June Cleaver in Disguise

How in the world can it be so cold in North Texas?  I was watching the news last night and the weatherman had a graph of last year's temps vs. this year's temps.  It was 86 degrees last year on Jan.3.  86 DEGREES  What happened?  Okay, I really don't want ti to be 86 degrees in January, but I also don't want it to be 44 degrees in January like it was yesterday.  I need to become independently wealthy so I can move to a warmer climate, like Jamaica or the Virgin Islands.  Do you know what the current temperature is in Jamaica?  81 degrees.

Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
82° F | 69° F	80° F | 66° F	80° F | 68° F	80° F | 71° F	86° F | 71° F
Chance of Rain 20% chance of precipitation	Chance of Rain 20% chance of precipitation	Partly Cloudy	Partly Cloudy	Chance of Rain 20% chance of precipitation
Is that perfect or what?  Unlike this post because for some reason when I copied the 5-day forecast it messed up something and now I can't figure out how to fix it. Oh, well, at least you get the idea.  I think I'll just go hang out in my laundry room where it's nice and warm from drying all of those clothes.

2010..... Twenty ten....It sounds so space age. How many of you thought we would be zipping around in flying cars? Living on the moon? Having robots clean our houses?

The first two sound okay, but that last one? The one about having robots clean our houses? That sounds AWESOME!! I have to admit, I do have a Roomba vacuum. It is my favorite cleaning apparatus. I had forgotten how much I liked it. Unfortunately it died over a year ago. The battery just went kaflooie (That's one of my new space age words.). For Christmas, as a complete and total surprise to me my husband had the battery refurbished. (How wonderful is he???) Now I can vacuum any room, any time and not even have to be there. Just put it down, push a button and leave.

I vacuumed the master bedroom first. I won't go into gory details. Let's just say it picked up a lot of stuff. The best part is it can go under beds and get all of the dust bunnies and other miscellaneous items. I found two washcloths under the bed before I started Roomba. I have no idea how they got under there. Sometimes it's best to have a don't ask, don't tell policy in my house.

Next I ran it in the boys' rooms. The game room is next, but I have to make the boys pick up all of the stuff off the floor first. Since I made them help me clean their rooms, I thought I would wait a few days to torture them again, alhtough my youngest might be game, because he was amazed at how much stuff it picked up in his room. He's a clean freak until it comes time to take a bath. The child would rather rot than take a bath. (My highschool English teacher would have marked up this paragraph with so much red you wouldn't have been able to read it. Not proper writing style at all!!)

Speaking of writing, I'm really going to try to do better about writing on my blog. I have a list of daily computer chores and that it one of the things on the list. "Write on blog". I won't be as witty and charming as Big Mama (I just love her), but I will try to be somewhat entertaining.

Hope you had a wonderful New Year's Day. Although this warning is a little late, whatever you did on New Year's Day is what you will be doing all year long. At least that's what my Mama always says.

I know what you're thinking!! Winter? Already? In Texas? Well, it seems we've skipped fall and moved right into winter. Yesterday it was 85 and realllllly humid. As I sit here writing, the wind is howling, the rain in pounding and the temperature is dropping like a rock. In the next couple of days, we are supposed to have lows in the 30s. On the bright side, at least it will feel like football weather tonight at the highschool football game. Nothing says football like sitting on metal bleachers, freezing and wishing you were home watching Monk and Psyche on a Friday night.

On a brighter note, have you ever visited Woot.com? They have lots of things you didn't know you needed for really great prices and always $5 shipping. Today is a:

Breville 15-Bar Die-Cast Espresso & Cappuccino Maker with Knocchi Knock Box for only $179.99 + $5 shipping.

I'm assuming that is a great deal since I'm not really an espresso/cappuccino kind of gal, but it must be if it's on Woot.com.

When they offer a 2-pack of Snuggies for $9.99 + $ shipping I will be the first to order. I looks like I'm going to need them.

Okay. It's official. I am ADDICTED to Farmville on Facebook. I tried to resist. My friends would send me invitations to be their neighbor or make me enticing offers of free gifts or the chance to "adopt" an ugly duckling that they found wandering on their farm.

Being the wonderful mother that I am (ha, ha), when my oldest son asked me to please send him a gift for his "farm" I said okay. That's when the torment began. Now I am constantly going to my "farm" to harvest vegetables, plow land, plant seeds and buy miscellaneous decorative items and animals for my "farm". Yes, there's even an ugly duckling that is eventually going to turn into a beautiful swan.

One of my friends sent me a free gift for my "farm" and I wrote her back and told her how addicted I was. She is on vacation from work this week and, apparently, she's spending a lot of time at her "farm" because she said all she could think about was checking to see if her vegetables were ready to be harvested.

There are a whole lot of other "games" you can play on Facebook. I refuse to be sucked in. I don't care how many requests I get to play Mafia Wars or Farkle. I'm just going to go to my virtual gazebo on my virtual farm and watch my virtual crops grow. Fortunately for my manicure, virtual dirt doesn't get under my real fingernails.

Today is trash day in our section of our subdivision. Not only is it trash day, it is also recycling day, so everybody (well, almost everybody) puts out their recycling tubs for the recycle truck to pick up. My youngest son and I cheated the recycle truck just a little. We walked around and picked cans out.

He loves to collect cans. We turn them in for money. I love for him to collect cans because it gets him exercising. We're trying to save up money so we will have enough to go to Six Flags. We already have three tickets (1 from a school reading project and two for collecting Coke Rewards), but we need one more ticket and we also need to be able to eat when we're there because 9 and 13-year-old boys and a 45-year-old man can't go all day without quite a bit of food. I don't seem to require as much as they do (if I did I wouldn't be able to get out of the house, I would be so big), so it doesn't cost as much to feed me.

We get some strange looks from people as we are collecting, but we also had a lady ask us today if we came around every week. I said "We try to." and she said she would put them in a separate sack for us. I thought that was really nice. We also saw a man we know, told him what we were doing and he said "Nothing wrong with that." I think most people appreciate the idea of being thrifty and working a little harder in this economy. I appreciate that it's teaching my child the value of money.

This morning I asked Brett if he wanted to make a cake. Of course, being 9 years old and a junk food junkie, he said "Of course." He wanted to make chocolate cupcakes.

I looked for a recipe in one of my Paula Dean cookbooks and its said "6-Layer Chocolate Cake" and me, being the non-attention payer to detail that I sometimes am, neglected to see that the only part of the cake that was chocolate was the frosting. I don't know. Somehow when you see the words chocolate cake, you automatically think CHOCOLATE CAKE, not vanilla cake with chocolate icing. Fortunately for Paula, it turned out to taste really good or I might have had to sic Brett on her. A 9-year-old boy who LOVES chocolate cake, thinks he's GETTING chocolate cake and doesn't GET chocolate cake can sometimes be a little perturbed. All is well now and apparently the chocolate icing had some kind of sleep aid in it, because he's in there on the sofa right now taking a nap. That rarely happens.

I cleaned out our shed yesterday and threw away an entire large garage sack full of stuff. Now you can actually find what you're looking for when you go in there. What a concept!! The workbench can actually be worked on now without having to shove 10,000 items somewhere else and the tools are where they are supposed to be. I wonder how long it's going to stay that way? I'll let you know.

We went on vacation. We got back last Friday. I am still tired from vacation. I need another vacation, preferably one like in Kenny Chesney's song where he has "nothin' to do, but breathe all day".

We went to El Paso, TX, San Diego, CA, Los Angeles, CA, Las Vegas, NV, The Grand Canyon and then the next couple of days were a blur. I think we ended up somewhere in New Mexico and then Amarillo, TX before we actually got home. Our minivan kept getting smaller and smaller the closer we got to home. We kept adding "stuff" as we went along, plus we had had about all of the togetherness we could handle. Two weeks, four people, one minivan.... you do the math.

I thought the boys would have come home and holed up their rooms to get away from each other, but nooooooooo. I went in the oldest one's room and they were in there wrestling on the bed, then the youngest came in later that night and hung out on the bed with me and hubby. I guess he hadn't had enough togetherness.

On a more positive note, we have some good friends coming to visit. They are only going to be able to stay one night, but we're thankful for that one night. This was the only time they could come see us, what with our son starting band next week (whatever happened to summer vacation?) and their son having to do weight training for baseball (?????). High school puts a new perspective on life.

It's off to Wal-mart today and then coming home to do some dusting. I guess my vacation from vacation will have to wait a couple of more days.