Halloween Greetings

Happy Halloween
from our pumpkins to yours!

Road Woes

The entire area where we live is experiencing improvement. So to speak.

Our street was ground down to the bricks and then resurfaced. It looks wonderful and is a joy to drive on.

The main drag to get to our street was completely destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed again for unknown reasons and then rebuilt.

Almost all of the side streets around us are undergoing grinding, repaving as well as getting new curbs. The little road that I think of as my fast escape route out of our neighborhood looks like a missile testing site right now. It's getting new water lines. (I really felt for the family who had to put up with a port-a-potty on their tree lawn over there. Today I noticed it was moved across the street to the cemetary's tree lawn. I'm sure the dead are handling this much better than the living.)

We are into week six of this project. Throughout all of this, I've tried to keep a sunny disposition. It will all be worth it when the roads and curbs are shiny and new. Property values will soar. Crime levels will fall. Peace on Earth will be achieved.

Okay. So maybe that's asking a lot of blacktop and concrete.

But today I have cracked. Today I'm really ready for these guys to be gone. Today I've had enough of being detoured around and the whole world smelling like pitch. This simple resurfacing job should just be a bad memory by now. But today, it all started all over again! Look at this map. This is what it looks like out there right now!
They are jackhammering huge holes in the roads around all of the manholes. They are digging up even more curbs. They are putting down another coat of blacktop on roads that we thought were done. They are everywhere at once surrounding us and pinning us in.

We are prisoners on our own street. And if we can get away, dodging huge filth-spewing trucks and grumpy workers in day-glo vests brandishing stop signs, then we can't get back to our own driveways when we return. I've had to park around the corner and walk home more than once.

I've tried to be understanding. I've tried to be grateful for the much needed roadwork. But enough is enough. It's time to show them where to put their orange barrels.

Corn Maze of Insanity

I'm usually pretty great with writing dates down on a calendar then actually showing up at places when I'm supposed to. I know this shouldn't be a trait to brag about, but I know lots of people who cannot handle the responsibility of showing up to scheduled events. But this weekend was a failure in my record. There was a training out at Timberlane that I agreed to help facilitate. I wrote it down on my calendar for Sunday and looked forward to helping out.

The Sister came along with me. She hadn't been out to the property in more than a decade and wanted to see all of the improvements. It was a beautiful warm afternoon. A day exactly like we needed last weekend but didn't get. The Sister and I wandered around, peeking into building and hiking trails. She oohed and ahhhed at all of the lovely new buildings and facilities. The weird thing was that no one else was out at camp. I mean no one. We had the entire property to ourselves.

Around the time the whole training was supposed to occur, I came to the realization that I had made a big scheduling goof. Wrong weekend or wrong day. Something like that. It didn't bug me too much though. That's the beauty of volunteerism.

But now The Sister and I had a whole sunny afternoon with nothing to do. Should we just go back home and call it a day? Nah. That's for losers. In a series of escalating dares* we ended up at Hillcrest Orchards and decided to brave the corn maze.

*Name that show!

Hillcrest does a fairly intense corn maze every year. There's all these little stations you have to find and pages of puzzles you have to solve. If you find everything and solve the one big puzzle you win... a candy bar. (Believe me, you want that damn candy bar by the end. It become a point of honor.)

The theme of the maze was Knights and Dragons. There were all these obscure facts at the stations about medieval times. We learned the definition of a gauntlet. (An armored glove. That's an interesting fact.) We also learned that why June is thought of as a wedding month. (The once a year bath comes in May and since you are still fairly clean, people would get married in June. That's a suspiciously dumb fact.)

Mostly what we learned is that corn mazes, especially when it's eighty degrees out and crazy sunny, suck. People start to lose their minds in there. Someone was screaming HELP while we were in there. Kids were running in rabid packs. And "No running in the maze" is rule #1!

The Sister and I kept at it in the blazing sun. Make rights and lefts. Ending up in the same place over and over. Considering cheating. Finally cheating. We protected a woolly bear. I left a piece of gum on a cob of corn. When we crossed for the third time into the area which we had dubbed "Loserville", we both decided to throw in the towel. No candy bar for us.

Our biggest regret was not having a camera while we went on this failed adventure. The pictures would have been amazing. Especially of the one row we called The Row of Insanity. It looked like more than one person had had an violent emotional breakdown in that row and the corn and ribbons had paid the price.

So since we have no pictures, here's an article about some really cool corn mazes. Love you sis!

Mystery Camp Out

Months of planning, dozens of phone calls, hundreds of emails, two trips to camp to deliver food and craft supplies and 120 Girl Scouts all collided at Timberlane this past weekend for our big once-a-year camp out. This is an event I organize for all the troops in the our city to attend. This year I had nine troops come out claiming every available bed and almost taking the dining hall to capacity. A huge leap in attendance over last year.

And I did it all myself!

Okay, no I didn't.

This year I had a quite a crew behind me that took over almost every detail leaving me in the end with the registrations, assigning cabins, providing training and programing for all our teenage Scouts (There were 42 of them this year!), coming up with the schedule for the weekend, hiring the cook and shopping for one meal.

That might sound like a lot, but in the grand scheme of the weekend, it's a drop in the bucket. I had one leader plan all of the program stations (27 of them!) and shop for all of the supplies. Another leader planned our one "nice" craft and hand made all of the insanely cute name tags. One leader and her troop made dinner for everyone Friday night. Another leader and her troop made a huge brunch for everyone Saturday morning. Co-Leader Supreme personally found the program we ran, picked out the fun patch, ran archery, opened the observatory, set up a killer clever trail with her younger troop and tried to keep me in line all weekend. (No easy task there.)

The weather tried to ruin it all. It was cold and it never, ever stopped drizzling. Just this steady, light, freezing drizzle the entire time we were there. We had to cancel boating. Nobody wanted to go to archery. We had our campfire inside the dining hall. It sucked the energy out of everybody ending the day around 9 PM instead of 11.

But everyone says that they had a wonderful time and that their girls had a super-fun-amazing experience. That makes it a success.

And I forgot to take my camera, obviously.

I Scream, You Scream, We all Sceam for I...pods

Not my best title. Granted.

The Boy has an Ipod Touch which he bought with his own money and is rightfully proud of. He's not super-possessive of it either. We all get time to mess around with the apps, run down the battery, and not charge it up again. He's cool with it.

He has it with him most of the time unless one of us has wandered away with it. Last year he would take it to school with him and listen to his tunes during art class (not to worry, though; that kind of deviant behavior has been cracked down on hard by the school this year!).

About a month ago, it stopped doing the number one thing it should do. It's an Ipod Touch and the touch part of it stopped working. It would come on, tell the correct time and that's about it. The touch screen was non-responsive.
Being the good mommy that I am, I diligently went through the "Troubleshooting Tips" on the Apple site and FIXED IT! That's right, me. I fixed it! I rock! Rename me Hero!

Last week though, it happened again. Same exact thing. Frozen screen. Nothing doing. This time the Tips failed. I went through them four stinking times and gave myself a splitting headache but the little gadget just wouldn't respond.

We picked up a warranty for the Ipod at the POS store when he bought it. What did our money get us? "Sucks to be you. Not our problem." Charming. Lesson learned.

Apple themselves wanted $30 to talk to them on the phone about it. Umm, no.

Or we could put it in the mail and wait and see. Again, no. Not liking the sound of that.

Or we could cruise to our nearest Apple store and talk to a real live human. That sounded good. The closest store was actually surprisingly close. It's in the hoity-toity shopping neighborhood only a short drive away. We made an appointment for 9 AM the next morning.

I can report it's very, very quiet and empty that early in the morning in Hoity-Toityville. Nothing is open. Nothing is moving except the street cleaner. The Man was predicting that we had made a 9 AM appointment in a store that wouldn't open until 10 AM. I had to agree. But as we came up on the door, it was unlocked, the lights were on and it had people in it. Quite a few people. I wouldn't call it bustling, but it certainly wasn't empty.

We were greeted at the door by people expecting us and directed to Lee the Genius, who would be taking care of us. It was like walking into heaven (that might be exaggerating just a bit, but it was extremely nice).

This story is already too long, so I'll wrap it up by saying that 10 minutes later we were leaving the store with a brand new shiny Ipod. The Boy's was really broken in a way that was nobody's fault and would be sent back to Apple for parts. It only cost us a car ride and a signature.

And since it was only 9:15, we went out to breakfast. Yay for stories with happy endings!

First Day as Sophomores

Okay, the first day was last week. But I took this picture on the first day, so at least I was on the ball for that.

Wonder Twin Sophomore Powers... ACTIVATE!

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.

No Love for Clean Streets

I've written in the past about how much I love the leaf sucker trucks. I love that they suck up and take away the mountains of leaves. I don't know where the leaves end up, but I do know that they don't have to be put in plastic bags and sit in a landfill for all eternity. What could be better than that?

(Well, what's better than that for me is the sound those trucks make. Knocks me right out. But that that is just a byproduct of a bigger thing. A happy bonus one could say.)

Here's my least favorite truck that the city sends around.

The street sweeper truck.

Is there a bigger waste of money and resources than this? For the most part, the street looks exactly the same before and after it does its thing. It's just wet afterward.Usually these guys run in pairs, one right behind the other. Times must be tough if we are down to just one truck spraying water and spinning dirt in a circle.

The guy running this truck didn't even notice I was taking pictures because he was too busying yakking away on his phone. That's the job I need. No, wait a minute. I didn't mean it!

Here's the News

Some of you already know this but I'm not going back to zombie sitting. It's my choice and I choose to treat myself better than that. It's time to try something new. What is the new thing? Not sure yet, but it's got to be better than the zombies.

How does it feel during this first week that school is open to not be going back? It feels like this...

Goodbye Summer!

We finished off summer the right way around here.

We took one more sunset trip to the beach.
We went to Taste of Cleveland and made pigs of ourselves.





We saw Weird Al rock the house.


That was the real end of summer because the next morning was cold and rainy, which can only mean that it was a Cross Country meet morning.

The Girl ran...and then The Boy.
They both ran amazing times despite staying up too late and eating a bunch of junk the night before.

Today we are having quite a wind storm out there. Dust clouds are being kicked up in the streets, doors are slamming and trees are being shook so they drop all that they have.

Like these.

I went outside to take some pictures of my poor sunflowers that have been knocked to the ground.

Isn't that just sad.

While I was out there the wind kept blowing and blowing and then the chestnuts started falling. I saw all of these guys hit the ground. That's as fresh as they get.
They are pretty when they first fall, cold and shiny, but they get ugly fast. They'll keep falling now for about a month. They'll disturb your sleep when they hit the roof, dent your car if you park in the wrong place and trip you up wherever you try to walk. If you are coming to visit, consider yourself warned.

Tomorrow the kiddos go back to school in their brand new building. If you have to go back, that's a cool way to go.

Sunflower Time

They took their time growing. They took their time blooming. It was worth the wait.
Ahoy there! There be other giants about as well, me hardees!
Shiver me timbers!

Primitive Camping

I don't mind camping. I can say that I actually like it. But what The Boy is doing this weekend is beyond my comfort level.

They are primitive camping which means they are taking everything with them that they'll need, hiking to an open spot in the woods and making camp. No running water. No electricity. Not even a port-a-potty. Horrible by any standards.


Here's The Boy with all of his gear. It weighs right around thirty pounds. Fun!
And here's the crew that's going.
All bright and happy now. We'll see how they look and feel on Sunday!

Beep Beep Beep and Beep

You remember Meg.

Motionless Meg steadfastly watching...

My new birds!

Four little zebra finches happily beeping away in their giant cage. There are two boys and two girls. And no, I'm not breeding them. Never again with that craziness.

It's been many bird-less months around here. I didn't know how much I missed having them around until they were back.We are back to very noisy mornings, having the TV drowned out and occasionally pulling Meg off the top of the cage.

In other words, back to normal.

Two Cats Turn Four

This day is almost over, but I couldn't let it close without some pictures of Jack and Meg today on their fourth birthday.


This has been the look on Meg's face for the past day. Tomorrow I'll post why.
She really hasn't moved much.
These are the best pictures I've ever been able to take of her. She's usually a non-stop kind of cat.

Jack on the other hand tends to take it easy.

Really easy.

Really, really easy.
Until he wants something...Then he wakes up and turns on the charm.

Happy Birthday Kittens!