were very excited to just fast pass Thunder Mountain and Splash Mountain, which in DisneyWorld are very conveniently located right next to each other. Thing A and her dad have never really been to a Disney park before, and she wasn't sure about some of the rides. So we split up by families and Hubby and I took our little Disney veterans on everything we could fast pass. It was all in all a good day at the Magic Kingdom.
The other big Disney day was Tuesday. In evaluating our past DisneyWorld experience we had seen that there were just a few things at the three other parks besides Magic Kingdom that really held the girls' interest. So we figured maybe we could get a park hopper and do all three of the other parks in one day. Thing A came with us while her daddy stayed at the conference. We hit the Animal Adventure to do the Safari Ride, which last time we were there was amazing, this time there weren't too many animals around.
Thing 2 had been looking forward to having her face painted.
Thing A and Thing 2 with their face paint.
We saw quite a few animals, the most memorable was this mother and baby gorilla.
We were at Animal Adventure park for 3-4 hours, then hopped a bus to the Hollywood Studios park. The only thing there for the girls, really, was the Honey I Shrunk The Kids playground and a Toy Story ride. The girls all thought the playground was great, and we let them run around there for an hour. I stayed at the playground while Hubby walked over to fast pass the Toy Story ride, and found that they weren't Fast Passing, and the line wait was an hour and a half the first time he checked, and between an hour and two hours the subsequent times he checked. No Thanks. We gathered up the kids and took them to Epcot.
The Honey I Shrunk The Kids Playground
I hadn't given Epcot enough credit. We could have spent a lot more time there. Last time it seemed that Epcot was just about food and shopping from different countries, and we spent the whole time looking for the two or three rides that are there. But this time we went through Spaceship Earth, and didn't have time for all the other things to see in the front circle, before you even get back to the countries. As expected, we ran out of time. The girls wanted to shop in Japan for Pokemon stuff, and we promised them dinner in Mexico. We hit it all kind of quick, and didn't even get over to the Aquarium part, which we've seen before and is very neat. We ended up meeting David back at the hotel at 10:30 at night or so. 3 parks with 3 little girls in 12 hours. As we rode the bus back to the hotel Thing 2 told me, "Today's been a LARGE day."
At Epcot they give the kids a paper mask on a stick that they can color. At every country there is someone from that country at a desk who will stamp the kids' masks and put a hang tag on it representing their country. The kids think this is really cool.
The girls liked Japan.
The other days we mostly spent at the pool, or letting the girls play at the hotel room. They like to get me out of their hair when they're doing their pretend play, but with me there in the room with them they were a little inhibited.
I took the girls to a restaurant that had the kids menus on viewmasters. What a clever idea!
The last night we were there David and Thing A were going to a restaurant over in the Swan where they have Disney characters come around to the tables to say hello. We joined them and saw Pluto and Goofy. The girls were tickled pink.
We were scheduled to come home Saturday evening, tonight. However, on Thursday night as we were assessing what to do with our last day we looked at reviews for Universal Studios and saw that apparently the whole world is visiting Universal Studios to see Harry Potterville. There were reports of 2 hour lines for rides, and huge lines just to get into the shops. Since we hate lines so bad, and based on our experience with Disney's Hollywood Studios that there are more shows there than rides, we decided we'll wait until the kids are a little older to do that. We could have done a Cirque du Soleil show at Downtown Disney on Friday night. David and Thing A saw one and said it was wonderful. Then Hubby told me he was leaving home on a 6:00 a.m. flight Sunday morning, and had a boatload of stuff to do to get ready for that. So instead of getting home at 8:00 p.m. on Saturday and having him pull another all-nighter on Saturday, we decided to end our fun a day early. After Hubby went to the closing keynote speech on Friday morning he called Delta and found they could get us on a plane that evening.
The girls were very disappointed to hear they wouldn't have another day at the hotel pool, but we placated them with a couple hours at the pool with Daddy while I stayed in the room and packed us up. We were out by 2:00 p.m., which meant we didn't have to pay for the hotel that night, and we caught our plane to make it back last night.
Did I mention the rainstorms every afternoon while we were in Orlando? Anything from a good sprinkle to a real gullywasher would hit at least once each day, if not two or three times a day while we were there. As we were boarding the plane they said there was a micro storm burst coming in and if we didn't get out ahead of it we'd be stuck there for a while. Apparently we made it out just in time, and landed early back home. We quickly got in and unloaded the car, fed the last two living crickets to the gecko (who did just fine and is still fat tailed and happy), and got the kids in their pajamas. As we were brushing the girls' teeth the doorbell rang and who should be standing on our doorstep but my sister, with Kelso and her dogs. She and her darling husband drove the hour and 45 minutes down to drop off the dog, then they hugged everyone and turned around to drive an hour and 45 minutes back to their house. That's a three and a half hour drive for them, just because they're sweet, completely saving us a trip to go get him. Above and beyond!
Hubby started printing last night and has had the printer going most of the morning today. I doubt if he would have gotten much sleep at all if we hadn't have come home a day early. I'm sad to have missed a day of playing, but all in all this was better. The girls are upstairs happily pretending in their room, the dog is asleep at my feet, I can blog and run some laundry, and the gecko will have dinner today. Hubby can help me move the old TV out of the new Toy Room in preparation for the friends from out of town who will get here at the end of the week, in addition to getting ready for his next trip. It's good to be home.
Friday, July 9, 2010
Somewhere between Soda Springs and Tin Cup
Each year my folks rent a big ol' four bedroom condo in Teton Village and take their three kids, of which I am one, and our families up there for five days. It is more fabulous than I can describe. They've been doing it for years. We've even had the same condo every year, until this year, when we got the one next door. It's even more fashionably furnished. But I digress.
This year on his way up to Jackson in their suburban, my brother hit a cow. The first we heard about it was an hour ago when my oldest niece texted a rather brief announcement. Something like "... we just hit a cow." Hearing this freaked out my mother, who is a professional worrier anyway. Despite it being past her bedtime, she can't make herself go to bed. She is knitting furiously, occasionally asking those of us with phones if we've heard anything. My niece finally responded that everything was okay and they were back on the road.
- I came back to finish the story - They got in sometime after midnight, but gave the full story the next morning. Everyone is okay, the suburban is okay, and they actually hit two cows, who both ran away. My SIL, who knows cows, assured us one will probably die, if not both. She says they hit them pretty hard, probably broke one's hip, and gave the other one a really nasty headache. There were lots of jokes, of course, about "Are we having steak tonight?"
The story that emerged the next morning was that the cows were laying in an alternating pattern on the road, creating a slalom course of sorts. My SIL saw the cow first, yelled "DEER!" about the time my brother saw it.(She's used to driving in the canyon.) The black hide of the cows blended in perfectly with the dark night. My brother swerved to avoid the first cow, and would have just bounced into the ditch except for the 2nd cow that loomed up in their headlight. (They had just found out at the previous stop that they only had one.) No one painted me a picture, but from my understanding they ended up going between the cows, sort of bumping both of them, instead of T-Boning (ha ha) one or the other. The braking, swerving, bumping, and the cascade of luggage from the back of the suburban woke up their four daughters and added the element of wildly screaming girls to the excitement.
Those black cows are mean, how they lay in wait on the road for you like that... Just look at her... She's challenging you to a duel with her eyes.
Hubby suggested they get a couple of little vinyl cow silhouettes to put on the side of the suburban. My sister tells me that one more and they qualify as cow aces.
This year on his way up to Jackson in their suburban, my brother hit a cow. The first we heard about it was an hour ago when my oldest niece texted a rather brief announcement. Something like "... we just hit a cow." Hearing this freaked out my mother, who is a professional worrier anyway. Despite it being past her bedtime, she can't make herself go to bed. She is knitting furiously, occasionally asking those of us with phones if we've heard anything. My niece finally responded that everything was okay and they were back on the road.
- I came back to finish the story - They got in sometime after midnight, but gave the full story the next morning. Everyone is okay, the suburban is okay, and they actually hit two cows, who both ran away. My SIL, who knows cows, assured us one will probably die, if not both. She says they hit them pretty hard, probably broke one's hip, and gave the other one a really nasty headache. There were lots of jokes, of course, about "Are we having steak tonight?"
The story that emerged the next morning was that the cows were laying in an alternating pattern on the road, creating a slalom course of sorts. My SIL saw the cow first, yelled "DEER!" about the time my brother saw it.(She's used to driving in the canyon.) The black hide of the cows blended in perfectly with the dark night. My brother swerved to avoid the first cow, and would have just bounced into the ditch except for the 2nd cow that loomed up in their headlight. (They had just found out at the previous stop that they only had one.) No one painted me a picture, but from my understanding they ended up going between the cows, sort of bumping both of them, instead of T-Boning (ha ha) one or the other. The braking, swerving, bumping, and the cascade of luggage from the back of the suburban woke up their four daughters and added the element of wildly screaming girls to the excitement.
Those black cows are mean, how they lay in wait on the road for you like that... Just look at her... She's challenging you to a duel with her eyes.
Hubby suggested they get a couple of little vinyl cow silhouettes to put on the side of the suburban. My sister tells me that one more and they qualify as cow aces.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Halfway Gone
Yesterday... or maybe the day before, was the halfway mark of Hubby's trip. 5 minutes after I tucked her in bed tonight Thing 1 called me back to their room and asked me to count for her how many days till he comes back. I can get a little crabby after being called back for a 2nd, 3rd, and 4th hug good night, but I kind of get marshmallow soft for that one. The sad part is he's having to hear over Skype about what's going on with us. It's funny that he'd be missing a lot of this anyway, he'd just be in Minneapolis or Chicago instead of London and Copenhagen, and he'd get to catch up in person on the weekends..
Thing 1's 2nd grade class made volcanoes out of salt clay dough a couple weeks ago, and then yesterday a whole class full of volcanoes erupted. Erupting involved dropping a tablespoon or so of baking soda into the middle hole of each one and then in front of the class each kid got to dump a quarter cup or so of red-dyed vinegar over the baking soda and everyone cheered over the foamy red bubble lava.
It was pretty exciting. I forgot the red dye on the first at home re-enactment.
Thing 2 got a haircut, she wanted it shorter. The beautician asked how short, and Thing 2 held her hands over her ears and said "Like this." What? Over your ears? Honey, that's pretty short! (I'm thinking BOY hair cut...) The beautician flashed me a look, then trotted to the next room and came back with a bunch of haircut books, thumbed through till she found one of a lady with her hair about jawline length, and Thing 2 conceded that would be okay. She looks very cute in short hair, it is a good cut on her, but yes, it is a little shorter than I would have picked for her. She was twittering and so excited all through the haircut, giggling all the way home that first her sister, and then the next day all the kids at school won't recognize her, she'll have to explain who she is. The joy lasted about 4 hours. By bed time she was lamenting that her hair was too short. All my assurances that it looks darling are a waste of breath. By the next morning she seemed resolved, and has been okay since. Something about seeing her naked little stem of a neck is endearing to me...
I've gotten a whole lot done over the past couple of days - the majority of it in the yard. I am not much of a green thumb, I'm more of a gray thumb. I come from a long line of green thumbs, but it sort of missed me. Things don't immediately die under my care, but they start on a long slow track of demise, heading toward eventual death. I can usually keep plants barely alive for years. Hubby is the gardener... as well as being the cook. Apparently his first marriage was awful, so he spent all his time in the garden. He had a beautiful yard. I suppose it's a tribute to a happy marriage that our yard is a mess. What grows without help is growing out of control. What needs help is slowly dying. It's obvious I'm in charge.
Thing 1's 2nd grade class made volcanoes out of salt clay dough a couple weeks ago, and then yesterday a whole class full of volcanoes erupted. Erupting involved dropping a tablespoon or so of baking soda into the middle hole of each one and then in front of the class each kid got to dump a quarter cup or so of red-dyed vinegar over the baking soda and everyone cheered over the foamy red bubble lava.
It was pretty exciting. I forgot the red dye on the first at home re-enactment.
Thing 2 got a haircut, she wanted it shorter. The beautician asked how short, and Thing 2 held her hands over her ears and said "Like this." What? Over your ears? Honey, that's pretty short! (I'm thinking BOY hair cut...) The beautician flashed me a look, then trotted to the next room and came back with a bunch of haircut books, thumbed through till she found one of a lady with her hair about jawline length, and Thing 2 conceded that would be okay. She looks very cute in short hair, it is a good cut on her, but yes, it is a little shorter than I would have picked for her. She was twittering and so excited all through the haircut, giggling all the way home that first her sister, and then the next day all the kids at school won't recognize her, she'll have to explain who she is. The joy lasted about 4 hours. By bed time she was lamenting that her hair was too short. All my assurances that it looks darling are a waste of breath. By the next morning she seemed resolved, and has been okay since. Something about seeing her naked little stem of a neck is endearing to me...
I've gotten a whole lot done over the past couple of days - the majority of it in the yard. I am not much of a green thumb, I'm more of a gray thumb. I come from a long line of green thumbs, but it sort of missed me. Things don't immediately die under my care, but they start on a long slow track of demise, heading toward eventual death. I can usually keep plants barely alive for years. Hubby is the gardener... as well as being the cook. Apparently his first marriage was awful, so he spent all his time in the garden. He had a beautiful yard. I suppose it's a tribute to a happy marriage that our yard is a mess. What grows without help is growing out of control. What needs help is slowly dying. It's obvious I'm in charge.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Hurry Home, Daddy
Hubby has a three week trip. He has only been gone this long once before. Usually he's out for 5 days at a time, sometimes 10 or 12, but he tries pretty hard to juggle things so he's not gone this long. This time it's 20 days, starting yesterday. A week in London, a week in Ireland, a day or two in Denmark, then a week in Norway. A real passport stamping opportunity.
Usually Thing 1 is the more unhappily melodramatic about him being gone, but this time they seem to be running a competition about who can be saddest he's out of town. Sigh.
There is apparently a tradition of taking a picture of your restaurant meal. Sometimes Hubby sends them to me. He sent me this of his late London lunch today. Proof he made it safe and sound, despite the best efforts of the volcano.
Usually Thing 1 is the more unhappily melodramatic about him being gone, but this time they seem to be running a competition about who can be saddest he's out of town. Sigh.
There is apparently a tradition of taking a picture of your restaurant meal. Sometimes Hubby sends them to me. He sent me this of his late London lunch today. Proof he made it safe and sound, despite the best efforts of the volcano.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
The Long and Winding Road Home
Friday, our last day in Santa Cruz, was wonderful. The girls and I went to the beach just after lunch - which was earlier than usual, and Hubby joined us after a half day at his client.
Hubby had wanted to go see a Redwood park, but the girls had spent their whole time on the beach looking forward to him getting there. So it was hard to convince them to leave, and we ended up staying until supper time.
Hubby told me the secret of the skimboard is to DRAG the girl, not run alongside. So I tried that and we had a couple of really good runs. Thing 1 even put on her wetsuit and boogie boarded. It was awfully cute to have the dog running out to see what she was doing, though she bumped into him more than once.
Skimboarding
Thing 2 refused to boogie board, despite having loved it in Oceanside. Oh well, she was very happy playing in the sand, and being dragged along the beach on the skim board.
We didn't get as much packing in on Friday as I'd have liked, TRANSLATE: NONE so we didn't get packed up and on the road as early as I'd have liked on Saturday. It was closer to 11:30 than to the 10:00 am I'd hoped. But it was a miracle we got everything into the car, and those kind of miracles take a little time.
The drive home was mostly uneventful. We stopped for gas 3 times, once for a meal, and once when the dog barked to let him do his thang in the bushes. What the Garmin indicated should have been a 12.5 hour driving trip, of course not calculating for gas, meals, and dogs, we did in just a little more than 12, including stops. Obviously we are a couple of leadfoots. The last half hour or so, from midnight on, the dog was obviously getting restless and started messing with the stuff he could reach in the back. I knew it probably wasn't good, but we just pushed through. When we finally pulled into the garage and let him out we found he'd gotten into the board games, and had chewed through a couple corners of the "Carcassone" game box. Repairable, but annoying.
Turns out the dog was pretty sick. He threw up shortly after we got home, and then barked a couple times in the middle of the night to be let out to throw up some more, and to trot around the yard with the trots. While it was mildly annoying to be up and down letting him out at 2:00 am, and again at 4:00 am, it's sure a lot less annoying than cleaning lots of vomit and doggy diarrhea off the kitchen floor in the morning. He came through smelling like a - well, not a rose, but he proved himself a great traveler, whether he likes it or not.
Hubby had wanted to go see a Redwood park, but the girls had spent their whole time on the beach looking forward to him getting there. So it was hard to convince them to leave, and we ended up staying until supper time.
Hubby told me the secret of the skimboard is to DRAG the girl, not run alongside. So I tried that and we had a couple of really good runs. Thing 1 even put on her wetsuit and boogie boarded. It was awfully cute to have the dog running out to see what she was doing, though she bumped into him more than once.
Skimboarding
Thing 2 refused to boogie board, despite having loved it in Oceanside. Oh well, she was very happy playing in the sand, and being dragged along the beach on the skim board.
We didn't get as much packing in on Friday as I'd have liked, TRANSLATE: NONE so we didn't get packed up and on the road as early as I'd have liked on Saturday. It was closer to 11:30 than to the 10:00 am I'd hoped. But it was a miracle we got everything into the car, and those kind of miracles take a little time.
The drive home was mostly uneventful. We stopped for gas 3 times, once for a meal, and once when the dog barked to let him do his thang in the bushes. What the Garmin indicated should have been a 12.5 hour driving trip, of course not calculating for gas, meals, and dogs, we did in just a little more than 12, including stops. Obviously we are a couple of leadfoots. The last half hour or so, from midnight on, the dog was obviously getting restless and started messing with the stuff he could reach in the back. I knew it probably wasn't good, but we just pushed through. When we finally pulled into the garage and let him out we found he'd gotten into the board games, and had chewed through a couple corners of the "Carcassone" game box. Repairable, but annoying.
Turns out the dog was pretty sick. He threw up shortly after we got home, and then barked a couple times in the middle of the night to be let out to throw up some more, and to trot around the yard with the trots. While it was mildly annoying to be up and down letting him out at 2:00 am, and again at 4:00 am, it's sure a lot less annoying than cleaning lots of vomit and doggy diarrhea off the kitchen floor in the morning. He came through smelling like a - well, not a rose, but he proved himself a great traveler, whether he likes it or not.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Is There a Bowling League for the Between -The-Legs-Rollers?
During the week I have to go in and wake Thing 2 up in time for school. But this morning, as I have noticed happening the last three weeks that Hubby hasn't been around to get up with them on the weekend, Thing 2 wakes up early- earlier than I am waking her up during the week - and lies in bed and calls me. This is even after agreeing the night before how nice it will be to sleep in the next morning. Oh well, we had a full day planned anyway.
Two years ago when Thing 1 started kindergarten we found one of her classmates has a family that is configured a lot like ours. I like the mom, Thing 1 plays beautifully with the little boy, and Thing 2 gets along great with his little sister. The dad, while in a completely different field than Hubby's, is self employed and has gone through some similar experiences as Hubby with that. They're all great, we've done a bunch of stuff as an eight-some.
In about two weeks they're moving to the other side of the valley, about an hour's drive away. I am so bummed.
Today the girls and I went bowling today with the mom and her kids - her husband works on Saturdays and normally we are having some quality face time with Daddy so we are unavailable on the weekends, but today with Hubby still gone we were all up for a little bit of getting out of the house. I think all the kids had a blast, it was so cute and funny to watch them bowl. We kept expecting to be evicted, but the management never said a word about all the bangs and crashes as the bowling balls smacked on the lane. The kids' techniques ranged from the between the legs scoop, to the running throw and toss, to the swing and launch - which sort of shot puts the bowling ball about five feet out in the air. All of these except the between the legs roll seemed pretty hard on the lane. Most of these techniques send the ball slowly meandering toward the pins... It can take nearly half a minute for the ball to finally mosey up to the pins and casually bump into a few, sometimes rolling off the back of the lane, and sometimes coming to a stop there with the pins. Thing 2 whooped and jumped for nearly every throw. They all had a lot of fun and bowled quite well, of course taking into account we had the bumpers up to keep the balls out of the gutters. It drastically improved my game as well, I actually broke 100!
Hubby gets home tomorrow, for a few hours, then he leaves Monday afternoon for a two day trip, then he'll be back for our week in Southern California.
Two years ago when Thing 1 started kindergarten we found one of her classmates has a family that is configured a lot like ours. I like the mom, Thing 1 plays beautifully with the little boy, and Thing 2 gets along great with his little sister. The dad, while in a completely different field than Hubby's, is self employed and has gone through some similar experiences as Hubby with that. They're all great, we've done a bunch of stuff as an eight-some.
In about two weeks they're moving to the other side of the valley, about an hour's drive away. I am so bummed.
Today the girls and I went bowling today with the mom and her kids - her husband works on Saturdays and normally we are having some quality face time with Daddy so we are unavailable on the weekends, but today with Hubby still gone we were all up for a little bit of getting out of the house. I think all the kids had a blast, it was so cute and funny to watch them bowl. We kept expecting to be evicted, but the management never said a word about all the bangs and crashes as the bowling balls smacked on the lane. The kids' techniques ranged from the between the legs scoop, to the running throw and toss, to the swing and launch - which sort of shot puts the bowling ball about five feet out in the air. All of these except the between the legs roll seemed pretty hard on the lane. Most of these techniques send the ball slowly meandering toward the pins... It can take nearly half a minute for the ball to finally mosey up to the pins and casually bump into a few, sometimes rolling off the back of the lane, and sometimes coming to a stop there with the pins. Thing 2 whooped and jumped for nearly every throw. They all had a lot of fun and bowled quite well, of course taking into account we had the bumpers up to keep the balls out of the gutters. It drastically improved my game as well, I actually broke 100!
Hubby gets home tomorrow, for a few hours, then he leaves Monday afternoon for a two day trip, then he'll be back for our week in Southern California.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Around the House
I try to get us up and doing something on the weekend, especially when Hubby's not around trying to relax after a long time on the road. I have sort of resigned myself that I only really get to sleep in when he's here to entertain the girls. Otherwise, I might as well just get up and do something.
Today I planned on taking the girls ice skating after a leisurely morning, but they dug in their heels and really didn't want to go. It helped that they started playing together beautifully, having a great time pretending - when they're getting along really well I have a tendency to let them go and not interrupt a good thing.
After a while they decided they wanted to play checkers. We have a neat retro wooden checkers and checker board set, but the red checkers are so dark you can't easily tell them from the black checkers. So I figured after they've played their game I'll pull out my acrylic paints from the good old single days when I used to paint crafty things and red up the checkers. In the cellar next to the paints I found several unfinished nutcracker woods, and brought everything upstairs to work on while I waited for the girls to finish their game.
Sure enough, when she saw me painting a nutcracker, Thing 1 wanted to paint one too. Turns out I had a box of six mini nutcrackers that look like they might be ornaments or something.
I also had a set of six plaster dogs and cats that Thing 2 was more than happy to paint on.
So at the end of the day, I finished off one nutcracker that I had almost completely finished before I'd packed it away and forgotten about it 11 or more years ago, and then started and finished another.
Thing 1 painted the mug bearing mini nutcracker in front.
The next picture is the plaster dog Thing 1 painted, and close up of the mini nutcracker which she also painted. These pictures don't do them justice, she did a really nice job. I'm just too lazy to upload pictures from my real camera, emailing them to myself from the phone saves me a step. Take my word for it, the detail is great. She painted the plaster dog as a miniature Kelso.
Thing 2 painted three plaster kitties.
Thing 2's attention to detail isn't quite as intense as Thing 1's, but she enjoyed painting them and was very happy with the result. Which really was the point of the whole thing.
I just got off the phone with Hubby and found that he won't be coming home on Saturday morning like I thought. Because of the conference he's at this weekend he won't be able to travel on Sunday (tomorrow) and so he will be flying to Brazil all day Monday and will be there Tuesday through Saturday to put in his five days. Since it takes 24 hours of travel to get home, he won't come home until Sunday evening. He was trying to figure out a way to get home in between San Francisco, where he is now, and Brazil, but it's just not looking possible.
He travels all the time, and I guess I don't think about it a lot... but finding he'll be gone all through the weekend made me a lot sadder than I thought it would. I'm used to him being gone during the week, that's status quo around here. But I don't like it when he's gone on the weekends, and I REALLY don't like him being gone this long - two or more weeks and weekends in a row... And then when he's home for 36 hours and goes onto another two week trip, it's even worse. He said a bunch of people at the conference were asking about his schedule and were commenting that they don't know how he does this much travel. He was thinking "by not thinking about it, thanks so much for reminding me!" He's sounding pretty tired of being gone this much too.
Today I planned on taking the girls ice skating after a leisurely morning, but they dug in their heels and really didn't want to go. It helped that they started playing together beautifully, having a great time pretending - when they're getting along really well I have a tendency to let them go and not interrupt a good thing.
After a while they decided they wanted to play checkers. We have a neat retro wooden checkers and checker board set, but the red checkers are so dark you can't easily tell them from the black checkers. So I figured after they've played their game I'll pull out my acrylic paints from the good old single days when I used to paint crafty things and red up the checkers. In the cellar next to the paints I found several unfinished nutcracker woods, and brought everything upstairs to work on while I waited for the girls to finish their game.
Sure enough, when she saw me painting a nutcracker, Thing 1 wanted to paint one too. Turns out I had a box of six mini nutcrackers that look like they might be ornaments or something.
I also had a set of six plaster dogs and cats that Thing 2 was more than happy to paint on.
So at the end of the day, I finished off one nutcracker that I had almost completely finished before I'd packed it away and forgotten about it 11 or more years ago, and then started and finished another.
The next picture is the plaster dog Thing 1 painted, and close up of the mini nutcracker which she also painted. These pictures don't do them justice, she did a really nice job. I'm just too lazy to upload pictures from my real camera, emailing them to myself from the phone saves me a step. Take my word for it, the detail is great. She painted the plaster dog as a miniature Kelso.
Thing 2 painted three plaster kitties.
I just got off the phone with Hubby and found that he won't be coming home on Saturday morning like I thought. Because of the conference he's at this weekend he won't be able to travel on Sunday (tomorrow) and so he will be flying to Brazil all day Monday and will be there Tuesday through Saturday to put in his five days. Since it takes 24 hours of travel to get home, he won't come home until Sunday evening. He was trying to figure out a way to get home in between San Francisco, where he is now, and Brazil, but it's just not looking possible.
He travels all the time, and I guess I don't think about it a lot... but finding he'll be gone all through the weekend made me a lot sadder than I thought it would. I'm used to him being gone during the week, that's status quo around here. But I don't like it when he's gone on the weekends, and I REALLY don't like him being gone this long - two or more weeks and weekends in a row... And then when he's home for 36 hours and goes onto another two week trip, it's even worse. He said a bunch of people at the conference were asking about his schedule and were commenting that they don't know how he does this much travel. He was thinking "by not thinking about it, thanks so much for reminding me!" He's sounding pretty tired of being gone this much too.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Paris? No Thanks
We've been doing really well lately. Hubby's home, which is always a bonus, though he has a heinous trip coming up after Thanksgiving. He leaves the 28th for Iceland for a couple of days, followed by a couple days in London, followed by a couple days in Paris. He returns the 12th of December or so, which happens to be my birthday. He tried to talk me into meeting him in Paris - who wouldn't want to be flown to Paris for their birthday?
Me, for one.
He has a long standing history of trying to do wonderful over-the-top celebrations for my birthday, which usually involve a night or two at a wonderful hotel or something. This was fine and dandy until we had kids. As the kids got older it has become a real juggling act of the holiday season, that not only do I have to get everything ready for Christmas, I lose a couple of days in which to do it, and I have to arrange for someone to watch the girls - my folks for the most part. There were a couple times when trying to juggle his schedule and the girls' schedules and my folks' schedule, and getting everyone where they should be at the right time kind of sucked all the fun out of it for me. It started to become more of a hassle and less of a delight.
So I turned down the Paris trip. He'd be teaching a class most of the day, I'd be bopping around Paris on my own except for meeting him for dinner... Don't get me wrong, I love Paris, I sort of speak French, and it would be fun, but having fun shouldn't be that much work.
And this year I would have the added problem of the dog, which would not go over well with my folks. We would probably end up putting him in a kennel. Which would not go over well with the dog.
So I'm staying home to keep the home fires burning.
I took the dog to a do-it-yourself dog wash place last week. He HATED it but boy howdy did he ever come out fluffy and cute. He smells less doggy, and his fur has that fluffy, bouncy Breck-Girl shine. It might be hard to tell from a picture, but believe me, he is much softer and fluffier than before. He better get used to this bath idea, as I see many such baths in his future.
We'll be doing Thanksgiving at my sister's house this year. My parent's house is sort of under construction (see earlier blog). The kicker is my dad's idea of having the floors put in while they were on vacation in order to avoid living in construction for a week completely backfired and now they're living in a construction zone for over a month through the holidays. I'm so proud of my mom who claims she hasn't once said "I told you so!"
With my family Thanksgiving is a two or three day affair. Bigger than Christmas in some ways. I'm looking forward to it.
The change of location helps us in one way as it makes it easier to figure out what to do with the dog, since my sister has dogs, we're hoping they all get along well enough. Had we had it at my folks', the dog would have been in his kennel the entire time, or locked in my sister's back yard or something.
Time to start figuring out my grocery list as the festivities begin tomorrow, and with my mom's kitchen all torn up, I'm helping out more than I usually do.
Me, for one.
He has a long standing history of trying to do wonderful over-the-top celebrations for my birthday, which usually involve a night or two at a wonderful hotel or something. This was fine and dandy until we had kids. As the kids got older it has become a real juggling act of the holiday season, that not only do I have to get everything ready for Christmas, I lose a couple of days in which to do it, and I have to arrange for someone to watch the girls - my folks for the most part. There were a couple times when trying to juggle his schedule and the girls' schedules and my folks' schedule, and getting everyone where they should be at the right time kind of sucked all the fun out of it for me. It started to become more of a hassle and less of a delight.
So I turned down the Paris trip. He'd be teaching a class most of the day, I'd be bopping around Paris on my own except for meeting him for dinner... Don't get me wrong, I love Paris, I sort of speak French, and it would be fun, but having fun shouldn't be that much work.
And this year I would have the added problem of the dog, which would not go over well with my folks. We would probably end up putting him in a kennel. Which would not go over well with the dog.
So I'm staying home to keep the home fires burning.
I took the dog to a do-it-yourself dog wash place last week. He HATED it but boy howdy did he ever come out fluffy and cute. He smells less doggy, and his fur has that fluffy, bouncy Breck-Girl shine. It might be hard to tell from a picture, but believe me, he is much softer and fluffier than before. He better get used to this bath idea, as I see many such baths in his future.
We'll be doing Thanksgiving at my sister's house this year. My parent's house is sort of under construction (see earlier blog). The kicker is my dad's idea of having the floors put in while they were on vacation in order to avoid living in construction for a week completely backfired and now they're living in a construction zone for over a month through the holidays. I'm so proud of my mom who claims she hasn't once said "I told you so!"
With my family Thanksgiving is a two or three day affair. Bigger than Christmas in some ways. I'm looking forward to it.
The change of location helps us in one way as it makes it easier to figure out what to do with the dog, since my sister has dogs, we're hoping they all get along well enough. Had we had it at my folks', the dog would have been in his kennel the entire time, or locked in my sister's back yard or something.
Time to start figuring out my grocery list as the festivities begin tomorrow, and with my mom's kitchen all torn up, I'm helping out more than I usually do.
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