No internet?!?! What ever will I do?????

Am I the only one who has noticed that losing WiFi access or internet access has apparently become cause for local governments to declare a State of Emergency?  Not to mention the whole "I called you seventeen times and emailed you eight times in the last 10 minutes.  Where have you been?!?!" phenomenon.  Errm.... I had to pee and didn't think it was necessary to bring my computer with me?  My bad.

The other day I decided to spend the entire day with my children.  We ran errands, we played games, we took Sarah to softball practice, we went shopping, and we didn't go anywhere near a computer or the internet.  My cell phone doesn't support WiFi and doesn't surf the internet.  I have a computer for that.  So when someone sent me an email about ten minutes after the family left the house and didn't get an immediate response, it was assumed that I was ignoring this person and therefore deceitful and untrustworthy and it was their duty to make sure the internet world knew what a horrible person I am.

...riiiiiiight

Fifteen years ago if someone was driving home and realized that they absolutely HAD to talk to their best friend RIGHT NOW they kept driving and picked up the home telephone once they'd arrived at their home.  Now, if you suggest someone not use their phone in a moving vehicle you get glared at like you're some kind of primitive while people wail "What if there's an emergency???"   Umm... you drive home and pick up the phone once you've arrived at your destination.  Just like people did for nearly a century without there being mass deaths or worldwide catastrophes.

Fifteen years ago if someone called someone else and they didn't answer, they left a message and waited for them to call back sometime that evening after their daily responsibilities had been attended to.  Now, if someone calls someone else and they don't answer, they leave a voice mail, send a text, send an email, text common acquaintances, and start tracking the GPS signal of the other person's phone, and put out a missing person bulletin via Facebook all within ten minutes of the original call.

Fifteen years ago if you wanted to bond with friends or schoolmates you went out and played sports or met up in person for board games or had coffee face to face while taking turns talking politely to each other.  Now, if you ask someone how many friends they have and what they do together you'll have to wait while they log in to Facebook and check.  Odd, I remember knowing what my friends looked like and what their REAL names were.

Fifteen years ago if the power went out during the day people went outside and struck up a football game or a BBQ grill and cheered being unable to do technology related work for awhile.  Now, if the power goes out people grab their cell phones and join hour long "on hold" lines waiting their turn to cuss out the electric company because they don't have anything else to do.

Fifteen years ago if the internet went down no one except CEOs and government leaders noticed and they simply said "Oh darn.  Who wants to play golf?"  Now if the internet goes down there is at least one family member who will sit at the computer for hours refreshing their browser window over and over and over and over until the computer either loads up the internet or the little gremlin living inside crawls out and beats them to death with their own keyboard.

How did I get on this longwinded high horse?  Well, we were out and about and stopped at one of those "I'm entirely too tired to be bothered with thinking up dinner ideas and here you can all grab whatever you want and I don't have to wash dishes afterward" places.  The instant everyone got back to the table, every head swivelled to stare at one of several big screen televisions hanging from the walls.  Not a single word of conversation was spoken.

*twitch*

So, I casually suggested to Steve that we should accidentally cut the power lines to the televisions and computers.  ALL of our kids, even the three year old, looked like they'd just been sentenced to an immediate and painful execution.

"But we won't have anything to doooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!"

You could play board games with each other.  You could read.  You could draw or color or play with the millions of toys you've accumulated over your lifetimes.  I know!  You could clean your rooms. 

"But MMMOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMM!!!"


Yep.  If we were to suddenly lose all access to televisions or the internet, my children would be found centuries later mummifed in their seats... 

One with a mouse attached to her hand, the other two with remotes in theirs while they clicked over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and..........

Dinner at the Dodos'....

A couple of days ago whilst mucking around on Facebook and managing to completely obliterate several hours that probably should have been used doing housework, I spotted an ad for some food company.  They were running a contest where people were to write in about their dinner time routines to win something or other.  I don't remember the details as it was one of those flashes you get between Facebook games loading up. 

What?  Like you don't have that one game on your phone, computer, or Ipad that seems to make your clocks speed up when you're not looking?  *twitch*

Well, last night while trying to calm down and think of ANYTHING that wouldn't make me injure the poor man trying to sleep with one eye open next to me simply because he was the closest target for my rage (funny how they fail to mention this sort of thing in the fine print of the marriage vows, isn't it?), I found myself remembering that advertisment and it got me wondering what kind of entry I'd be able to supply.

So what would I write?  I think my entry would look something like this... 

Heather and Hunter bound down the stairs and zip into the kitchen: "What's for dinner? We're hungry!  We want pizza!"
Kiri dodges one child then the other as they dart through the kitchen in obvious attempts to trip anyone holding boiling water: "I already told you.  We're having spaghetti with lots and lots of cheese on top just the way you like it."
Heather: "Yay!  That's my FAVORITE!"
Hunter watches Heather for his cue: "Yay! That's MY favrit, too!"
Sarah meanders down the stairs and cautiously peers into the kitchen to make sure there are no dishes in the sink and the table is already set: "Can I help with anything?"
Kiri eyes the oldest child with a resigned sigh: "Nope, everything's all set.  I just have to dish out the food."
Sarah turns to head toward the livingroom and the remote.  Kiri calls her back: "Oh wait.  You can get their hands washed and then into their chairs." 
Sarah looks suspiciously like someone just cancelled Christmas and her birthday for the next couple of years: "Okay, come on guys." 
"Wash our hands! Wash our hands! No, I wanna get the stool out!  Move over! Sarah, he won't let me stand on the stool too! Mom, Heather splashed me! Sarah, I wanna get the soap MYSELF! Hey, you two stop spitting at each other.  MOOOMMMM!  They just threw the soap at me, now I have to change shirts again!"
Steve gets home from work and quietly sneaks into the back room hoping no one spots him.  No such luck.
"DADDY!!! You're home you're home!  Hey, why'd you lock the door?"
Kiri loses her patience and manages to make her voice carry over the cacophony, throughout the house, and probably down the street: "Food's ready! Plant one end of your body in chairs so we can cram food into the other end!!"
Everyone takes their place at the table and Steve calmly suggests that someone pray over the food.
Heather jumps up and down in her seat, nearly knocking her drink over: "I will! I want to do it!"
"Dear God, thank you for our food.  Thank you for the pretty day.  Keep us all safe and together.  Make Hunter stop taking my toys.  Oh, and I still want a Tinkerbell Barbie. Amen."
"Errmm... Amen."
The family starts to dig in.
Heather and Hunter finally look at their plates and wail in unison: "I don't like this!  I thought you were gonna get us pizza!"
Kiri glares at Steve: "Tell me again why I'm not allowed to eat my young?"

Yeah.  Normal Rockwell we ain't.

Poor Sarah.....

She has a bit of a dilemma.  Well, for her it may very well qualify as a full blown catastrophic event, but for the rest of the world it has serious potential for quality entertainment.

Sarah, my twelve year old, wants to play softball.  On a co-ed team.

Now most of you are sitting there thinking "Yeah?  And?  What's the big whoop?"  It's like this...

Sarah is rather intellectual.  Almost annoyingly so.  She is the reason my little snipe "If you're gonna be a know-it-all know it all" is getting so much use these last few years.  She's quite a bit more advanced in reading, grammar, spelling, and some science than anyone her own age.  If she could just get around hating math (and thus, refusing to try) of any sort she'd be guaranteed a scholarship to nearly any school she might want.  When it comes to artistic creativity... well just take a look at some stuff she's done this year:

A Liger she threw together at bible camp.

A stylized cat that she was churning out by the dozens

She was working with some fancy type of crayon and playing with the colors here.

Her first day playing with drawing on a computer.

Testing out chalk pastels.

A doodle done when she was supposed to be listening to the teacher.



A quick doodle creating new "characters"



More of the new creations.

One of her first attempts at a more realistic style.



I rescued this from the trash pile.  She hates it.

One that she's actually rather fond of.

She can also turn Play-doh and sculpting clay into some of the most amazing things you'll ever see...

Her elementary school mascot.

A Mother's Day gift from a couple of years ago.  Our family turned into swans.

This is actually about two inches big at most.  She made it out of an artist's moldable eraser, when she was 10 years old.

As you can see, Sarah's totally in her element when she's sitting in one place creating or reading.  It's quite a treat to see her sit down to draw or sculpt and walk past her every 20 or 30 minutes to "ooh" and "ahh" over whatever she's dreamed up.

Softball, however, does NOT involve sitting in one place.  Now I was a very active child and teenager.  Sports and coordination came naturally to me and softball in particular was one of my favorite activities.  I'm not saying I was any kind of an all-star or anything, but I could usually avoid making a complete fool of myself on the field.  I knew I'd never be able to convey instructions from my active point of view to my child who tended to look like a deer in headlights when you told her to chew gum and walk at the same time.

So I enlisted the aid of two of the ladies on our church's league softball team.  These two sweethearts also happen to be on the city's women's league and one of them is the team's coach.  Like I said earlier, poor Sarah.

I kid you not, Shirlene tossed the first ball toward Sarah and my beautiful, intelligent, creative daughter squealed and tried her darnedest to retract every limb into her body ... at the same time. 

I honestly don't know what was more comical;

Sarah apparently believing that gravity would forgive her curling up into the fetal position while still upright
or Shirlene standing there with her mouth hanging open and obviously wondering what in the blazes she'd just gotten herself into.

This is gonna be fun. 
Bahahahahahahahahaahahahaaaaaaaa!!!

Friday again. WIP me!!

We'll wait a couple of seconds while the folks with the dirty minds calm down.... I can't say too much, I used to have a whip some friends gave me for my 25th birthday.  It wasn't a real whip, of course, and it had a string attached to the end of it that left red dye all over everything it touched.  As a matter of fact, it got passed around the club so much that I actually had to go looking for it before our party broke up and we went home.  It was a cool gag gift!

*looks around*

Umm...

*cough*

ANYWAY!

I didn't get wolfie-poo done this week.  (I know.  Shock all around, right?)  But look at how much progress I made on him!!!

I'm very pleased with myself, lemme tell you!  And I'll tell her over there.  And my buddy that I just spotted.  And that complete stranger who just noticed me and suddenly looks rather alarmed.....

*ahem*

This coming week will see me working on the little Garfield project I'm stitching up for Christmas.  Once I complete him, I think I'm going to take a week to "design" a small Christmas ornament suitable for singers and band members.  Loosely translated: I'm gonna find something relatively simple but obviously Christmas-y and chart something equally simple but obviously musical on top of it.  If I can manage to pull this off satisfactorily, I'll stitch up a bunch of those for the folks in our church choir for Christmas this year.

.. or more likely next year.  We all know how fast I actually manage to complete any of my endeavors.  About the only thing I can consistantly complete on time or even early is sabotaging my attempts to complete things on time.

Oh well, this way I can hold out hopes that I'm guaranteed to be late for my own funeral.

So I'm late... again.

No, I'm not late like THAT.  Trust me, the breeding program ended quite some time ago and there are no plans of any kind to undo that decision.  I'm discovering that parenthood should probably be left to those people who are more mature than their toddlers.

A bit late for me, I know, but at least I can get the warning out there for others who may still benefit from such knowledge.

It's been a very lazy week for me which means a lazy (or boring) week for the kids.  It also means I happened to glance up at a calendar and only then realized it's been several days since my last update.

Steve's out of town and it's still summer so there is no reason to look at a clock for awhile and I'm taking full advantage of that fact.  I have no idea what time I decided that Heather and Hunter should probably crawl into bed, no inkling of when Sarah came to the conclusion that she needed at least a few minutes of sleep, and absolutely no clue what the clocks said when I eventually gave up the fight and turned out the lights.  If my eyes hadn't mutinied and refused to focus properly, I'd likely have stitched my way into this morning's sunrise.

Normally I'd have to schedule in some outside time for the rugrats but, since the average temperature this week appears to be somewhere in the general vicinity of the sun, they haven't been overly interested in testing the theory of spontaneous combustion.  I managed to get them out there for a little bit by bribing them with bubbles but within ten minutes or so Hunter was doing an amazing job of convincing me he was literally melting.  I figured it was probably a bad idea to see how close he could get to reenacting the Ark of the Covenant scene from "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and brought them back into the air conditioning.

Heather promptly asked for some hot chocolate.

That's my girl!!

One lovely benefit of having absolutely NOTHING pressing to do for the next few days is that I get to stitch like a mad woman for as long as my back can stand it.  And when one has a bottle of pain reliever readily available one can convince one's back that it can tolerate an awful lot of horrendous posture.   Since this is what I'm currently working on...

...there's plenty of hunching over to be done.

If I get my way Steve's gonna come home and find a completed wolf project spread out on the bed. 

Granted, I may bear a remarkable resemblance to Gollum by then but it'll be worth it!

Should I ever get delusions of normalcy....

... they never last long.

As is typical, my alarm clock went off while it was still dark.  That is, it rolled out of bed with a thud that reverberated around my room and gave my wall hangings anxiety attacks, scampered loudly down the upstairs hallway, thumped down each.

and.

every.

step.

into the livingroom,bounded back up the steps for a couple of minutes, and then thumped down

each.

and.

every.

step.

back into the livingroom before realizing I was awake and cheerfully offering to get breakfast without any help. 

*insert slightly panicked "No, I'll get it for you!"

By the time Hunter was fed and I was finished gathering the trash for trash day it dawned on me that today is Friday and that means WIP reports.  Only, I didn't do mine last night before bed as I was supposed to do.  Doh.  Grabbed my camera and sat down to upload and edit the photo I took this week's stitching.

Errm?  I don't remember this picture

Odd...

Doesn't look much like stitching to me.

Doesn't look like ANYTHING to me.

This explains alot.

Once I solved that mini mystery, I managed to get my WIP report finished.  You'll have to go over to my website to see it though.  Yup! Shameless plugging of my page in progress. Predictably, the most recent stuff is at the bottom there.

By this time, Heather and Sarah had rolled out of bed and were wanting to know what the day's agenda is.  Nothing.  Zilch.  Nada.  Ain't doing a thing!  The littles started to look all brokenhearted so I tried to cheer them up by telling them that tomorrow we get to go over to Sam's so they can get their ID kits done. Of course they didn't know what this meant so I explained that they'll get to go talk to a police officer and a nurse and get their fingerprints taken.

Hunter burst into tears.  Huh??  I asked him what was wrong and he wailed out in classic 3 year old flawed english, "I doh wan*gasp* go do chale!!!"  (For those who don't speak Toddler Howl-inese: "I don't wanna go to jail.")

Why on Earth would he think that???  Wait...

I managed to catch a glimpse of Sarah discreetly making herself scarce.  *growl*  As I turned toward her room to clear this little ... misunderstanding... up, Heather decided to help comfort her little brother.

"Don't worry.  We'll get to come visit you sometimes."

*twitch*

I'm going back to bed.

It's my birthday. Ick.

The one day of the year I could cheerfully yank out of every calendar in existence.  I'm one of those people who honestly hates her birthday.  I can't begin to tell you how many times I have to stop and do math to remember how old I am and the idea of creeping closer and closer to needing a scientific calculator to work out the algebra isn't overly appealing.

I don't want to get old.  Sorry. That's just the way it's always been for me.  Of course, the alternative isn't exactly at the top of my "Things I Wanna Do" list either.  So my remaining option is a simple one.  Ignore it and maybe it'll get the hint and go away.

So far it's been a colossal failure, but I keep trying.

I'm relatively new to Facebook. I think I opened my account about 9 months ago, but I'm not sure.  Much to my chagrin, it appears that Facebook announces to everyone on your friends list when it's your annual turn to step closer to needing Depends.  Now my page is crammed full of these lovely little messages wishing me a great day and much laziness.

Nope.  Not giving in.  Still hate my birthday.

Steve snuck out of the house with a hasty peck on the cheek and one of his "I'm up to something" smirks.

Well... maybe it's not all bad... 

No.  Not gonna crack.  Hate hate hate.....

Oh geez.  Sarah just sent Heather and Hunter up here one after the other to say "Happy Birthday, Mommy" and give me hugs and kisses.  Awwww!!

Oh phooey.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ME!!!