What do you do with new cans?

Our city is starting a new trash program soon. Everybody is getting two new cans, one for trash and one for recycling. Our new cans were delivered yesterday.

And what do the kiddos do as soon as they see these brand new giant cans?

What do you think? This year's Christmas card?

And then things got really silly!

Lantern Awards

The Lantern Awards presented by The Lit were last night. It was a fairly fancy pants event at the Palace. Check out how cute I looked!

This is like the best picture taken of me in years!

Anyway, there were ten different categories, each with three nominees. The Man was up for "Poetry, Single Poem". It was cool to be nominated, but neither of us thought about it much in regards to winning or losing. It was an event to go to with free tickets that involved appetizers.

When we sat down in our seat, the awards themselves were sitting on the stage.
Each one was different and they had a flickering candle glow inside. That's when I wanted The Man to win because I wanted one of those lanterns!

Being a nominee for this award has kept The Man busy over the last month. He had to go to a photo shoot for the picture in the program.

He also had to go get videotaped talking and reading for the show they put up on the big screen.

Not a great picture, but that's really him talking away. The little lights underneath are the lanterns flickering.

He was really dreading the video parts, but he looked good and sounded smart.

And then he won his category. It was really cool when his name was announced. Since he wasn't planning on winning he had no idea what to say, but his acceptance speech was perfect.
Later on he had to accept the Lifetime Achievement award for Shelia Schwartz and that speech was even better. He had that one worked out a little bit in advance.
Dan Chaon won the award for Best Novel, but he couldn't be there and asked The Man to pick it up for him if he did win. So we ended up bringing three of the lovely little lanterns home.


Here's The Man's...

Here's Dan's...
Here's Shelia's...

Those are pages from her books wrapped around. Very cool.

Here's all three showing the side with their name and which award they won...
And all three lit up.I love that these awards are locally made pieces of art instead of something like a slab of polished wood with a brass plate or a block of etched glass. These little lanterns are just beautiful.

There's a nice write up of the event in today's Plain Dealer. It says that The Man is 43, which cracks me up, but he's not finding much humor in.

At the after party, he carried around the same plate of food all night but never ate because he kept talking to people. Not to worry, I put away enough appetizers for both of us.

Charity Poker

I mentioned before that The Girl made Dance Team. She and The Boy are also running Cross Country. And when you kids are in athletics, it doesn't take long before the parent booster club comes knocking at your door. Our booster group is The Elyria High Pioneer Club. Yours truly is the new parent representative for Dance Team, the newest recognized sport at Elyria High. I'm not the parent representative for Cross Country, but I'm sure that's just a matter of time.

Being in Pioneer Club means that you have to help out with the massive fundraisers they have. The one this past weekend was running a charity poker event at Nautica. I will admit I came into this blind. I had no idea what this would be like. I knew there was "Dealer Training" that you could go to, but you didn't have to so I didn't go. They said there were plenty of other jobs to do at the event. I just couldn't get a clear answer on what.

We four were at camp Saturday night when we started packing. On Sunday morning we were up extremely early, took down the tents, threw everything in the van and on the road by 9 AM. An hour and half later we were home to unload, shower, pick up the dog, start laundry and give the kids money to order in a pizza. The Man and I were back in the van and headed to Cleveland by 1:30.

After some crazy detouring caused by constantly closed bridges, we arrived at site. The poker room was, way back in the day, a very cool arcade in the Powerhouse. I still have some tokens from there, but that's not the currency they use in that room anymore.

The place was filling up and we were thrown immediately into dealer training. The one thing I didn't want to do. (The Man on the other hand was thrilled. It was exactly what he wanted to do.) I must have passed training because before long I was sitting at a table dealing to 12 poker players. They were friendly. They were forgiving of my mistakes. They helped out as much as they could. But I spent the whole time a tense ball of nerves. When I was finally relived, I practically ran out of the room.

The Man was dealing at the same time. He loved it. Thought it was big fun.

A little while later, I was put back at the same table where I was a little more comfortable and made fewer mistakes. That table broke up before my shift was over so I got a reprieve.

This went on all night. You stand around with nothing to do until the guy running the show pulls up to you and says, "Hey, head over to table 18, okay?" The other jobs? There was getting chips for players. That really only took one or two people. The other 58 of us were there to deal. And deal and deal and deal. The amount of money that flowed through that place was blowing my mind.

They let us go at 11:30.

After spending three nights sleeping in a tent followed by nine hours of working a poker event, I slept like the dead once we got home.

And that was our weekend.

Jet Skis and Good Eats

This is the post that involves zero pictures because I didn't have the camera with me for either of these days. (On a side note, the camera that fell in the creek has made a full recovery.)

Maumee Bay boasts two beaches. One is on Lake Erie and the other, across the parking lot, is a man-made lake with ringed by a huge beach. The Lake Erie beach is for boating and water sports not involving swimming. The man-made lake is for swimming. Were there people swimming in Lake Erie? Yup. Were there people boating in the little lake? Nope.

Friday we went as a group to the Erie beach.

And rented jet skies.

And rode jet skies.

Super fast.

Now you're bummed there's no pictures aren't you?

The Girl and I went out on the jet ski and were literally scared to death. You get barely any training besides, "Stay away from everything else," and "If you find yourself on a collision course with something, bear to the right." Then they put you on it and say, "Squeeze this to go. Let go to stop. Steer." That's it.

It was a lot of fun, in its own terrifying way. Bouncing over the waves. Gunning the motor all the way open. It is unbelievably fast when you are actually on one. (Remember now that we are a couple of girls who just recently flew a plane. You would think that a jet ski would be a piece of cake. We both agreed we felt safer on the plane.)

We took turns on the jet ski. The boys went twice and we went once. Once was enough for us.

The next day we went to the man-made beach. Not as an exciting day because we four were already miserably sunburned from the day before. The Man and I sat in the scrubby shade of a lone tree for the afternoon. Behind us were some jabbering foreigners who's tabletop grill got knocked over and they lost all of their yummy smelling food. Bummer.

Speaking of food, I have never eaten so well on a camping trip. Each family was in charge of two meals and one snack for everybody. Being the newbies on this trip, we were assigned lunch both days and instructed to just bring stuff for cold cut sandwiches. Our snack was pie iron pizzas. Couldn't be easier.

The other families seemed to be in a competition with each other. Every meal was better than the next. It was outrageous. Barbecue chicken, steak kabobs, waffles, omelettes. We ate better at camp than we do at home! And every meal worked. There was nothing burned or undercooked or just completely flubbed as camp food tends to go. I've got to step up my game if we go camping with them again in a big way.

One last story. This is not about camp but what happened directly after camp and involves at dimly lit room and lots of cards. Stay tuned.

Family Camping

It's been weeks of camping around in here some form or another. Day Camp, Boy Scout Camp, Student Council Camp, Aviation Camp and Dance Camp. We are just home from our last camp of the summer: Family Camp. We headed off to Maumee Bay State Park with nineteen friends for three nights of tent camping.
The weather was a bit too warm and sunny during the day, but the nights were cool enough for sweatshirts and blankets. Our last camping trip with this group of friends ended with everyone going home a day early because of non-stop rain. This year it was clear the whole time.


Our campsite was just a bit too far away from the shower house so we rented bikes including this tandem.The Man and I rode it all over the place with this. I always helped pedal but sometimes I would just close my eyes and cruise along. I also mastered texting while riding this. The kids were impressed.
There was a boardwalk hike through the site. It was one of those things that sounds like a good idea at the onset, but about halfway through you realized you made a big mistake and now it's too late. You're trapped on this walk and might as well see it through to the end.


I'm including this pictures, not to prove what a good daddy The Man is making sure his girl has on bug spray (though he is!), but more to point out the trees. The number of dead trees in the campground and the surrounding area is so depressing. The boardwalk hike went through whole sections of nothing but dead trees. It's all because of the Emerald Ash Borer which is spreading through Ohio and surrounding states. Our own county is infected but hopefully the quarantines put in place will prevent our area from taking a big hit.

This is what they do to trees. Not pretty. Back at the campsite there was football, hanging out (Note the lack of shade!)
and s'mores.


Ugh. I'm actually too tired to keep going. I've got unpacking to do and a crippling amount of laundry. Stay tuned for our adventures at the beach, the best camp food ever and how I know for certain that being a Texas Hold 'Em Dealer is not the career choice for me.

Too long and rambling to name

When I woke up this morning the house was so quiet. The kids were catatonic. The Man was out teaching thirteenth graders. A perfect time to sit and blog. It occurred to me that I've been blogging less since I started on Facebook. I could probably graph it out and see an immediate and obvious correlation. Maybe later. And just for me. I won't make you suffer through that.

After I pondered over where the graph paper might be and some colored pencils, it then occurred to me that my blog readers and my FB friends don't overlap. You are one or the other. I might have a few FB friends who occasionally stop by here if they have absolutely nothing else in the entire scope of their life to do, but not many. And the three of you are not on Facebook. So there it is.

(But just so you don't feel bad, my devoted blogosphere-ites, I don't update my status on FB that often either. Twice a week max. I'm in short supply all over.)

*********

If you'll remember last year, I gave myself permission to blow off Christmas cards. Seems they were just that one straw too many. Now I'm not sure what my problem was. I whipped out those cards in one night thanks to the magic of pre-printed labels. But they haven't gone out yet because my choice of the Christmas picture got nixed by the girl. Nixed big time. Her idea of the picture would be a one where she and The Boy would be doing something bad and we would caption it with something along the lines of they chose to be naughty this year. My suggestion was trying to break into a car. There suggestion was breaking into a safe.

Awhile back I wrote about finding my little safe and the miraculous way I remembered my combination. Their idea was to dress up in black, get flashlights and get a picture of them being caught trying to crack it.

This type of picture is exactly as complicated to take as you can imagine. Here's some of our attempts, mostly at trying to get the lighting right.






There are literally dozens of pictures like these and none of them are even close to what they want to achieve. I'm giving them this weekend to either come up with a better plan or perfect this one. If not on Monday I'm sending out the picture I originally planned on.

*******

Marco has been sick. He got sick the day after I spent the day shampooing the living room carpet. He got very, very sick in both possible ways all over my clean carpet. I'll admit I cried.

But he didn't seem sick. He was acting exactly like himself. Obnoxious, loud and annoying. He was eating and drinking and had a cold nose. We figured it must have just been something he ate and it was over.

The next morning, the same present waited for me by the Christmas tree. And the same dog was not acting as sick at all. The mystery grew.

Morning three Marco left us no late night gifts. It was over?

Morning four, no, not over. Worse than ever. Time to call the vet.

The diagnosis? Roundworms! Isn't that charming! Medicine and a shot for Marco and drops for the cats, just to be safe. (The cat medicine was banana flavored. On purpose. Why would they do that?) Since the late night decorating has stopped, I guess he is cured.

The vet went through all the ways that Marco could have caught roundworms but they all involved being around other dogs, which he hasn't. We have no idea why this has happened. Is it possible to catch roundworms from raccoons or squirrels? We've got plenty of those. Anyway, I'm going out to re-rent the carpet shampoo machine.

*******

I've had to sit through three Christmas programs in the past week as part of my zombie duty. Three programs in three different schools. You could say I was just unlucky, but this happens every year. Teachers ditch on program day.

Winter programs always involve trotting out the band and orchestra. At the first school (we'll call it Tolerable School), both the band and the orchestra were just terrible. It was painful and the only solace was that it was a very short program. The instructors made excuses that they had only been playing for seven weeks and this was as far as they got. Understandable, but still torturous. Two days later I had to sit through another program at a different school. Let's call it Miserable School. This time different instructors started out by explaining that their groups had also only been meeting for seven weeks. I braced myself.

In the end, both the band and orchestra at Miserable considerably outplayed the ones at Tolerable. They played the exact same tiny songs but Miserable had better control and sound. They also seemed happier at Miserable than at Tolerable. I'm handing this one to the instructors. The ones at Miserable really seemed into their zombies and were very excited to be there. The ones at Tolerable were phoning it in. Yay for good teachers!

********

The Man is home and the kids are up. What? Hungry? No clean clothes? The cat did what?

Christmas Tree Day '09

Today is Christmas Tree Day. We are celebrating it one day early this year since the actual date lands on a Saturday and the kids threw a fit. Getting out of school for half a day is a large part of the magic of Christmas Tree Day.


This morning I started thinking about all the past Christmas Tree Days. This will be our seventeenth tree sacrificed to the idea of jolly hollyness. We've had all kinds of weather for this adventure. Warm, shirt sleeve days. Knee-high snow. Sloppy, shoe-sucking mud. Toe numbing cold. And two years ago, we had to drive home in a blizzard. The one thing we didn't have was a camera with us every year. I only remembered to capture the day five times over the years. So I present to you a truncated history of Christmas Tree Day subtitled The Man and his Conquered Foe...

2001

2005

2006

2007
2008

And today.
Let the merry times begin!

You can dress her up...

Last weekend (actually the weekend before that at this point), The Man and I were invited to a fancy-pants poetry shin-dig thrown by The Lit. (That's the official fancy-pants literary society of Cleveland.)


This event was a celebration of The Lit turning 35 years old. In order to give the event even more oomph, they sent selected writers a photograph and asked them to write a response to it. The Man got asked to do one of these pieces and that's how we got invited.

Here are the tickets they gave us.
That side of the tickets aren't as interesting as this side:See the two different categories? While not immediately evident, the difference between having a Platinum ticket and being a Lit Lover is this:

Platinum ticket holders got a chair to sit on. Lit Lovers had to stand. And that was me. The non guest of honor. The plus one. Whatever you want to call me, I was the girl with the shoes that were built for cute not for extended standing around in an art gallery that was once a church. It didn't take long for my shoes to end up in the coat room and I spent the rest on the night barefoot.


The next thing I discovered was that while I brought the camera I forgot to put a memory card in it. The meant I could take a grand total of three pictures. Which is a shame because the location was beautiful and the appetizer buffet was beautiful and all of the hobnobbers were beautiful and the band was kicking it out.


The band? Oh yes, a snazzy little jazz band. They played while the everyone mingled and sampled the knock-you-out yummy snacks. They played while people debated over bidding on the silent auction items and while the wait staff whisked dishes and glasses out of your hands the moment you were done. The played while I went through many, many glasses of wine.


When the writers got up to read their pieces, the band accompanied them softly in the background. Some of the writers were obviously shook up by this intrusion on their art. Most of them ignored the band. But The Man worked the music into his reading and it was so cool!He owed that room!


To wrap up, here's the program. (Very fancy paper I might add.)

And here's proof that The Man has amazing friends.

And here's the unimpressive cover to the book that contains all of the photographs I mentioned before with the pieces written for them put together by The Lit to sell. It's actually very, very nice on the inside but they must have run out of money by the time the cover came around to design.


And what have we learned through all of this? It doesn't matter how fancy the party is, I always end up barefoot and tipsy.

The Man Can Roll!

In front of me now there are THREE lists of things I need to get done in the next few weeks. Some things I need to get done in the next few days. The lists are long and very few things are currently crossed off. Work called twice today to get me to come in. But because the lovely function of Called ID, instead the phone set was addressed in a different manner.



I was going to use this stolen day to work on these massive lists. So far I've done zero things with any of them except add more items. Isn't that depressing? But all of that will have to wait just a bit longer because I have much more important news to convey to the three of you.




The Man's bowling team won their league championship Monday night!




That's right, they are the champions and they expect you to treat them thusly. This is the second time they have been league champions (but not consecutively). So those of you who think they are just out at the alleys guzzling beer and oogling floozies, you just better think again. (Actually beer is too expensive to drink at the bowling alley and the hotties must all bowl on a different night.)



The Man was not even going to be on the team this year because he was teaching at Bowling Green on Monday nights. It just wasn't going to work out. But with a little begging from his teammates, he found a way to make it to the alley to bowl in the last two games every night, missing the first game and the warm-up. Does he not deserve to be a champion for this sacrifice? I say he certainly does!

So congratulations to The Man and his team! Way to roll!

Oh! If only he had an Italian Charm bracelet, I could get him one of these!

The fire at LCCC

While The Man is still travelling to Huron to teach his classes for Bowling Green, all of his classes at Lorain County Community College have been cancelled until Thursday.

A fire was set in the tunnel under the Business Building. Most all of the buildings on campus are connected by tunnels and the smoke filled them all and then rose into the buildings. All the classes were cancelled. The library was closed. It's rumored that all of the costumes in the theater storage have been damaged. All of the new construction has come to a stand still.

It's hard to find anyone around here who hasn't attended classes out at LCCC. I graduated from there in 1992. It's a beautiful campus. Why anyone would try to destroy it is difficult to understand.

Happy Birthday to The Man!

Happy New Year

Truthfully, I've never been a big fan of New Year's Eve. It always sounds like a good time but in reality it's usually just a bunch people sitting around and waiting for midnight so they can finally go home. The past three New Year's have been particularly bad because The Man was in Vermont. It's hard to be jolly when your sweetie is so far away and won't be home for another week.


But this year The Man is here and in about an hour we are headed out to once again spend the evening with our oldest friends. Even if we are driving home by 12:15, this will be the best New Year's in quite awhile.

Happy 2009 to everyone!

Halloween Day 3

My sister is having a Halloween party.

Yeah?

Yeah. And we're not doing anything that night, so I already said we would come.

Oh?

Yeah. It's a costume party.

silence

Did you hear me?

I haven't worn a Halloween costume since I was in the sixth grade. I don't think I've ever even been to a Halloween party before.

So this will be fun!

The kids don't even have costumes this year.

Nope. But we will.

Huh. What night is it?

Thanks for the invite sis! We had an great time!

The Man stands alone

This weekend the Girl and I are headed out to Timberlane for our big rented-the-whole-camp event. This event was on the verge of cancellation two weeks ago. On the deadline day to sign up we had 27 people attending. I couldn't understand it because last year it was such a hit we had to turn people away. Even with the measly 27 though, we decided to go ahead anyway and just scale it back. I should have remembered who I'm dealing with here. Since the deadline, I've had more and more reservations trickle in as the leaders get their act together. Tomorrow we leave and we are 93 strong. What a relief.

Coincidentally, the Boy is also going camping this weekend with his troop. That leaves the Man home alone (with the dog and all the cats). Is he sad about this?

"I think I'm going to go up to Detroit for the day and get in a poker tournament."

No, I think he's fine.

The Power of Anger

The Man has been having a bit of trouble with his truck and its brakes. A bit of trouble meaning that they've been acting wonky enough that he's been wary of driving it. That's bad news for someone who has to drive to Bowling Green Fireland's campus four night a week!

So today, being his school day off, he took his ailing vehicle in for a look over. The news wasn't good. It needed all new brakes, from soup to nuts and it was going to be a very pretty penny. The Man kept his cool with the condescending mechanic on the phone while he was given the grim news. But as he related the whole ordeal to me later, I could see he was fuming on the inside and suspicious that he was being ripped off.

But it was done and he needed a lift to the shop to pick up the truck. As he walked across the parking lot, I got an evil idea. I jump out of the van and started shouting at his back,

"Hey! Watch your temper in there! Don't go beating everybody up in there like last time! I won't bail you out if you get arrested again! I mean it! You better not punch anyone! It's not their fault!"

He never turned around or even quickened his steps. His only move was to slouch down further in his jacket the more I yelled. But the guy across the parking lot? He reacted. He stood there with his mouth hanging open staring at me and then The Man.

The bays to the garage were open right beside my tirade and I'm certain everyone heard my performance. After The Man was safely in the door, I jumped back in the van, slamming the door extra hard and peeled out. As I drove past the gaping mouth guy, I put on my angry school teacher face and shook my fist at the building. And yeah, the kids were in the van too. They thought the whole thing was hysterical.

Inside no one acted like anything happened. Perhaps screaming women in the parking lot are a common occurrence at the garage. The only strange thing that happened was that by some warehouse mistake, the bill for the repairs was $250 less than was quoted. Coincidence? Oh, I think not.