Totally Useless

I stopped by Albertson's on my way home from the airport this evening to get a few things for the dinner I'm doing on Sunday. After paying for my groceries, I got the receipt and a coupon. I just looked at the coupon. It's for Milk Bones. I don't even own a dog! Usually the coupons are triggered by something I bought. What was it this time? The garbanzo beans? What a totally useless coupon.

Weird

Richard Simmons is singing ABBA songs to David Letterman. Wearing a very weird outfit. Wow-Richard Simmons is really weird. I think I need to stop watching....

Four Things

I've been tagged by my friend Martha. So here goes:

A) Four places that I go to over and over:
1. the grocery store
2. Brandon’s preschool
3. Chick-Fil-a
4. Brandon’s room

B) Four people who regularly e-mail me:
1. Brian
2. Mom
3. Dad
4. Anni

C) Four favorite places to eat:
1. Chick-Fil-A
2. Chili’s
3. Pho (any good place will do)
4. Old Santa Fe Grill

D) Four places I would rather be right now:
1. California
2. Sweden
3. Hawaii
4. Singapore

E) Four TV shows I watch all the time:
1. The Morning News
2. Lost
3. House Hunters International
4. Mickey Mouse Clubhouse

F) Four books I'd read again:
1. The Poisonwood Bible
2. Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself
3. Angela’s Ashes
4. The Bridesmaid

G) 4 Places You’ve Traveled to:
1. England
2. Sweden
3. Hawaii
4. Alaska

H) Your 4 favorite cereals:
(I don’t eat cereal for breakfast. Just as a snack sometimes)
1. Cheerios
2. Granola
3. Cinnamon Toast Crunch
4. Life

I) Four favorite hobbies:
1. Scrap booking
2. Walking (when I can)
3. Shopping for bargains
4. Time with friends (includes catching up on friend's blogs)

J) (Amy's added question) Four favorite movies:
1. The Commitments
2. Ballroom Dancing
3. Raiders of the Lost Ark
4. Close Encounters of the Third Kind


K) (Sarah's added question) Four famous people (dead or alive) you would invite to dinner
1. Jesus (although I'd probably just sit and stare at him)
2. Angelina Jolie
3. Miep Gies
4. Laura Ingalls Wilder

L) (Martha’s added question) Four favorite foods
1. Nuts!
2. wheat thins
3. Persian cuisine
4. barbecued pork spare ribs

M) (My added question) Four popular shows that I don't have any desire to watch:
1. Desperate Housewives
2. Law and Order
3. American Idol
4. CSI (seen once)
...plus any cop or lawyer dramas.

Issues With CSI

I have a love/hate relationship with the show "Forensic Files." (I use to stay up way late back in 1998, when I first got cable, to watch "Medical Detectives" (now known as "Forensic Files") and Vh1's "Behind the Music". TMI, I know). Anyway, I find the forensic investigation fascinating, but hate the fact that something bad has to happen to someone in order for an investigation to start. I've heard that the field of forensic science has been booming at universities across the U.S., with women comprising most of the student body. I wonder if most of these students know how long it takes to solve most crimes based on forensic evidence prior to enrolling in the classes? One can only hope.

I watched CSI the other day. Wow. That was bad. I think I've seen a snippet of it here and there, and thought the same thing. But, wow, it was really, really bad. I keep thinking that it was going to get better. It has to! After all, this episode had Rachael Harris and Katey Sagal. It had to be good, right? But no, it just kept getting worse and worse. How is this show popular? It wasn't a drama. It certainly wasn't funny. The dialogue left a lot to be desired. And the very quick working fingerprint database....? Loved how that worked. But hey, Marg Helgenberger has never looked better. She's improved a lot since "China Beach." I'm sure I'm going to be insulting several friends who just love the show. But, hey, everyone's different! I've been known to love shows that the rest of the world thought were just weird ("X-Files", anyone? "That 70's Show"? Love "The Office," "Scrubs", "Lost," and back episodes of "Good Eats"). I'm a cable girl at heart, and watch very little on network TV). Luckily, my husband and I share the same warped sense of humor, and enjoy similar shows on TV. Maybe it's just me. Maybe it's the show. But I've been wondering for days how CSI enjoys any popularity at all, and how on earth it has managed to spawn not one, but two spin-offs? It's been days since I watched the episode, and the mediocrity still haunts me. What I'm wondering now is..... Why is this even taxing my brain at all?

CSI-The Aviary Unit

I opened up my window this morning to find.... a perfect imprint of a bird - feathers and all - on the clear glass middle of the window. It's a large window, currently needing 4 drapery panels to cover it. But I never expected to find a bird imprint on it! It was a little disconcerting. I imagined the birdie CSI unit coming in and doing a chalk outline of the victim right there on my window. I took a few pictures, but the outline is white on a clear window, and just looks like a smudge in my pictures.

I looked down onto the patio, but saw no bird. I did a full sweep of the patio about half an hour later when I was downstairs, but still no bird. Hopefully it didn't die! I guess I could get some window decals if this keeps happening. Brandon would probably cry if he saw a bird hit our window and die. I might, too.

Random Day

84 degrees today with just 5% humidity. Can you say dry? My contact lenses were out by 2:00 pm! The kids are craving water, and just took their sippy cups down to the basement. It's been weird the last few days - very warm and dry. Most counties are on fire warning due to the higher temps and the crazy winds (seriously - it's like living on the northern California coast without the benefit of being near the ocean. The winds here can be fierce. Honestly, I regularly worry about my kids and groceries blowing away. I've never worried about a full shopping cart with 2 kids inside blowing away while I'm unlocking my car. But I do here! Now, back to your scheduled blog....).

Today - 84! Tomorrow. Maybe 42. With snow or rain. A storm is blowing in (doesn't that sound like a country song?). It's kind of nice right now. I have almost every window open, and all the inside doors are propped open (otherwise they'd blow shut, and I'd wonder what the noise was). We only had 3 functional screens at our rental - so white trash - so I feel empowered to open windows now that we have complete screens on all our windows! It's 70 degrees, but you wouldn't know it by the winds. Feels more like 60. I need to go turn off and drain the sprinklers, since the lows will be below freezing tonight.

Not much else happened today. I attended the brunch at Women to Women. It was nice, and I didn't feel like running out the door like I did at the last one. And we had a more filling meal than the soup we had last time. I'll never be skinny - I've accepted that. There are many reasons, and one of those reasons is because I want filling meals. Creamed soups as a main course, tasty as they are, really never fit that bill. That's what we had at the last brunch. Today I was a little too full, and didn't eat a lot. Hmmm.... what was I eating? I have no idea if I'll be attending this same Bible study in the fall, mostly due to the fact that I don't know if Brandon will be in morning or afternoon kindergarten. Morning class runs from 8:00 am to 10:45, so I won't be doing anything next year if he's in that one! The schedule is just awful! The school is very overcrowded this year, resulting in odd kindergarten schedules. But still, they could have done better.

Hope your day was as non-stressful as mine! This is such a blessed day. Nap time was a mess, but so far the rest of the day has gone well.

Oh, Trader Joe's

Oh, how I miss thee......

Oh how I miss thy great dried fruits and nuts section, and children's yogurt
Oh how I miss thy great prices on milk, eggs and butter (although thine prices have inched up just a bit since I moved)
Oh how I miss thy great wine prices, and large selection (and, lo, how I miss the ability to purchaseth wine in a grocery store.....but that is another lament altogether!)
Oh how I miss thy small, but well priced, selection of environmentally-friendly cleaning products
Oh please, Trader Joe's, maketh thy way to the great state of Colorado soon!

Day One

It has begun. NaBloPoMo. What is that? National Blog Posting Month. I will be attempting to post every day for the month of November. Should be interesting. Let's see if I can do it. I'm feeling a cold coming on. Lucky me. If I can get through this month without a migraine, we are good-to-go!

I Miss My TiVo

When we moved out to Colorado we decided to suspend our TiVo/Directv service while we were renting. It's been hard, but 5 months later we have come to accept that fact that we don't have a menu, don't have a buffer, can't rewind when we didn't get what was said, or speed through the commercials. We've had cable the entire time, thanks to the previous tenants. Neither one of us is a fan of Comcast at all, but it's free so we aren't complaining. Before leaving California I loaded up on a few of my favorite shows, and a boatload of Brandon's favorite shows. Since we've been here I've taped things on our ancient and very moody VCR (which likes to eat tapes, and won't rewind to the end of a tape. It leaves about 3 minutes that you have to rewind while watching the tape). But all that is about to change.

Fall is starting. We have shows we like. Someone, somewhere along the line completely screwed up TV viewing for the mountain and central time zones, and prime time starts at 7:00. 7:00!!! Seriously - who can manage to sit down at 7:00 to watch TV? 8:00 is pushing it, but 7:00???? Without TiVo, it will be a huge challenge to even watch our favorite shows. Survivor started tonight. Not a fan, but Brian is. Had I known, I would have taped it. As a TiVo user, I never had to worry about when shows started. I'd just find them on the menu, and set them to tape. The Office starts at 8:00. Brandon's usually just going to bed at that time! The nice thing is that Lost will be back on at 9:00, instead of 10:00. Still, the negatives of an earlier schedule outweigh the positives.

Besides TiVo, I miss Directv. Comcast, aside from being free, is crap. There is no longer a channel menu on the TV. That's a premium channel now. Comcast switched it sometime in late July. When there was a TV Guide channel, it was slow as molasses, and always always always had some asinine show on the top that you were forced to watch (even in mute) as the channels sloooooowwllly scrolled by. Granted, we are pretty sure we have the basic of a all basic subscription (for free, as I keep telling myself), but it is still annoying. This week a show called The Truth About Food was on Discovery Health. It looked pretty interesting. And I like Dr. Oz's totally straightforward style. But do we get Discovery Health anymore? Nooooooooo. That's a premium channel now. I miss knowing what the topics of Secrets of the Dead are going to be. I miss Decoding the Past. I miss BBC America. I have the local and cable channel listing bookmarked on the laptop, which does make things easier, but the times are screwed up, even beyond the mountain time zones. Nothing is as it's advertised on the actual TV channel. We got use to the fact that most channels on satellite TV played 2-3 hours different in California than the advertised time. When we'd had cable before, the advertised times were the actual times. Here? Of course not! The cable channel times are not usually anywhere near the advertised time. They're not east coast time. Or mountain time. They're just random. Comcast has seriously slacked on lining things up! It was a major feat for me to tape all 6 hours of the Christiane Amanpour series "God's Warriors" on CNN last month! Beside it being an effort to find a free VCR tape, I then had to search and search for the times. Advertised to come on at 8:00. Would that be 6:00 pm here? No, 7:00. Then again at 10:00.

Now you know way too much about me. This was suppose to be a *short* little blurb about how I miss my TiVo and Directv. Here I am - on the 4th paragraph - and still whining! We got TiVo in 2003 - my Christmas present to Brian. Little did I know that I would grow to love it so much. TV watching was radically altered by the presence of children. And while yes, there are other things to do, sometime I just don't want to do them. By 9:00 my brain is tired. I try to read a book and end up reading the same paragraph over and over again, finally stopping because I can't remember where I was on the page before I somehow stopped paying attention. I also strictly monitor Brandon's TV viewing (Caitlin doesn't care) in both amount of time daily and shows, and I miss the control of obtaining those shows. It took discipline to tape a few episodes of Higglytown Heroes, which he only wanted to watch after moving to Colorado. Brandon doesn't mind care if watches TiVo, a tape, or a DVD. He loves watching a show (probably a little to much) regardless of how he gets to watch them. I found a few Veggies Tales tapes at the local thrift store for a dollar. But I had to warn him that he couldn't cry if the VCR ate the tapes. I almost cried when the VCR ate 4 episodes of Higglytown Heroes and The Micky Mouse Clubhouse, but that's another story. Must. Control. Emotions!

I know, I know. I shouldn't complain. I've had cable, for free, all summer! It could have gone out at any time, but it didn't. But I do complaining so well, and I have to watch it around the kids. This is one of the few places I can vent at all! Even about something as vapid as TV. Brian is going to have Directv set up soon - right after the odor removal service and new carpeting. We're taking my 19-year old, 13 inch TV over so we can at least set up the shows we like. Sad, but true.

I Gotta Rock

Finally, Charlie Brown gets some respect!

http://badgods.com/guitarsolocharliebrown.html

Hello 1980

Last night, as I was lying in bed trying to sleep, I had the dulcet strains of ""Morning Train (Nine To Five)" by Sheena Easton running through my head. Where did that come from? That song came out in what - 1980? I liked it - in 5th grade! The odd thing is that I haven't heard it for years, and yet, there it was, bouncing around in my head like an old friend. Hello, 1980!

Parties

I am so overwhelmed, I can barely write. Last Wednesday my playgroup gals threw a little party for me and my friend Taira (who is also moving next week), and today our friends threw a going away open house party for us. I don't even know what to say. My heart is so full of emotion I think it might explode. I had to excuse myself a few times today because I thought I was going to cry. I'm good at using frivolous excuses, such as "Caitlin is going to be killed by the swings" just to get away so I won't start weeping! (Okay, that's a valid excuse, but an excuse none-the-less). I am excited about our move, but the process is daunting. Packing while being a mommy of young kids is much harder than packing while single, even when you work full time! I'm sure that many out there agree with me! My time really isn't mine anymore. I took a few pictures today, but have no idea when they'll get online (Brian packed the computer yesterday). I don't know how I will cope without my extended support network of friends, especially those in the same stage of life as me. But just so you know, dear friends, I will miss each and every one of you. I wanted to say that here, since I forget to say things like that in life.

The Packing List

I find it very very sad that I now have to have a list of things to pack when we travel. It's on the computer, so I can quickly print it out before I leave. Otherwise, I'd probably end up forgetting my underwear. No one wants that. Especially me.

Naps

Why is it that on the days you really need your kids to take a good nap they take a crappy nap, and on the days that you couldn't care less about naps, they snooze for 4 hours straight? AARRGGHH!!!!