Instant Karma's Gonna get You...

And my, how it does! John Lennon was a wise man, indeed. I must've done something really bad recently, because karma got me in the worst way...unexpectedly and out of nowhere. Wednesday night I was cleaning out my My Pictures folder, as I do occasionally. I separate the pics into different sub folders and then copy them onto CD-R disks. Then after I check to make sure they were written to the disks, I erase them off the hard drive. I've been storing my pictures this way for about two years. The last time I did this was in May, and all was well. So Wednesday night, I got Patrick's pictures done, then the ones of the family and both the boys together, then I pulled out Ben's disk. Only this time, when I saved the newest folder, it for some insane, unheard of, unbeknownst-to-man reason wiped out all the previous folders. Gone. All my pictures of Ben. His whole life. Needless to say, I freaked. It has taken me until now to be able to think about it without crying a little bit...for two reasons. The first is that I called my computer whiz friend Chris, who owns his own computer-ish business here in town, and he had me bring in the offending disk and my hard drive first thing in the morning. After extensive discussion about what went down, he assured me that I did not make some bonehead mistake, that you are not supposed to be able to delete off a CD-R even if you wanted to, and that this seemed like one of those freakishly unfortunate things that sometimes happens with computers. He also advised me to store all my pictures ever on both a disk and my hard drive, so if this happened again, they'd at least be in two places. Then he kindly installed a second hard drive for storage that he said would hold 10,000 pictures without breaking a sweat. Thank God, otherwise I would be sweating every time I copied a disk from now on. The second reason I feel better is because I was very proactive about taking inventory of my old photos. I went upstairs and dragged out the actual prints that I occasionally get at Walmart, and there were quite a few in there. Then I looked through all my old files of Patrick and Ben together, which were cataloged differently, and there were plenty of those. And finally, I went through my blog post by post and downloaded all the ones that I had previously uploaded, which was no easy task since I live in the sticks and have to deal with dial-up. But it was worth it because I got about 90 photos back, ones that were obviously favorites or I never would've posted them in the first place. To be truthful, some were lost...but that's life, I suppose. It could've been a lot worse.

I'm not sure why I'm even rattling all this off...a form of therapy, maybe? At any rate, in an effort to make sure Ben doesn't feel unloved later in life, I'm trying to take a few more pics of him now. Here's one I snapped today:

He's just chillin' with the Braves here. Ben is now a die-hard sports junkie, to the point where he gets mad if you turn on cartoons and whatnot. He wants to watch ESPN. His favorites are baseball ("ball-ball"), football ("ball-ball") and I'm thinking he will love basketball ("ball-ball") when it starts up again this fall. Katie, I'm not quite sure how he feels about tennis yet, but I have a feeling that you and he might soon have a date on the couch rooting for Nadal or Roddick or whoever...

Anyway, Luke is eating it up. He gets to check out the game and spend quality time with his sons. Whatever. Hey I'm happy too...they're all out of my hair when ball-ball's on.

Weekend Wrap-up

So this weekend was Luke's "office party", if you can call it that...which you can't. I had met all of the new recruits through various school and graduation activities, but I had never met the veteran firefighters that Luke works with. So this weekend was my chance. And if you think that I was going to take my camera for that, you're crazy. Anyway, it was an interesting experience. Enlightening, I should say. I never realized how different things could be just one county over. Let's just say if here were ever any doubts in my mind about my compatibility with Luke because he might just be a little too good ol' southern boy...well, I now have some perspective. Luke is downright preppy compared to these guys. And if you're thinking denim overalls and a piece of straw between the teeth, that's a little off the mark. Try imagining a different Luke and his cousins Bo and Daisy and their penchant for fast orange cars...and moonshine...and now you're starting to get a clearer picture. Yeah. Wow.

Then on Sunday we caught up with the kiddies again at Luke's parents house. They had been having a party of their own with some friends from school and Rebeckah (aka "the world's coolest girl" to both my boys) had spent the night as well. Other than sleeping, they basically swam non-stop:

Patrick grappling with his nemesis: The Chlorine Mushroom

Pa held the inner tube while the kids attempted to jump through. I have to point out that Patrick would not even put a toe in the water unless he was safe in my arms at the beginning of the summer, so as you can see...he's made great strides.

Rebeckah gets fancy mid-air...

...but ends up like this???

Ben was not partaking in the jumping game, but he is always happy to paddle around by himself and watch the fun. And if you blow bubbles in the water, he'll come up and kiss you. It's a great trick. We're going to teach him to roll over next.

Hope y'all had a great weekend too! Perhaps Patrick will do something outrageous at school and then you might hear from me again before Saturday. One can always hope...

Family Portrait

Today's Pre-K schoolwork:

If you're the sharp type, you may have noticed that there's a new member to our family. No, this isn't an elaborate ploy to announce another baby...just the realization of Patrick's latest obsession. Jeff is one of the guys that works with Luke, and even though Patrick has never met the guy, he has latched onto him like nobody's business. He alternates between pretending that Jeff is his brother and pretending that he actually is Jeff...therefore demanding that I address him so. Not cool. Especially since it looks like I may have been an afterthought in the picture, like maybe his teacher suggested that he may want to add, oh, I don't know...MOMMY into the picture?? On the plus side, he gave us all a great pair of legs.

Weekend Warrior

My past few days have not been for the faint of heart. Let's start with yesterday. Luke and I have known since spring that during the previous winter, we had enjoyed the noise and astronomical prices of our archaic gas furnace for the last time. For once we decided to do the responsible thing and not wait until it became an emergency. So yesterday we had an appointment for the Sears consultant to come take a look at our system and see what they had to offer. And while we were at it, we figured we'd also check out air conditioners too, since ours is the original one that came with the house--which is 17 years old--and they usually only last 15 years or so tops. Let me just say that I was not prepared for the ordeal. I figured the guy would come out here, hitch up his pants, spit, and say "Yeah, that'll run ya about so-and-so...", and then we'd spend the next thirty minutes trying to talk ourselves down to the cheapest possibility while he added in hidden costs every five minutes or so. Well, this is not at all what happened, and I'll take the time right now to go ahead and plug Sears for all your HVAC needs. The guy came out at 11:00 and walked around for an hour and forty-five minutes talking to Luke, inspecting our current system, taking measurements of our house and then writing up quotes for five different systems. Then we proceeded to sit down and discuss those quotes for another hour and a half. In the end, he actually recommended the cheapest option, gave it to us for the employee price and then set up a no-interest account to make it actually doable. I'm telling you, it's hard to find customer service like that these days. So we got a new heat pump, which is a single unit that somehow heats in the winter and cools in the summer using the air outside. And it's electric, and very energy-efficient, so no more breaking the bank over the natural gas bill in January. And even though I dropped a few G's for it, I feel good about the purchase, which is very unusual for me. Usually, I have diarrhea until the balance is paid. Eeek.

And as if that wasn't enough, lately our main TV has been on the fritz in a major way. But it was hard to get mad, because Luke bought it fifteen years ago and it's had a good life. It's like when your very very VERY old dog keeps pooping on the floor, but you don't mind, because he's been so good about not doing it for all these years. Anyway, we decided to say goodbye to the TV and we gave it to the Salvation Army in the hopes that someone even more poverty-stricken than us might get a few weeks of enjoyment out of it, and off we went on Thursday evening to go buy a new TV. I've got to give Luke props for planning this out so well in his evil mind, because heaven knows, if we hadn't gotten it before we signed in blood for the new heat pump, then we wouldn't have gotten it at all. I would've told him to shut up and content himself with watching a blue screen. At any rate, I wasn't prepared for this purchase either. I don't live under a rock, so I know all about plasmas and LCD screens and the like...what I didn't know is that projection TVs are all but extinct. I really thought we'd go in there and buy the same size and shape TV that we had before, the kind I've been watching my whole life, but with a flat screen this time. Oh no. Not at all. The showroom was a plethora of sleek, futuristic looking screens, all perched atop their shapely pedestals and grinning at us with wide wide WIDE screens and pixels galore. Off in the corner were two projection TVs, dragging their massive hind sides around by the hair and modeling the latest in caveman TV animal skins. My first instinct as a cheapskate was to suck it up and adopt one of those awful snaggletooth projection models, but after comparing prices, even I could see that the obvious choice was a more updated model. So we are now the proud owners of a 32-inch flat screen LCD TV, with a price tag that wasn't too bad.

My only concession was that it must fit into my entertainment armoire, which is a beautiful piece of furniture that Luke and I bought just before we were married, and I would never ever buy a TV that wouldn't utilize it. Luke said that this one could actually hang on the wall, but that is the epitome of tackiness, so I'm not even going to go there.

Thus, today was deemed a no-spending day, as are the next seven days or so, with the exception of groceries and gas. So when I went out to get something out of the freezer for dinner tonight, I noticed a formidable trail of ants on the side driveway and, having just in the last week conquered an attempted uprising in my kitchen, I decided to investigate. I followed the trail, which wasn't hard, since there were millions of them, and it led me straight to the garage and into the trash can where we store the dog food. I took the lid off and almost fainted. Then I had to stand there for the next ten minutes and figure out what to do, since Luke had just bought a 50-lb bag of dog chow and by golly after the past two days, there was no way I was throwing all that food away of I could help it. So I analyzed their weaknesses, planned my strategy, and began my attack. It began with a can of Raid for the outside of the trash can and the trail of critters leading down the driveway, and ended with the hose and what has affectionately become known as the "ant sponge"...and I'm happy to say, the huge vat of dog food is now ant-free, chemical-free, and just a slight bit damp. My work here is done.

Fahrenheit 111

No, it's not an adaptation of the Ray Bradbury classic, it's just the temperature the credit union thermometer registered when I drove by at 4:00 today. It's too hot. Everything is feeling it. The boys haven't been outside in ages, my carpet looks like it's made of mohair from the dogs' need to shed every dispensable hair on their body, even the praying mantis that had taken up residence in my begonias for the past month has given up on this God forsaken land and headed for (literally) greener pastures. Or he just dropped dead from the heat. And my plants...my poor plants. At this point, I'm just watering stems with the hope that when the highs drop back to 95 degrees, they might still have the strength to recover. I finally put the poor marigolds around my mailbox out of their misery and just yanked them out of the rock-hard dirt.

So that's it. We sit in the house and wait for the moment when we all spontaneously go up in flames. Or I go to work, where for some insane reason, the thermostat is set at 60 degrees and I spend the day slowly turning blue, only to come outside at 4 p.m. and microwave myself. I'm surprised that I haven't gotten the mother of all colds by now.

You want pictures? Wilson sends his love from the coolest place in the house, the tile floor in the kitchen...

"The heat! My God, the HEAT!"

One hundred blogger bucks if you know where that line came from. Anyway, what else is there to say? It's freakin' HOT. Last night the Atlanta weatherman said that Tuesday night was the hottest night in the history of recorded temps for us. No overnight low has ever been that hot. Our two weeks of fall cannot come fast enough.

Yesterday, Luke's buddy Delmos had an incredible stroke of bad luck and his air conditioning unit broke. But those are only half his woes...his problem was made much much worse by being unfortunate enough to be renting from my former landlord, the one that Mandy and I used in college during a year that involved...let's just say...rats and misplaced rent checks. I'm just sayin', she's not the best to have around when the a/c breaks in 107 degree heat. So Luke invited him to come over for the evening to literally chill out at our house, which we keep at a frosty 80 degrees. They spent the evening parked in front of the X-box playing Halo 2 and sniggering like Beavis and Butthead.

I literally cannot understand this phenomenon, but whatever. They somehow had fun and Delmos didn't melt, so that was good. Anyway, that's it around here! Keep cool, folks!

The First Day

Today was Patrick's first day of school...heaven help us!

Hopefully, they'll be able to do something about his grammar. Look at this, for crying out loud! Who does he think he is, 50 Cent?

Okay, okay...in all honesty, today is one day that I can brag on my kid. He had a great first day and was a great student. On the plus side, he walked down the hall quietly with one hand on his hip and the other on his lip (this is called hip/lip for the uninformed readers), he sat nicely and ate his lunch without goofing off, and he laid down and closed his eyes during rest time. On the plus plus side, he did NOT come running out of the bathroom without his pants asking if he wiped well enough, as he is sometimes inclined to do at home. I really like "School Patrick". I hope he sticks around for a couple of hours after 3:15 each day.

How do I know all this, you might wonder? No, I am not actually his teacher, nor do I want to be. But I do work there and did manage to take a few spy breaks during the day. And I ate lunch with him. And yes, I think I am a lucky duck because I can do this. Today was my best day of work--ever.

No Longer Mommy

Patrick starts Pre-K on Tuesday--the big time--all day every day. And as if on cue, I'm no longer Mommy. I am now Mom. Way to drive a stake into my 30-year-old heart, kiddo!