Tell You [a] Little Story

Today, we paid off the student loan in full and I made quinoa. I think both are cause for celebration. Also, I'm white-spacing out the goose. Be dead, already!

It's always a special treat at church when we get to sing "Go Tell Aunt Rhodie." You know: Go tell Aunt Rhodie, go tell Rhodie, go tell Aunt Rhodie the old grey goose is dead. Always with that song, it's grey with an e, even though I just googled the lyrics (dark lyrics, them) and it had gray with an a. It's not a terribly popular hymn , so when on that special occasion we do get to sing it, and always at the end of the meeting, I get really excited and want to do like I did when I was a child, and look around the congregation to see if anyone else thinks it's funny that we're singing "Go Tell Aunt Rhodie." Nobody ever seems to think it's funny, but oh! how it makes my day. It reminds me of that time when someone had recorded two movies from the tv onto the same video tape and, every day for an entire summer , Neil and I and probably Abby and sometimes Sarah, but probably not Ryan would watch (edited for tv) Ferris Bueller's Day Off foll

This weekend, 1. I danced the Hokey Pokey with a room full of sober adults. 2. Steve is retiring his signature back handspring. 3. A giant rugburn wound adorns my husband's forehead. These three things have everything to do with each other.

States I've been to and have distinct memories from: States I've probably been to, especially since I was supposedly born in one of them, but I do not recall being there: State in which we spent $50 tonight to take the family to Nanny McPhee: State where every house is worth a million dollars according to zillow.com :

We have had some super experiences with valet parking. A few years ago, we were at Amy June's wedding luncheon in southern California at a restaurant with complimentary and mandatory valet parking. We had driven our really nice car to California: our 1990 Chevy Lumina Euro that we had inherited from Steve's grandpa and which had sat in a field in Canada for a year and a half, with its window down. It may have been the only rusted-all-over car in the entire state of Arizona, but oh! was it reliable. When we got the vehicle, it was like 11 years old and had only 20,000 kilometers on it. It seriously had no mechanical problems and since Steve and I are not all that into appearances, we drove it everywhere. Maybe not proudly, but we weren't too embarrassed. After all, it was a free car that ran perfectly! So we drove that car to California for Amy's wedding, leaving our much-newer-but-much-less-reliable lemon of a car at home. Alright, so maybe it was a little embarrassin

My son has a pretty bad rash on his arms, so, in trying to think what could have caused it, I remembered that a few days ago he was in the front yard, pulling leaves off of bushes and trying to make a bird's nest with them. Then I remembered that some of the plants in our front yard are poisonous, so I went directly online to see if touching oleanders=rash on skin. And what did I find out about that oleander shrub? "All of its parts are very poisonous. For example, one leaf is enough to cause death." "The characteristic poisoning symptoms are as follows: nausea, vomiting, accelerated or retarded heartbeat, and cardiac arrest." "So powerful is this poison that a single leaf of an oleander can kill a child. And, many people have died merely from eating steaks speared on oleander twigs and roasted over a fire." "TOXICITY RATING: High. Ingestion of even small amounts can kill." Oh. My. Gosh. Why has nobody told me this before? That plant is so o

My husband tells me I go through stages. For awhile I was addicted to Yahoo computer games. Then, I was a sucker for watching Starting Over every day. After that phase passed (and thank goodness) I had a brief love affair with family history. You get the idea. Blogs have been my diversion of choice lately, but...Blogging Is Starting To Bore Me. Thus, I've had nothing interesting to say lately. I haven't even read many of all the fun blogs out there that I used to be so hooked on. I am nothing if not a creature of change. So, I'm metamorphosing. I may come back in full force, but I may also take up knitting or quilting or Family Feud or some other temporary obsession. I'll let you know what happens.