I’m giving my scanner a rest today to share some of my Journal Your Christmas pages. I only have 6 done so far and sort of at random but I am hoping to get caught up through the 10th at least this weekend
If you are doing a Christmas project, how are you doing?
I’m a bit slack when it comes to keeping the food in the house organized and rotated. I do, every few months or so, empty out the pantry, reorganize the shelves, donate the cans & boxes that will be expiring soon and put everything back with the nearest expire date toward the front.
Then I go buy whatever we are out of or running low on and put it all away in it’s precise place.
From that point on the pantry goods get shoved in and piled up willy nilly wherever they fit until months later I can’t find the jar of pesto sauce I know darn well I bought when I first restocked the pantry.
Repeat.
I clean the fridge a couple times a month, though the jars of mayo, salad dressing and assorted sauces may wait awhile before I go through them, usually when someone reaches for the little used mayo and discovers it was ‘best by’ a month ago.
The freezer though… Maybe twice a year I clean out the freezer.
It’s cold in the freezer. Pulling all that stuff out chills my fingers. Trying to wipe up frozen spills is a PITA. So I just don’t do it unless forced to.
I was forced to this week. Two different grocery stores had sales on ground beef, boneless chicken breasts, london broil cuts and thin pork chops. These are a few of my favorite things. The catch was you had to buy Dugger sized packages to get the deals. I don’t mind repackaging into smaller sizes, even with buying the Ziploc bags it was still a heck of a price
But.
There was no room for all that food in the freezer. I forgot to take a before photo but this is halfway through emptying it
Frozen fruit & veggies anyone?
Here is the problem with frozen veggies…we don’t eat them that often, yet I am stocked up for a year.
You see that big bag of fish sticks? It was buried under & behind so much stuff I forgot we even had fish sticks. And I am left wondering why on earth I have a bag of brussel sprouts. We all hate brussel sprouts. If I am going to try one of those “This will make you love brussel sprouts” recipes with all the garlic, bacon & butter, I use fresh sprouts. We never end up liking them though. There is not enough garlic, bacon & butter in the world to cover that cabbage-y taste.
These are the bags of frozen foods that were half eaten & then were left to get freezer burnt. This does not include 8 bone in chicken thighs from October 2008 & 3 bags of ground beef from early 2009 that were also freezer burnt
Please note the snowball that has grown in the bag with the leftover pancakes.
This is some of the stuff we are keeping. The opened bag of potatoes is recent & will be used again next week so I feel safe keeping it.
This is freezer cleaned out, some things were tossed & some things put in the chest freezer.
I have to do the chest freezer next…sigh
This was the oldest thing in the freezer.
This was when it expired
It’s not that I haven’t cleaned the freezer out in 2 years; it’s that I don’t always check dates. Especially if I can remember why I bought the item. I assume, given my memory, that if I can recall why a specific item was purchased, it must be recent. I bought these to make a breakfast casserole. Then I remembered it was for breakfast the morning after our NYE party..in 2007.
What is the oldest thing you have found in your freezer?
I love Christmas trees. They are the symbol of the holiday season to me. They are the first thing that comes to mind when anyone mentions Christmas.
Childhood Christmas? We had a fake white tree with red decorations almost every year. Except that one time we had a real tree & spent a month stepping on dried needles.
Memorable Christmas? Taking a tour of the Oglebay Mansion Museum. They had about a half dozen trees decorated in the Victorian style with live candles.
Perfect Christmas decor? A 9 foot fir covered in lights and a hodgepodge of ornaments & a big bow & streamers on it.
I want a big tree. A big fake pre-lit tree. Live trees are a PITA to care for & if I touch them I break out in a rash. I want one of those 9 foot ones that are 4.5 feet across at the bottom. They are spendy but the real expense comes with the accessories, all the ornaments to cover it, the ribbons, the garland – mostly the new larger house with the high ceiling and huge room needed to hold the tree.
We’d have to take out some tiles in the drop ceiling and put one of the couches out of the porch to make room for a tree that big.
No one sits on the 3 seat sofa anyway.
We’ve had a small tree for about a decade now. When we were first married we lived in an apartment & had a small live replantable tree in bucket. Then we had a larger apartment & for a couple years got a ‘live’ tree from one of the Boy Scout tree shops ib the grocery store parking lot. When we bought the house we cut down a tree at a neighboring tree farm. But honestly, I don’t like cutting down trees, so we went back to replantable tree in a bucket. We could only afford small trees in buckets, 3ft on average. The year Havoc was born we bought a 3ft fiber optic tree & have had it ever since. It had the advantage of being able to be put out of reach.
But you can’t hang normal sized ornaments on it. The branches are not sturdy enough and the scale is all wrong. The live trees were ok for normal sized ornaments sort of. When we got the fiber optic tree I packed up most of the ornaments. We hung the smaller ones on the tree, plus the ‘1st Christmas’ ones & left the rest in the box.
I love decorating our tree. I love so many of our ornaments have been with us for years and years. It’s like wrapping the tree in memories when we hang them. My favorite part of the holiday season is decorating the tree with the boys and telling them about the various ornaments, where they came from, who made them or why we bought them. And I’ve always been a bit sad that most of them never saw the light of day.
This year we have at last a full sized tree. Only 6.5 feet tall and 2.5 feet across but big enough for all of our ornaments, at least from a scale & weight point. We have a lot of ornaments. We have ornaments made or bought from DH’s childhood, from my childhood, wooden ones my mom painted, yarn ones my grandmother made and Hallmark ones I bought before the fiber optic tree came into our lives.
We hadn’t seen most of them in a decade.
Oh hello Princess
and the X-wing fighter!
This angel is from high school
This truck was on Dh’s tree from his birth until his mom passed away in 2001
Now that we have a tree that can support them I was able to get some Keepsakes ornaments this year.
Santa sent us these ornaments with Elvin on Monday morning. I think it will be a tradition.
Havoc got Superman
Mayhem got Batman
And mom & dad got Luke’s Landspeeder
I’ve missed so many Star Wars ornaments since 1998!
This is the tree
We put up the small one as well because of scale issues again only the other way. You can’t see the small ornaments on the big tree.
Have you put your tree up yet? What are your favorite ornaments or Christmas decorations?
I take back what I have said about the uselessness of a crock pot & how I can never get anything to come out tasting like anything other than food that has been on a steam table too long. I made a very delicious cranberry pot roast yesterday. Though it could have benefited from having the liquid cooked down into a more concentrated gravy before serving.
I have to go stand in line with all the other procrastinators in the area and pay my property taxes which are due today. They don’t accept Visa check/debit cards anymore on site. It is cash or check only. I don’t have a checkbook. I can’t remember the PIN number to the account with the tax money in it & it’s unconnected to the other accounts & I can’t transfer it over to an account with a PIN I can remember. So I have to wait until the bank opens & stand in line there first to get some cash.
Santa sent us some ornaments for our new tree. Elvin brought them this morning. More on that in another post.
We no longer have snow. We have large white crumbly chunks of ice.
I have 3 more gifts to buy for the boys, plus 2 gifts for friends’ kids (all 7 of the friends’ kids are getting puzzles this year. Usually it is books or games but it’s getting harder to keep track of who already has what.). I also have to get something for DH but I have no clue what to get him & he has not suggested anything. I sent him my Amazon Wish List because I am all helpful that way.
I need to make up a meal plan for the week but I am still so full from the pot roast I can’t even think about food.
I have one page completed for my Journal Your Christmas album. Today is day 7. I have only finished day 4. I need to get a plan going on that today. I suppose I’ll have plenty of time while standing in lines this morning to think about it.
Some photos from our Thanksgiving vacation.
Sunset the first day on the road
Early morning in Walterboro, South Carolina
Our in car navigation system (only got us lost once each way)
We went swimming
Road bikes
Went fishing with Pa
Played Wii with friends
Argued about what to do next
And greeted the dawn at the Waffle House in Santee on our trip home as usual
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This is my Great Grandfather William Wetzel. I don’t have an exact date for this photo but he was born in 1882 & looks less than 2 years old in the photo. I love the dress and lace collar. This was taken back when little boys & girls both wore the same style clothing until they were age 3 or so. I suspect it had something to do with ease of changing diapers and being potty trained. I also love the boots & tiny cane he has been given as a prop.
But what I love best is his resemblance to Mayhem
Not the vacation so much as the 2 day drive home. 2 long long days, including the first day when it seemed we would never get out of Florida.
It always seems like we will never get out of Florida, we have taken every known route from interstate to highway to back roads to get from Naples to Jacksonville and ALWAYS it takes 2.5 hours more to get to Jacksonville from Naples than it did to get to Naples from Jacksonville.
ALWAYS.
None of these cars are moving and the stand still continues all the way up the road vanishing into the distance
That is the problem with travelling on a Saturday on a holiday weekend during football season around a popular vacation spot. Orlando or Tampa, one or the other will bring all forward progress to a grinding halt. We averaged about 40 MPH through the whole state. It was a mix of going 55-60MPH in spots and going 5MPH in spots.
I must admit for all my problems with directions from Google Maps, their ‘show traffic’ options on the map app, was very handy. We could see where traffic was sitting still & where it was flowing. The app let us down on the getting from one to the other by not showing exit numbers until you were zoomed in at street level or by giving route numbers that don’t appear on exit signs.
This guy helped navigate
He went through an amazing amount of caffine. You would not believe the number of restroom breaks he needed.
I had called ahead Friday & made reservations at a place in Santee, SC. I had calculated we would arrive there between 9-10pm based on our drive time down. Sitting in traffic in Stark on 301 I debated seeing about moving the reservation to Walterboro or some other city farther south because it looked like it would be midnight before we arrived and the boys would be wired.
We made up for lost time by eating lunch in the car rather than stopping for fast food and then we had Burger King for supper rather than stopping at sit down dining place. While we were there I found a wifi signal & downloaded a new audiobook – Making Money by Terry Pratchett because we were almost done listening to his Going Postal.
We made it to Santee at 9:30pm in spite of traffic, but with unhappy bellies from eating so much junk. Everyone went to sleep fairly quickly which was just as well because Mayhem was awake at 5:18.
Santee, SC Waffle House in the pre-dawn light
We made good time on I95 the rest of the way home. We stopped for fireworks before we left SC and DH once again expressed his love for the roominess of the mini van because now he didn’t have to pack the explosives in around the children as in previous years.
The boys were so zoned out on movies they never noticed we drove by South of the Border without stopping. Around 2pm we realized we would be home at the inconvenient hour of 4pm. It was inconvenient from a supper standpoint. There wasn’t much at home except frozen meat and macaroni & cheese and neither of us wanted to get home, unload the car and then get back in it in search of a meal. So we Googled up a nearby park & stopped to let the kids play for an hour or so. 
Then we wandered around a shopping strip for a bit. Eventually we drove to the Chinese buffet place an hour from our house & had a large early supper. We were home before 6 & unpacked by 6:30. Mayhem was playing Wii at 6:40.
I had hoped to run some errands Monday & then have Tuesday to not go anywhere, just sit, maybe dust & vacuum. But the lice changed my plans. Then I thought I might get Thursday to stay in the house. But Wednesday Havoc knocked his glasses off when the school bus came to a sudden stop & then someone stepped on them, snapping the frames in half. The eye shop seems to have lost their records of his frames & couldn’t tell me if they were in stock so I have to take them in today so they can look them up. Friday I have got to get back to the gym. Saturday is the parade & a bunch of winter carnival events at school.
Maybe Sunday we can all just stay in one place.
We don’t have many holiday traditions as a family.
Matching Christmas pajamas never occurred to me until last year.
DH is horrified at the idea of opening any gifts on Christmas Eve, even the aforementioned pajamas, so that never happens
The baking of holiday cookies is random & may happen in October due to time constraints.
Santa has no special wrapping paper.
Until this year the tree was 3ft high. While we do make a big deal out of decorating it, it made a tiny impact on the overall holiday appearance and feel of the house.
We took the kids to see Santa once 5 years ago. It was more than an hour wait and they freaked out when we were about three people away from our turn. They never expressed a wish to see him since.
Normally we do a Lego Advent calendar but I left it too late this year and they are sold out everywhere & I’m not paying $60 for one on eBay. I have no objection to getting one as late as the 10th though so I am still looking.
We do drive around looking at the lights at least once in December.
Part of the problem is that every other year we are in Florida at Xmas & so I spend much of December packing & shipping & planning for the trip.
Traditions must be portable.
We started a new one this year.
This the elf Elvin (gosh I am so clever with names aren’t I?) who is visiting us for the month of December. Elvin is Santa’s narc, his stooge, his spy. Elvin rats the boys out to Santa nightly. Um…I mean… Elvin is here to help the boys to remember to be good. He lets Santa know how well they are doing every night and if they have been doing very good for awhile Santa might let him bring the boys a surprise one morning. He reappears every morning in different places & they have to find him.
Havoc was so cute about it this morning. I left Elvin on my desk with the letter & assumed the boys would see it right away when they got up but apparently they missed him initially & Havoc told me Elvin suddenly appeared on the desk where he hadn’t been before! He was so excited by it. He came running in our room and read some of the letter to us, left, talked about it with Mayhem, came back in, read some more to us, went back out, talked more with Mayhem (who was more interested in getting in as much Wii Batman time as possible before we got up and made him get ready for school) and then came back in our room and summarized the letter for us.
It was a matter of some discussion that Elvin was sewn together. He eventually decided that Santa makes his own elves & cloth ones are better workers. He is looking forward to finding Elvin every morning. Probably his enthusiasm will get Mayhem’s going but I could see Mayhem eyeing the elf suspiciously. But Mayhem’s default reaction to anything his parents ask him to do is “NNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOO” so I can understand his hesitation about it.
I probably have one more year, if that, of Santa being real. Havoc believes, but it’s an almost desperate belief, like he knows the truth but isn’t willing to let it go yet. Mayhem has always been willing to go along with it but has no strong affinity for the Santa myth. We never made that big of a deal out of Santa so that is not too surprising.
Next year I’ll order that Advent calendar in October.
I had planned to do a post today about our trip home.
I had planned to go grocery shopping.
I had planned to trade in some of my used DS puzzle games at Gamestop
I had planned to go to the library & check out the last 3 Terry Pratchett books
I had planned to then drive out a bunch of long, winding roads to pick the dog up from the kennel.
Then I had planned I would come home, edit some photos, finish the laundry & maybe play whatever new game I had bought.
This was all planned at 8am. At 8:45, as I was gathering the last of my things for my errands the phone rang. It was the school.
Mayhem has lice.
Or maybe he had had lice. The nurse said she found dead ones & some eggs and thought I had been treating him for it over vacation.
I’ve never encountered lice. Had no clue Mayhem had them. Couldn’t begin to guess where or when he got them.
She said to get some RID or other lice meds & I said “oh I’m on my way Wal Mart & I’ll add it to the list” and she says “Do you want us to check Havoc?” and I said yes please and that was the end of the conversation.
45 minutes later, while I am about halfway through my shopping I get another call from the school.
“Um, you are aware you need to come and pick Mayhem up aren’t you Ma’am?”
No. No I am not aware of that, which is why I am in Wal Mart, 45 minutes away from the school with a half full shopping cart.
I’d been thinking getting lice was like getting your knee bloodied- the school has to tell me about it but I just need to change the bandage when he gets home at 4.
Turns out lice is contagious.
Yeah.
Not that I didn’t know that. I did know it on an intellectual level. I just didn’t connect it to Mayhem not being allowed to stay in class.
Being the awesome parent that I am I decide to grab the rest of the stuff on my list and check out, rather than just grabbing the RID from the cart & hurrying over to the express lane. He’s already going to have waited 90 minutes by the time I get there, what is another 10 really? And we NEED milk & waffles and the way to the dog kennel goes no where near a grocery store.
I finish the groceries, skip everything else that I needed there, rush down to school, pick up Mayhem, hurry home, unload the groceries, and then Mayhem & I set off on the trek to the kennels, because you have to make an appointment to pick up the dog and if you are 15 minutes or more late they charge you for another day.
We get the dog, come home, treat Mayhem’s head, strip all the beds, because he was in every bed last night & this morning, start washing sheets in hot water, spray down the car seats and the sofa, chase down the dog who has gotten off her lead ALREADY and along the way realize Mayhem has been playing outside in the icy rain for about a half hour with me not realizing it was raining
I’m am just MADE of awesome today.
I’m waiting now for Havoc to get home so we can hurry off to tae kwon do where apparently they are practicing for some tournament that is going to cost $80 that I don’t have because it is Xmas and I need to buy gifts with that $80.
I suppose I actually *do* have it because I wasn’t able to spend it at Wal Mart today.
Then I think we’ll hit McDs on the way home because i have had no time to get anything in the slow cooker and it will be late when we get home, making it 3 straight days of fast food crap for dinner.
Mother of the Year, that’s me.
Today is DH & I’s anniversary.
We were married at Oglebay Resort in Wheeling, WV in 1993.
This is the part where I want to say all those lovey sentimental things about what a wonderful man I married.
But I lean more toward sarcasm & humor and don’t do lovey sentiment very well even though I feel it. It’s just not how I express myself and after 16 years married & 20 years together he understands that.
It has been a wonderful 16 years. Things are very different now than we imagined them at the time but I wouldn’t change one of them.
DH proposed to me under stress. We’d planned not to get married, just live together. He was finishing up school, looking for work and some TV show or other that he’d watched for years had the series finally that night. All these endings & changes he couldn’t control so I think he grabbed for something he could.
He woke me up out of a sound sleep at 1 in the morning (and really you had better be dying or the house burning down if you do that) and asked me to marry him.
I told him to ask me again in the morning if he was serious.
cuz I’m all romantic like that.
In the morning he did ask me again and I said yes this time.
Thank you for asking me again honey.
I’m no good at meaningful thankful posts. I come off sappy, maudlin or cynical, at least to my way of reading it but I am going to make an attempt to list the things I am right now thankful for.
1. Modern medicine & VA insurance. Because of both my father can go bike riding, running, swimming, fishing and even wrestle with his grandkids and still have money to live on.
2. The mini van. OMG! The trip down was so much nicer than in the Cruiser. I loved my Cruiser but it was so crowded the past couple years on the drive to FL. I had none of the clausterphobic feel I’d had last year.
3. Internet being like crack. My husband is still employed because even when forced to economize the majority of people will cut cable before giving up their internet fix. It’s become almost as necessary as electricity.
4. My little demons who keep life from getting dull and routine
On the non Thankful side I’m not wild about certain developments. When did the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade become “Parade – the Musical”? what is with all the musical acts? I want to see floats and marching bands, not singers standing still. If the casts from Cats is going to perform in the Macy’s Parade then they should have to do it while marching!
I hope you all have a happy day and a good weekend!
A few people asked about the skin on my DS in my last post
This is my DS skin. Matrix Productions WraptorSkinz for the DS Lite.
I love these skins. They come in an assortment of colors & patterns, are relatively low cost, come on and off easily & leave no residue. They have them for an assortment of gaming systems & phones. I had several for my Razr phone when I had it. They don’t make any of those styles anymore apparently or I’d link you up. My favorite was very trippy. They don’t make a skin for my Pantech Matrix phone or I’d have one on it. When I some day get an iPhone though, it will be Wraptored.
I get paid not one darn cent for telling you this, I’m just sharing a product I am pleased with. Though if you should click on that link & buy that specific skin I do get some cents from Amazon. (insert legal jargon here)
Regarding my post on Monday…It is now Wednesday and I still have NOT had any ice cream. My parents have dinner early (which is apparently a law in Florida if you are over 65) and that throws off my snacking rhythm. And the little restaurant in their community is closed for remodeling so there is no quick walk to a peanut butter & chocolate waffle cone. I’m setting an alarm for 2:30 to remind me to go get some today.
A few weeks ago my insurance company left a long pre-recorded message on my answering machine. I don’t remember it specifically but the gist of it was:
Hey ancient crone! Our records indicate we’ve never had any claims to reject from you for a mammogram. You do realize you are a woman of a certain age and getting older & ought to have your bewbs squished annually don’t you? Oh, we’re not saying we’ll pay for it. This message in NO WAY implies that bewb squishing is a covered service under your policy terms. It might be, but we are not about to confirm that until we absolutely have to. Possibly we’ll have some money left over from fully covering Viagra prescriptions and be able to throw a few bucks your way. Either way, you’re old and should make a bewb squishing appointment with the hospital after referral from the appropriate provider, after getting permission from your primary care physician to see that provider so you can then make the appointment. (Ha ha! That’s $45 in flat fees right there plus 20% of whatever extra little charges we can manage and we are not about to tell you whether the squishing is a $30 specialist fee or $100 hospital fee now because then we might not be able to stick you for more money later). We’re your insurance company and we care about you, so start the bewb squishing process today for your health!
Seeing as how they care so much about my health I took their advice. I’m 42 and by rights, even with the every other year suggestion of my various physicians, I ought to have had at least one mammogram by now. But due to my doc of 10 years leaving the practice to go back to school 2 years ago and the variety of specialists I’ve been to see for my endo, the mammogram thing took a back seat & was overlooked. There was also apparently a typo on a referral form making me 5 years younger than I am, which was only realized at the last OBs.
I was able to do the insurance companies out of their flat fees by making some phone calls. Everyone had seen me recently enough to just fax paperwork without my presence. HA!
Last Thursday I went to the Medical Imaging Center and waited my turn. Despite my early appointment this naturally took much much longer than anticipated. Fortunately I had brought my Nintendo DS, which is all sylin’ with a black & purple skin and in a black & purple case
Everyone in the registration area thought it was really cool and asked me about the skins. Everyone in the lobby thought getting yourself a DS was a great idea & maybe they’d take Junior’s old one since he was getting a DSi for Xmas and then pimp theirs out too. The techs asked me about what games I play and where I got the skins & the case.
And for the first time ever I felt like one of the cool people, a trendsetter even.
I’ll bet I was the hippest crone getting a mammogram that day. W00T!
For probably the first time in 8 years we managed to get through Virginia without getting lost. Though gas stations remain elusive around Lynchburg. Hotels and restaurants abound but gas stations are hidden from view. I hate going into restaurant bathrooms when all I need is to use the facilities. Like I am committing a crime buy using a bathroom in a place where I buy nothing. Gas stations though expect you to use their restrooms & not buy things.
We did track one down eventually for the boys and then found our way right back to the highway. We managed North Carolina fine, though gas stations continued to be elusive. We were able to get on all the various interstates with no confusion. We made very good time with little traffic. The boys watched various movies and played intermittently with the DS. DH & I listened to The Color of Magic
We arrived in Walterboro SC, at 10:30pm along with every other mini van on the highway and finally got one of the last 3 rooms in town. Next to the elevator, on the second floor. You’d think with it being 11p and the hotel being full the elevator use would come to a end fairly soon. But no.
And of course the boys were up at 6a. We were greeting the dawn at the Waffle House at 6:45. We were on the road by 7:30.
This time we got lost on I10, which never happens because it is an interstate & all the exits are clearly marked. But somehow we drove 12 miles past it without realizing. The final area of confusion was at Gainsville, which is not actually on I75 but rather just near it so you have to by/around/through Gainsville to get there. There are some signs saying I75 this way but no mileage mentioned. Google’s directions with their little maps that don’t show anything more than the turning point left us confused as to just where we were. And given neither of us trusts Google maps all that much, we were fairly sure we were lost actually, though since we were following directions we were not lost technically.
I’m fairly sure there is a better way to get to I75 than Google told us. I’m even more sure that going to Ocala & getting on I75 is easier. I’ll be keeping that in mind in future.
But eventually the long tedious stretch of I75 began. Miles of flat road with palm trees. The thing I find most tedious about I75 is the lack of ice cream shops. ( I don’t know why I associate ice cream & Florida but I always *want* it while I am here. It’s a like a switch in brains says “Oh Florida state line? Where is the soft serve?) All the way down there was a DQ every hour just about, or a Coldstone.But after that first exit on 75, where we had lunch, there is nothing until Ft Meyers, which is 20 minutes from my parents’ house. And we just can’t bring ourselves to stop for ice cream 20 minutes from our destination (after which we will have ample time to go get ice cream whenever we want). I spend the whole 4 hours watching FOOD signs go by hoping for a Dairy Queen and am disappointed over and over again.
We made excellent time though. We were here at 5:40, 2 hours before my parents expected us. We went out to CiCi’s for dinner. I was all for it because there is a Baskin Robbins right next to it.
But they had closed.
It’s now Monday and I still have not achieved a waffle cone or peanut butter milkshake.
Some P365 photos this week.
What is in the fridge?
Aftermath of a nor’easter
Our dog was missing for several days. She is back now
New cat bed, or possibly napkin holder
Posing
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Thanks for stopping by
We’re heading out this morning on the 2 day trip to Naples FL. The car is packed, the dog is at the kennel, the cats have been rounded up and the house sitter has arrived (She brought her netbook, I warrned her about the phone problem)
We’ve decided on the wander through Virginia and North Carolina route for the beginning of the trip and then cut down 301 to Ocala or Gainsville (we almost always miss the Gainsville exit) to meet up with I75 route for the end of the trip. I predict we will get lost in Danville or maybe Lynchburg because it wouldn’t be a vacation without driving 10-15 miles in the wrong direction. Though maybe for variety construction detours around Columbia SC will confuse us into heading west rather than south. It’s been a few years for that one.
The longest part of this 1150 mile drive, mentally, is the 272 miles on I75. Florida just goes on and on. And it’s interstate so apart from spotting Waffle Houses there isn’t much to do but watch the mile markers go by and calculate in your head how much longer this trip is going to take. One year I counted all the Waffle Houses we passed from Washington DC to Naples. It was an impressive total but I cannot recall it.
The boys have picked out some movies for the trip – mostly Scooby Doos, plus Wall-E, The Road to El Dorado and Ratatoulli. I have Scooby Doo’s complete 3rd season as a surprise for the long I75 stretch. I also have Mario Party for the DS as a surprise if needed though I’m hoping on keeping it for I95 in Virginia part of the trip back (it’s the longest part of the trip home).
DH and I have some audio books to listen to (the boys have headsets for the DVD player & we set the radio speakers to the front only so we don’t have sound overlap). We have Terry Pratchett’s The Color of Magic and Going Postal. We also have the latest Hitchhiker’s Guide book - And Another Thing by Eoin Colfer. It’s had mixed reviews but listening to Douglas Adams on the trip is a tradition we’ve had since 1994, so we’re giving it a chance. We also have a BBC radio program – Old Harry’s Game, which is very funny.
We’re hoping to get to Savannah, GA today. Theoretically we should get there about 10pm. I’ll be twittering & updating Facebook as events unfold so you can follow along if you want.
I really wish it would stop doing that.
It’s the phone this time.
Actually it has been the phone for almost two years now but it comes in waves. Sometimes all those wonderful ‘features’ are the problem.
When I grew up (oh here she goes…) in the 70’s, a phone was physically attached to the wall. Possibly if there was a second phone in the house it was ‘portable’ in the sense that you could carry it into another room and plug it into a phone jack there (assuming there was a phone jack there and probably there was not) and then use it, but you were still tethered in place by a cord. Maybe, if you parents really loved you, you might have had a princess phone in your room, which was sleeker and lighter & usually had a longer cord so you could roll around on your canopy bed and hang upside down off the side while talking to your best friend about what this guy said to this girl about this other girl (we didn’t have BFFs back in the day. We had to use whole words). If they really really loved you they might have had a second line put in JUST FOR YOU! My parents didn’t love me that much (no phone in my room, no canopy bed and certainly no second line) so I had to stand in the kitchen, where the phone was mounted, when I was on the phone. Eventually a long cord for the handset was purchased and I could sit on the floor in the hall. But due to the house layout everyone could here exactly what I was saying.
It was hell.
But no one in my family ever stood in the kitchen listening to a vague distant ringing while shouting “Where the hell is the phone?!?!” and sometimes I sorta miss knowing exactly where the phone is. Today for example.
We have 2 portable phones. We got them because it would be convenient to be able to wander around the house while talking, which it is. And there is no jack in the kitchen or the playroom and it' would be handy to be able to just take the handset with us so we don’t have to keep getting up and going to the other end of the house when the phone rings. Which it is. But 75% of the time we leave the phone where ever we were when we finished speaking so we still have to get up and go get it – assuming we can find it. It only rings 4 times before the answering machine comes on and sometimes that is not enough ringing to find even one handset. Especially when both of them are later discovered in the towel closet & no one can remember even being in the towel closet.
One of the helpful features of our portable phone set is that it scan a couple of bands for the best frequency when you answer the phone. One of those frequencies is the one the wireless router uses. So about half the time if you answer the phone you cut off the internet. There is no way to tell it to stop doing this. You can have it rescan once you realize it has cut off the router but there is no way of preventing it.
The problem we hadn’t foreseen at all is one of power. There is no battery back up. The phone unit runs on electricity so if the power goes out, so does the phone. Meaning I can’t call the electric company to tell them I have no power. We only get cell signal in one corner of the house where the cell booster lives and it runs on electricity. So in order to call the electric company I have to go outside in whatever bad weather is happening and stand on the highest ground I can find and hope for a bar on my cell. Also due to a recent weird wiring issue the phone base had to be plugged into the jack in the living room instead of our bedroom. The nearest electrical outlet is one that is on the switch. So we can never turn the lights off completely in the living room or the phone won’t work.
In the past week I have lost one handset completely, even the locator beep doesn’t turn it up. The phone is currently cutting out my internet connection about 85% of the time. I absentmindedly turned the living room lights off twice on days when I was expecting phone calls and only realized when wondered why it had been so blessedly telemarketing call free all afternoon. And the power went out yesterday morning. I asked DH to call me at 9am because I had an appointment & a dead cell phone so no way of knowing what time it was. Both of us forgot it wouldn’t matter if he called me because the phone wouldn’t work.
I swear I am going to go buy one of those old school wall mount phones off of ebay & run a jack back to the spot on the kitchen wall where there originally was a phone mounted in 1978.
There will be no photos in this post despite the title.
Havoc came home with a school project. It is related to their current social studies segment somehow that was never adequately explained. They have to do a time line of their lives.
All 6-7 years of it
What came home was a couple pieces of construction paper glued together with numbers running along the bottom. The child is supposed to, with parental help, mark milestones or events for each year, they want you to use photos. Parent helps arrange the photos & labels & the child decorates it.
Havoc says “Do we have some photos of me to use?”
Oh little boy. Are they so prevalent they are background decor in your life now? Have the numerous photo albums, the hardbound book of your play last year and the non stop photo slide show screen saver on my computer become the same as the legos on the floor? Just things you don’t notice?
I say “Havoc. Mommy has over 10,000 photos that she knows of and that doesn't include the last 5 months.”
“You have 10,000 photos of me?”
“Of you and your brother mostly, but a couple thousand are of things like toys and the house and vacations.”
Havoc goes off to inform Mayhem that Mama has “Ten thousand photos of ME, Mayhem”, which of course sends Mayhem to me wondering “You have 10 fousand pichers of me?”
We looked at the folders of photos on my laptop. Mayhem did not mind that his brother had 15 folders all to himself, while he did not. Until Havoc started bragging on how he has more photos than Mayhem. I had to explain to Mayhem that 10 years from now Havoc would move out & go to college and Mayhem would still be here. Then there would be folders of just Mayhem photos. This seemed to satisfy him and he went back to playing Lego Batman while Havoc and I sorted out timeline photos.
OMG! I have so many photos! I am so not lying when I say over 10,000 and geez can we say ‘excessive’? Havoc had about 20 photos picked out before we finished years 0 & 1 and there was no room. 4 photos a year was pretty much the max. It took us over an hour to choose 30 photos for 8 columns. Every column has a birthday photo, a vacation photo, a Christmas related photo and either a 1st day of school or Ren Fair photo. I had to start skipping folders and just going right to the month with the event because Havoc wanted to look at and discuss every single thing in every photo. Which is sweet and fun to do for about 45 minutes. But after and hour and beginning each time with “how old was I in this photo” which when you are looking at things chronologically and are still looking at pictures in the May2005 folder, gets really really annoying.
It’s a cute timeline. We glued in the pictures I printed & Havoc drew in the columns around them images he remembered from the photos we weren’t able to fit. He took it in today.
I wish I had taken a picture of it.
Directions.
I live in the middle of nowhere. There is a town to the east of us and a tiny town south west of us in a 20 mile radius. If you double and add some to that radius you get a larger town north of us and a small city south of us. There is one main road connecting all 4 places and we live about 12 miles from that. Everything else is winding country roads. We don’t exist on Google or Mapquest. Our address comes up about a mile & half from where we actually live and on a different dirt road in another county. Directions from that spot to the main road include this bit “turn left onto unnamed dirt road 0.7 miles” which is totally bogus. The road has a name and if you drive about 50 yards further there is a perfectly good paved road that parallels ‘unnamed dirt road’.
The kennel we are putting the dog in while on vacation has a similar problem. (Athena does not stay on her lead run, she gets out of every collar & harness ever made & then disappears for a few hours & turns up again around 4pm. We don’t want to stress out the house sitter with worrying about the dog getting loose & whether she will ever come back. The cats just hang out in the yard). They say on their website basically - “Google us for directions? Good luck with that.” and then spell out different ways you can get to them from the various towns in the area. (including helpful bits like ‘if the bridge is flooded out, go back to this road…) What we can’t figure out is if there is a more direct way or which of the two nearest places should be our starting point. We have to pick up the directions midway in whichever we choose but I wish I could figure out the mileage so I knew which was shorter. The road we’d meet up with from the south town does seem like it goes on forever but I think that is because it’s just the one road, then just one turn there at the end (well, not the end but the road the kennel is on, 3.2 miles later). If we met up with the road in the east town directions there are 3 other roads we’d have to turn on before that last one, which keeps things from seeming to take so long.
I’ve been moving routes around on google maps, getting from the general area of my house to the turn for the road to the kennel, which are at least locations google can find, but it can’t seem to make up it’s mind how I should get there and knowing it will not make the 50 yard change to a paved road I distrust everything it says. It says it’s only 15 miles away but should take anywhere from 43 to 47 minutes to get there. Which leads me to suspect there are dirt roads involved
Tomorrow I have to sort out how to get to Florida. Do I go to I95 and straight down to Jacksonville or do I drive through Virginia, meander into North Carolina, then using various interstates, finally meeting up with I95 near the Georgia border? Do I cut across Florida at Jacksonville and pick up I75 somewhere north of Tampa? Continue down 95 to I4 and take it across to I75? Or do I head south from Orlando to Immokalee and then from there over to Naples? Could I just avoid Tampa and Orlando somehow? The trip, on paper could take 17 to 19.5 hours depending on changes. I just find endless I95 boring, though really ‘get on I95 in Washington DC, drive 850 miles to I4, make a left’ makes it hard to get lost. And we regularly get lost driving through the small towns on the US & state routes in Virginia and Florida. Last year we drove a half hour in the wrong direction around Immokalee after turning around because we though we had originally been headed the wrong way, though it turned out we weren’t. Interstate travel keeps that from happening.
But it’s so dull.
The weather was finally enough to rake up the leaves.
and jump in the pile
These guys joined us
for a game of Hunt the Dinosaur
they were well hidden
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