Daily Venting & Exclamations…

Emma saw her first circus yesterday! We all (there were fifteen of us) had a great time. I think we enjoyed watching the excitement on all the faces of the kids (Emma and her cousins) as much as the show! She got a little wiggly for a while, but when she got a flashing clown nose to wear all was good again!!!!

but it sure wasn’t easy. It still isn’t real that Uncle Charles is gone. It’s very surreal - you’re with your family saying goodbye to a loved one and then a couple days later you get up to your alarm clock and get dressed and go to work like any other work day. And you drive your same route and go through your same routine and still eat, breathe, live - like any other day. Life goes on even when you have to say goodbye to someone.

Everyone is still having a pretty hard time - there are still lots of tears. The service was beautiful. There were tons of flowers and tons of people that came to say goodbye (or see you later) to Uncle Charles - that is a testimony of his life right there. And even Uncle Charles had some final words for us as they played one of his CDs during the ceremony. He had such a beautiful voice. My grandfather did, too so maybe now they are singing together again. It was so sweet and sorrowful at the same time to hear his voice while at the funeral.

Uncle Charles had Coronary Artery Disease - so did my PawPaw. He’s had it for years so we all knew this was a possibility I guess. But over the years Uncle Charles had sustained many other near death events. He got hit in the head with a baseball as a teenager and was paralyzed over half his body for a while. After that he suffered seizures for many years - but he overcame that. He had a 2,000lb log fall on him and break his back - but he overcame that. He suffered a couple heart attacks, once actually being legally dead on the table for a couple minutes - but he overcame that. He has had bypass surgeries - but he overcame that. So, you see why it was hard to believe that he didn’t overcome this.

We’re going back to East Texas in a couple of weeks for my niece’s wedding. I’ll be glad to visit some more with my Grannie and Aunt Elaine. Aunt Elaine’s kids are with her now and Grannie stays with them or has people stay at her house with her at night. She was already living alone, but Aunt Elaine is going to have to adjust to that. I know that has to be so hard to do after living with someone for so long. I’ve only lived with Michael nearly four years and I know it would be awful to go to bed every night knowing he wasn’t there. I know she’ll be okay in time, but that’s just it - it takes time. She has a lot of support, though and she is a strong lady.

My mother is also having a hard time adjusting and I think it’s a little harder for her b/c she is here in Houston while Aunt Elaine and Grannie are up in East Texas. They are in the middle of a big home remodeling project, but I think as soon as it’s over she’ll go back up to stay for a little while. This was her baby brother after all so it will also take time for her to heal as well.

Life is never the same after losing someone, but it still has to go on. That’s the design of things.

Last night around midnight my phone rang - I jumped out of bed to grab it & it was my father so right away I knew something was wrong b/c he was calling so late. My first thought was that something had happened to my mother, but what he said was the furthest thing from my mind. He told me that my Uncle Charles (my mother’s brother) had passed. I honestly could not believe it and am still in that “this isn’t real, is it?” stage.

People were lucky to know my uncle - he was an amazing man. Uncle Charles could do anything; he could build anything; he could fix anything. And he had more patience than any man I’ve ever known. He was a fantastic singer. He was 67 years old when he passed away. My mother’s little brother and my Grannie’s baby boy. I feel for my Grannie - I can’t imagine how hard it is to lose your child. He was a husband, a father, and a grandfather.

And I will miss him so very, very much.

This is too crazy…but pretty cool, too!!

I am so excited! We’re taking Emma to the circus next weekend! I haven’t been in years and I can’t wait to see her expression when she sees it all for the first time. We’re going early to the preshow so we’ll get to see the animals and clowns and everything up close. I hope she isn’t afraid! The last time I saw the circus it was at The Summit - which, of course, is no longer here. It turned into the Compaq Center, which also is no longer here b/c it is now Lakewood Church. Just to show how long it’s been!

I found a good article today that I thought was worth sharing. Since I’ve started weight watchers (did you know I was doing weight watchers?) I’ve lost about ten pounds. My neighbor and I are doing it together and I have been pleased with the results so far! One thing I think is important when you’re doing something like this is to do it out in public - don’t do it on the DL like you’re hiding it. You need the support from family and friends and the accountability! This is actually one of eight steps listed in the excerpt below to take control of your weight.

Here is the link to the entire article as I cut out quite a bit for space!

Living Life Overweight: 10 Reasons Why You’re Not To Blame

Anyone who is overweight will testify that losing weight is not as easy as it seems. The people that are lean, or have gone from fat to skinny will say it’s just a matter of motivation and elbow grease.

If you’re overweight then you’ve probably experienced the sharp end of the ridicule stick from many people in your life. It can’t possibly feel good, and that type of attention isn’t helping your weight loss goals either.

The fact is that such negative reinforcement creates a real psychological depression, and the very real scientific way that your body deals with this is my craving more carbohydrates. This is all part of the vicious cycle and part of the reason why being overweight, especially in America, is not just a lack of motivation.

1. Slowing Metabolism
2. McDonald’s Policy
3. Sedentary Jobs
4. Household Chores
5. Prepared Foods
6. Portion Sizes
7. Daily Workouts Not Enough
8. Fad Diets- Harmful
9. Fat Cells Multiply- Permanently
10. Genetic factors

The information provided above shows that it’s not a matter of having a lack of motivation. Our environments have waged war on us. Their weapons are sedentary lives and trans fats of mass destruction. All is not lost though, we can stand strong and fight for what we believe in. We can fight for zen, simplicity, and health for all, and here’s how …

8 Steps To Take Control of Your Weight

1. Substitute Water
2. Chew Your Food
3. Exercise daily
4. Publicize your intentions
5. Create a food scheduleDo not over eat
6. Choose your snacks wisely
7. Lifestyle

This was posted in the ANIMALS/PET section of our classified ads at work:

We will have about 10 head to sell in the fall they are Angus stears and will go about 1000-1200 pounds that is around 600 pounds of beef per whole in white paper packages ready to shake and bake ranch raised and very good to eat All natural . $3.25-3.50 depending on the price of grain. Please Call

If they are dead, I don’t think they qualify as a pet anymore!!

Sitting here waiting on Emma to wake up and Michael to finish mowing so I thought I would give an update for the weekend…

I only had a two day work week this week - it was so nice!! I had hoped to go out of town for the long weekend, but sick kids changed that plan. Yes, kids plural - the neighbors’ kids were sick, too (and even me a little and little Carlton’s daddy) so I guess they did a good job of sharing this weekend. I’m well over the stomach part, but have a bit of a stuffy head. Michael woke up with a sore throat this morning, but I think that was just b/c of the smoke from fireworks last night. We had a block party on our street last night and had a wonderful turnout! Our neighbor Kim does an excellent job of being our “street captain” and organizing our little get togethers! She made up flyers and gave them out to everyone on the street and planned several games for all as well. I have pictures that I’ll post later, but mostly I took video last night.

Since my sister came back into town this weekend (she and her husband have been in Colorado) and we are here mother planned to have us over to grill tonight. She told me the menu yesterday and she has a ton of food prepared. I still had some leftovers from last night, too so I am going to take that with me. I made my beer potatoes last night (Yum-O) and Michael grilled ribs, chicken, hot dogs, and corn on the cob. Everyone brought a ton of food last night that was all delicious! I had also bought us steak that was wrapped around feta & spinach that was awesome! I only bought two of those so that was one thing we didn’t share with everyone!! It looked like something I could do myself, though and I think it would be yummy in chicken so I might try that, too. One neighbor brought a wonderful salad that was tomatoes, cucumbers, red onion, & mozzarella that she drizzled with jalepeno vinegarette. I’ll have to make that some time, too - it was so good.

Staying here we did get a lot of work done, though. I’ve been wanting to paint in our room for a while so this weekend we got it done. It looks so nice! I still need to finish working on the curtains, but I’ll take more pictures when they are finished. We’re getting hardwood floors downstairs except in the bedrooms, but now I wish we were getting them in our room, too b/c I think it would look so good with the new paint. I also think now I want to paint the wall that leads into our bathroom, too. We only painted the wall behind our bed and part of another wall that leads up to our windows - the wall isn’t straight there so it was a perfect added accent to paint that portion.  If we do paint the wall that leads into the bathroom, though I won’t paint it this same color, though - so we’ll have to wait and see about that one.

So even though we didn’t get to leave town this weekend we did get a lot done and had a good 4th of July right here at home! It looks like it is clouding up outside right now…I don’t know if we’re about to get some bad weather or not. Well, Michael is finished mowing so I guess we’ll start getting things ready to go to my parents’ house while Emma finishes her nap. I hope she’ll be feeling better when she wakes up than when she went to bed…

A usual read of mine led me to this site with a cool DIY project for keeping cables in order…

More times than not if we’re at home and I’m taking pics Emma is just a blur in my viewfinder!! Here she is many blurs in my viewfinder!!

I repotted my office plant in a pretty mosaic pot that Elaine gave me a while back. I’ve had this plant for 8 years. My mother gave it to me when I first started this job. It’s been through several different pots and was actually very big, but when I moved back to the big building (thankfully) from our little building across the water, I decided I didn’t want to bring that big pot with me…so I broke it into several pieces and gave them to coworkers that I knew would nurture and care for the little plant and I just brought a small piece back with me.

Well, my small plant in its tiny pot started to get root bound - hence the intro to my post, I repotted it into a bigger home. Well, the new dirt I put into my plant’s new home seems to have been nurturing gnats! A couple of days after I brought the plant in its pretty new pot back to the office I started seeing gnats flying around. Then I realized they were all in my flowerpot!!!

So, I started reading everything I could find about how to get rid of gnats naturally and I’ve done everything they said short of buying chemicals to spray on the plant. I can’t kill it. It’s the only plant that I’ve actually kept alive for a long period of time and it’s just starting to get big again.

The last thing I tried was letting the dirt dry out by not watering the plant and then putting a small glass of soapy water nearby. This actually worked - the gnats, not being able to find moisture in the plant would seek it out in the soapy water and then die b/c they couldn’t fly out. This was supposed to eventually kill off the hoard of gnats - well, all I ended up with was a nasty cup full of dead gnats - and they are still flying around my office. It’s very annoying!!! I haven’t watered this plant in over two weeks now. Maybe that’s why I’ve kept it alive - it doesn’t need a lot of attention. I thought the gnats were gone for a while, but these last couple of days they have been their normal nuisance selves again.

How do I get rid of these things and not kill my plant!?!?!?!

It’s hard to believe that it’s already July…almost! This year has just flown by - lately, everything seems to be moving fast this year! The REALLY busy time for my department is budget season and it starts in August and goes until around October. We are slowly starting to get prepared for it now. This will be my first budget season with the group - I am not looking forward to the long hours, but I am anxious to be a part of the process. This group is very high level and it’s amazing to see everything that goes on company wide.

So, that being said, I went ahead and made my desktop for July - it’s nice and summery!!! I wish it looked this cheery out my window. It’s been raining all week and another hard rain just passed through again!

We had a full and fun weekend! Friday was my Friday off and Emma and I kept baby Addison for the morning. Emma had fun playing big sister I think! We also had someone come in to give us an estimate about changing out our counter tops to granite. I wanted to rebuild some of our counters to create a breakfast bar, but this gentleman didn’t seem to think my idea was doable in a way that would look just right. :(  I was disappointed, but we’re still going to see what his estimate is for the granite…though we talked about it this weekend and another project we wanted to do was to get rid of the carpet downstairs and replace it with hardwood (probably laminate hardwood). We have been tossing around the idea for a while and thought about waiting until we were finished having kids and they were all walking, but I think we’re both sick of the carpet and now the granite may be what’s put on hold for a while instead. We are also having a sprinkler system installed in about a week or so - Michael spends so much time outside working in the yard and the a big amount of that time is watering so this should cut his time by at least half! So, we have a lot of home projects on the horizon. I’m also trying to decide about painting our bedroom. I have curtains I need to get up in there (have had for a long time) and I want to paint the back wall in our bedroom, but can’t settle on a color. I am terrible about trying to imagine what something will look like w/out actually seeing it.

Saturday we drove out to Plantersville to spend the day with friends. They actually live out in Clear Lake, but Alice’s parents (I went to college with her) live in Plantersville. We’ll actually be going back that way next weekend for Connor’s first b’day - that’s Alice & Sean’s little boy. We had a lot of fun - fishing and riding 4-wheelers. Alice’s dad raises/harvests catfish - the whole operation was pretty fascinating. I had no idea so much work went into it. We cooked what we caught for dinner, too. That evening we rode over to a nearby ranch that had zebras, ostriches, peacocks, cows, deer, Polish chickens, etc.  We got to pet a baby zebra - it was so neat! Emma wasn’t too keen on the idea actually, but she was interested in the calf in the next pen! She kept sticking her hand through the fence and motioning for it to “come here”!! The ostriches were rather intimidating! I didn’t dare get us too close to them!!! We also got to see the owner’s two seater plane and the runway he built on his land that is over a mile long. It was all very impressive!! Riding back on the four-wheeler Emma was between her daddy and me and she actually fell asleep riding! I couldn’t beleive it - she must have been really wiped out!!

Sunday at noon we had a b’day party for Ashley’s little boy Parker. I can’t believe he is six years old now - it’s amazing how fast time goes by! It was a swimming party and Michael took Emma into the pool. She had a blast playing in the water! And as it swimming and eating always does, it knocked her out, too! She was whiny on the way home, but crashed shortly after we got there for a couple hours. Michael left to go play basketball for a while so I took the opportunity to relax a bit myself! Then around 8:00 Emma and I went walking with our neighbor.

So, after such a good weekend I was all tired out and really didn’t want to get up and come into the office this morning. This week won’t be quite as busy as last week either, so maybe I’ll be able to ease back into work today and be more “with it” tomorrow! LOL!!

Before PDA’s and iPhone I used to carry around a pocket calendar in my purse. You know the  one month per two pages format calendars with the plastic cover over a Monet picture or if you like a picture of your favorite kind of dog or cat or what-have-you. When I got my first PDA, though that went away as I could just sync it with my outlook calendar and now I do the same with my iPhone. So, I haven’t carried a real paper calendar in a while.

Last year I made a couple of covers for these calendars for my mother and mother-in-law and sister-in-law, too. So, now that I have more time and have been playing around with my digital scrapbooking more (thankfully) I decided to make myself one and use one of the 2008-2009 calendars I bought a while back that’s just been collecting dust and here is the product of that labor!

I have also collected all the pictures from Emma’s first year and am slowing working through the pages for her first year album. I haven’t decided if I am going to make it 12×12 or 8×8 yet - depends on printing prices I guess!! I also haven’t decided if I am going to print page by page and put them into an album myself or have a coffee-table type book made from them. You can do that now for relatively reasonable prices. And if I start that then I could print all my books that I make that way and have a nice, neat library of our family albums! We’ll see what I decide when I get it finished! My goal is to have it finished by the time she is 2, but what I should do is try to finish it earlier and go ahead and start working on her 2nd album - then if I ever get caught up I can scrapbook as life happens instead of having to go backwards and collect pictures from the past! I just didn’t have the time before when I was in school to keep up with it!

I still have TONS to do in her real baby book, too. I didn’t keep up with that either - such a bad mommy!! I did try to keep up a diary of things that happened with her and I photographed everything and I have those dates in the EXIF data so I can get the dates right in her book. I think after her first year album I’ll just start doing yearly family albums, though…then with our next child do the same. A first year album - then just start working on yearly family albums.  I should have started when Michael and I got married, but again there is that time thing b/c of school!! Maybe I can play catch up and our first family album can just be 2004 (starting with our wedding) to the present!

Digital scrapbooking is so much more economical than regular scrapbooking. I mean you have to buy the software (I use Photoshop CS2 - I couldn’t find the link on the Adobe site b/c CS3 took its place) and you have to get templates, elements, paper, etc. online, but the things you download are pretty reasonable and you can use them over and over and over again once you purchase them. Also, when you’re starting out you can download freebies from a lot of places to use and help learn. I did that A LOT and have just started really purchasing templates and digital kits to use.

My friend Pamela has really helped me immensely starting this project! She got me into regular scrapbooking in 2003 when she was doing Creative Memories - and then later moved to digital. Her scrapbooks are amazing!!! I bug her quite a bit with questions! Thanks Pamela!

I knew after I had Emma I couldn’t drag all my scrapbook stuff out and work on it so it’s great to have it all on the computer - no mess and I don’t have to worry about keeping little fingers out of everything! That being said I have a TON of scrapbook stuff filling my office/craft room that I now need to get rid of. That’s another project in itself. I am going to take pictures of all my stuff at some point so that I can post it on our classifieds here at work or if anyone else is interested I’ll post them here, too in order to sell everything off. Some I’ll just give away, but a lot are things still in packages, never opened. I have a lot of Stampin’ Up stuff, too. I got into that from Kathy in 2004 (or 2005) when she was selling it and loved it - but again didn’t really keep up with that either and can’t really bring all that out with Miss Grabby Fingers! And I can do cards digitally, too with the software and downloads. I made Michael’s Father Day card this year - as long as you don’t tell him I’m not worried about him finding out before Sunday as he doesn’t read my blog!!

Wow! This entry turned out to be a real blog post! Something I haven’t done in a long time!! And I was just going to post the picture of the calendar cover that I made! Maybe that should be something else I set as a goal for myself - starting blogging either daily or at least every other day!! LOL!