Lactic Acid overdose

On one hand, waking up this morning with my muscles screaming bloody murder is nice, it lets me know that the workouts I have been doing are actually working.

On the other hand? OWWWWWWWWWWWWEEEEEIIIIIIIIII!!

Here are a few pictures of our weekend so far! ( I really need to get off my butt and stick them all on FaceBook!!)

Our city (not "our" city, per say, but the one closest to us), is Known as The City Of Bridges, mostly becuase we have six million nine hundred forty three bridges..

Can you tell that this picture was taken through a closed car window? I'm pretty pleased with it, though I plan on putting it through a few photo shop actions to give it some extra OOmpf!

RUN FOR YOUR LIVES! Giant Mutated DUCKS are attacking!


The boys, playing some sort of game at a tree outside the place where we go to have coffee.

Payday Plans

Tomorrow, Payday, I will be purchasing a few things.

Hubs needs a car adapter for his PSP for when we go camping - we plan on leaving him at the campsite with the dog while the rest of us go swimming, and the car adapter will ensure he is well occupied for the hours and hours and hours we will be at the pool. The adapter costs under ten dollars on eBay, but almost forty dollars in the stores, so we will be buying in on eBay.

I will be paying Sheila back - she saved my butt by providing the money I was short when I forgot about renewing my blog. Actually, I will be paying Sheila back before I buy the adapter LOL.

And third, I will be starting another step in my weight loss journey by ordering my diet pills. Please remember, these pills - or, their ingredients - have been examined by my doctor, the doctor I have been seeing for six years, and he has deemed them safe for me. Please also take not that I am changing how I eat, and getting added exercises Every Day.

By the time all of that is done, I do believe my paycheck will be gone.

It Stopped Raining!

It;s been raining here , off an on, for three days, and it is super annoying! In between rain showers we have beautiful, not too hot, just right blue sky weather. And it lasts just long enough to get outside and start doing something fun. Then the rain starts again!

Last night it rained twice in the four hours it took us to fill up the pool, and when we woke up this morning and the ground was dry, I was hopeful. It hasn't been until now, 9 PM at night, while I am sitting outside typing and watching the boys play together outside (can't buy memory like that!), with no rain clouds in site, am I finally convinced the rain has stopped!

I hope that when we go camping in August we do not have rain.

Back Yard Plans

Now, first of all, these are allllll LONG range plans. We simply do not have the $ laying around to do them all at once!

Here are some of the improvements we have planned for our yard.

Although it would make sense to start with the front yard, I will instead start with the project we are working on this year!

Last week I hauled eight barrows full of dirt from the back alley. Sometime after the house was built, in the five years the original owners had it, they dumped garden soil back there, three feet high. I guess they planted some potatoes or what not out there. A lot of people in town here do that, Grow veggies in the alley, it allows them the extra garden space without taking up valuable back yard play area. ANYWAY. I am not much of a gardener, I can do it, and I like to eat the things that come out of gardens but I hate the upkeep. the weeding and watering and the braving of spiders and the dirt. Oye, do I hate the dirt.

So, the dirt went away. (with much much effort on my part - and like I told my husband when he got home that first day of shoveling and dumping, I am a bonbon and soap opera wife, not a manual labor one!)

Just leveling off the dirt from the back alley is not enough, if we leave it like that it will be over run with weeds in a matter of weeks, so we have ordered a few trailers full of crush rock and are going to fill it in with rocks. it will not stop the weeds entirely, but it sure will help! At the same time, we are replacing the rock along the backyard path. Most of it is gone, washed or carried away by little hands, so it is definitely time for that!

Anyway, that is our landscaping plans for this summer. The list to follow, I do not know when we will finish it off, well one thing I do, sort of, but the rest is up in the air.

*I want to seal in the dog house, we are still deciding if we should go with vinyl siding, which is easy to clean, or get it stuccoed to match the house.

*I want to build a shed. One that is about 8x8 or 10x10. No bigger than that. They sell kits at the lumber yard that has all the materials and the wood is already cut to size, so that would be an easy project for hubs and I to do. But It will cost about 1000.00

*I REALLY want to take the rocks out of the front yard and those two ugly bushes there, and replace them with sod. At the same time, I want to continue the sidewalk on towards the back yard. I will not be removing my beloved apple trees from the front yard, I will leave them there, placing cement tree rings around them. Having lawn in the front yard will do two things - make the front yard look a lot nicer, and give the kids more room to play! This will also be a costly project, between 1000.00-2000.00, so it will be waiting a bit.

*lastly, In the back yard, in the corner where I would put up the shed, I have a four by twenty patch of garden. I want it OUT. It's not big enough to offer enough veggies to satisfy us, and yet it takes the same amount of work that a larger garden would take. So, this fall when the peas and carrots are done, I am going to rip out the railroad tie border, add a bit more dirt to level it off, and put in some winterizing grass seed. is there such a thing? if not, I will do it in the spring, but with sod. (Sod is only 3-30 cents a square foot, so it won;t cost that much)

And there you have it. My plans for the - oh - and I want to re-paint the front rail, it is starting to chip, and if that is left, it will begin to rust - but thats it! thats all I have planned!

Right?

(and maybe while we are painting the rail, we can paint the front door?)

Musically challenged

I have to admit that newer technology confuses me. My six year old is more up to date on what things plug into what and how to turn machines on and all that stuff. We have several ipods in our house, the boys have shuffles, and me and hubs have Ipod nano's.

But. My Nano is dead and needs to be recharged. And when I try to just plug it in, a thingy pops up and wants me to do updates and blah blah blah, and its HARD. And CONFUSING! And I keep forgetting to ask Hubs to come and do it for me!

Will you come do it for me?

It's either you or I will have to ask the six year old, and trust me, that's a very embarrassing option!

Where Was I : A Continuation of Where I Was

So. Where Was I? LOLz!

Round Four PM this afternoon, I took the laptop, and my computer memory card out to the garage to sit in the shade, blog, drink coffee and keep an eye on the boys. My first decision was "Where do I want to blog". I decided that the best place for the pictures would be Where Was I and clicked over to it.

Then I closed the window, convinced I had clicked the wrong button and tried again. And Again. And then I panicked!

In the time it took me to load and reload the page a few times, digital signage was flashing in my head :

DOMAIN RENEWAL!

OH MY GOOD YOU FORGOT TO RENEW YOUR DOMAIN!

WHAT KIND OF BLOGGER FORGETS TO RENEW THEIR DOMAIN??

Me. That's what kind. The domain place had tried to email me (I later found out there had been four reminders starting four weeks before the date it was due) but becuase I had no way to access my Yahoo account, I had not received any of them.

Did I mention yet that I started to panic?

I headed over to the place that I bought my domains from, NameCheap, tried to login to see what the reactivation would cost me, and crossed my fingers, knowing I only had 5 dollars in my paypal account becuase we had just bought the Wii Fit!

But. Did you see that word up there? TRIED? As in I FORGOT MY PASSWORD! And becuase I am an idiot and do not write them down, I was screwed.

Then I remembered that Nobody had helped me set Where Was I up on the domain and to do that, I had told him the password, and then not changed it.

I twittered and emailed my distress to him and he came through - while at his children's swimming lessons with the PW. YAY! And Then, THEN, I had to ask a friend to loan me Five dollars to bring me up to enough to be able to renew the domain, which was only 9.29.

Thankfully, My BFF Sheila came through for me, and loaned me the $ and litteraly, the minute the screen cleared with the payment, I clicked over to Where Was I and there she was, in all her glory!

SO.RELEIVED!

Somedays I scare myself.

Today I had an almost disaster, thanks to some very very very good friends, the disaster was averted. You see, Today I wanted to post some photos of my boys, and I bunny hopped over to my other blog, Where Was I? Only to find it was GONE.

[cue horror movie type scream here]

My mind raced as I tried to figure out what the hell had happened when it hit me. Yahoo. You see, way, way back in 1998 I was introduced to the internet by my then boyfriend, now husband. From there I found yahoo, and in particular, their games. I fell in LOVE with a game called Canasta and played it constantly.

But to join Yahoo, you need to first sign up. Well, I was SO new to the internet that I was terrified of giving out ANY personal information, so my registration looked like this:

NAME : laskurfsndf
Date Of Birth : lalksfjapofs
COUNTRY: alksjfoaipsf

Are you getting the picture?

Fast forward now ten and a half years, I was still using the same Yahoo account, Bluepaintred, and had used my Yahoo e-mail to sign up for almost everything. It's better to use a web based e-mail, like Yahoo, Hotmail or G-mail - my favorite is g-mail) than the email your ISP provides you because if you change ISP's you will lose that e-mail.

ANYWAY. My boys dumped a full glass of water on my laptop, and I had to set yahoo (and everything ELSE) up again. Except. I forgot my password. And all my info was fake so I could not request a new one, AND I had forgotten that one of my domains was up for renewal, and that the renewal forms were sent to - you guessed it, my yahoo e-mail.

Hmmm

This is getting longer than the used cisco network cords, so I will continue this horrifying tale in another post!

Stupid - or lazy?

Some dude is a retard. He is throwing a bunch of stuff onto the curb.

1. Garbage day was Friday - that means that stuff will be sitting there, in front of his house for five more days.

2. He is tossing out stuff like a couch (really ugly and worn)(yes I went and looked) weight benches and a - yes really- a DOG HOUSE!

2.a. When Friday does roll around, he will expect all his junk to be picked up and taken away. Did he not read the notice we all got last April? You know, the big neon yellow paper TAPED onto our new garbage cans? The one that stated that they ONLY pick up what is in the garbage can, and nothing around it? Thats it is an AUTOMATED truck thingy doing the picking up and NOT a person like last year?

Sigh.

At least I can be thankful he is tossing out household goods and NOT heaps of garbage! Imaging the stench.

Wonder how long he will leave it there before hauling it away himself?

Vacation - Success!

Looks like we will be going camping this summer after all!

[yesssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss!]

Back story : Smokey - our dog - came to us from a farm 11 hours away, in November, VIA a kennel in the back of a pick up truck. The ride was long, and cold and lonely. She was one of 11 pups, who had known 12 weeks of having her siblings, her mom and dad, as well as about six other adult dogs with her. She had never been in a vehicle, much less taken an 11 hour ride in the cold, before.

Because of that horrible ride, Smokey came to us hating cars, and trucks, and basically anything with a motor. We found this out one evening when we decided to load her up and take her into the city for some dog toy shopping. She puked and pooped and foamed at the mouth. She shook and cried and was generally terrified. I've never felt like a meaner person that when I had to push her rump to get her back into the car for that 20 minute ride home from the city.

Since then, we have slowly been acclimating her with the car. First by just getting her to go in it for treats, and in the past week, we have taken her for short drives, 10- 15 minutes every night. In the middle of each ride we stop for something fun, a few minutes of running in a park, to explore the pond and water fountain. When we get home she gets treats and cuddles.

She has not soiled herself, nor does she spend the whole time crying and shaking, but she does bark. A lot. In fact, she barks constantly. We have just over a month to get her up to handling a 45 minute drive, becuase mid August we will be heading out to the campground.

Our first plan was for Smokey to spend the weekend at my brothers place, but he was evicted. I checked out the kennel, but felt Smokey would not get the kind of attention she was used to, and the prices were horrible. My Mother in law offered to come over every few hours to walk her and play with her, but she would spend the rest of that time alone. In a kennel.

So it was decided we would not go camping. and we were all pretty sad. Sure, Camping is not on par with Vegas vacations, but we LOVE it.

With the improvements Smokey has made in the past week, we are determined to bring her with us. I know she will love being outside with us, and she will be fine sleeping in the tent. I am kind of sad that we might not be able to go to the pool, becuase I will not leaver her alone in the campsite (she would BARK!BARK!BARK!) but hubs said he is willing to stay back at the site with her while me and the kids go, so that might be an option..

Anyway. I'm super happy that we are going. I just wish it was sooner than the middle of August!

eBay FAIL

All afternoon I have been trying to bid - successfully - on a Wii Fit. After all, the reason we got the Wii was because I wanted to use the Wii Fit!~

So far I have bid in four different auctions, all around the same price, and every single time I am the highest bid until anywhere fro 30 to OMG 11 seconds remaining.

It's easier to play beer pong with whiskey than to get a Wii Fit on eBay!

We would buy it in stores, but they NEVER have them in stock. Well. We did see it that one time, about a week before we located our Wii. We talked about picking it up and eventually decided it was too weird to iuy a game for a system before we have the system. By the time we drove home from the city that night we were kicking ourselves for not picking it up, and hubs went back to the store the next day after work, but they had sold out by then.

We haven't seen it since!

Eventually, I will win the Fit. I might have to wait until next payday so I can up my bid, but eventually, it will be MINE!