my camera, my poor camera.. *sob*

I love it, I talked Hubster into it for Mother’s day last year, It takes the most wonderful pictures.  And then Hubster insisted that he needed to take it to Germany with him. He promised to be careful, blah blah blah… while he is in Germany he asks me when the LCD screen started cutting in and out.. my response WHEN YOU TOOK IT.  He swears he didn’t break it.. but it worked great for me, no troubles, he takes it and it breaks… do the math. Anyway, it only had a 1 year warranty,  so I look up what a repair is going to cost… they want $149 to fix it at the Canon shop. I only paid $314 for the camera to begin with.. it has probably gone down since… so I look it up, on Amazon, were I got it.. NOPE they now want $950 for the exact same model camera.

Needless to say I shipped it off to be repaired. It is now at the Cannon shop, they say they have a less than 10 day turn around, hopefully I will have it back before Thanksgiving, I miss my camera… it is my precious.

I have realized

that I will not be able to publish my book here.. unless I want the blog to be labeled for adult material, as the book I am in the middle of almost done writing is an erotic romance. But… what I CAN do is open another blog and mark it as containing adult content, and then link to it from here.

As of right now I have less than 3000 words to go!!

Is anyone actually interested in reading it? Should I go to the hassle of opening another blog?

NaNoWriMo update..

so, ok, I didn’t wait for the month to start before I did.. I got almost 2 weeks head start, but I still plan on limiting it to 30 days, so that makes it kind of valid right?

Anyway… update.. I have been working on my book for… um.. hang on, gotta do the the math. 17 days now, including today. There were several days that I ended up not working on it.. The day we were at the zoo, and Halloween there just wasn’t enough time to even think about working on it, much less actually finding the time to sit down and type..  Whoops, side tracked again… This morning when I got up, I do what I do every morning, I ran a word count. Now I try not to do word counts during the day because then I become obsessed with how many words I have done today, and how much more I need to do to reach my 2k a day goal. Anyway.. my word count this morning was 39081so, in my sleep drugged mind I decide to figure out how many words a day I have averaged, so, in16 days work I have managed to average 2442 and change words a day. Not to shabby..

The closer I get to being done with this book the more certain I am that I will post it here, a chapter a week, until the entire thing is posted. Granted, I am not done yet, but so far, I am very pleased.

Great Weekend.

We took our travel trailer on it’s first trip. We hauled it to Phoenix for my uncle’s graduation from college,  and we stayed in an RV park instead of a motel. There were a lot of things I totally loved about the experience.

Enough beds for everyone without having to rent a second space/room. With 3 kids often end up with at least one child who doesn’t want to sleep with the others, and with the girls getting older, even more so. Plus, my mom made the trip as well, and 3 adults plus 3 kids in one room just doesn’t work so well, so  that is another room and more money. The trailer will sleep 9-10 if we push it. but the 6 of us was very comfortable. I wouldn’t want to do it long term, but for a few days or even a week or two as we travel, it would be good.

No hauling of luggage. Yes, I had to pack the trailer before we left and unpack it when we got home, but there was no hauling of luggage in and out of motel rooms. For a single destination trip this isn’t so bad, but if you are on a long trip where you stop for one night on the way, get back in the vehicle and go more, then stop for another night, it gets tedious, especially with 3 kids.

Food and dishes. Let me state first off that I am not particularly fond of restaurant breakfasts, plus, eating every meal out gets old fast, and very expensive. I picked up cereal before we left, and baked a batch of oatmeal cookies, and we had breakfasts as each person was up and moving around and ready for it. On my own dishes, which yes, I did have to wash but still, better than drive through rubber eggs.

Bedding and beds. I don’t know about anyone else, but I don’t sleep all that great in a motel with unfamiliar beds, and strange bedding. In the trailer, I was able to have my own pillow, again without hauling it in and out of a motel room, I knew when the sheets had been washed last, and with what detergent. And it is my bed,   in time I will get used to it, and it will be more familiar to me.

Rooms. This was one of the best parts. Our trailer is a Bunkhouse model , it has a section that is bunk beds, then a door that closes that room off from the main living space. This was wonderful for putting the kids to bed and then playing games and talking.

Price. We did some shopping, and found an RV lot in a nice area  of town, with amenities that we wanted (pool, etc)  and for two nights we paid less than what one night in a  motel would have cost, for a single room, much less the two rooms that the 6 of us would have required.

 

I did discover several things that I had missed in packing up the trailer, I made a list and things will be making their way out there to fill the list. Yes, there is room for improvement, but it was still a far better experience than staying in a motel. 

Teh Happy…

It eludes me…

I think a big part of it is not enough sleep last night. Hubster got home from his weekend drill around 9:30, and after we talked for a few minutes, he settled on the couch and started watching his recorded NASCAR race (BORRRRIIINNG… what is entertaining about a bunch of men driving in circles for hours continues to baffle me.) So I disappeared into the bedroom to work on the story  I have been writing. I worked for about an hour and at 11:00 I let him know I was going to sleep, and turned out the light, knowing that sleep would be slow to come since I was working out plot details, but confident it wouldn’t take too long.

I was just drifting off to sleep (after only having popped back up once to jot some notes on the story) when I heard a child cry. *sigh* I got up and dealt with the cold, wet child, and his bed. and by the time I made it back to bed it was a quarter to midnight.

I start to fall asleep again… and again, just as I am –><- this close to being asleep, more noise… this time it is the herd of elephants that is my husband. Crash banging into the room, using the restroom, and getting into bed. I feign sleep, cause I really don’t want to be bothered, but while he is in the bathroom, I sneak a peek at the clock… 0:18, for those of you who don’t have their bedroom clock set on military time (it is a big help when setting the alarm, no more setting it for pm instead of am) that is 12:18. The Elephant climbs in bed, shuffle, wiggle, cough, squirm, cough, wiggle.  (I feel the need to state here that I don’t necessarily need quiet to go to sleep, but I do, however, need still, this was my biggest problem in adjusting to sleeping with another person in the bed, every little wiggle wakes me up again, at least until I reach a sound sleep.) at one point he got up, and I could hear him hunting for his glasses, then 37 seconds later he was back, climbing back in bed.  He did finally settle down and let me go to sleep, but it was after 1 by then.

Needless to say, being a good mommy and going to bed on time, knowing you have to get up at 6am, doesn’t always do what it is supposed to.

some recent realizations…

1. Putting kids to work yields iffy results.
2. I own a LOT of blankets.
3. Putting 2 kids on the same job is asking for fights and a bigger mess than you started with.
4. Windows Live Sync is a wonderful thing. Especially if you have more than one computer you use regularly.
5. Weekends, when all 3 kids are home during the day, mom gets no more than 37 seconds of quiet at a time, and absolutely no time to concentrate on anything.
6. A beard trimmer, with guides, will double as a set of clippers for giving a small boy a haircut.
7. If you say you will do something “over the weekend” this means that the kids start nagging for it to be done as soon as they get home from school on Friday, and continue until the promised event is done or until they annoy you to the point that you cancel said event.
8. I need a new copy of Office ‘07
9. I still enjoy cooking…
10. Google docs Rawks for so many things.
11. Temperatures over 100 in mid October is obscene.
12. Well.. I enjoy cooking when it is not obscenely hot…
13. Men who think they know more than you on a given subject will not accept that you might have learned something they don’t know… no, this isn’t a new revelation, but I feel the need to remind myself periodically.
14. When PMS strikes, it is entirely possible that nothing will sound good to eat, except dark chocolate, and baby carrots. No, not together, that is nasty…. and no, I am not pregnant.

Steel Cut oats… cookies…

ok, I decided I wanted to make oatmeal cookies out of steel cut oats.. Here was my thought process… steel cut oats are much harder,and take much longer to cook.. so I thought, lets soften them some first by soaking them in water… that will work right? um.. no.. first.. the dough turned out gummy… add more flour, now no flavor… add more spices… more flour…some rolled oats for texture… Dough is now the perfect consistency to lay bricks. Because I can’t just throw it out without trying to bake the cookies, I spooned out 12 cookies on to a cookie sheet, topped with chocolate pieces (because I wasn’t wasting the chocolate for an entire batch by mixing it in like I usually do)  and baked…

The kids say they are good… I think they are being way nicer than usual… They each ate two, begged me to make more, so I am baking up the rest of the batch… We will see what Hubster thinks of them.. and no, I won’t be telling him about the brick laying bit… What he doesn’t know, won’t stop him from trying them… me not eating them won’t be abnormal, I am rarely interested in a cookie once it is cooked.

Zout

far better than Shout…

Over the years since I have been married and had kids, I have dealt with a myriad of stains on clothing. I have learned a lot of tricks for getting things out…

For small amounts of ink, hairspray works well.

for grease stains.. cola,

but by far and wide the best stain remover I have ever found is Zout, I first found it about 5 years ago, in Walgreens. I picked it up on a whim, and tried it…

We had this little dress for the girls, it was a really cute white dress with blue flowers… but one of the girls had spilled spaghetti sauce on it, long before, and it had become a set in stain, many times washed and dried, I had given it up as play clothes.  As a trial, I just *knew* it would never come clean, but the bottle claimed it would get out set in stains… I applied the Zout to this dress, let it sit about 30 minutes, and ran it through the washer. The stains came out, I was shocked. They came out so well, that my sister used the dress for her little girl, and my sister didn’t dress her in anything that showed the tiniest amount of wear or hint of stain, ever.

Over the years I have used it for many things, nothing as amazing as that first tomato sauce stain, but with 3 kids, I have plenty of opportunity to get stains out. And then this morning… Hubster was getting ready for work, when he discovered that he had left a highlighter uncapped in his uniform shirt yesterday, and now there was a huge yellow highlighter stain on his tan uniform shirt. So I tackled it… Of course, it being ink, I applied hairspray first… and it got a lot of it out.. but not all. So , I dug out my Zout… sprayed the area liberally, front and back, and set it on the washer… 30 minutes later I tossed the shirt in a washer full of cold water and let it run… the water in the washer turned yellow… But by the end of the wash cycle, the stain came out…

Zout saves the day again….

One day there was

a little boy, he was only three years old, but pretty quick thinking… He ran into the kitchen, where his mama was working, and asked “What ‘cha doing, Mama?” His mama tells him that she is making banana bread, because she realized that they had some bananas that were getting ready to go bad. At the same time she is measuring and adding the flour to the mixer, and greasing the loaf pans to bake the bread. The little boy looks at her for a minute, and says “I want some ‘nana bread!” then he looks into the oven. The oven is not yet hot, and is still empty. At which time the small boy sits on his butt on the floor in front of the oven and tells his mama that he can’t see the ‘nana bread and it needs to get in there soon so he can eat it.

He waited very impatiently for the bread to make it into the oven…. all of 5-10 minutes… But he was very patient for the hour that the bread took to bake. By then, his older sisters had gotten home from school, and they were all impatient to have some bread as an after-school snack. The bread had a very short life span, and was deeply mourned when it was gone.

ugh, my hands

Not sure what is causing it, but my hands have really been bothering me the last few days, really achy, difficult to move. I finally had to dig out the ointment. The only solution I can see is to keep them moving… I guess this means even more knitting… What was on the Christmas list again?