Instagram September

Can you believe today is the last day of September?  This month just flew by.  Here’s how we spent our month in Instagram:

We went to a family Labor Day picnic at my Aunt Betty’s house.  It was nice seeing family.   Here’s my baby brother Jesse and my dad.  Isn’t it uncanny how they look alike?  They were even wearing almost matching shirts. 

Hmmm, I’m not sure this photo really does the resemblance justice, you will just have to trust me on this one.

The kids returned to school!  Hooray!  Here are the boys scootering to the school bus.  I like when just one of them decides to scooter, because then I can scooter back home after they get on the bus.  I think I probably look really young and cool and hip when I am scootering.  Probably.

I’ve been able to go lots of places all by myself this month.  One place I’ve been a lot is the library, and when I saw this book on the shelf I nearly peed my pants. 

I had no idea there was an audience out there for pregnancy romance.  What’s next?  Premenstrual romance novels?  Seven Days of Hell, Twenty-One Days of Heaven:   join Brittany and her poolboy Paco as they ride the roller coaster of love that is the menstrual cycle.  “Oh Paco, the things you can do with a pool skimmer, oooooh my…DUDE!  MY BR**STS ARE TENDER-- DID I OR DID I NOT MENTION THAT??? Oh Paco, I’m sorry, I just don’t know what’s wrong with me…[crying]  You’re the best thing that ever happened to me, baby.  I’M GONNA PUT THAT POOL SKIMMER WHERE THE SUN DON’T SHINE MISTER IF YOU GIVE ME THAT LOOK AGAIN!”

Ahem.

Ben has decided to be a professional wrestler when he grows up.  No, not the kind that gets pinned on high school gym mats, but the kind who dresses up in crazy outfits and throws his opponents into folding chairs.  I’m so proud.   He’s been working on his flips.

We had a little rain this month!

Neither of those places should have any water on them at all.  The one on the left is the road to our development (see the houses on the hill) and the one on the right is IN our development.  Crazy, crazy amount of rain.

Oh!  Also, all of that rain gave our fair city its share of sinkholes!  This one opened up right outside our development’s entrance, effectively cutting us off from the north side of town (the sinkhole extended under the road all the way across the street).

Jack started taking piano lessons and loves it!

My friend Sue got puppies and named them McGee and Tobey.  Don’t you just wanna hug ‘em and kiss ‘em and tickle their bellies?  (The puppies, not Sue, though she is mighty cute too).

It’s pumpkin time!  We got our pumpkins a little bit early because someone started a vicious rumor that there is a pumpkin shortage out there and we were afraid we’d miss out if we waited too long. 

My bratty brother Dave and the lovely Jamae moved into a beautiful new house this month!  I helped them move (a little bit).  While loading boxes into my minivan, I noticed these feet peeking out at me:

Disfigured Barbie feet?  Muppet feet?  I just had to open the box and snoop.

Troll feet!  And a big old Garfield.  Tee hee!  It’s so cute that Jamae has kept her Trolls all these years!  (Unless they are my brother’s, in which case…that’s kinda weird.)

We also watched Jamae’s sister Chelsea’s daughter one evening so they’d all have some time to paint without a two year old running around.  Hailey was so good and sweet.  We loved having her every minute.

Have a great weekend!

I am linking this post to Life Rearranged and Instagram Friday!

P.S. I can’t use words like br**sts because weird people might google something like “pumpkin br&&sts” and then because I have the words “pumpkin” and “br%%sts” in my post, google will offer it to the weirdo as a choice.  I try to keep the weirdos away when I can.

Quiz

Don’t you just love all of those quizzes in magazines?  Where else can you get good advice for (almost) free?

Okay, besides there.

Back when I was a Seventeen reader, it was so useful when the quizzes helped me decided which celebrity crush would be my perfect match (Matt Dillon, Michael J.Fox, or Rick Springfield), which hairstyle flattered me the most (permed and big, permed and bigger, permed and biggest), or how to tell if he really liked me (he usually didn’t).

Then I matured.  My gosh, when I started reading those Cosmo quizzes, I learned a whole new, frightening array of knowledge.  In fact, if I had had this knowledge back when I read Seventeen, I’m betting I totally would have aced those “Does He Really Like You” quizzes.   Now, of course, the occasional quiz comes from Good Housekeeping and is usually titled something like “Can You Get Out That Stain?” with questions like “Your son skinned his knee on the sidewalk and his pants are a bloody mess.  Do you a) run it under hot water, b) run it under cold water, or c) buy new pants.”

Quizzes were totally more fun in my twenties.

Would you like to take a quiz on this gloomy, rainy, humid (at least here) day? 

a)  yes,  I’m so excited, Beth you are the BEST!

b) no, why don’t you write a real blogpost one of these days?

c)  maybe, after I get the blood out of my son’s pants

Correct answer: A…if you got that one correct, you may proceed to the quiz.  If you answered B, go read “Clover Lane” and stop whining, if you answered C:  To remove a blood stain: Immediately rinse under cold running water, then rub stain with bar soap and rinse. If it's still there, add 1/4 cup ammonia to one gallon of cold water and soak for 15 minutes. Launder with color-safe or chlorine bleach.
Read more: Stain Removal Tips Quiz - How to Remove Stains - Good Housekeeping  (and you thought I was kidding about that.)

Beth’s Super Duper Rainy Day Friendly No Pressure Quiz

1.  Your house looks like:

a)  a tornado hit it

b)  perfect in every way

c)  a square, with a rectangle door and a triangle roof.

2.  You drive a

a)  disgusting, french fry infested, stained and stinky minivan

b)  a cute little convertible Beetle

c)  hard bargain 

3.  Your favorite pasttime is

a)  Pinterest, reading blogs, Pinterest, Facebook, and Pinterest.  Also conversing with your guinea pig.

b)  organizing your lingerie

c)  napping

4. Your Celebrity Crush

a)  Ryan Reynolds

b)  Michael Bolton

c)  Justin Bieber

5.  You would describe your physique as

a)  comfortably soft, wobbly, and gooshy

b)  cute and tiny like a cockroach

c)  a head, torso, two arms, and two legs. 

6.  If no one in your house was allergic, and you could get a cat, which you would love and hug and snuggle soooo much  you would name him

a)  Mr. Fluffernutter Roberto McScratchy

b)  Fido

c)  Sweet Salmonella

7.  Favorite way to eat an Oreo

a)  open it, eat the cookie side that has no cream on it, break the other side in half, put those two sides together to make a Doublestuff, and eat.

b)  you don’t eat Oreos.

c)  bite into it and chew.  Then swallow it.

8.  Number of cars you have accidentally backed into with your car

a)  4 1/2*

b)  0

c)  12

9.  Your plans for the day include

a)  Pinterest, Facebook, cleaning the toilet

b)  meditation and  fasting

c)  removing the bloodstains from your son’s pants

 

If you answered mostly A’s:  YOU ARE PERFECT!

If You answered mostly B’s:  I do not like you, but I will pretend to, because I am an adult.

If you answered mostly C’s:  You seem like a nice enough person.  Good luck with those pants.

 

*my bratty brother Dave’s car, the lovely Jamae’s car (yes…two seperate occasions), my friend Cindy’s car, my friend Jenny’s car, and the 1/2 is because Dave’s boss parked his Corvette (I kid you not) behind my car, and I backed out not expecting it (pretty much the case with all of the cars), but looked in the mirror inches before I came into contact with it. 

Final Field Trip

I’m a little late on this blogpost.  I actually kind of forgot about this field trip and just stumbled across the pictures while looking for something else.  As you can imagine, my photo filing system complements my steel trap of a brain very nicely.

Our last “field trip” before school began was to Lake Tobias, which is both a zoo and a safari ride.  Lake Tobias also has a very nice souvenir shop, which may have been the highlight of the trip for the kids (unless it was possibly devouring the most gigantic Kool-Pops I’ve ever seen which I bought for them because I’m so nice).  I didn’t get a picture of the Kool-Pops though, believe it or not.  But let me tell you, they were about two entire feet of popsicle awesomeness wrapped in plastic.

The real reason we went to Lake Tobias was not for the souvenir shop or the popsicles or even for the zoo.  We went for the Safari Ride, which is the best.  After buying your tickets, you hop onto a school bus with the roof cut off of it. 

With bonus camo paint!

The bus is driven by your tour guide who stops occasionally and tells you fun facts about the animals you’re seeing.

Since the roof is cut off, she doesn’t have that big overhead mirror to gaze menacingly at you with.  So you can be naughty.  Bwahahahaha.

Since we have done the safari ride before, we knew to stock up on crackers and popcorn for the animals.  I don’t know why giant bulls would like a cracker, but they do. 

See?

Yes.  That is his tongue sticking out to get the cracker.  I know!  EWWW!

One happy fella even climbed up the bus steps!

This one is totally sticking his tongue out at us!  Rude.

There were a lot more animals and birds on the safari ride (not just cattle), but I won’t bore you with all of the pictures I took. 

After the safari ride, we went through the zoo.  I took lots of pictures of ostriches and lions and prairie dogs and monkeys.  Would you like to see my pictures?  I didn’t think so.

Our second favorite at Lake Tobias is the petting zoo.  Guess why Maddie is excited in this picture…

Herbie’s cousins!  And did you ever see a pregnant guinea pig???

I bet she’s got some heartburn and sleeping issues.

We spent a good 3-4 hours there, on the safari ride, wandering among the animals, whining because mom never buys us anything at the souvenir shop, and petting goats before we headed back to our car.  If you haven’t been to Lake Tobias, I highly suggest a visit, it’s one of our favorite places!

The End.

Please Excuse the Mess

Have you discovered Pinterest yet?  I love Pinterest.  I can lose hours of my morning looking around on Pinterest.  You know how you can stroll through all these blogs and see the coolest ideas, but then find it’s hard to print ideas from a blog page or it’s crazy to bookmark all those recipes or you think you’ll remember where you saw that craft and you go back, but can’t find it?  Well, that’s what Pinterest is for.  Once you figure it all out (and it took me awhile), you can “pin” the ideas you find on those blogs (or anywhere on the internet) onto your personal “boards”.  I have a board called “Recipes I’d Like to Try” and one called “Stuff For the Kids”  and more, and all those ideas, in the form of pictures linked back to the original text, are pinned right there for me.  And, even better, you can scroll down through what everyone else in the world is “pinning” as their favorites and see a whole bunch of really cool ideas all in one spot (which you can repin onto your own boards).

One of my own blogposts was pinned onto Pinterest once, by someone I don’t even know.  That’s how I discovered Pinterest (and I was very honored and walked around carrying a pen for weeks certain I’d be asked for autographs!  I wasn’t.)

So, anyway this is actually not a blogpost about Pinterest, but about a quote I saw on there this morning (which I didn’t repin and should have, darnit!)  It really spoke to me.  It said, “Please excuse the mess, but my children are making memories.”

My house is a bit of a mess right now because Dave’s been out of town all week, and things get a little bit…crumbly… around here when I’m the lone adult.  Dave’s mantra with the kids was always “Clean up what you’re playing with before you move on to the next thing.”  And that’s a really good mantra.  I wish it were my mantra.  My mantra is more like “Someday it will get cleaned up, probably right before company comes.”

So I guess that little saying from Pinterest gives me a chance to blame the mess on the children’s memory making and creativity, and not my housekeeping, so sure, let’s go with that.  And let me tell you, my kids make lots of memories…

It is amazing that no one has ever broken a bone going up and down our staircase.  But if they did, I would just say to them, “Well, my kids are making memories!  I think that is more important than your stupid femur.”

Pumpkin Muffins

Made from two ingredients.

Yes, you read me right!

I think this recipe has been around for awhile, in fact I seem to remember it from my Weight Watcher’s days which were back when Maddie was born, so that’s a good 11 years ago.
Also, these are delicious.  Words cannot describe how moist these muffins are, in fact, if I were to try a word, it would probably have to be “creamy”.  I’m not sure how a muffin can be creamy, but these come pretty darn close.

Here are your two ingredients:

The original Weight Watcher’s recipe I used was a box of angel food cake mix and a can of pumpkin (because angel food cake is fairly low in fat and calories), and the recipe that’s traveling around blogs right now calls for any cake mix (red velvet, chocolate, yellow, etc.) and a can of pumpkin, but when I went to the grocery store to pick out my cake mix (I was thinking a spice cake would be good) I saw this muffin mix.  First of all, it’s made with Cinnabon cinnamon which I just love.  Second of all, it comes with a streusel topping, which just sounded better than a bare muffin.  I was worried, however, that the recipe would only work with a cake mix, not a muffin mix, but I gave it a try anyway
.
ALSO, did you know that there’s a pumpkin shortage right now?  The first two stores I went to had signs like these:

But I found some at Walmart.  I bought six cans, and I may go back and buy more, because these muffins were such a hit with my kids, and with a whole can of pumpkin in there, I think they’re a little bit healthy too, right?  By the way, Walmart’s pumpkin was only priced at $1.68 a can instead of Giant’s $2.19—BONUS!)

So basically, mix together your muffin or cake mix and your can of pumpkin (not canned pumpkin pie mix though…just plain pureed pumpkin), then dump it into your muffin tins.  I found this box only made 11 nice sized muffins.  I wonder if a cake mix would make more, because a cake mix usually makes 24 cupcakes. 

This came with streusel topping, so I also patted that onto the top of each muffin.  Bake the muffins in a 350 degree oven for about 20 minutes, or until a cake tester comes out clean.  Mine took about 22 minutes.


These were seriously delicious, made of two ingredients you can keep on hand (if you can find the pumpkin), and a little bit healthy (lots of pumpkin and no oil in there!)

I hope you like them as much as we did!


Pumpkin Muffins
1 – 15 oz. can pumpkin
1 muffin or cake mix (I used Betty Crocker Cinnamon Streusel Muffin Mix)

Mix together.  Fill muffin tins almost to top.  Bake for about 20 minutes until cake tester comes out clean.  Allow to cool for a few minutes, and then remove muffins to a wire rack to cool completely.

I am linking this recipe with Foodie Friday!

I Am Crafty!

Well, no, in fact I am really very NOT crafty.  I don’t even really like to read all of those craft blogs out there.  I also have friends (mainly Wendy and Stephanie) who like to go to second hand stores in search of junk that they end up making into absolutely gorgeous things.  I have tried doing the same thing, but usually leave the store empty handed…it all just looks like junk to me, and I just don’t have the creative vision necessary to make it nice.

However.  I have noticed a lot of really cool crafts out there made with chalkboard spray paint, and I saw one project in particular, in multiple places, that I finally thought I could do (I wish I could tell you where, I don’t remember, although Wendy may have been my inspiration because she has done a lot with chalkboard paint). 

Last week I hit the secondhand store again, with very low expectations, but I found this!

And I decided to try to be crafty.

I bought these:

I removed the painting from the frame and spray painted the frame (both sides).

Then I spray painted the painting with the chalkboard paint, following the directions on the can (at least 3 coats with 10 minutes of drying time between coats, painted with vertical then horizontal sweeps).  I let it completely dry for 24 hours.

Then Maddie and I seasoned the chalkboard (also per the directions on the can).  Look at the wall behind Maddie…that’s where this puppy is going!

After that it was ready to hang.  Dave did this for me, and he attached it securely to the wall in multiple places, since we knew it wasn’t going to be just hanging there.  And I love it!

I really am so happy with it, and am trying to figure out what I’ll use the remainder of that chalkboard spray paint on.  Possibly my car hood (I could write “Hip Mama” on it!),  my wine glasses (“I’m with ‘Stupid’”), empty Kleenex boxes (“Get Your Snot Out Here!”)

It’s possible I still need to work on my artistic vision.  But it’s a start.

Technology

I thought this was pretty funny…two of our neighborhood girls biking and texting…you get the feeling their moms said, “Put down the electronics and go outside and get some fresh air!”  So they did.  Kinda sorta maybe.

Wouldn’t it be even funnier if they were actually texting each other?

Things really haven’t changed that much since I was their age.  When I was about 13, I was so excited because for Christmas I asked for—and got—a handheld gaming system:

It played games like BlackJack, Tic TacToe, and Echo, and I spent hours on my bed with my feet up on the wall and my Holly Hobbie dolls gathered around me playing that thing. So I can relate to the electronics-addicted biking/texting girls.  Kinda sorta maybe.

My family was always on the cutting edge of technology.  I was also the first one in my neighborhood to have one of these:

We also had a cordless phone!  And I got an electric typewriter as a graduation gift!  My college boasted telephones in each of our dorm rooms…no community phone in the hall!   And when I wanted to talk to my parents on the phone every couple of weeks, I’d call home collect, they wouldn’t accept the charges and then they’d call me back.

I wrote papers on my typewriter and when I made a mistake, I put a little piece of white ink paper into the typewriter, hit the letter again and typed over it in white, then went back and typed the correct letter in black. When I needed to do research I went to the library, looked in the card catalog, worked my way through the stacks, and read books.  I took a roll of film with my camera, mailed it off to the photo place, and received my 24 photos back in about two weeks.  If I wanted extra prints, I had to take the negative to a photo duplicating place and wait another week.  Which I never did because the photo quality on my Disc camera was so bad.

For entertainment, we played Trivial  Pursuit, eating popcorn we popped with oil in a popcorn popper, surrounded by walls covered with Oneida/Snoopy/Michael J.Fox posters, our books stacked on genu-wine milk crates we “borrowed” from all of the local stores (one time a wild rumor circulated campus that the police were coming to check dorm rooms for “borrowed” milk crates and anyone that had them would be fined $50 a milk crate…crates were immediately ejected from all of the dorm rooms and littered stairways, lobbies, hallways, and front lawns of dorms!)

That’s me on the left in pink!

We cooked Ramen noodles in hotpots, and later a few fortunate girls got giant microwave ovens in their dorm rooms.  We received real letters from people and we sent real letters back.  We wrote notes in notebooks using pens and highlighters. When we wanted to see a movie, we went to a theatre (seriously…no one even had VCR’s then). When we wanted to see what our “friends” were up to, we headed down the hall and asked instead of checking out their Facebook status. We walked to class using our own feet, none of this fancy flying skateboard crap kids have nowadays.

Sorry.   I think I got carried away and suddenly started channeling Back to the Future.

Anywho, I do like technology, and I really wish I would have had it to help me out with research and papers and socializing.  I’m glad my kids will have access to so many more resources for entertainment and information.  The eighties were a good decade, and I wouldn’t have had them be much different if I had a chance.  Except for maybe cell phones.  And Red Box.  Ooh! And blogging!  And Angry Birds, Instagram, Google, and iTunes.  Also digital cameras.  And no perms.  Geez, I hated getting perms. 

Dude, the eighties stank!  We wore jelly shoes and our mixed cassette tapes were always getting ruined and our “digital” clocks clicked at us every time a minute changed and our eyeglasses were huge and there was only one flavor of Oreos! 

How did we survive without mint Oreos?

The end.

September Book Review

Welcome to the September edition of Beth’s Super Fab Book Review!  I hope you find something you’d like to read.

Left Neglected by Lisa Genova-Lisa Genova also wrote Still Alice, which I read in August and really liked (remember-- the links to my previous book reviews are over on the right). I was excited to read this novel, but was pretty disappointed.  Left Neglected tells the story of a woman who is in a car accident and as a result, loses the ability to not only use the left side of her body, but to recognize anything on the left.  So if there are two people standing in front of her, she only sees the person on the right.  Supposedly this is an actual medical condition, but the whole story seemed far-fetched, and quite frankly, I was bored after awhile with all the ways the main character had no left…can only read the right half of a page, can only see half a picture, can’t read her watch if it’s on the left arm.  It just got old fast.  Additionally, the other storyline, that of her being a busy working mother before the accident and now coming to terms with her having to be content staying home with her family as she can no longer work seemed thrown in there and could have been developed better.  It was an okay book, and you might definitely like it, it just wasn’t for me.

Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay- This book has had a lot of buzz lately, and is even being made into a movie so I was excited to read it.  The setting of the book is Paris during World War II.  Sarah and her family are Jews who are forced to leave their home during a huge round up of Jews (the Vel’ d’Hiv’), however, Sarah, not realizing the seriousness of the round-up, and that she and her family would likely never return, locks her little brother into a hidden cabinet for safety, with the intentions of returning and letting him out.  A really great yet awful premise, and the book generally was a page turner.  Sarah and her parents are taken to a concentration camp and the conditions and storyline are truly heartbreaking.  I won’t tell you anymore, you have to read it to see what becomes of the family and the brother.   I only gave the book 3/5 stars however, because although that part of the novel is interesting, I didn’t enjoy the second storyline which is woven through Sarah’s story…Julia Jarmond, a reporter in modern days who is researching the Vel’ d’Hiv’, is a whiny American living with her French husband and daughter in Paris.  She’s pregnant, her husband cheats on her, there’s a dying grandma…really?  The author needed to add all that to this terrific story?  Also, I hate to say this, but the author is not the best writer in the world.  I think the Sarah/Vel’ d’Hiv’ story idea was great, but another author could have written this better.  (I feel so mean saying that, and I hope the author never googles herself and finds her way here, because I’d feel bad.  But I think you will probably agree with me.)

Smokin’ Seventeen by Janet Evanovich-If you haven’t read any of Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum books, go get one at your library! (Although, maybe not the first one, Evanovich hadn’t hit her groove yet with the characters.)  The book titles are numbered (One For the Money, Two For the Dough) so as you can see, Evanovich has written 17 novels now about Stephanie and her sidekick Lula, Grandma Mazur, her two hot guys, and her hamster, Rex.  Basically, Stephanie is a bounty hunter…she goes after the people who don’t show up in court after her cousin’s bonds business bails them out of jail.  She is bad at this.  Her car gets blown up or somehow destroyed, sometimes multiple times, in every book (and in very crazy, creative ways).  Her sidekick Lula has the best lines of a sidekick, ever.  She is constantly going back and forth between her two hunky guys…Ranger and Morelli (I’m pulling for Morelli, but I also enjoy when she’s with Ranger).  The situations she gets herself into are usually hilarious (in this book for example, one of her captures is a self-proclaimed vampire, and three people are trying to kill her, which made for one of the best endings ever in the the Stephanie books this time!)  Is this great literature?  No!  Definitely not!  It’s very fun, light reading, and I can’t wait for number 18 to come out in November.  As soon as I see it, I will get on the waiting list, and will probably be something insane like #39, because the books are popular:  once you read a Stephanie book, you will be hooked! (Again, maybe not the first one.)

Before I Go To Sleep by S.J. Watson-Talk about your page turners!  I read this one in a day and a half, I really couldn’t put it down.  Christine, the main character, suffers from a tragedy induced disorder that makes her forget everything from day to day.  So when she wakes up every morning, she doesn’t know where she is, who that dude is in the bed next to her, or why she is almost 50 years old (she thinks she’s in her twenties, her age before her accident).  Her husband fills her in every morning on who she is, how she has this crazy amnesia, and assures her she is safe, and then he leaves her alone and heads to work.  The only thing is, every day she gets a phone call from a doctor who tells her that he has been secretly working with her, and to look in the closet, where she will find a journal she is keeping there.  When she looks for the journal and finds it (every single day) she reads what she’s been writing (which of course she forgets once she falls asleep at night) and discovers that maybe the story of her amnesia that her husband tell her isn’t quite right.  In fact, on the cover of her journal she has written, “Don’t Trust Ben” (Ben is her husband).   But can she trust the doctor?  He also seems in on things, and why are they meeting in secret?  I’m not telling you anything that’s not on the dust jacket, so don’t worry that you know what’s going to happen, because you don’t.  This is a page turning thriller and I bet it’s made into a movie in the next year or so!

Election by Tom Perrotta-I ran across Election because I was trying to reserve Perrotta’s newest novel at the library.  I’m very excited about his new one (The Leftovers), and am first on the list when the library gets it in.  Election and one of Perrotta’s other novels, Little Children (also an excellent novel),  were both made into movies.  Election was made back in the 90’s starring Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick, I remember seeing it years ago and it was an enjoyable movie.  The book was good too.  A very easy, quick read, the story revolves around a high school student presidential election and is told in turns by the three candidates and the social studies teacher who is the election advisor.  It was a terrific story, very well told, the characters were spot on (high school angst and all), and the ending was a good satisfying wrap-up. 

Sneak Peek:  Now I’ve moved on to Confessions of a Prairie B*tch, Alison Arngrim’s autobiography.  And shame on you if you don’t know that Alison Arngrim played Nellie in “Little House and the Prairie”.  I am loving it, and will tell you about it next time!                                                                                                                                                                                      

Yes.  I wear reading glasses.  You got a problem with that?

Rain Rain Go Away

We’ve been having a little rain around here.  It started in mid-August with a soaker of a rainfall that reportedly gave us 2-5 inches of rain in just an hour.   The rest of August gave us a slightly above normal amount of rain until Hurricane Irene, who soaked us again and gave all of us the chance to play Musical Lawn Chairs/Trampolines/Garbage Cans with our neighbors and knocked out power for many people I know for almost a week.  But this week?

Has. Been. A. Doozy.

Picture a nice map of the northeastern United States.  Now picture Tropical Depression Lee to the west of Pennsylvania and Hurricane Katia to the east, in the ocean.  Those two weather systems funneled a crazy amount of hard, heavy rain right through central Pennsylvania for three days.  Three days of crazy hard rain.  I’ve made a technologically advanced illustration for you to help you visualize it!

Yes! Those are Twistables!  The latest in crayon technology!

I’m thinking of buying one of these:

                                                                   Or maybe just scuba gear.

School students were dismissed early on Wednesday (after the school decided that it wasn’t safe to transport them home in buses—huh??), and roads became covered in water so quickly, that some kids didn’t even make it home and spent the night at school.  Since the start of this thing, some of us have had ruined basements galore, a boil water advisory, and no electricity, we’ve seen a submerged Pizza Hut, two dead bison at the local zoo, and plenty of newly opened sinkholes (we live in an area abundant in porous limestone) and Facebook has been alive with stunned gawkers, whiny reporters, and nosy lurkers as folks post devastating  photos from around the area.  Like these:

Thank you, Facebook Friends.  You are totally better than any news report.

It’s not funny, and it’s not a joke, and I really feel for those (like my parents and in-laws, and many, many friends) who’ve had to bail the water out of their basements one bucket at a time (my father-in-law estimated it took him 150 trips up and down his stairs).

We’ve had it rough around here too.

I’m so glad that I’m kidding.  We’ve watched the basement carefully but so far so good. We need to conserve our water, but not boil it, and our electricity outages have been fairly short.  And since school was cancelled yet again today, the kids have decided to practice their sloth impressions.  They’re getting mighty good at them too.

Oh!  They did move at one point…

Boys.  Maddie and I think they’re totally dumb.

There are also a bunch of really cool looking mushrooms around now.




And if we didn’t already have a pool, we could go swimming in our backyard…



I wish I could send some of this rain to Texas or Oklahoma since I know things are dry, dusty, and dire there.  All I know is we are ready to say goodbye to Lee and Katia and send them on their happy, floody ways.   Sunshine?  What the heck is that?   Even Herbie is getting depressed.  I think.

To my local friends…stay safe and dry.