I'm only happy when it rains....

Sorry for the lack of blog posts lately. I finally have some time to sit down and type because (insert angel chorus) it's the weekend!!! I've been under a lot of stress from work and it seems like when I am stressed everything in my life unravels. I start eating crappy (like Oreos for dinner badly) and then I don't bother to work out and I stop cleaning my house and pretty much everything falls apart. WIWW falls by the wayside. The vacumm cleaner goes untouched. On and on. Anyways, I can't write about it specifically (of course) but it is a terrible continuation of the stressful situation from about this time last year that caused me to flee to Florida for a while. Also the continuous stresses of never having enough money. I have been tutoring after school like crazy. It's still never enough though. I'm wondering if I might need to get some kind of weekend job to hold me over until summer. I feel like I am barely squeaking by with the monthly expenses. And then there's everything else. The dishwasher is not really cleaning the dishes anymore. I need rear brakes for my car. It goes on and on. I'm trying hard to look for the positivity, because I do have so many blessing in my life and so many people that help me. While we are on that topic, here's one I probably need to record for prosperity. Last week Isaac and I left to meet up with my brother Tom at Costco (mom got us a membership for Christmas and we never went to fill out the paperwork-- isn't that an awesome present?) which is a decent drive from my house. Afterwards we stopped at Game Stop because Isaac's birthday money was burning a hole in his pocket. Then we decided to stop by Zwahlen's for some ice cream, just to make a night out of it. By the time we drove all the way home we had been out for several hours. I opened the door for Isaac and went to bring in my trashcan from the curb. Isaac came running out of the house screaming "Mom, there is water everywhere!!!!" I came in and sure enough water was POURING out of the kitchen ceiling through a big gaping opening along the seam of the dry wall. There were puddles on the floor, and my work laptop was sitting in a pool of water on the counter. I ran upstairs to see that Isaac didn't turn the water off when he used the bathroom before we left. Unfortunately, the sink that was left on was the sink that has been draining extremely slowly for the past few weeks. Water was flowing over the edge of the sink and there were several inches of water on the bathroom floor, and soaked into the carpet outside the bathroom on the landing of my stairs. It was bad. I freaked out. Isaac was terrified. We turned into a two man clean up team. Water continued to pour of the ceiling out of the gaping crack in the drywall of the kitchen and in eight different spots in the living room ceiling for the rest of the night. I had to put out huge mixing bowls and pots to collect it all in. I was pretty much hysterical envisioning rotting drywall, mildewy carpet pads, tons of home repairs. But the next day after I returned home from work I discovered that everything was pretty much dry. All of the holes and spots in the ceiling that had gallons of water flowing through them were barely noticeable 24 hours later. The carpet that had been totally saturated with water was only mildly damp. My work computer still worked fine. Tons of water poured out on either side of my TV and TV stand but all of my electronics stayed dry. Even the kitchen cieling which was the worst was quite dry and the somehow didn't seem as gaping as the day before.

It was pretty much a little personal miracle and I'm not quite sure why it worked out that way but I'm so grateful.

So what else is new?

Not to get political, but why does it seem like everything in this country is going to hell in a handbasket? NPR and Planned Parenthood are being defunded. The Postal Service is in real trouble. I will refrain from posting a million links about terrible things that are happening in education locally and nationally. It can be so discouraging. I went to the movies last night and saw The King's Speech. We pretty much just chose that one by default. There are no good movies playing. It came down to that or the Justin Beiber movie (seriously). I had my doubts about a period movie about a guy with a stammer, but as everyone I knew who had seen it assured me, it was really, really good. Not too sure why it was rated R though. I guess because of all of the swear words. (He doesn't stammer when he swears and the speech therapist sort of runs with that).

I have had this book:

for book club for nearly a month and I haven't opened it. It is really long and my coworkers who have already started it aren't crazy about it, so I haven't gotten the motivation to start it. Maybe I will just skip this month. January I was tearing through books, but lately I can't seem to get interested in reading (see first paragraph about being in a funk). Anyone read it?

Anyways, I guess I should get out of bed and crank up the Lady Gaga station on slacker radio and get to crossing things off my to-do list. Happy Saturday everyone!

Well...

I survived... And it wasn't as bad as I anticipated.

Isaac had fun and so did his guests.

( This one turned out especially blurry but look how terrified Ilona is of Monkey Joe.)

I'm glad birthdays only come once a year. :)

the social network

Source

So I'm e-mailing back and forth with a new e-harmony guy. He seems nice enough, although he tends to go for long periods of time (5-7 days) before he replies to my e-mails, which I find rather irritating. I suggested since we both have gmail sometime we could use the chat feature on there. He responded that he likes the chat feature on facebook better and gave me his screen name there.

Which, eh, no.

I'm just going to ignore that one. I think I would much rather give him my phone number friend him on facebook. As a matter of fact, besides my home address, (which he could probably find on his own with a few minutes of internet sleuthing) I can't think of anything more personal to let him see. I know I am rather addicted to facebook, probably more so than the average person. Giving him access to that would mean access of my pictures. Ones that I added and ones that others have tagged....

Including this little gem my aunt recent tagged of me:

***shudder***

Also providing total access to pictures of Isaac, my friend's comments, events, groups, my updates, my tweets, a link to this blog.... yeah I don't think so.

Thoughts?

?

Enlarged the font. any easier to read?

tee hee

This was in the Sound Off comments today. It's funny because it is so close to the majority of the comments published by the paper. " Yeah! Down with education! Teachers are the worst. They are the most evil people on the planet. They are the ones who caused the economic downturn that caused banks to fail and people to lose their jobs. It wasn't greedy people on Wall Street, it was teachers. I lost my job because of teachers. I did not get a raise because of teachers. My life did not turn out the way I wanted because of teachers. I am a disappointment because of teachers. Down with education. Our country would be just fine if no one went to school. We would still have the strongest economy. You don't need to go to school to be an engineer or a doctor. You don't need an education to be a computer software developer or to design the jet fighters that keep our country safe. Education is so overrated. They should fire all the teachers and replace them with random people off the street. You would not even notice a difference. You don't need special training to teach kids with learning disabilities how to read or do physics. I heard that Osama bin Laden is really the head of the teacher's union. Don't get me started on unions. All unions are evil. Companies like Wall Mart don't allow unions and look how well they treat their workers. Who needs a middle class anyway? There should just be rich and poor people. "

Of all the cool presents Isaac got for his birthday...

It's been the fart putty that has had us in stiches all afternoon.

What can I say? We're easily amused.

not exactly pristine...

I've noticed a disturbing trend on some blogs lately. It seems that many mommies in blog lands mysteriously have kitchens that look like this:

Source

Or this....

Source

Not even a dirty mug and some bagel crumbs on the counter, let alone stray underwear, crayons, rollerskates, briefcase, school projects, unopened mail that are magnetically drawn to all surfaces in my kitchen.

If you only saw kitchens like the ones above all day, you might start to feel pretty bad about yourself.

Let me lift your self esteem...

And let me introduce you to my floor...

Bad to worse...

I was home from school today.

Did some cooking and baking for the week.

And I made a big mess.

I wish I was not the kind of person who struggles with things like getting up early, tidying up after myself, staying on top of things...

I'm trying though, to be better.