03.31.08
Hopping Along
Naomi is up on crutches due to a mysterious foot ailment, so I’ve been doing my best (or so I claim…do any of us ever really do our best?) to maintain a hint of sanity around our household. It has been a frustrating excercise in futility. I’m guessing all my excercise is really paying off, though, because I am becoming quite adept in this area….heck, I’m probably an expert in futility.
Through it all I am becoming much more empathetic to the struggles of Naomi’s plight as a homemaker (a term she disdains…she prefers the title “ringmaster”). I took Amelia to Church Sunday morning, and in the two hours (ish) we were away, the other two kids had managed to dump a nearly full box of sticky, tiny, granular, rainbow colored cereal all over the living room. Naomi, confined to the recliner had watched helplessly through through the fuzz of painkillers.
Actually, I exagerate. The painkillers Naomi was on have been fairly mild and non-haze-inducing. But, I imagine the flying rainbow speckles would have made for quite an experience if she had been a bit loopy.
Our kitchen is in a particular shambles at the moment, so we set up a blanket in the living room to have a “picnic” lunch. Unfortunately, that first required vacuuming up the sticky, specks of technicolored cereal. So the kids waited patiently as I cleaned up their mess.
Actually, I exagerate again. The girls ran screaming into our room and slammed the door behind themselves. Nathaniel scrambled up the couch in a desperate attempt to save his life from the certain peril of the vacuum cleaner. Scale is apprently a concept lost on them. But before I poke too much fun, Naomi recalled a time when she was terrified by the certain doom contained within the swirling vortex of an unstopped bathtub. I have vague memories of a similar terror.
After we had had our picnic, and cleaned up the resulting mess, I went to the pharmacy to get Naomi’s prescription filled. When I returned, frustrated as always, from my pharmacy misadventure, I walked in the door to find a can’s worth of chips crumbled into the carpet. Once more, the kids had taken advantage of Naomi’s state of helplessness and run amock in the living room. Once more, I did another repetition in my exercise regimen.
We are fortunate to live close to both sets of parents, so in a state of overwhelmsed crisis, we called for backup. Nathaniel went home with my mom, and Amelia went to Naomi’s folks. We spent the evening with just Arden, who is the most self-sufficient of the three, but who was disappointed because she had to stay with someone “boring”.
We watched Ella Enchanted from the warmth of a blanket fort (apparently, it was snowing in the living room, or so Arden claimed) before playing a game of Dora the Explorer “Membory.” She then got to sleep in our floor in a Dora Futon sorta’ thing. I think that while the other kids are away, it will be a nice chance for her to spend some quality one-on-one (and -two) time with Naomi and me.
Hopefully she won’t be too bored these next few days with the “boring” one(s), but I guesss if things get to be too much of a ho-hum drugery, I can always fire up the ol’ vacuum cleaner to liven things back up. The living room could use it again.
03.27.08
Ubiquityberry
Naomi tells me of a bumper sticker she once saw. It said something to the effect that if God didn’t want us to eat animals, He wouldn’t have wrapped them in meat. I can appreciate that. I like meat.
I’m also a bit squeamish, though, when it comes to blood and guts and killing things (unless they’re covered in pixelated polygons). In a less sophisticated world, I would probably be a gatherer rather than a hunter…at least for a while until I built up a stronger tolerance for blood.
That being said, I guess I probably do like berries and nuts as much as the next guy (assuming the “next guy” likes berries and nuts about as much as I do), but I have to wonder why berries are such a staple to the marketing industry.
This isn’t a new trend. I grew up with Booberry and Frankenberry cereals. And, when the apocalypse wipes away civilization as we know it, I’m going to definitely plant some Crunch Berry bushes in the backyard. Those were all sensible (and tasty) creations, but today, things are just getting plain silly.
We like Pop Tarts. Our kids like Pop Tarts. We buy our fair share of Pop Tarts, and we have tried many of the trendy, exotic flavors. I would think SpongeBerries probably have a bizarre texture, but as long as they taste alright (apparently, much like strawberries), then I’m okay with them in my Pop Tarts. ScoobyBerries, on the other hand, just sound disgusting, and have no place as part of my less than balanced breakfast.
In the name of catering to the whims of our kids, however, we have purchased many cartoon-induced “Berry” flavored foods along the way. I’ve tried Ogreberry Gogurt during the Shrek III craze, and, yes, I’ve even been desperate enough to try the ScoobyBerry Pop Tarts. They, too, tasted like strawberries — the chicken{berry} of the berry world, I guess.
But as desperate as my food scrounging may get at times, I plan to forever steer clear of the Bikini Bottom Berry Gogurt in our fridge. That just sounds unpleasant, and quite possibly contagious.
03.24.08
Easter Pictures
We went up to Gadsden this Easter to visit with Naomi’s immediate and extended family.
Here are pictures of the kids with their cousins Jackson, Malyn and Micah.
Then we ran the cousins off (okay, not really) and got a picture of Amelia, Arden, and Nathaniel in their Easter clothes. 
Nathan got a mandolin recently, so he, Scooter, and Aron performed for us all.
Nathaniel’s square dancing turned to slam dancing as he started to get a bit dizzy.
Arden enjoyed some egg hunting. 
…both with and without cousins. 
03.22.08
What’s with all this grease, anyway?
I am not much of a shopper. I enjoy going to certain stores (like Best Buy and…well, I’m sure there’s got to be another one), but even a leisurely stroll through the aisles usually takes me about 15 minutes, tops. The prospect of bumming around Wal-Mart for 1-2 hours while getting my oil changed is not a favorable one to me. So I changed my own oil this time, and instead of wasting an hour in a climate controled store listening to resonably, pleasant music, I spent three days in my dank, dusty basement. My victory is less satisfying when I think of it like that.
To be fair, I didn’t really spend three days just changing my oil. I had intended to change my oil, brake pads, and drive axle. I did the oil first, and then tried to tackle the hardest of the jobs, the axle. My CV joint has been announcing my turns with a steady click for some time now, and it’s a job that I’ve really needed to do (or “have done”, probably) for a while. I decided to buckle down to do it on Sunday. Naomi didn’t need the car on Monday, which was good to know just in case. I figured I could wrap things up Sunday evening, but it would be nice to not be rushed.
Well, Sunday came and went, and fortunately, Naomi didn’t have to have to car Tuesday either. She did need the car Wednesday morning, though, and at this point, that was starting to look more and more like an unreasonable deadline.
After all my progress (and regress) the first two and a half nights, I finally resigned myself to putting the pieces back together Tuesday night around 8:30 PM. Fortunately, I didn’t have too many extra pieces left-over, and I made it home from my midnight (well, 10:30, really) test drive through the neighborhood in one piece.
Four days later, my fingernails are still stained with grease, and I probably need a new tie rod end, since I managed to screw up the threading on my current one by beating it with a hammer. After all that, I probably did more harm than good. The one thing I did accomplish this week was a three-day oil change.
…Oh, and I think I also learned that I have a long way to go in learning to work on cars.
