One down, one to go

Hoopty car #1 has been purchased. This one is for Lazy Teenager, excuse me, Lazy Non-Teenager. Happy 21st Birthday!

We are still shopping for hoopty car #2 for Surly Teenager.

It's such a whipping.

The Continuing Adventures of HANDY HUBBY

Hubby is feeling very unappreciated because I haven't been putting up his recent (and not so recent) accomplishments.

So without further ado, handiness:

This is the bin on the back porch that we keep dry cat food in. I went out one day and found a neighbor cat hanging out of it with his head under the lid. A couple of days later I went out on the back porch and suddenly, the lid flew open, and the same cat jumped out. He had been inside eating. So Hubby rigged it with a "lock".

We used to run electricity out to the shop by this attractive method:

That is an extension cord coming out of the kitchen window. Hubby (in his Brawny Man outfit) wired up an electric box on the outside of the house.

Then he redid his set up down in the shop. Now you just walk in and flip a switch. And it is set up to make installing overhead lighting more manageable.

The construction people gave us a new gate. Only there was a fairly large gap between the gate and the house. A Haylie sized gap. If she was in the yard alone for more than 2 minutes, she would escape. Hubby fixed the problem by getting a matching post and cutting it down to size and attaching it to the gate post. Haylie was totally confounded and had to resort to trying to dig out under the gate in order to escape.

The short story with this one is I locked Surly Teenager's medicine in our bedroom while we had gone out of town. We told her to kick in the bedroom door. She did a really good job of it and didn't mess up the door at all, just ripped the trim and lock plate off, and cracked the jamb.

He fixed it and you can't even tell it was broken. (Sorry for the blurry. I am too lazy to go back and take it again. Trust me, it looks good.)

Last fall, we moved my mom out of her mobile home and into a senior living place. This entailed much hard work that included, among many other things, taking down the carport, tearing up the wheelchair ramp, and moving a storage shed.

AND on top of all of that hard work, he still occasionally takes time to help with the dishes.

He's such a hard worker. I am very lucky to have him.

Bounce-y Fresh

I spent the better part of the day marveling at the staying power of
the scent from the dryer sheets I use. It seemed liked every time I
turned my head or moved, I caught a brief, unmistakable scent of dryer
sheet.

I have also spent the better part of the day scratching at an itchy
shoulder through my sweater.

I just now found out the connection between the two when I reached
beneath my sweater to scratch my shoulder and pulled out a used dryer
sheet.

Happy Valentines Day

For Valentines Day, we went to see "Tuna Does Vegas", earlier in the week.

This is the fourth of the Tuna plays. If you are not familiar with Tuna, Texas and Joe Sears and Jaston Williams, you are missing out.

I have seen the three previous Tuna plays: "Greater Tuna", "A Tuna Christmas", and "Red, White and Tuna". Hubby has not seen any of them, so I was a little concerned that he wouldn't enjoy it as much as I would. But I am please to report that he did. He did, he did, he did.

And that was supposed to be our Valentines. No gifts, no cards, just going to the play.

But Hubby doesn't listen very well.

I was presented with this, early this morning.

It had this recorded on it:

Yesterday I was on the computer in the family room, and he was in the living room on the laptop. He sent me a message saying he was leaving me. I messaged back saying thank goodness. (yes, we actually use the iChat when we are in the same house but in different rooms. It cuts down on the hollering.) After about five minutes I got up and went in the other room, and noticed that he had really left the house. He came home about 30 minutes later with a bag of CD's from Movie Trading Company, so I didn't think anything of his being gone. Little did I know but he had also snuck over to the electronics store and got me the camera.

This camera is exactly like the one that we had just bought last month. Normally, I would say two cameras are unnecessary. But he was taking the camera to school with him every day, wearing it on his belt. I wanted to take a picture of something and I couldn't because he had it.

I started complaining about needing one of my own because he was hogging that one.

And it worked!

Now I am going to start to complaining that I need an iPhone. All those apps to play with!!

(Thank you Honey Bunny. You are the Best Husband Ever. (So far.) I love you very much.)

The Boo-Boo Toe

Swollen

Bruised

He is on restricted physical activity for a week. Then he can use an elliptical. After 1 month he gets re-xrayed and if it has been healing properly, he will probably be cleared to run again.

New Picture Link

If you look to the right, at the top of the sidebar, I have added "TCC Fire Academy Day Class #59".

If you click on "PICTURES", over there, it will take you to Hubby's photo account on Picasa, where he is keeping all of the pictures of the fire academy fun. The pictures on the main page are the album covers, and if you click on one, it will show you all the other photos in that series. Then if you click on one of those, it will show it to you in a bigger version.

Hubby is taking most of the pictures, so he is not in most of them. But if you do spot someone with a BLACK helmet and ORANGE reflective stripes on the bunker gear, that's him. He is the only one with that combination.

I will still occasionally post some here, but the majority will be over there.

See, black helmet, orange stripes on bunker gear.

Hubby.

Health Tip Of The Day

Do NOT drop an 8 lb hand weight on your foot.

Unless you want to break your pinkie toe.

Just ask Hubby.

Record Snow Fall!

We got over 11 inches in 24 hours. That's the most in the last 111 years! (I guess that 111 years thing is when they started keeping track of that kind of information.)

Well I Tried

I took a sick day today. I haven't been feeling great the last few days, and I have a ton of sick time, so I thought I would take a day, to rest, and hopefully not get any sicker.

Well, I started feeling a little guilty. I have been sicker before and still gone to work.

I thought if I did something slightly productive here at home, I would feel less guilty.

I decided on picking up the living room. I could have the tv on, so I could listen to Boston Legal. I would be near the couch, so I could take many rest breaks. But mainly because it would mean the Christmas tree would get put away.

Yes, that is correct. The Christmas tree. In my defense I want to point out that it is not the full 6 foot, covered in decorations tree. It is a little 4 foot, pre-lit, table top tree. But still, yeah, a Christmas tree in the living room until mid February.

(I won't tell you about the time, when I the girls

were young, I didn't take down the big decorated

tree until some time in February. Then I didn't get

around to taking the stuff out to the storage shed.

Then it got to be like July and I figured, hell,

it's almost Christmas again, so I just left it in the

living room.)

I dug the box out of the spare room. I took the top off. I spent a fare amount of time folding up the branches so that it would fit back into it's little box. Then I go to take off the legs, so I can put it away. They won't come off. I pull and pull and pull. I stand on them and pull on the tree. I got 2 off finally. There is still one left. I can't get it off.

So there you go. There is STILL a Christmas tree in the living room.

I have the bestest daughter EVER

Because of having a Lap Band, I am not allowed to drink anything
carbonated. And because I have "issues" I can't have anything with
sugar. And I refuse to drink caffeine.

This severely limits the options of things I can drink, that aren't water.

One of my few options is Minute Maid Light. I started with lemonade,
which some places even have as a fountain drink. Then I found the
orange and liked that better. Then I found raspberry and I LOVE that.

Then I couldn't find any anything at the stores, aside from the
occasional lemonade. And I am pretty much over the lemonade because I
drank so much of it before I found the other flavors. The one time we
found the raspberry, we bought like 8 cases of it. As it became
obvious that it was going to be difficult to buy more of it, I started
rationing it. I would only drink 2 cans a week.

It ran out months ago. I have 2 cases of orange left. And one
emergency case of cherry limeade, that I don't like much, but will
drink if I have nothing left.

This morning I had a message from Lazy Teenager. She was at Kroger's
and they had Minute Maid on sale, and what flavor was it that I liked.
I quickly called her back, gave her my preferences and told her to
buy all they had, I would pay her back.

She called about an hour later and said I owed her $30. She got 5
raspberry and the rest are Orange. I was planning to stop at every
other Kroger in the area on my way home, and asked her which one they
had gone to. Bless her heart, she had already gone to all three that
were in our immediate area.

5 raspberry! I'm rich!

What a lovely sight to behold

Guess what I saw when I got home tonight? It is actually more of a what I didn't see.

A bulldozer.

No more bulldozers! They are finally finished!

We have been surrounded by bulldozers since APRIL.

This has more or less been our house for the last 10 months.

They started with the street and then the sewer and then putting in a sidewalk. Then around the end of December it turned into replacing the part of the sewer that runs between our house and the neighbors.

Protesting did no good....

"It's a bypass. You've got to build bypasses"

(nerd award if you know what that is from)

We could not park in our driveway while this was going on. There were strange men in our backyard. There has been dirt everywhere. The heathen neighborhood boys were constantly climbing in/on the equipment and supplies.

Tonight when I came home it was all over. I can now park in the driveway again and not have to worry about moving the car before 7 am, or possibly get blocked in.

AND we got a new section of fence.