Archive - 2011

Spent

I have had a very emotionally and physically tiring 2 weeks. Sometimes it’s taken everything I have not to pull all my hair out and gorge myself with food. Especially bacon. Bacon makes everything better.

What little extra time and energy I’ve had has been devoted to keeping up with my watercolor class. I’m behind on my Alphabet Project. I’ve got deck pictures to share. At some point I’ll even tell you about Boo’s Tiger Cruise. So give me a couple of days to decompress and I’ll be happily blogging again.

SOD

I have the SOD – Seasonal Overcommitted Disorder. Does this happen to you? In spite of your best intentions NOT to over-schedule your children, carefully keeping them to one extracurricular activity at a time, you find yourself with multiple activities all occurring at once.

This seems to happen to us on a seasonal basis. Spring soccer, ballet and scouts all sort of collide into a mass of over-committments. Saturday, was a blur. We had two soccer games, scheduled 45 minutes apart and located 40 minutes away from each other. (Did you catch that – 40 minutes away. Both games were in the same city, neither were at the farthest edge of the city and we have a 65 MPH speed limit on the freeway. Urban sprawl at its finest.)

Phil was nominated for our parish council and they chose Saturday morning for their day of discernment. I guess it was to sort out the unwashed masses of the nominees. What it really meant was that I was the lone driver for the day.

Poor Boo, he got dropped off at his final soccer game of the season, given a key to the house and strict instructions to only accept a ride home from a parent of one of his teammate, but if no one offers, to sit and wait for me.

Meanwhile, the rest of us traveled to Bip’s soccer game. His team finally won a game, 7 to 4, which is more goals than they’d scored during the entire season combined. Then we had a little party on the field with trophies and cupcakes and pictures. This was to celebrate the end of the season, not the complete routing of the other team of 5 year olds.

Back to the other side of town to pick up Boo. The weather had gotten colder and when we finally picked him up an hour after his game had ended, he was wearing his hat, sweats, sweatshirt and gloves. No one had offered him a ride home, of course. Our days of living in Military Mayberry are over.

After lunch Boo went off to some scout merit badge workshop. Somehow scouts manages to morph itself from a single, weekly meeting into almost monthly camping trips and other various and sundry weekend activities. We have a tough time getting him a ride to some of these things, too. But that is a vent for another time.

Then I took Pumpkin Girl and Bip to see “Cinderella.” This was Pumpkin’s ballet school’s pre-professional division’s year-end performance. I was originally just going to take Pumpkin Girl, but one day Bip saw her student teacher – also called Pumpkin Girl – and thought she was pretty. When he found out that she was dancing the lead as Cinderella, he decided to come along.

By the way, the student teacher has the same real life name as Pumpkin Girl, not the same nickname. But you figured that out, right?

Whew, I am tired just typing that all out. But now soccer season is over, as is religious education – which we don’t count as an extracurricular – and Pumpkin already had her own ballet recital, so things can start to settle down. Right?

Right?

A Farewell to Deck

When we bought our house we loooved the deck! It was definitely one of, if not THE, nicest decks in the neighborhood. It was Trex (or so we thought) which is so nice for bare feet and no maintenance, too. Oh yeah!

I particularly liked the two levels, it was like a dining room and a separate living room.

But before our first summer was over we noticed some cracking and bowing of the planks. Over the winter there was a visible difference in the size of the planks versus the size of the planks during the summer. We actually covered one of the broken planks with an inverted flower pot to keep the kids from tripping. Classy!

Well, it didn’t take long before we realized that our lovely deck needed to be repaired. While we got estimates and proposals we slowly pieced together the whole story.

The deck was not original to the house. The builder used a recycled, plastic planking that was inappropriate to the weather conditions in Colorado. The deck was replaced once, never paid for and the builder went out of business. The deck never had a final inspection and would actually not have passed if it had.

We moved from repair to replace rather rapidly. (Ogle that awesome alliteration!)

Work started on the new deck last week. When I went to take some “before” pictures, I could feel the steps leading from one level to the next sagging as I walked on them. Yikes!

Goodbye old deck!
(you can tell how bleached out the planks were – in the corner there used to be built-in benches)

Hello fancy, steel frame!

Giant Hole of Nothingness

So that’s the big news around here – we’re getting a fancy pants new deck. Every morning at 6:58, I hear car doors slam outside my house. At precisely 7:00, the hammers start hamming and the saws start sawing. There is work being done on the front porch, too, which involves cement drilling. You know all our neighbors are loving us about now.

More pictures to come later as the deck progresses…

Watercolor Class

I signed up for an online watercolor journaling class which started last week. It’s perfect for me because I don’t have the time to attend a workshop outside the house. We get our assignments through PDFs and videos, which is also cool because I can watch the videos while I paint and stop, rewind and replay anything I need to.

I’m going to be brave and share my assignments.

Both paintings are from photographs.

Find out more about my watercolor class and others that are offered here: Imaginary Trips

Gone Fishing

Boo is home.

We have house guests (6 children and a mom!!).

We all attended the Easter Vigil mass where it snowed on our Paschal fire. The next day we woke to about an inch of snow on the ground and later it snowed during dinner. We had an indoor egg hunt (9 children running amok!!) and gorged on yummy baked goods, ham and scalloped potatoes. The children played board games and Wii. Our guests talked to their dad via Skype from Afghanistan. A good time was had by all. We are blessed to have such good friends.

So while I enjoy our company, I’m on a bloggy break. See you soon…

H is for

Hat! Soccer hat, specifically.


I have actually managed to squeeze in a little knitting here and there. It took me 2 weeks, but I made a hat for Boo that matches his soccer uniform. He plays in a club that has the same uniforms every year, so no need to make him a new one every season.

Spring soccer in Colorado is a chilly affair. As I type it is 52 degrees and falling, and soccer practice is still an hour away. Last year we had a game canceled because the snow from earlier in the week had made the field too wet. I think that was in April.

I send the boys to their games and practices with hats, sweatshirts, and even gloves. I keep telling them that suffering breeds character.

This is another hat from The Knitter’s Handy Book of Patterns. Just a basic K2P2 rib for 2 inches, knit until it fits, decrease evenly and finish. I like to reference the book for the exact numbers to cast on based on the yarn I’m using, the needles I have available and my gauge.

There Goes My Baby

Boo is on this ship, sailing out of Pearl Harbor. They left about an hour ago. He’s just gotten so out of hand with his adolescent self that we made him join the Navy. I’ll miss him.

Actually, he’s on a tiger cruise, courtesy of my friend Shanti, who commands said vessel. I figured that since the Navy trusts her with a ship, I can trust her with my boy. Even though he’ll probably talk her ear off.

Naughty

Yesterday I bought new sunglasses.

Aren’t I cute?

I wore them out of the store since my old ones were broken. When I got to my car I realized that the little vinyl sticker with the brand name was still on the lens. I peeled it off and stuck it to the window of the car next to me.

(click on the picture to see it better.)

I wonder how long it’ll take them to find it.

I also wonder what gets into me sometimes.

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