I don't wanna...

Just haven't wanted to write for a while.  I used to apologize for extended absences.  Nowadays I say "deal with it.  Or don't"  I am just not inclined to worry about it.

A month ago I renewed my love of road biking.  The Boss Lady helped me make the leap and I bought a Specialized road bike (aka a ten speed - though this one technically has 18 gear combinations).  I have had the bike for 3 and a half weeks and have already topped a hundred miles in the saddle.  I still grin like a school boy when the new blue racer and I hit 30 miles per hour on a nice, flat cruise.

The new bike may have been a really well timed purchase, too.  A week after I got the new ride home, the bottom fell out of our household.  And since then it has been nice to have something to keep my mind and body occupied.

Not even a month ago we got some awful news about The Big White Dog.  His chest cavity was full of one giant and fast growing tumor and the cancer was already showing up in his kidneys too.  We knew he was not feeling great, but we were certainly not prepared to hear the worst case scenario was coming true.  Less than a week later our 125 pound, 8 year old puddle of puppy was gone.  After realizing that he was unable to eat or drink, The Boss and I knew that we had to let the vet help Kodak go.

And that sucks.  Again.  And Again.

Long suffering readers may realize that this is indeed the third pet we have lost in less than a year.  Our Spring addition to the family was a 2-3 year old Great Pyrenees girl who had been used up by a lousy backyard breeder.  Something went wrong after her spay surgery and we lost her two weeks later.  The kids were crushed.  The Boss was devastated.  I was wrecked.  It sucked.

A few months ago we had to decide to have our 17 year old kitty cat, P.K., aka Pretty Kitty, put to sleep.  She was ancient and it was no surprise. Still, the kids were crushed.  The Boss Lady was devastated.  I was wrecked.  It sucked. Again.

After losing Kodak, none of us are totally back to ourselves yet.  We have mostly quit crying but it is still horrible to realize that our big ol' albino melon head is not sitting and peeking OVER the fence when we arrive home in the evenings.

The 12 pound puppy we adopted last summer is adjusting well to his role as big dog of the house.  Now I can only hope that the rest of us adjust pretty soon, too.

Might want to take your pills

'cause the insanity that is about to spew forth from this post might make your head spin.

There you have it. Fair warning.

I am a junkie. I don't know if I have admitted it on this blog, but lots of people know. Not the Dr Pepper thing, that is old news. Truth is, I cannot walk past a red tag/clearance sticker at Target without stopping. And frequently buying. Slam a clearance sticker on a 3 day old salami sammich and sell it to me for 80% of it's M.S.R.P. I would probably buy it.

Today is a great example. I had to run to Target for Spray and Wash because I cannot seem to eat dinner out without wearing a little of it home. Pick up $4 of laundry spray and get in and out of the store. 15 minutes. Tops.

Of course, the kids were with me so we detoured through the toy section. "No buying today, just looking" I reminded the herd. Can't blame a guy though, it will probably hit 102 this afternoon, so we might as well soak up some air conditioning at the store. The kids did good and nobody whined when we walked on. Good times!

Since we were close, we walked past the school supply section. Found some lunch boxes that The Boss Lady will hate. But they were "red-stickered" for $4 each AND made in the USA. So they came home with us. One Hello Kitty, one Star Wars Clone Wars. Everybody happy? Yep!

The wine aisle was only a few feet away, but no good deals to be found. So we walked on.

The last time I walked through Target I found some silk ties on clearance for less than $9 each. See, I told you I can't resist... So we cruised over to the Men's Clothes section. No dice.

Walking to the registers The Talker spotted some tennis shoes that he likes. I saw a sticker that I like. The shoes were on clearance for $8 from $35 and they had his size. Sold! The Princess got some new shoes the last time we were shopping, but I couldn't resist searching for clearance stickers in the girly shoes.

When I was a kid, we loved to come to my grandmother's house here in Austin. She had a half dozen huge pecan trees and each fall it was big fun to make huge messes with the leaves and to pick up a few pecans. I have never forgotten that I learned while picking up pecans. Where there is one on the ground, there are several nearby. Bend over to pick up one nut and you might as well take a second to glance around for more. It saves time and you don't have to bend over as many times. Hey, I told you this post was going to be crazy. Nutty, if you will...

That pretty much sums up the way I seek out Target clearance stickers. If there is one nearby, there are always more. You just have to keep looking.

No good deals jumped out at us in the girls shoes. But then we hit the end of the aisle and turned the corner.

There they were, a pair of cool looking Converse All Stars, in my size AND with a beautiful red sticker. $9 instead of $34! I didn't even mind the fact that they only had one lace. For $2, which is full price :( , I could get a new pair of black laces and still be way ahead and looking good in my geek-chic shoes.

But it turns out that I am not cool enough for my new shoes.


The Talker has a pair of shoes like this. Still I didn't notice until we got home and tore into our deals that the one lace was only done up half-way. That is because these shoes are not made to be laced at all. They are slip-ons. The bottom three eyelets don't even have holes though the canvas.

I took out the half lace and tried on the shoes. They are comfy enough, but without laces they are just too cool for me. At almost 41 years old I guess I am proud that I can actually bend over to tie my shoes, so I don't want to give it up yet. Besides, I am pretty sure that the 6th-8th grade set would laugh me out of the classroom if I strolled in without laces.

Like I said, The Talker is cool enough to make the look work. I am not.

Never one to give up on a good deal, I decided to "fix" my new shoes. After all, I own power tools for occasions just like this, right?

I cut out the canvas covering the three lowest eyelets and laced these bad boys up. And NOW I am ready to show off my new kicks to the middle school crowd.

I have a college friend who collects thousands of dollars of basketball and sports shoes each year. The dude is waaaaaaay into Jordans and Nikes. He rolls around Dallas in several pairs that he had custom made. The guy has no kids.

And that probably explains why he has probably never taken a power drill to any of his kicks.

Who said I could rest during the summer?

I woke up with a headache this morning. That is nothing unusual and the fact that my headache wasn't too bad, not unusual either. I drove the boy out to day camp at 8am and ran a couple of errands on the way home. I can only force myself into a Wal-mart before 10am and the MINI needed a new license plate frame thingy. Sure I could have bought the $45 one at the dealership. But instead I went with the $10 a pair frames that are made of an entirely less interesting shade of black plastic in a totally different Chinese factory.

I digress. It is almost 2 am and I am blogging. My bad.

Once home, The Boss Ladies, Sr. and Jr. needed to run some other errands. Seeing as it was closing in on 10, we had to limit this outing to Target and the hardware store. Nothing terribly interesting to report at either of these stores. Sorry to disappoint. Well, that is not entirely true. I bought a new set of red wine glasses and they are super, duper cool. But everything else was uneventful. The real fun started when we got home and I realized that my headache was getting worse. A lot worse.

Three house of napping, followed by a couple of hours of snoozing and laying around and I was finally able to sit in a room with lights and people and not scream at either of them.

Anyways, I generally sleep 5 or 6 hours a night, so now I am a full day ahead on my sleep. And it is 2am. So here I am, wide awake even after I put the new wine glasses to good use earlier in the evening.

Back in the day, before kids I would have been out in the garage, running power tools on a night like this. Now I am afraid of waking children. I am even more afraid of what happens if the children were to wake up Mommy, so I think I'll skip all the possibility of causing great harm to myself and I'll go read some more blogs.

After I published this blog post, I realized that I was going to tell about something entirely different, that would more closely relate to the post title. I have recently fallen into one of the easiest traps for a new teacher. It is summer and I am not paid for extra work I do during the summer (with the exception of a few staff training days), Yet I have been out at my new classroom no less than three times in the past two weeks.

I used to get annoyed with the wife for giving up all of her free time to work at her school during the summer. Now the tables have turned. For goodness sake I was even telling The Boss Lady that I need to run to the teacher's supply store soon. Who the heck am I? And what have they done with that cool, laid-back stud I used to be?

Create-A-Day

The Princess woke up early (or at least earlier than I planned) this morning. I wasn't totally ready to face the morning pet-feeding chores, so I went and crawled into her bed to chat for a few minutes.

She started telling me all about her awesome bear stuffed animal. Yeah, I had no clue either. Turns out, she was trying to remember all the details of a toy that she had dreamed about. The Princess was ready for me to fire up the sewing machine and get working on her newest masterpiece. Now I am not totally clueless around a sewing machine. My mother would have never, ever allowed that. But creating a 3D toy from scratch? Yeah, this sounds like a project best passed onto mom.

Less than 2 hours later The Boss Lady and The Princess have a pattern created and the fabric parts cut out and pinned together. They have a plan for finishing the bear in short order. Planning and working quick, not my strong suits...

The Talker set out this morning to design a brand new board game. He worked solo for an hour or more and in the end the wife and kids sat down to play the new game. It involves a lot of math, so I wasn't invited.

With all of the creativity flowing around here, I went out in the backyard and worked on my newest masterpiece, the wine bottle tree/garden trellis. All I need now is to empty another few dozen cool looking bottles. Or maybe I'll gather some from the neighbor's recycling bins and save my liver all that hassle.

The Boss Lady has her own plan for creativity today. She and the boy are leaving in a few minutes to take the dog to Dirty Dog Wash for a bath. That is always a three hour adventure in wet, smelly mess. Lucky for me, I get to skip out and watch movies with the girl!

Catching up after a busy start to the summer

The Princess had a fairly big surgery last week. I won’t go into a lot of detail here since The Boss Lady has blogged the surgery elsewhere. Email me if you need the address to that blog. Due to the personal info posted over there, I won’t link to it here. Now, 4 days later, she is doing great. She is currently singing Taylor Swift songs and splashing in a nearly empty bathtub.

Elsewhere in the AtHomeFamily kingdom, it is HOT! 100 plus for something like 12 days in a row. So I have thrown in the towel on the garden. This morning I took down the gate and let the chickens have the parched and burned up leftovers.

This is not the first pampering the birds have gotten this week. It has been so hot out in the back 40, that I bought a misting system to help keep everybody cool in the backyard. If you are sitting right near the mister, you can notice a big difference in the temperature. Not that I want to hang out there anyways. I hung the misters in the trees near the chicken coop and I saw that 6 of the 7 birds (and 1 cat) were hanging out under there during the hottest part of the day yesterday.

The kids bought me a 12 bottle wine cooler for Father’s Day. I am always looking for something new to learn about (previously it was trucks- which I am still working on, boats- that I lost interest in and set sail on craigslist, cigars- which I enjoyed but annoyed everyone else with, guitars-which I still can’t play but somehow now own two and… The Boss Lady can give you the entire list). This year I have been soaking in as much info about wine as I can handle. I still have no vocabulary to describe wines that I like or don’t like, but I am having fun shopping for bargains and reading up on different varietals and vintages.

Cruising the ‘net for wine info, I ran across several sites about bottle trees. Our neighbor used to add all of her empty wine and beer bottles to the limbs of a dead tree in the middle of her yard. You could see it from our kitchen window and it actually was pretty cool when the morning sun hit the bottles. And it was only half as tacky as you might think. Anyways, I started my own bottle tree this morning. I don’t have a dead tree to decorate, but I do have a bunch of wooden trellis surrounding our garden/chicken fun park. So with the addition of some 1/2” dowel rods, we have the start of a spectacular piece of yard art. I’ll post some pictures of the bottle trees soon.

Best of all, it isn’t in your yard. You are welcome.