Whatever These Are, They Bloomed

April 'take a picture of me too, mom' Stone

Crazy

This made me laugh so hard I couldn't catch my breath.  What's the abbrieviation for that?  wol (wheeze out loud) maybe?  It just caught me at the right moment and struck me as funny.

Possibly due to the high level of insanity in my life...

TV

More Summerfest Pics

Andrew at the parade

Jessica at the parade

Andrew by the firetruck

Pictures I finished retrieving from Jared's phone.

Orem Summerfest 2012

      We went to Orem Summerfest on Saturday and enjoyed ourselves at our city's big shindig for the year.  We went over to the park around 11am for the carnival stuff and to see what the vendors had out.  It was 80+ degrees, sunny and only a slight breeze.  The kids rode one ride at $1.50 a ticket that was pretty much all the cash I had left after a couple of $3 bags of cotton candy.  $20 just doesn't go as far as it used to and five kids can use it up in seconds.  So anyway, we toured the firetruck,

April in the firetruck

did the free craft activity,

Andrew with the foam hat he decorated

ate some cotton candy, debated whether or not to play the game where "everyone wins a real live frog!"  (please mom, please mom, please mom, please mom, please mom, please mom, please mom, please mom!), rode something called the Vortex or the Tornado or the Twister or the Swirler... something, anyway, it went around really fast and made April cry but thankfully not throw up, and then we went home for lunch, mostly because I was out of cash and starting to get a little sunburned.
      I took the older girls to a play at BYU and then we went back to Summerfest for the parade and the fireworks.  Remember how nice it was in the morning?  By time for the parade in the evening, 6:30-ish, the temperature had dropped to somewhere around 50 and a very strong wind came up.

Kylie in her blanket

Kylie sharing her blanket with Clara from next door

    Just to give you an idea how strong the wind was, the kids jumped out of those metal folding chairs to go grab some candy and a few seconds later a gust of wind came through and blew the chairs over.  Middle of June and I've got the baby in her winter coat and the kids are so cold they gave up running after candy to huddle in blankets on the curb.  Ha ha ha.
     I've got more pictures but they're all on Jared's phone so I have to e-mail them to myself one at a time (there's probably a faster way...) when he's not using his phone and none of the children are playing games on it.
      We were a bit worried the fireworks wouldn't happen but as the sun set the winds died down and with everyone huddled in the van for warmth we parked in the Target parking lot across from the park and watched an excellent fireworks display.
      Thanks City of Orem, that was lots of fun and everyone slept really well that night.

Contents Under Pressure

One of the most amusing facebook shares I've seen in a long time.

It does, it scares me EVERY time.

Inside My Head

Yeah.

Possibly a lot darker and more dangerous as well.

Children

At first I thought this was funny.

My amusement only lasted a moment.

Then I was sad.

Very, very sad.

That's me on that exam table.

Sad, sad me.

Nice Kitty...

Kinda having one of those days/weeks.

At least the angry puffball made me smile.

Now on to the available chocolate...

Losing My Mind

Yes indeed, Summer Vacation has begun with a vengeance.

This made me smile today.



We're All Kids At Heart

LA Times Cartoon

Maybe a little out of date but it made me laugh.

I do like Ron Paul.

Expeditiously vs. Exhibitiously

I was helping with the younger children at a rehearsal for a dance recital coming up and one of the teachers came into the waiting area and announced "If you're in the next number get into the studio expeditiously!"  I was thinking to myself, 'great use of a big word' when one of the teens standing next to me asked her friend, "What does 'exhibitiously' mean?"
Mwahaha! (but I only laughed way down deep inside)
I turned to the two confused teens to explain 'expeditiously' means to hurry and go into the room quickly.  'Exhibitiously' is an entirely different matter.  It's not exactly a word but if it is taken in the context of doing things as an exhibitionist would then you would go into the room nude or flash the people in the room.  The two girls seemed satisfied with this answer.  I thought about it a bit more and decided 'exhibitiously' could also possibly be understood as to make an exhibit of yourself as you enter the room which would be easy for the teens as they're all about attention most of the time anyway.
Yeah, so they hurried into the room.

Mothers Day

My mother sent me this one.

I have to agree with it.

HAPPY MOTHERS DAY

The Foundling by Georgette Heyer - loved it!

This one is going to go on my top picks or must reads or whatever that list in my head is where I keep the books I really liked.
The Foundling is a great adventure story with a little bit of romance and a cast of very entertaining characters:

The Duke, he's super rich and a nice guy but he's short and he was sickly as a child so everyone bullies him and he runs away from home for a few days on his own just to see if he's really a man or only a Duke.

Tom, the crazy kid who gets into trouble constantly but isn't such a bad guy.

Belinda, the ultimate dumb blonde who will do anything for a purple dress or a ride in a fancy carriage.

Harriet, (I like Harriet) who seems to be turning out very well despite external forces.

Gideon, the soldier that could kill someone with his bare hands but mostly just laughs off the insanity around him.

Liversedge, the bad guy, he'd hate to kill anyone but maybe for the right price he could overcome his sensitivity to violence and in the mean time he likes to manage the kitchen with his excellent skills.

      There's a few more besides these but you'll have to read it to meet them all.  The story is great, lots of twists and turns and plenty of comedy and drama to make it seem very true-to-life.  I laughed right out loud a couple of times.  I'm going to have to read this one again and find a website where they tell you what some of those old expressions mean.  For example, I know "pockets to let" means out of money but there were a bunch of other ones I had to guess at the meanings from the context, especially when the bad guys are all plotting together.

The Reluctant Widow

 Yesterday I finished reading The Reluctant Widow by Georgette Heyer  , it was entertaining, adventure/mystery/romance with some twists and turns and nothing disgusting.  The Reluctant Widow is the story of a gentlewoman who has been forced to either live with her relatives as a dependant, or go to work as a governess.  She is on her way to begin work when a case of mistaken identity lands her in the middle of a inheritance dispute where a woman is needed to marry a man who is close to death so that his property will pass to her rather than a cousin.  The man dies the same day as the wedding and then important documents turn up missing and there's a lot of drama surrounding the funeral and the missing papers.  Everything works out in the end.  I found the story both implausible and predictable but still good enough to keep me reading.

paper cuts

Writing letters I won’t send
If I sent them the end of things would leave a bitter taste on my tongue and force me to curl up and be gone from this place
or it wouldn’t
But the end of things is invisible and always in question because of the means
If I write a letter it becomes set down on paper
Why is it paper cuts?
All I want to say is how much I miss a moment I never had but in my mind
If it’s on paper then it’s a bare shadow of the leaping grasping thing in my head
Shall I tie it to the page and force it to form to the surface in neat and tiny print?
it’s too heavy for paper
it’s too formless to fit within the strokes and bends of my written mind
On paper I can force it to burn and dance outside the confines of my own head
Inside my head it forces me on goading me with guilt or inspiring me with innocence
I never know which until it’s pressed into the page and my perspective can see it from somewhere other than the inside where I can only catch glimpses of it out of the corner of my mind’s eye.

Some Trials Seem So Heavy

I sat here thinking about what I wanted to say in this post and I started to type something about how a friend's baby with life-threatening birth defects makes my trials look small.  That's not exactly right.  My trials still seem large and take up so much space in my head and my life that I don't see around them sometimes.  It's different than that.  Thinking about my friend gets me past myself for a little while and gives me a clear opportunity to think of someone else and to pray for them and to love them a little bit more than I usually would.  See, Jamie Hoerler was a sweet girl I knew when I was a teenager in California.  She's younger than I am by about 5 years so she probably wouldn't have been on my radar very much if it hadn't been for her brother.  Jamie is married now and lives on the East Coast.  She just had a baby, Paul.  You can read more about Paul's challenges here - http://kjcarpenter.blogspot.com/  .  I've been fasting and praying for them.  I don't know what will happen with Paul, his condition is so serious that it's medically unlikely that he'll survive.  I can't even imagine what that's like for Jamie and her husband.  I know that they will have Paul as their son forever whether they have the opportunity to raise him in this life or will have to wait for when they are reunited in heaven.  God doesn't always give us what we want but he always gives us what we need.  It's hard to see God's perspective from where we are in life.  Trials break us down while at the same time giving us tremendous opportunity for growth.  I will keep praying for their miracle and I will keep asking God to give them comfort and peace, whatever he has in store for them.

Who knew findagrave would be this exciting?

I keep finding amazing information on http://www.findagrave.com/.  It's a site where people share cemetery information to help in family history research.  Just this weekend I found this amazing headstone with all these different names from Jared's family history carved into the base.  The person who took the pictures and posted the information has shared over 50,000 (!! wow !!) of these records.  It makes me wish I could do something in return.  The cemeteries in my area seem to be pretty well covered and I posted that I was willing to take pictures and search in them if anyone wants me too.  There are requests for information from cemeteries all over the world and if photography and helping people with family history appeal to you then consider joining this free site and possibly adding to the wealth of information available.

Euonymus

Mom calls these her "You-don't-want-a-mess" bushes.

Yesterday was the annual trimming.

I was SOOOOO happy Lynn didn't leave me to do it alone.



Lynn vs. Bush



These bushes are kind of massive and if we don't trim them back they tend to crawl up into the eaves of the house.

I had to do before and after shots this year.



I want to mention that I did the bottoms of the bushes before thinking to take the before shot so maybe next year I'll remember to get a before the before shot.

BEFORE



AFTER



There's also a kind-of-in-the-middle shot that I stopped to take when I got to the point where I had trimmed most of a what a six foot tall gal on a six foot tall ladder could reach.  It's also the point at which I went for a drink of water and considered asking for a raise.  It's the best point to ask for a raise because they can see I do good work and they don't want to risk offending me and having me leave it like that, right?  No dice on the raise btw, lucky for them I'll work for practically nothing, or even downright nothing, or no pay whatsoever...

Anyway, here's that picture -




We also planted onions and potatoes.

These are the onions.  The potatoes get buried so there's nothing to look at there.  There's also a rogue carrot in this row because the kids found one that was sprouting and we just had to put it in.

Then we sent in the irrigation team.

The irrigation team is a highly skilled, extremely motivated, and fiercely dedicated group.
They got into their work immediately.

 

My arms hurt too much to type yesterday.  Today was much better.  I have no idea what the caloric burn on trimming those bushes is but I know it was high, VERY high.  Lynn and I had a pretty good time and our version of Katy Perry's In Another Life is something to hear.  We also did a little Phantom and Lynn did songs from Chess, which she hopes makes a come back, but I'm not familiar enough with that one to have an opinion.