My husband hates it

I tried and tried to come up with a new one.

I really did.

I made a list.

I showed multiple ideas to my husband and children.

I got responses ranging from rolled eyes to "I don't care".

Hubby hates this one because he doesn't like self-deprecating humor. Especially when I do it. Which is all the time.

But I CAN'T DECIDE ON A NEW NAME FOR MY BLOG.

So, when I do, I will put a new one up there.

Until then, this is it. But this one is temporary. I hope.

By the way, HAPPY NEW YEAR!

It is snowy and icy and freezing here. I think we are staying IN and trying to having fun with the kids. They probably won't agree with us on what fun is. They used to...times change.

Here's to 2009...may it find us all healthy, employed and with peace in our hearts.

It's time to admit the truth

As of December 30th, I will officially be married to a middle aged man.
He has hit the magic number of 45.

FORTY- FIVE
That, my friends, is middle aged.

Unless, of course, I hit the magic number of 45 in which case it will not, I repeat, will not be middle aged. Do not call me middle aged when I reach that age. Got it? I'm sure I'll remind you when the time comes.

So, in honor of my dear hubby's birthday I will present 45 reasons why Frank is lovable.











-he likes to buy me presents
-he cooks pancakes every Sunday
-he won't admit to having any grey hair, even though it is growing increasingly obvious that he does. So cute.
-he feigns sympathy for me and my myriad of aches and pains
-he scratches my back
-he is a good provider
-he doesn't complain
-he can fix things
-he isn't afraid of electricity
-So far... no stray, scary nose/ear/other freaky facial hair (I know this is a thing with men as they get older. Why is that?)











-he is funny
-he plays board games with the kids
-he likes to play cards (so do I)
-he turns a blind eye to my computer/email addiction
-he does his own laundry when necessary
-he has cooked pop-overs several times now!
-he likes tropical locations and takes me there on occasion
-he lets me use his frequent flier miles to go see my girlfriends
-he has surprise b-day parties for me on his birthday
-he still likes me after all these years









-he apologizes to me
-he won't even eat a piece of my See's candy when I offer it. He wants me to have it all.
-he takes care of his health
-he jokes around. (sometimes I don't think he's funny right then but later I do. I'm tough to live with, what can I say?)
-he is industrious
-he plays the electric guitar with his sons
-when I come home with my hair done and it's too blonde and I'm worried. He says things like "Hey, Blondie!" "Do you have a blonde attitude?"
-he's fine with grilled cheese for dinner...again.
-if I have an ache or a pain or an injury he almost always says something along the lines of "I know what we can do to fix that..." with a certain leer on his face. Depending on my mood I thinks its either cute or extremely obnoxious. :-) For today we'll put it in the cute category.
-he keeps chocolate in his office for my emergency chocolate needs











-he likes to spend time with me
-he'll watch chick flicks even though they torture him
-he's patient when I jump out of bed at 11:30 PM to take my picture of the day
-he buys me mens pajama pants because he knows I like them even though they look awful
-he is very smart
-he let the people at the temple think he was Branden's brother.
-he calls his mother and father. Not often enough but he does do it without my prompting.
-babies (especially baby girls) love him
-he makes milkshakes for the kids every week
-he has a cleft chin. swoon.











-his hands are just the right roughness...perfect for those back scratches I was telling you about.
-he likes to be active
-he includes me
-he tells me I'm pretty
-he isn't mad at me even though its midnight and I'm in my office blogging and scrapbooking instead of going to bed like a normal person.

I keep counting those and I think it is up to 45 but since my eyes are crossing I could be wrong. It's past my bedtime! If I'm wrong I'll add more in the morning...

Happy Birthday Sweetie! You are the best. I don't deserve you.

New Post

I feel like I should blog about something because I am so over that Christmas morning post.

but there is nothing going on here.

I spent a couple of hours today cutting and pasting my old blog posts into my blurb book because the slurp feature of blurb is BROKEN for blogger. I'm so annoyed at blurb right now. If my book weren't 85% done I'd be jumping ship. Maybe.

All 3 of my kids went to friend's houses after church today AND are spending the night. Frank and I were like empty nesters all day. I said, "I know what we should do!" He said, "What?!" I said,"Clean the house!" He wasn't excited. But gee, the house is a disaster and with the kids gone we could get it all spic and span in no time at all.

We did clean the kitchen. And I did the self-clean on the oven. Had to be done...we set the oven on fire the other night because of all the grease that had spilled in the bottom from the "breakfast casserole" we made for Christmas morning. Big fire! Pretty exciting. But messy.

Frank thought we should go out for a hike or walk since it was really warm here today (60 degrees!).

We didn't. No reason...just never did. Then it got dark at like 3:3o as usual. dang.

It was still fun to be "free" like that.

I have a bunch of stuff to return to the malls and I have no desire to do it. I dread the lines. Plus one of the boys got a jacket and they left the stinking security tag on. I hate that. Gotta go back to get that removed.

Frank's bday is this week. He says he doesn't want to celebrate it. ??? What does a wife do with that, I ask you?

How cute is Frank?

Well it is nearly noon here.. Frank is snuggled in bed taking his Christmas day nap. The kids are all playing with various Christmas toys. I have already eaten several pieces of See's candy.

We got up at 6:00 a.m. which is our minimum sleep time here. The kids are not allowed to wake us before six which means they wake us at exactly six. When Carter woke us this morning and I mumbled something that must have sounded like I didn't want to get up, he quickly told me that we were LATE as it was 6:02.

So, I already showed you one of Frank's gifts with the little saying on it. He loves to do those hints or sayings on his gifts...not just the ones for me, so I thought I'd share a few from this morning. I'll add pictures later but right now the camera is in the room where he is napping! oops.

My gifts:
It's not your outfit that makes you beautiful to me
-fuzzy, warm sweats- (obviously not that attractive)



















Improving on perfection is a difficult undertaking
-a photography book-

















You feed my addiction, Here's food for yours
(kind of a repeat, but it works for this gift too)
-a very cool camera strap that I had asked for. Love it! Here's the link if you want to see it. Watch the video to see how it works.-



















Ryan's gift:
ZZ top was telling the truth
-a sport's coat- (Ryan's been wanting one really bad)
We did have to explain this one and so Frank and I broke into song "Every girl crazy 'bout a sharp dressed man" of course!



















Austin's gift:
Here's to passion
-electric guitar-

From passion to fashion
-t-shirt with picture of guitar on it-
















Carter's gift:
Don't forget to invite us to the fish fry!
-drum set-
Do you know the saying "If wishes were fishes, we'd all have a fish fry"? I say it a lot. So that's where that one comes from. Carter wanted a drum set but we told him it wasn't going to happen. But it was the only thing he really wanted besides Legos which he has a million of already. So we got it (with some help from the grandparents). Thus the saying...

Obviously my house is going to be very very loud from now on. That is a future blog post.

So there are just a few of Frank's cute sayings this morning.

I hope everyone is having an enjoyable Christmas with Friends and Family!
Merry Christmas to you from Us!

It's now 2:30 and I got my camera so I'm going to add a couple of things.
Look what my sister gave me. Is she awesome or what? Between the See's and this I'm going to gain a few pounds I have a feeling...



















Then there is our son Ryan, who is a working man and bought everyone gifts. Nice gifts. We were totally shocked by him. Here we are opening our gift from him.


Clueless.













Now Frank is thinking "What the..."














I've moved to the "shocked" phase.















I said something like "Are you serious?"

and

Frank said something like "Now we never have to leave our bedroom!"









Posing.

Found under the tree...

In case you can't read it, it says:

To Debbie
You're my addiction!
Here's to yours.
Love, Frank

I think I'm getting me some SEE'S CANDY!

I'm so easy to buy for.

Teenagers! ...or...time to call a psychologist?

I know you've been waiting anxiously for the photos of our annual Gingerbread house extravaganza!

We had some friends over again this year so we made a total of 11 gingerbread houses. I usually clean things up before I take the photos but this year I just took the pictures as we were making them...with all the mess and candy in the background. So you get to see what a huge disaster we make with this project!

Here are a few lovely shots of us hard at "work":









And now on to the houses.


Since this is my blog, I will start with my house. The normal, typical and traditional Gingerbread house.












Frank's house. He can never follow the rules. He had the same pieces as the rest of us...



















Carter's house. One child still doing simple cute houses with just lots of candy on them. *smile*



















Ok now for the teenagers. OY!

So Austin has this cute looking house...luring the kids in.
"Kids Welcome"















and "I Have Candy" on the roof.













But then you go to the backyard.
I had no idea that this fun tradition would turn to something so morbid!



This is apparently the Hansel and Gretel house but things didn't turn out so well for the kids this time...














Then Ryan, after seeing the hilarity of Austin's creation took his pretty normal looking house and added some "fun" additions.


Yes, a man jumping from the roof with a noose around his neck.

and

in the front yard

a guillotine.

nice

real nice.


I will say that all the teenagers were laughing and having a great time so it was fun.



And although these houses aren't exactly the Christmas decorations I'd hoped for, they did give my normally technology addicted teenage boys a couple hours of fun and they interacted with family and friends. Woo Hoo!

Hope you enjoyed this tour of our houses. And I hope you aren't too worried about my childrens' mental status. I'm keeping my eye on them, don't worry...

Popovers

So hubby and I are shopping in Target last night and he sees this pan:

And he's going all crazy!

"Oh, a popover pan!"

He's carrying it around and practically hugging it.

I'm like, "What's a popover?"

He looks at me like I have 2 heads and says, "You don't know what a popover is????"

(yes, he used 4 question marks!)

Um, nope. Never heard of it. Never heard of a popover pan either.

He is elated to find a second popover pan and he buys them lickety split.

He comes home and goes on the internet for recipes and tips for making perfect popovers. Apparently they are kind of tricky, which he is a little dismayed to find out. But he is not deterred.

It was a little bit funny because at times he was running around the kitchen all frantic "Where is a brush?? DO WE HAVE A BRUSH? I need to brush the pans with butter!"

He didn't gather his supplies beforehand you see. ahem.

But it turned out well. Even better than that actually.




















The popovers were perfect.

And tasty!












He thinks I'm going to learn to make them. But he's wrong. I think this should be his little specialty. Don't you?

One quick story

Just a quick story from our power outage adventures.

First of all I just want to mention that tomorrow my kids are going back to school for the first time since the storm last Thursday! Yes, we've had nearly a week off of school now. Up until a day ago there were still over 1700 people in my small town without power...that is a long time to go without power. ugh.

They are using the schools as shelters and there are still lots of downed power lines and trees all over town. Each night there was a town meeting between safety people, power people, and the school people to decide if school could be held and each night they decided it was not safe.

Of course the kids loved it. I don't mind it either except we get in "vacation" mode and it is hard to get back out. We love to be lazy around here.

Ok. Back to my story.

So, after Frank had cleaned up the debris from the driveway, he measured the wires hanging down and decided that we could just squeeze under them with the car. We could escape! I was nervous about doing that as you might imagine.

But we got invited to a friends house who still had power. How could we turn that down? The kids had spent all day hauling wood and being cold so it seemed only fair to go out to a warm house for the evening. Frank was going to stay home and keep the fire going etc.

I told him that he had to drive me past the wires and then I would take over. I'm a chicken!

He drove me just past the wires and got out of the car and walked back to the house. At that moment I got a phone call. And the kids are talking to me. And the neighbor starts walking up. It is dark outside at this point and he is walking up with a flashlight and saying something to me...but I've got about one too many things going on and can't quite figure out what's happening.

I hang up the phone.
Shush the kids.
And ask the neighbor what up...

He says,"I wouldn't park there if I were you."
I say (thinking that he means that I'm too close to the hanging wires) "Oh I know, we are headed out but I made Frank drive me past the wires."
He says, "I thought something like this might happen."
I look bewildered.
He says "didn't you notice?" and he points up above my car.

We all look up to see huge flames coming from the power lines just over my car! Uh, nope, hadn't noticed that!

Of course I hightailed it out of there and parked a few yards away. We all got out to look because, really, who could resist?

We thought it was our transformer at the time but we would discover the next day, in the daylight, that it was a tree where the wires were touching (due to the fact that our power pole was askew and wires were not where they should be).

Two sets of flames were shooting out of the wires a good couple of feet into the air. It was quite a sight. There were occasional loud pops and sparking noises. Then suddenly it sort of exploded. Big bang and huge fire! There was a weird sound like electricity traveling along the wires...I thought the wires were coming down. It was like a whipping sound. That noise caused all of us to run because none of us wanted to get hit by falling electrical wires.

Then we went to our friends for dinner. :-) Seemed like a good time to leave.

The next day we saw that it was a tree, not a power pole that had been on fire. Crazy stuff. It's kind of hard to see from a picture just how impressive it is, but you'll have to believe me. Just imagine this tree encased in ice and all wet and then shooting huge flames out in the night sky. Impressive.

So there you have one of our adventures. The only picture we got of the fire was with Austin's camera phone and it doesn't look like much but some bright lights. Oh well. We have a burned tree as evidence.

Let there be light!...and internet

I found it quite humorous that I opened computer yesterday to discover a number of emails from people "checking on me". The emails said some version of this:

"I heard about some big ice storms in your area. Are they affecting you? I hope you are ok. Let me know."

or

"I heard about a big ice storm in New England but I didn't see anything on your blog about it so I guess it's not affecting you."

Here's a tip: If you hear of a big storm that might be knocking out power to large amounts of people, email might not be the best way to communicate with someone. And they just might not blog about it because when they have no power they have no internet either!

Too funny.

Anyway, yes, we were affected by the big ice storm. We woke Thursday night to a pitch dark house and the sound of cracking, falling limbs all around. We are surrounded by humongous trees so I was nervous. I moved Carter out of his room upstairs and had him sleep downstairs in the middle of the house.

We woke to a beautiful and awful scene. The world was coated in ice but many many huge branches had fallen everywhere. Our town was officially put in a state of emergency due to the huge amount of damage and the number of power outages. The power pole in our driveway way knocked askew and our power lines were dangling very low. We were extremely lucky that none of the huge branches hit our house or cars.





In our particular situation being out of power presents a few extra problems because we have a well. So...no power, no water. Good times.










We have tried to prepare ourselves for various possible emergencies but we did find some holes in our plans with this particular emergency:
-We need more wood! We went through a ton of wood trying to keep warm when the temps were in the teens at night.
-We need less whiny kids! Hauling wood is not their favorite activity...who knew?
-Marshmallows are a must-have emergency food. What good is a roaring fire with no marshmallows to roast? (and, no, the mini marshmallows from the marshmallow shooters are not ok for this purpose)




We have in the past owned a generator but we took it in this last spring for a tune-up and the shop was robbed! They took our generator. So after much difficulty we got an insurance check. We've been shopping around for the "perfect" generator but hadn't bought one. Figures, huh?

We were without power for about 2 1/2 days. We were grateful it wasn't longer. We thought it would be since they had to come and reset a power pole that only affected 2 families. Turns out they just pushed it back up straight(ish) and called it good. Hmmm. Let's hope we don't have a big wind anytime soon.


I didn't get out to get pictures of the clean-up til Frank had already done a lot of the work. Good timing, eh? He thought so.