My Cutie Patuti

Crack Me UP! 

Sticker Shock!

Today I bought school supplies at Wally World for a 1st grader and a 4th grader! Total bill? $130.00 and I still have to get contruction paper, copy paper and 1 back pack! OH MY WORD! School is expensive already and we have to get this and uniforms in addition! Granted my kids go to private school, but I've seen the public school lists they're not much better and the city public school went to uniforms this year too! I only remember my parents sending me to school with a new lunch box, and I'm not sure that was every year, at least in elementary school! No wonder our generation can't save any money! My parents 1st house cost 8 or 9 thousand dollars, my first house? $90,000.00. Gas when I started driving was less that $1.00 a gallon, I have no idea what it was when I was a kid! The cost of going to the doctor and healthcare are through the roof...SOMETHING HAS TO GIVE...and so far its been the saving capacity of my generation. No one I personally know is living life large, okay maybe you Bec :), and trying to save and live with the future in mind is getting harder and harder. Okay I'll climb off my soap box and go shop another clearance rack!

Fall Fun

This picture montage was from this past Thanksgiving in Missouri 

All about Emma

I learning to use Picasa2. Cool free photo software. 

Hmmmmm

Today my Dr. called and said I have Rheumatoid arthritis. Doesn't sound fun and I'm against all things that aren't fun!

High Hopes

I had high hopes this morning when I woke up that today would be a good day. Then I went to make coffee and I didn't have enough La Vida Dulce to even make one pot! OH WOE! Hope DEFERRED!

Word of the Day...

dysleptric (adj)

To purposefully make a bad choice.

As in: King David was being dysleptric when he married Bathsheba.

Goal: Use this word three times in a sentence during the day. Come back and post people reactions here on this blog.

Today's blog posted in honor of John and Dena Culpepper and to smart alec's everywhere and those that love them :)

My New Nephew!

Welcome to the world Samuel James McConnell, born on your grandpa's 65th birthday. Ain't you sweet! I want to tuck you under my chin and snuggle! Love you tons already!

Here's your Sign...and mine must be on again!

My friend Kellie swears I have a sign on my forehead that says:
"If you are weird and have slight or majorly off balance opinions that you'd like to share come talk to me".
For a while the light must have gone out of my sign because I hadn't had any of these "weird" encounters for a while, but then came Blackmon Mooring Steamatic...who I must say did a lovely job extracting water from my flooded house but who's hiring criteria must include the ability to talk the bark off a stump! I have heard more random chatter on the most wide ranging and totally useless topics...such as opinions on why a 20ish year old guy should or should not continue to write romoantic literature, whether same said guy should continue to date a girl from a halfway house...whether said girl should change her lifestyle or not...whether said girl was capable of changing or not...what was the correct proceedure for taking soggy carpet from the house; roll by roll or wait till there was pile and then remove the pile. Then I heard the opinions of a slightly older father of 5 on what to do with sexual perverts, what to do with the Middle East, (oddly enough the solutions were similar) how to raise pit bulls and rotweilers and how to raise kids (again solutions were similar), today I got to hear about salary caps in football and baseball, about the ungodly perspective of Toyata entering the Nascar arena and the positives of driving around picking up fans from previously flooded homes verses driving a forklift.

I think I'm going to get a tatoo that says..."I see your lips moving but I don't have a clue what your saying" maybe it'll counter a little that sign that I can't seem to turn off!

We are moving AGAIN

Okay not really but almost...

I'm getting new flooring in my entire house....

Oh I think I forgot to mention that it is 12:30am Friday morning and the reason I am getting new flooring in my entire house is because while we were at my parents swimming this past evening the toilet overflowed...and overflowed...and overflowed.

The guy just left after giving us the estimate on the clean up...$5,000.00 (give of take a couple hundred). That figure doesn't even touch putting down the new flooring! The "extraction team" (two littleish guys) are here right now to take out every stich of carpet, pad and tack strips and then set up 14 really loud fans for 3 days give or take a day or 2!...Did I mention it is 112 degrees here in Texas (they say there is a cold front coming this weekend and it will actually drop to the low 90s) and the water extraction is going to raise the humidity in our house considerably over the next couple of days :)

So once again we get to move every stick of furniture in our house...

To show you my state of mind I sat here tonight and contemplated selling all but 20 of my 5 bookshelves of books...if someone had come to the door and offered me $1,000.00 for them I would have let them take them with out a second thought...I'm still wondering what half price books would give me for them...

I don't think I've mention yet that God is good, not that the following list is proof its just to remind me...Bernie (Ray's brother) is alive, Katie (Ray's niece) is alive, we have food to eat, a roof albeit a hot and humid one over our heads, we have insurance, we have a God that promises not to give us more than we with His Spirit can handle, we don't live in the area that was just hit AGAIN with a tsunami, we don't live in an area that is war torn. Yep God is good, and I would have to say that regardless of my circumstances, but I will practice saying it tonight in my frustrating, exhausting, wearing me out, can't believe this is happening, there goes our financial buffer and any traveling plans for the rest of the year kind of circumstances.

By the way if anyone is calling me tomorrow...use my cell...I probably won't be here. If I am I won't be able to hear you over the fans anyway or as seeing it is 1am and they haven't finished one room yet...I may be sleeping.

Breakfast

I used to love breakfast....these days it just seems to be getting something in to protect the lining of my stomach from the massive amounts of caffine to be dumped in it! :)

New Favorite Quote

I'm reading Girl Meets God by Lauren Winner...here is my favorite quote so far....

"There are a few people out there with whom you fit just so, and, amazingly, you keep fitting just so even after you have growth spurts or lose weight or stop wearing high heels. You keep fitting after you have children or change religions or stop dyeing your hair or quit your job at Goldman Sachs and take up farming. Somehow, God is gracious enough to give us a few of those people, people you can stretch into, people who don't go away, and whom you wouldn't want to go away, even if they offered to." (p85)

Hummm My Blog is getting boring

I should post some picture of my house as we are slowly unpacking boxes...but...I haven't found the box yet that has the disk for my digital camera in it! Oh a happier note I've been sent a sign as to how to decorate this new house. It's going to be expensive but when your given a "sign" you must obey, right? This past week I got the "late summer 2006" Pottery Barn catalogue...besides being the most beautiful catalogue ever did anyone else see my "sign" on page78? The Hanna Quilt is personalized with "Lara"...I take this to mean that I need to do my patio like the patio's in Pottery Barn, and my bathrooms like theirs and heck I just need to start over from scratch! Just to show you I'm going to include some pictures that I took to Lowes to get color swatches to match so I can paint my new house these colors... The light blue will go in my bedroom, the dark blue on the wall/walls in my living room, the coral in the 2nd bath and green somewhere I don't know yet...the dark blue may eventually go in my kitchen too who knows....look and dream

I'm exhausted!

I go to bed and wake up tired. Yesterday was my final board meeting for the wonderful Fort Worth Metro Chapter of AFP. I was sad but relieved! I would love to have tons of energy to be working on finishing laundry, hanging pictures, organizing 2800 square feet of stuff in to 1700 square feet but I just want to sleep! ...I think I'm going to go take a nap!

If....

If your whole body were a hot air balloon, would you stop eating spicy food?

Define spicy?!?

Sometimes its the little things

My books are on their shelves.

I have DSL.

I've had my first and second cup of La Vida Dulce in my new house.

Boxes are piled high and my dryer doesn't work yet so laundry is growing by the minute....


BUT LIFE IS GOOD. :)

Saying a pray for Ray's brother Bernie, who was in this car wreck yesterday in between Grinnell and Des Moines Iowa. He has a broken neck and lots of other injuries. 

More Daddy Daughter Dance Pictures

Getting ready at the salon. Posing for Mommy. Waiting for Daddy

Daddy Daughter Dance Beauty

This is Emma ready to leave for the 2006 Daddy Daughter Dinner Dance.

Hangin out with Mommy's best bud, Miss Kellie