Sticky Surprise

Last night I was cleaning under the couch in my family room. I realized that this does not happen as often as it should. When I pushed the couch back I found a gooey, sticky surprise. Not a good sticky surprise like carmel popcorn or crispex mix, no this was a bad sticky surprise called a melted, hardened Popsicle. Since I highly doubt that the Popsicle walked out of my freezer and went under my couch to melt into a syrupy blob, my guess would be that someone put it there. My money is on Diana. She is always saving food to eat later. I don't know why? Perhaps she'll die. Who knew laminate flooring would turn out to be a lifesaving device. But tonight it did just that. Hurray for being able to mop up the sticky mess.

Hit and Run

Yesterday morning when I took Diana to school, this is what I saw as I backed out of my driveway. This is shocking because the night before there was a perfectly good wall where there now is this mess. I do not even know how this happened. Who hits a wall and then just drives away? It is not anyone of the cars in my family, because none of our cars are crunched in the way a meeting with this wall would make happen. One possibility is the garbage truck, because it was garbage day. Would they just leave and not do anything about it? Perhaps. Another possibility is my neighbor, but his car seems unscathed as well. Then of course maybe it was some random maniac driving through the streets. It seems unlikely because we live on a cul-De-sac not a through street. So now we are left with a bit of a hole in our wall. Bummer.

I've got the school copier blues!

Today I innocently walked into the school and signed in to be a parent helper. If it was a TV show, ominous music would have played, foreshadowing trouble looming on the horizon. Perhaps the copiers have become alerted to my Thursday afternoon routine. Probably, they have met at night in secret meetings to conspire against me. If they had arms and hands they would rub their hands together with glee, knowing that I was coming back for them to torment me yet another time. The other problem is that the teachers have lulled me into a false sense of security by giving me a smaller copy load the past two weeks. So I show up unaware that my copier karma is at an all time low. (Any of you now familiar with copier karma, see my first post on this blog)
First of all the teacher gives me a mountainous pile to copy. Then the darn copier proceeds to come up with every error message I have ever seen before and even a new one I have never seen. I wasn't even finished by the time the bell rang. After finding Diana, I tried to finish up but the confounded machine kept jamming. Finally with 2 double sided copies to go, I decided to call it quits. Sometimes that is the best thing to do, just walk away. Sadly I had these 6 piles of copies that I usually put in the teachers room. The teacher had left and locked her door. We don't have school tomorrow and everyone cleared out of there fast after school. So I had to squish these big piles into each of the six third grade teacher's boxes. If I calculated it correctly I used about 2300 pieces of paper. Most of those were double sided copies, so I ran most of those papers through twice. Also at least half of it had to be hole punched. Whew! What a big job. Is it just me, or does my picture portray a copious amount of copies? Next week I have a doctor appointment and I told them that I can not come. But at least I persevered today as long as I did. I feel victorious, if only in my own mind.

Queen of Denial!

Ok, so I don't think that we own any cats, but these pictures seem to prove me wrong. Yesterday I was sitting out on my patio, and the cat kept coming around. I told it in no uncertain terms "You DON'T live here" It just looked down its nose at me like cats do. The look on the cat's face seemed to say "You go ahead and think that lady, if it makes you feel any better, but I know differently." I guess if I really don't want to have a cat, I am going to have to be more proactive about it. Not wanting to expend any effort to de-catify myself, I have been hoping that they would just go away. You see how well that is working for me? We still are not feeding it, but it must be finding food somewhere. And it does get a fair amount of attention, ie holding, petting, and rides on the slide, so maybe that is enough to keep it coming around. Not to mention it has taken to napping on my patio furniture. Aye carumba!

Accidents Happen

As I said before, our trip to California would have to be the highlight of that week. But you know what the law of physics says "what goes up must come down". And so Friday August 17th was the low of the week. This happened about 12:30 that day when I received a call from Trent. He told me that he had been in a car accident and I needed to come to where it had happened. I was helping at the choir camp that Diana was participating in and so I was about 25 minutes away. I quickly left the choir camp and drove over to the accident. He told me that everyone was OK, which I was glad to hear, but still it was a very long, anxiety filled trip for me. When I got to the accident I was horrified to see that front of my car was pretty much smashed to smithereens. I was glad to see Trent standing pretty much unhurt on the sidewalk. Apparently he was making a left hand turn and failed to see an oncoming truck. The truck hit him on the front passenger side of the car. Both of the front airbags deployed. Trent had a small abrasion on his head that I think was from the airbag. So sadly it was his fault and he received the ticket. The police at the scene said to look at it as a good learning experience. And to feel lucky that Trent could get such a good lesson without anyone having to be seriously hurt. I wish that he could have learned this lesson in a less costly way, but oh well that is life.

So now my car is totaled. I have had a rental car for the past week and am looking for a new car. I hate buying new cars. I would rate the experience right up there with root canal and moving. But I guess that there are some things in life that are unavoidable. The good news is that I am going to receive a fair amount of money to help purchase a new car. The bad news is that my car insurance is going to go up. I don't know how much yet, but it can not be good.

Traveling Flood

I have heard the saying "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade", but what do you do when 4 gallons of lemonade spill in the back seat of your van? Unfortunately I found about this tonight. We had made the lemonade and put it into a 5 gallon jug to take to Jared's soccer party. Marion put it on the back bench of the car. As I got in, I half though to myself about the stability of said jug. And sure enough when we turned the second corner I heard it tip over sideways on the back seat. I was sitting right in front of it and tried to turn around to life it upright. But as if in horrifying slow motion, I turned around just in time to see the lid pop off and gallons of yellow liquid flooding the car. This was not just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible with raisins in it. We turned the van around and went home. Marion emptied all of the wet and sticky tools from the back of his van. I ran in the house and got every towel we own and tried to sop up as much of the mess as possible. I think tomorrow we will take the seats out of the van and hose them down. Then we will park on a hill and wash down the inside as well. I don't imagine it will ever all come out or be the same again. The good news is that we decided not the make the homemade root beer, which is twice as sticky. We stopped at the store and bought supplies to replace the drink and we were only 30 mins late to the party. It all seemed to go well and we are glad that it is over. Jared does have 2 games tomorrow as well as Diana having one. One more week after tomorrow, YEAH! Boy it is too hot to want to be outside as we have finally gone over the century mark in the temperature department.