Exceedingly Mundane

I just added quite a few more pictures to the Photo Gallery on Hambones. Gail was very kind to send me some pictures, and I have been remiss in the last few days to get them transferred, sized and uploaded. Those are done now though! She sent several from Fred’s birthday party here the last weekend of April, several from Elizabeth’s graduation the next weekend, and then some various and assorted pictures. Those that weren’t from the birthday or graduation were put in their own album. Gail has a “Misc Photos from Gail” album now, under Misc Pictures, so go check it out!

For the birthday and grad ones, just check out the 2005 album. For Fred’s party, the new pictures are on pages 2 and 3. For Elizabeths’ graduation, I put them all on page 1. Good people pics! 🙂

Enjoy! And thank you Gail, for sending them all to me for us to share!

Well, I went outside this morning and watered all of the plants and flowers. I spotted one dead rat, half under the deck out back. One down, at least one more to go, maybe more.

I will be kind and spare you guys a picture of the DEAD rat! 🙂

Hopefully one of the neighborhood cats will take care of him soon. If not, poor Tim is going to be forced to remove him to the creek out back after he gets in from work. Everyone send lots of pity to Tim! 😀

Well, I saw this elsewhere online, and I love it. Just love it. I miss Jerry Seinfeld, his funny show and his humor!

Here’s the quote for the day:

“It’s amazing the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.”
Jerry Seinfeld

I have quite an extensive list of blogs I like to read. Some are stay-at-home moms, some are working moms, many are scrapbookers. Some blog extensively about TV shows that I watch, reality and otherwise, and some just blog about nothing at all. A la Seinfeld. Sometimes those are the most enjoyable. I stumbled upon a blog by a writer named Carmi Levy, out of Canada. You can visit his blog here. He’s a bit of a techie, but he has a healthy sense of normalcy to him that you don’t always find with geeks. 😀 Here’s a sample of what he wrote last week about the space station (yes, I love anything to do with space), and after I read it, I went “MAN, I wish I could write like that“.

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My clematis is late blooming this year. I looked back at digital pictures I took of it the last couple of years, and it’s usually blooming by mid-April. It didn’t bloom hardly at all last year because we forgot to cut it back to the ground in the fall. But, I remembered this past fall and it has come back good, but just hasn’t opened up and bloomed.

There are six huge blooms on it, and I’m more than ready for them to start popping open. This afternoon, I went outside and got my wish:

Click more to see another picture and also one of my visitor yesterday afternoon, our friendly neighborhood black cat. He/she only seems to show up if there’s a rat about (Tim saw one Saturday evening run under the deck)

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OK, if anyone out there watches “24”, can you tell me if this was used last night on the show? The phrase “geosynchronous orbit”, maybe when they were talking about the satellites. I woke up this morning, almost chanting this to myself. I had actually forgotten about it, till just now, when it popped in my head again.

I think I have a brain defect. Some memory chips are not seated properly or some kind of wiring is loose. 😀

Found this while blog surfing… I’m sure there are a lot of these kind of “aha” things, but of course, I can’t think of any right now. If you think of some, post them… and I’ll do the same.

This one is true for me though:

“Why did I call conditioner, “cream rinse” as a child? Did everyone? Why did we stop?”

Growing up, I have a vague memory of having to stand on a stool and having my mom wash my hair at the kitchen sink. I remember conditioner being called “cream rinse” back then. I also remember that I had to use something on my hair called “no more tangles”. My hair is awful, always has been. I envy women/girls with smooth shiny silky hair. Mine has always been dry and very frizzy, and it gets soooo tangled. I always begged for this stuff to be sprayed on my hair (or the equivalent oh those many years ago), so that it wouldn’t hurt so bad. My mom would brush my hair and just pull tangles until it felt like she was scalping me. I hated it.

Well, I’m not in any mood to blog today. I have done a bunch of private blogging, but no one can see that but ME! Nananah-boo-boo. 😈 I even checked a couple of memes that I like to do, but those aren’t very good this time around either.

I do need to enter a couple of movie (Ocean’s Twelve and Spanglish) reviews on the Reviews section of Hambones. We watched them almost two weeks ago and I have yet to enter a review. No one reads them anyway. I also finished another book last night, after struggling with it for far too long. It just was not my kind of book. I may not try this author again (“Blue Shoe” by Anne Lamott). Thankfully, I have a very light, entertaining book to read next, another Shopaholic book by Sophie Kinsella. I think I will take a long break and read some on that book.

Yep, that’s the ticket. Decided then. The reviews, and everything else, can wait. I’m going to go read. Au Revoir.

I was reading in the Jackson paper yesterday where they quoted this article from the Washington Post entitled “Women Wearing Pedometers Walk More”.

I know it’s true for me. I find that if I wear my pedometer during the day, it’s a physical reminder there on my hip (usually clipped to my pants or shorts), that I need to get up, move around, walk around while I’m talking on the phone, etc and not sit so much during the day and be sedentary. I shoot for 10,000 steps a day, and always easily reach my goal if I 1) go shopping or 2) go for 1 or 2 walks a day with Tim. Our 2 mile trek around the subdivision is usually good for a ballpark step count of about 4,900 steps. So that’s half my daily goal right there. I hit a new all-time high two days ago, when we walked twice (4 miles) and I did the weekly shopping. I logged over 20,000 steps that day, and I was very proud. 🙂

Anyway, just a reminder – get up out of the computer chair and move!

I say … and you think … ?

Texas:: Shanna!
Scholarship:: money
Runner-up:: second-place
Mustang Sally:: song
Jones:: keeping up with the …
Hard to get:: playing
Jewish:: rye bread
Crew:: J Crew
Cable:: TV
Assistant:: secretary

Tim came home yesterday and surprised me – he had finally found the kind of toolbox he wanted for his truck and he went and had it installed yesterday afternoon. He didn’t call on the way home (which he usually does, it’s a ritual I look forward to every afternoon), because he said he wanted to surprise me! 😀

He had been wanting a toolbox for a while, and he finally found the kind he wanted. It’s sort of low-profile, but not completely recessed in the truck bed. It’s also really deep, and black; he didn’t want a silver one. We had actually seen one like this in a truck in the Lowe’s parking lot a few weeks ago, then he got online and started getting info on this company (CDI) and where he could get one of their toolboxes. He got this one through Big 10 in Pearl (according to the receipt he gave me when he got in :D)

I asked him yesterday if he is going to use this for tools, or is it more to stow his hunting stuff in? He gave me this quizzical look and said “it’s like a trunk for my truck”. Then, on further consideration, he muttered something about “you know, I might need to get more tools to carry around in here”. As to that, I threw my hands over my ears and started chanting Gregorian chants at the top of my lungs, interspersed with “I Can’t Hear You… I Can’t Hear You”.

I took a few pictures of the new acquisition, and they are in the Photo Section of Hambones. But, here’s one of Tim (like a kid at Christmas) with his new toolbox:

Last night on our walk, we were nearly home and saw one of our older neighbors out in her yard. Her name is Miss Jean and she flagged us down, and wanted us to come look in her backyard, as she had been working in her yard all day and wanted to show off all her hard work. 🙂 She pointed out several plants she had planted yesterday afternoon, some perennials that had come back, some really great birdfeeders she had, things like that. Then, she showed me a “stick in the ground” that she had planted, and said it was a “Confederate Rose”. She said it was part of the hibiscus family, and wouldn’t I like a cutting? 🙂 Well, I’m not one to turn down anything free, let alone plants to put in my yard and try to get to grow, so I kindly accepted. I thanked her, and I was promptly told that for pass-along plants, you never say “Thank You”. You say “I appreciate it”, but never thank you! Apparently, it’s sort of a “break a leg” kind of line of thinking! 😆

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I’ve gotten this before, but thought it was worth posting when I got it again, so here we go:

TO ALL THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED the 1930’s 40’s, 50’s, 60’s and 70’s !!

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us.

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing and didn’t get tested for diabetes.

Then after that trauma, our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paints.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking.

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.

Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.

We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.

We ate cupcakes, bread and butter and drank soda pop with sugar in it, but we weren’t overweight because WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.

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A Little Background:

We live in what we consider a really nice little subdivision of smaller homes. The “front” part of the subdivision has homes in the 1800-2100 square foot range. The “back” part of the subdivision (where we live) has smaller, starter-type homes, in the 1500-1800 square foot range. When I looked here at houses 12 years ago, they were billed by my real estate agent as “patio homes”. One of the things I liked best about this subdivision was 1) easy access to the highway and all the amenties close by and 2) that there were woods and a creek behind my house and that the middle of the subdivision was divided by a lake.

The lake. It’s just a couple of big ponds really, but we call it a lake. At our little lake live any number of ducks and geese, pretty much year round. The numbers and varieties change, but on any given day, you can see a lot of Canadian geese, mallard ducks, white ducks and what I call “ugly ducks”. The mallards and geese are my favorites. We have fed them many times across the years, on our own and with our nieces and nephews, as well as neighborhood children we have “borrowed”. 🙂 The ducks and geese are very used to humans and have no qualms about coming right up to you if they think you might have bread.

We have had ducks in our front yard twice this spring, so far. Tim and I go out and feed them bread and take pictures. We have had a goose one time in 12 years venture to our front yard. We named him Chester.

About 2 or 3 years ago, something happened to one of the Canadian geese. We’re not sure what, but he has a broken wing now and can’t fly. Therefore, he’s here all the time. Sometimes he has a lot of company and sometimes he is out there all by himself. When I first began to notice him all alone, it just broke my heart. We soon realized that his wing was broken and he was stuck here. He seems to be a bit ostracized by the other geese, I guess because he can’t fly. He pretty much lives in the back yard (right on the lake) of one of our neighbors, right around the corner from us. He has a lot more ducks to keep him company than he does geese. He will venture across the road to the other side of the lake, and sometimes down around half of the lake, but he never goes very far from the yard that he “lives” at. I call him my “broken winged baby”. We see him almost every day, and on the days that I don’t see him, I worry about him. When we first noticed his wing, Tim didn’t think he would make it very long. But, here he is, at least 2 or 3 years later, maybe more, and he’s still going strong.

Click on the -More- link for a couple more pictures of him and his buddies 😀

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Tim and I went walking this morning and it was mostly very quiet out. There were a few people leaving for work, and a few pockets here and there of school age children waiting on the bus.

We spoke to a couple of the kids in passing, just a simple ‘Hello’ or ‘Good Morning’ and both noticed (as we have many times in the past), that the kids don’t acknowledge us or speak to us or smile or anything. We started discussing how sad it is that kids have to be so cautious in today’s world, so wary of strangers. I’m sure it’s been told over and over to these kids in our neighborhood, “don’t talk to strangers”. Which is a good thing, I think, overall. But, I thought it was sad that they can’t respond when someone is being friendly to them, or show respect for their elders, or just sheer politeness in returning a greeting. Sad that they have to be so wary of people and their surroundings at such a young age.

Tim brought up an angle that I had not thought of. He said…

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