Happy Birthday, Lindsay

I think one of the more amusing things about being an adult is embarrassing younger members of the family. My mom and aunt did it to me and, looking back, it was pretty funny. One of my personal favorites was the time that my mom followed the boy’s varsity basketball team’s bus all the way to one of their away games. She waved and honked the whole time. After experiences like that, you realize that no matter how much mortification you feel at any one time, eventually you get over it.

It’s kind of like giving birth. After surviving that, you know you can handle most anything.

I got the chance to pay it forward when my cousin, Lindsay, was in Jr. High.


(This is a picture taken 18 years ago of Lindsay and my brother, Tommy.)

I was helping to shuttle some girls to the movies for her birthday party. As I drove them home, they requested that I go by, not-surprisingly, a boy’s house. A boy that Lindsay had a crush on.

Of course, I was more than willing to do it.

As we headed toward the house, we actually drove right by the boy and a couple of his friends walking down the street. All the girls, except Lindsay, squealed that I should turn around to go talk to them. And after a block or two, I did.

As I slowed down to make a U-turn, Lindsay, who was sitting in the passenger seat, opened her door, jumped out of the car and took off down the street, away from the boys. I never even had a chance to stop the car and she was gone. She was haulin ass, with her arms pumping and her head thrown back, like her body was actually going faster than what her head could keep up with.

I let her go. And decided that if she wasn’t going to stick around, I was really going to embarrass her.

So, I pulled up next to the boys, rolled down my window and asked, “Is one of you Dennis?” [Note- I don’t actually remember what the poor kid’s name was, but for this story, it’s going to be Dennis.] The rest of the girls were, by this time, giggling hysterically in the back seat.

Dennis, who never did admit to actually being Dennis, by the way, looked terrified. I’m not sure if he was more worried about the older woman (I was probably 19 or 20) who knew his name or the car full of laughing girls.

To put him at ease, I said, “I think you know my cousin, Lindsay. Well, it’s her birthday today, and since I didn’t get her anything, I was hoping you would come back to her house with us and be her birthday present.”

Needless to say, he did not get into my car.

Smart boy.

But we did give him directions in case he changed his mind.

So, Happy Belated Birthday, Lindsay. I hope I didn’t do any permanent psychological damage.

And I didn't get you anything this year, either. I have been driving around random neighborhoods with bus fair to Durango, looking for guys. I don't really know your type, though.

A Little Pick Me Up

It seems like the only thing I do lately is clean house. And I've spent all morning thinking about why that is.

I think it's because when have something to do, I do it slowly. I start it half heartedly and then get easily distracted before I've really made any dent in it. I'm not sure why this is. Lately I just feel like I'm moving through mud, with my feet all caked with it and too heavy to pick up.

So, I think it's time to put on one of my playlists, one that almost always gets me moving a bit quicker. I don't think it's any coincidence that I haven't listened to this in months.

It's mostly just Rodrigo y Gabriela and Flogging Molly (with a few Madonna songs like Holiday and Express Yourself thrown in for good measure).



Wish me luck. I've got too many fun things to be doing to spend all day cleaning.

Red Juice vs Strawberry Stains

I believe I mentioned the strawberry stains on Joey's Easter dress. I didn't get around to cleaning it until 5 days after Easter. (I know it's 5 days because that's what the date on the picture says. I love time stamping.) Anyway, I use Red Juice for stains like this. It works really well on food stains particularly, not greasy ones so much, but berries and curry and stuff like that.


Strawberry stain


Immediately (like 2 seconds) after using the concentrated Red Juice


A few hours later (I just let it sit, didn't scrub or rinse or anything)

Once when Jeff had an impacted tooth, he got up in the middle of the night for an ice pack and came back to bed with what he thought was a bag of frozen corn (which normally works brilliantly, by the way). In the morning, though, I discovered a bag of blueberries melting onto our comforter. I forgave him because he was all hopped up on pain meds at the time. Besides, the Red Juice worked like a charm. Really. It just dissolved the stain over the course of about 24 hours.

The company that sells it is The Clean Team. You'll need to type "Red Juice" into the search box in the top left corner of that link if you want to see the Red Juice specifically.

The site says this about it... "To start with, the degreaser in Red Juice is made from user friendly and environmentally friendly seaweed, while the degreasers in most similar cleaners are derived from petrol-chemicals. Red Juice is all natural with ingredients such as soybean extracts, palm kernels, and palm oils. Red Juice is pH neutral, non toxic, unscented and completely biodegradable."

It's actually an all purpose cleaner and they sell it in bottles of concentrate, which I really like from an environmental perspective. One bottle of concentrate makes 20 bottles of cleaner, which saves a lot of plastic. Packaging and shipping water is pretty ridiculous, if you ask me.

For Linda

I recently received this in my Inbox...

You haven't posted anything since april 4. Time to report back to work! Some of us check almost every day, and I'm always disappointed when there's nothing there! Hope everything is ok.
Love you!

Obviously, some people are missing me, even if it's only family. Who knew?

So, here goes.

When I was a kid and had a project of any kind to do, I would always clean my room first. At the time, I secretly admitted that it was a form of procrastination, but really, at 10:30 at night, once my room was clean, I always felt energized and ready to go.

I’m still like that. When I have projects, I have a hard time functioning when my space is too messy. It just makes it hard to focus. So, I always clean up first. The area is usually a disaster when I'm done, but at least it starts out clean.

The problem is that a month or so ago, Jeff and I decided to paint the kitchen. And at the same time, I also thought it would be great to make new curtains. But half way through making the curtains, I realized that it would be a whole lot easier if I first moved my sewing table into my new office/workroom. Then I could walk all the way around the table instead of having access to it on just one side. (Here's the table after an especially crazy Halloween/Birthday season. That's fur from Joey's costume all over the place.)

Now let me explain about my sewing table. It belonged to my mom who used to work for an interior designer making drapes and curtains and that sort of thing. She needed a huge table. To get the table into one of our old houses, my uncle had to cut the thing in half so it would fit down the stairs. As Jeff and I began to move it down the hall from our laundry room to my new office, we realized that it needed to be cut down again.

So, we put the moving project on hold. I had a brief flash of sanity and realized that surgery on the table was just one more thing on my plate that I couldn't handle, a wafer thin mint you might say. And yes part of my brain was saying It's only a tiny little thin one. But, I fought the urge and I began to shove all the various crap I’d pulled out from under the table into any available space I could find in the new office.

The new office is now completely full of stuff. And all my sewing stuff is somewhere amongst the piles.

Every time I go in there for something, I cringe.

Eventually the situation came down to this… it was 2 days before Jeff’s 40^th birthday party, only two thirds of the curtains were finished and hanging up and I needed to prepare food for somewhere between 50 and 100 people [Note- when someone sends you an Evite, please, for the love of God, respond to it.]

Luckily, Jenny has a Costco membership, lots of serving platters and a generous heart, so she helped with the shopping and food prep. Jeff’s mom helped too. Without those two, it would have been a disaster.

All of this is really just a very long explanation as to why I have no pictures of my finished kitchen or of my new office/workroom, two projects that have taken an inordinate amount of my time the last month and which I planned to post about.

I do have pictures from the party, though.

Doesn't Aurora look fantastic without her hair?

This is Kam and his two Uncle Matts. (Jeff's brother and my brother.)


And one of Jeff's friends brought a bottle of Patron so they all had to do shots. Ugghh.

Jenny actually laid down on the floor to take this one.

Oh, and my apologies for the strange Mr. Creosote, crafting analogy. I wrote this late last night and have decided to leave it in because it so accurately describes my deranged state of mind lately.

Family Love Jeff

Today is Jeff's 40th birthday... and I forgot to tell him Happy Birthday this morning.


Sorry Honey.

Happy Birthday.

I love you lots.

I made this for Jeff many years ago for Father's Day. The kids from top left going clockwise are... Sean, Kenzie, Joey and Randa. Jeff was all of 21 years old when Sean was born. What a kid he was, huh?

(If you don't get the title of this post, it's probably because you haven't watched a million episodes of Arrested Development like we have.)

Here They Are!

So, are you tired of posts about kids and bald heads yet? Well, too bad. It's all I've got right now.

So even if you didn't donate over at St. Baldrick's, I've decided to put up pictures for the whole world to see. It isn't like I'm embarrassed of what I look like, I just wanted to get more people to donate. Since we're just under $2,000 as a team, I'm feeling pretty good about what we've done.



(The day before we were getting shaved, Angeleen wrote and asked, "Dude, are you seriously going to shave your head for $75?" Yes, I was going to. And, luckily, a lot more donations came in, including Angeleen's. Most of it is to us as a team, which is appropriate, 'cause that's really what it was, a total team effort.)










We were also on TV, I think mainly because Aurora was crying. (We're at the end of it, so watch all the way through if you want to hear what my nasally voice sounds like.)

I will be doing the prize drawings sometime after April 5th. Sorry, but I've got Jeff's 40th birthday party to figure out before then.

Thanks to all of you that donated and also to those of you who put up links on your sites. We appreciate it so much!

Namaste.

PS- I just realized it's April 1st. And I can assure you that this is not a prank. I am seriously not that good with photoshop (nor do I have access to the Channel 7 news website).

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Sweet Boy

I tried and tried to upload this video to my last post, but, I just couldn't get it. It would have fit in perfectly with the goofy kid stuff.

Jeff helped convert the format this morning, so hopefully it'll work now. Right now, it's uploaded 18 of 21 M, so I'm hopeful. OK, now it's "processing" and if it craps out now, I'm gonna cry (I tried this 5 different times in 5 different ways on Tuesday).

Success!

Oh and "Mo Pea" means "More Please."



Happy Thursday!