Sunday with my new friends

For over three weeks now, we've had some guests in our house, a sweet little colony of fire ants.

My buddy Zack, the semi-inept bug guy has been out four times free of charge to try to "remove" them from my kitchen, but to no avail.

This morning was the first morning in 23 days that I didn't see any of the creatures poking around my kitchen windowsill. I breathed a sigh of relief and wondered if maybe they were keeping the Sabbath holy and had stayed in their hill with their family or maybe ventured to church. Nope. By lunchtime, I spotted a few looking forlorn since all the dishes were done and there were no crumbs out to lure them.



Well, happy Sunday, little suckers. I'll take a break from squashing your family members today in honor of the Lord's day. If you'd quit biting me, maybe we could even be friends.

Discontent

I've been living here a year as a tenant of Mr. Boogers and a few things are starting to drive me crazy.

The dining room chandelier,


The white walls,


and the not-my-taste wallpaper border.


This is on my mind because we did a room swap today - giving Joe what was the guest room and Joe's old room is the new guest room. It is so perfect! The kind of change that makes such a big difference I wonder why we didn't think of it earlier. So now I'm on a roll - what else can I do that is inexpensive, works well, and isn't prohibited in my rental contract?

TGIF

This week was "back to school" 2008-2009 and all the emotions; misgivings; check-writing; logistics-figuring; picture-taking and adjusting that goes with it. I loved every minute of it, I think - even though some of it was/is difficult. We're alive, healthy, and loving God in Las Vegas. Here are my favorite kid photos of the week:

Our second-grader.


Our Kindergartener.


Joe, Cayna, and Bethie on the first day.

Plenty of French's

Do you have any particular item in your pantry that you either knowingly or unknowingly overstock? I really want to know.

I seem to have accumulated a LOT of mustard. I had a coupon this week, so I went ahead and picked up a 14-ounce French's "Classic Yellow". I was disturbed that my grocery-shopping buddy, who had the same coupon, did not buy any. "If I suddenly run out of mustard," she said, "I'll pay the extra money." It seemed to me that she was fairly confident she wouldn't run out of mustard all unawares.



Arriving home, I opened the pantry door to discover another 14-ounce container of mustard, and the big-papa-size 30-ouncer. That's over 3 pounds of mustard counting the new bottle. And in the refrigerator, I discovered another 30-ouncer! I lifted it out of the door shelf to see if it was approaching empty but it feels at least three-quarters of the way full. Geesh. Now I'm wondering what the expiration dates are on all these containers. Doesn't matter - I think even if I ate deviled eggs and hot dogs two or three times a week I still have a two-year supply in there.

I am out of ketchup. How do these things happen to me?

New Mug

I'm going to tell you a true story. The title could be: "A Snippet of My Summer Vacation". Take notice how many parts of the story reveal that I am just NOT as sophisticated as I wish I was.

We headed for our family adventure in rural Idaho to celebrate the last week of summer vacation. Somewhere in Utah, we pulled into a truck stop to let our passel of children go pee. It was Love's truck stop, and, since I was staying in the van to nurse the baby I called out to my husband, "Buy a souvenir cup since it'll have our last name on it!"

This...

...is what he came out with.

It is enormous. It is insulated. It is tacky. (It works darn well. You fill that sucker with ice and water and half a day later it's still cold enough to crack your teeth.) Husband carried that thing with pride into my brother's lovely, tasteful home in upstanding Rexburg Idaho. I think it brought his property value down. You should have seen us passing it around to the kids in the van so they could each get a drink on the road. It's larger than our 3 year-old's entire torso, so it was quite comical to watch her gripping the thing in her carseat.

We came home and resumed our normal lives. The only hitch was I had to find a storage place for our new 970-ounce beverage container. It takes up half a shelf in the pantry. This past Saturday, husband filled it up and toted it to the community pool. Then our five year-old accidentally left it, and we didn't discover the oversight until we had loaded up the van. Husband was driving so --- I had to go back into the pool and pick up the forgotten "mug" myself and be seen in public carrying it.

Public Statement

In an unexpected and impulsive move, I deleted my entire "My Column" blog a couple weeks ago. "I got tired of it," I told my husband. This was not entirely true (see the definition of "impulsive"). In reality, I was just tired of it that day and it seemed like a good, solid idea to erase the whole thing and maybe use the time I was spending on blogging to work against global warming, clean my toilets, play Hi-Ho! Cherry-O with my kids or do some sit-ups. But now some time has passed and I miss telling my devoted readers what I'm thinking every day. So here I am, back again - with a new resolution - I will "be myself". This means I will likely be a little over-analytical, critical, dramatic, pretty, middle-class, Christian, braggy, narrow-minded and intelligent. But I will be free to post whatever I dang well please and not worry that I don't measure up to other bloggers who shall remain nameless but seem to have really cool lives while I'm just sitting here typing on my computer and avoiding something.

To all my friends (Magan, Janice, Kim, Rachel, & Karen) who wrote and asked what I did with my blog - I adore you. To Laura, who just became a stay-at-home-mom and decided to take up blogging - you inspired me to come back! Kisses to everyone! And to all a good night.