Friday Update

I usually do Five Question Friday on Friday. Lately, I haven't liked the questions so I haven't participated. This also means that my blog hasn't been getting updated because I have less than nothing to say. I've been using 5QF as a handy writing prompt. I was holding out hope that this week's questions would be appealing to me but they're not. No offense.

Summer has gotten off to a slow start. We haven't done anything. The girls keep having sleep over after sleep over to the point where I told them no more until next week at the earliest. The other night, they each had a friend over so I had four girls, three of them teens, in my house. I didn't get ANY sleep that night. I needed a break. When they're not having sleep overs, they're hanging at the pool. I have to say, I'm very thrilled that we have a neighborhood pool within walking distance. There are actually two that they go to even though they have to kinda, sorta, cheat to get into the other one.  Oh wells.

I'm mostly ready for the Oldest Child's 16th birthday. I already have her big present and I just need to round it out with a few smaller things. She wants me to bake her a cake (isn't that sweet of her?) so that's easy peasy. She's not planning a big party. We had to browbeat her into the casual get together that she decided to have. She insisted that she didn't even care to celebrate it at all. She sounds just like me, lol. My 35th birthday is in eight days. I really don't want to talk about it.

I do have something sort of funny to share. Our neighbor across the street moved this week. Well, his family moved to Texas and he moved in with a friend until he retires at the end of this year. Anyway, they really didn't get along with their house neighbor (we live in duplexes). To express their dislike of this neighbor, they tp'd their car using Vaseline to hold the toilet paper in place. LMAO! I love it. I'm really ambivalent towards this person seeing as how I don't share walls with them and they've never bothered me. I really wish that I didn't like them so that I could have gotten in on the action though. I haven't done that since the first time we lived here. Although...we do have a certain person on our street that we really wish the ground would swallow her up. Or maybe an earthquake could knock her house into the canyon. Or maybe a giant pterodactyl could come and pick her up and drop her into a volcano. Hmm. Maybe, if we manage to move before they do, I could get a little of my own back on the way out. That would be fun. But only if her husband was deployed because we actually like him. He's on his current deployment voluntarily because he wanted to get away from his own wife. See?? I'm not the only one that doesn't like her.

And on that lovely and positive note, I'm off.

Summer Time

Mission Trails - A shot from our Memorial Day hike.

I cannot believe that June is here already!! Am I the only one? This year has gone by so fast. I think it's all the kids' activities that we had this year that made the school year fly by. Between band, JROTC, sleepovers, birthday parties, open houses, etc., etc., my days revolve around trying to figure out which kid I'm taking to which activity. A "soccer mom" I am not.

The Oldest child could have gotten her driver's permit back in January but due to the fact that she's been in trouble off and on and she hasn't even asked to get it yet, she hasn't even checked it out at this point. I didn't get my driver's license at 16 either, but we only had one car and my step mom worked all the time. I could have had ten driver's licenses and I still would have been walking everywhere or hitching rides with friends. This isn't the issue at all for the Oldest though. She would have a car to drive to and from school 3-5 days a week if she wanted it. She would certainly have a car to go shopping or drive to work in the evenings should she want to. I'd really like her to get her license just so that she could drive herself to her own appointments. She was in physical therapy for her shoulder, twice a week for about two months. It would have been really nice if she could have driven herself to some of those appointments. For the summer, she's getting a job whether she wants one or not. There are quite a few places in town that she could work that are within walking distance to our house but she'd have a lot more choices open to her with a driver's license.

The Youngest child doesn't have any plans for the summer so far. She's already brown as a berry. She'll probably continue to work on her tan as she hangs out with the neighborhood kids on her vacation.

As a family, we haven't made too many plans. We'll be celebrating the Oldest's 16th birthday in July. We'll be going to Sea World at some point. We also want to get in more hiking this summer. We went over the Memorial Day weekend and had a blast. We're lucky in that one of the staging areas for Mission Trails is about five minutes from our house. We've hiked Mission Trails many times over the years and still have probably about 3/4 of the park we haven't been to yet. We'd also like to do some hiking in the mountains this year too. Honestly, we don't hike as often as I'd like and I can only say that it's because we're too lazy to get out of the house on the weekends.

As for me, I'm job hunting myself and trying to decide what I want to do about school. This last semester was brutal. I read all kinds of Shakespeare and seven modernist novels over the course of eight weeks. That's not to mention the mountains of papers I had to write and projects I had to do. For the summer, I intend to read as much as I can for leisure. Being in class tends to kill any desire to read anything other than the required stuff. I also want to buy a fire pit for the backyard and do some container gardening (hopefully not container killing). The snails have disappeared for anyone that was wondering.

All in all, I'm just looking forward to the leisure days that summer brings. No schedules. I can cook dinner at 8 at night if I want to. I don't have to nag the kids to go to bed. We get to SLEEP IN! One week until summer vacation starts! Woohoo!

June 1, 2012: Five Question Friday

Before we get started, I just have to say that I can't believe it's already June. Where in the world did the first half of the year go?!?!?

1. What were you scared of as a kid? Thunderstorms always scared me. None of the tricks that parents try on their kids worked with me. I just didn't like the unpredictable flashes of lightning followed by the loud booms of thunder. Growing up in Ohio, we had some big booming thunderstorms.


2. Do you sleep well in a hotel?  I do if I bring my own pillows. I am very particular about my pillows. If I don't have the right combination of pillows, I can't sleep and it doesn't matter if I'm in my own bed or not. If the hotel is nice and I have my own pillows, I can sleep there just as well as I can at home.


3. If you could meet any celebrity, dead or alive, who would it be and why? I never know how to answer this question. I'm not the type of person to get star struck. Celebrities' poo smells just the same as anyone else's. If I had to pick, it would be a celebrity chef because at least then I could get a gourmet meal out of them.


4. It's a hot summer day. Do you prefer to be pool side or at the beach?   Definitely the beach. I DO NOT like public pools and we don't have our own pool nor do I know if I'd ever want my own pool. They're too much trouble. Public pools are full of dumb people that bring their nasty little kids that puke and do other unmentionable things in the water. At least at the beach, you have the ocean breezes, the sound of the waves, and the ability to spread out so that you're not lounging two inches away from someone else's group. And you can play in the sand.


5. What is your favorite summer dish? I love to barbecue in the summer. Anything on the grill is yummy in my book. I also love the summer fruit like melons and berries. And a good pasta salad. Ok. This is just making me hungry.