I can’t believe Hanukkah starts tomorrow! We haven’t even gotten our holiday card picture taken yet, much less chosen and cropped and ordered and received and tucked into signed cards and sealed into addressed envelopes and stamped and mailed!!! Aaarrgghh!!
On the up side, I made it through NaBloPoMo! Up next: Holidailies! Heh.
Sammi was dismissed from speech therapy tonight — one semester, in and done. I was right when I suspected that all she needed was a little “tune-up” to master the sounds she was missing (vocalic R and the -ing suffix). Her therapist raved tonight about how smart, cooperative, and hard-working she’s been. Yay Sammi-girl!!!
Alice and I went to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 last night. We went with some friends, and we went without Sammi, who would never have been able to tolerate either the length, or the intensity.
I feel like I should write a review, but then again I feel like I can’t. We’re so into the Harry Potter universe, that I don’t really feel like I can be objective about the film. Any visit with dear friends is a good visit, right? So on that note, it was great to be back “visiting”, and the film certainly didn’t feel too long to me, even though it ran 2½ hours. (My friend was less impressed.) I read the book back when it first came out, so my memory has dulled enough that I wasn’t sitting there picking up every little change or omission they made. It all flowed and was entertaining. And of course there was this little issue. Heh.
Sammi’s sicki today, poor chook. Low fever, headache, just general exhaustion. We took it easy, stayed in PJ’s and didn’t do much. Hopefully a restful day or two is all she needs to get back to health. Being sick is no way to spend your holiday break.
It’s snowing!! It’s snowing it’s snowing it’s snowing!!!
(It’s going to turn to rain in a little while, and then it’s going to rain all day, but it’s so pretty right now!!! First flakes of the year!)
Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate, and happy Thursday to those who don’t!!
(I never could get the hang of Thursdays, so I’m guessing we all need some well wishes…)
A new installment of the always-awesome series: 17 Images You Won’t Believe Aren’t Photoshopped (Part 7)
(Links to the other seven (yes, seven) installments are at the top of the article)
The apple butter I made yesterday is so good, y’all. Here’s the recipe.
Hey, a new batch of pictures is up — a round dozen shots from our trip to the Please Touch Museum last winter!
The Owl Prowl was fun, but freezing. No one was really expecting it to be 33°F out; in retrospect, that may have been naive. We walked all over the dang place, but didn’t hear any owls in the woods. Still, the owl pellets were super coolio — Alice’s pellet was just chock full of rodent bones, including skulls and little hips and eentsy leg bones and tiny tiny ribs. Sammi’s had scads of soft fur, plus a few tiny bones. Also, there were cookies, which was nice, and cold drinks, which was less nice. They could have sold cocoa for $5/cup and made a bundle, I betcha.
Tonight we’re off to take Alice to a birthday party at a paint-yer-own-damn-pottery place. While she’s doing that (I hope she makes a mug!!), Sammi & I are just gonna bop around whatever nearby stores there are there.
But tomorrow!! Tomorrow, I am making apple butter. Because I have a bunch of sad-looking apples. And because I like apple butter. Yum.
We’re going on an Owl Prowl tonight at a nearby arboretum! We’re going to “meet live owls; touch feathers, talons and other artifacts; dissect an owl pellet; learn to call for screech and great-horned owls”. There will even be refreshments. It’s going to be coolio! Sorry you can’t be there!!
I did three loads of laundry yesterday, and two loads of laundry today. People need to stop wearing clothes all the damn time, you ask me.
hey its the samster mommy didn’t have anything to post so hi…….ANYWAY 1.what i want 4 xmas:i want anime stuff and japanese stuff and i like pandas and owls and koalas and horses and guinea pig stuff and art and facebook and hula-hooping and candy and skeletons and hello kitty and clothes bunnys littlest pet shop and hannah montana and food……well thats pretty much. bye!
The girls and I went to the aquarium today, and I got a fish manicure! Well, it was shrimp, actually. In one of the “touch a thing” rooms, there was a little tank full of tiny shrimp, and if you stuck your hand in and held it very still, they would all swarm around you and nibble the dead skin and stuff off. I did it. It was very creepy. It felt tickly and tingly and skin-crawly and weird, and occasionally it stung a little. Took care of my hangnails, though.
Continuing my apparent new trend of blogging right before bedtime with a link in lieu of actual content, here is LSD TV: Robert Abel’s mindbending television commercials of the 1970’s. Those 7-up ads, in particular, are supah-cool.
Throwing tiny pies at bees with a twee little catapult. (Seems to be some sort of viral commercial thingy, but still cool.)
Crap, it’s 29 minutes past bedtime and I didn’t have anything to blog today. Well, I have one thing, but it’s mostly only going to make sense to Scott Pilgrim fans…
Sammi: Did you like rock ‘n’ roll when you were little?
Me: Yes.
Sammi: Really? I hate it. My only ones are Sex Bob-omb and Metallica. Oh, and Clash at Demonhead.
*sigh* I dream of an oven that actually holds its temperature, and that is evenly hot top-to-bottom and front-to-back, so I wouldn’t have to switch the cookies sheets around halfway through the baking time. Still, I just went from assembled ingredients to 5½ dozen perfect Tollhouse cookies cooling on racks in under 40 minutes. And I even made exactly 5½ dozen, just like the recipe says. And they’re freaking delicious, of course. Why do people buy premade dough again?
If you have an Amazon wish list, please take a moment, right now, and go look at it. Do you still want that stuff? Have you gotten some of that stuff already? Is there some new stuff you want that you haven’t added yet? When I want to buy you a present but you haven’t added anything to your list since 2008, I am in a quandary trying to divine whether or not the things on your list are still true wishes. The holiday gift-giving season is upon us, so please make it easy on the lazy folk (like me) and check your list!!
My grandmother’s house, which became my father’s house, which became my nightmare when he died in it and left it to me full of hoarded crap, is going up for auction at the end of the month.
It’s nice to see that the people who bought it from me (largely as-is because I couldn’t clean it all out) fixed it up real nice… Still. Looking at all of those pictures? Weird.
They cleared away all of the hedges from the front of the house, but it looks like “my tree” (the one that was planted when I was born) might still be there — it’s a willow on the front corner of the front lawn; I think that’s its branches swinging into the first shot of the front of the house.
They completely redid the kitchen — it looks nice, but my grandmother’s vintage metal cabinets sure were cool.
Oh, and it made me laugh to see that they didn’t retile the bathroom; they tried to hide it by drawing the shower curtain, but the big pink S tiled into a blue-grey tile background over the bathtub is clearly still there. Heh.
I almost want to go to the open house this weekend, but then I think, no, not a great idea. *sigh* I miss my dad.
The girls and I went to see Megamind today. It was really, really, really, really, really, REALLY adequate. Some stand-out funny spots, but overall pretty meh. *shrug*
Just a quick post here; I am under the gun and have a headache. I just wanted to say that we had a “close to the end of the semester” meeting with Sammi’s speech therapist tonight and she has made such wonderful progress that she’s not sure we’ll even need a second semester of therapy. In under a dozen sessions, Sam has pretty much mastered all of the sounds that were giving her trouble. The difference in her articulation is amazing! Sammi rocks!!!
Oh extra hour of sleep, I missed you so much. Welcome back.
(Alice is going to be less pleased about your return, hour, once she realizes that she’ll be going to and from ballet class in the dark for the next 6 months, but I’m still glad to see you.)
New recipe up. I made this out of an empty cupboard last night, which was nice.
So, I know I’m going to sound like a crotchety old lady here (you kids get off my lawn!), but I really was not ready for the full-out Christmas onslaught that arrived on November 1. I was in Target that day and it was Santa Claus Overload. That kind of caught me off guard. According to my sidebar over there, we’ve got 50 days left until Christmas. I am, however, indulging in some “pre-shopping”, which is to say that I am paging painstakingly through Must Have Cute and bookmarking a bunch of purveyors of cuteness on Etsy. When the time to shop comes, I will be ready.
You know, as I’ve gotten older and my tastes have matured, I’ve come to realize that the vast majority of candy on the racks is not very good, and not really worth the calories involved. It’s become a lot easier to “resist” that temptation once I saw that giving in to it wouldn’t be that fun, anyway. On the other hand, I will always take a Fun Size Snickers, because those things are da bomb. Milky Way’s still pretty good, too.
My favorite s-word has just appeared in the forecast for the first time — 15 days from now, AccuWeather is calling for “Rain, mixed with snow early”. It won’t happen, of course; the 15-day forecast is largely a fabrication for all days after day 3. Still, mark it: Real snow is coming.
Ha ha to you, Anth, for trying last night to fool me into believing that 4″ was predicted for tomorrow. I check for coming snow every morning once Halloween has passed.
…the frost is on the pumpkin. I saw it at school this morning — there was a pumpkin, there was frost, so there you go.
Speaking of pumpkins, we haven’t carved ours yet. As Sammi persists in reminding me, it’s getting a little late (or, I should reply, extremely early) to carve them for Halloween. I just put them on the deck in a pile of leaves, which is very aesthetically pleasing. I’m thinking maybe we’ll just cut some stars into them and make pretty pumpkin lanterns. Also, it is extremely difficult for me to not type “pumpking” like it’s some kind of obscure gerund or the ruler of a small Autumnal country.
In past years, I’ve done NaBloPoMo in November — this was an exercise that was created as kind of a companion to the NaNoWriMo project, whereby bloggers would pledge to post every day in November. Somewhere along the line, though, NaBloPoMo got changed from a November-thing to an every-damn-month-thing, which has diluted its interest somewhat for me. Dilution notwithstanding, NaBloPoMo (along with the December version, Holidailies) has traditionally been the time when I kind of reaffirm my commitment to blogging, such as that commitment is. I tend to blog less in the fall, as school comes back into session and the pace of my life increases in a distressing manner, so pledging to post every day for a good chunk of time is usually just what I need to get back into it.
Soooo I guess I will be NaBloPoMo’ing it up again this year, even though Facebook has seriously eaten into my blogging energies. I tell myself that I update my Facebook status when I have a pithy one-liner, and blog when I have a thought that requires a longer form or more in-depth development. The problem, of course, is that I have about 999 pithy one-liner thoughts for every in-depth thought. Heh.
Beanmom blogs about life, food, kids, links, and various random topics of mildly passing interest.
