This may take awhile...

Hello all - If all goes according to plan, this post will appear first followed by a pile of posts with pictures on them. I've spent hours today and last night getting all these pics downsized and such so I hope you appreciate them. = ) I've been meaning to post for awhile and life has just been crazy. I don't know with what exactly, but it's just been nuts. I take that back, I do know a little why it's been crazy - for one thing, I never ceased to be amazed at how LONG it takes to do ANYTHING. It seems like every time we leave the house, we're gone for at least 3 usually more like 5 or 6 hours. Just for a few stops here and there. Which reminds me, last Thursday I had some errands I needed to do. I really needed to get to a chiropractor and then I wanted to go to the social security off, the license branch, etc. Well, that morning after oversleeping by an hour, I remembered that Lucy was in Dave's car. Oh my stinkin cow!! How am I ever going to get where I needed to go. Well, I'm happy to report that without the aid of Lucy, little miss airhead successfully navigated the city all day long. I was frantically writing directions before I left to get to various places, then I decided that since I was out, I was just going to try to do everything I needed to do. So I went to a gas station and bought a (gasp!) map! And it worked! I mean, I would still a million times rather have Lucy by my side. One of the most frustrating things is that many of the intersections aren't marked and so you have to guess if it's the right turn or not. The other frustrating thing is that you can't read the signs in time to know what lane you need to be in. At one point I was wavering in my decision (aka driving down the middle of 2 lanes) and the jerk behind me started honking. So I picked really fast. And then just a bit later, the car in front of me is weaving all over the road, in one lane, out of another and I could just tell she (or he) was having the same problem I was. And did I honk and violently shake my fist and said driver? No, of course not! I felt such a connection, such a bond, such affinity with that person. I wanted to get out and invite them over for lunch. I smiled to myself, feeling like I wasn't the only struggling motorist on the road.



What else - we had let our laundry situation get way out of hand. Can I just say that doing laundry here is not on my list of things that make me jump with joy? The room is boiling hot, FILTHY, and smells strongly of urine. So anyway, we finally did a bunch of laundry on Saturday and were up until 2 waiting for things to dry. I was SOOOOO frustrated. There was at least one load that we dried twice and it still wasn't dry. Another load that had dried once and wasn't. And we are paying for every load! So after paying, we still have to bring wet clothes in and hang them all over the house. It made me sorta cranky.



Yesterday we came close to getting in a car wreck which would have fallen on the FIRST day of our new policy and the FIRST day in about 5 years that I haven't had comprehensive coverage n my car. How ironic. But as my gramps used to say, a miss is as good as a mile. (he didn't really say that)



I really should be doing many many things right now other than blogging but this has been on my list for ages. So I decided if I don't just do it it will never happen. One of the things I need to be doing is clearing a path for the COUCH we are getting tomorrow! We are greatly excited about that. We have been looking around and there was one that was new that we liked but it was too expensive. Then I looked at it online and it was way cheaper. So we went into the store and it's on sale ending today. And it's cheaper than a lot of the used ones we looked at. So that's a happy little occurrence. I'll try to post a picture once it's more shoveled out.



I'll leave you with one final thought before pictures (if you're still reading and haven't just skipped to the good stuff). Are all guys like this? Maybe just mine. But sometimes it's like he acts like there's a global word shortage so he really needs to conserve them. So the other day we were sitting at the table and these were the words that came flying out of his mouth: "Birthdays! 25, 26, 27! Group of friends! Parents house! PAPA MURPHY'S!! (pizza chain) CARDS!!!!" I just stared at him. Then started laughing. Then asked if complete sentences were out dated. And he said, "Okay, for my 25th, 25th and 27th birthdays, I did the same thing. I had a group of friends over to my parents house and we played cards and ate Papa Murphy's. It was a lot of fun." And I said, ahhhhh, now we have a paragraph. It was very funny, but I'm sure you had to be there. And it reminded me of one of my favorite brother Derek stories. I have laughed about this for the last nearly 20 years. We were at my brother Sheldon's house and Derek was probably 13, 14, just a guess. And some of us were sitting around and he was all excited and says (and it's not nearly as funny if you can't hear the excitement in all the nonsense ... "MOM, downstairs, playing, basement, hockey stick, all of a sudden, BRRRRUMP (can't spell the sound) on my shoulder!!" Oh my, I have bugged him about that for years. I guess he was down there playing hockey and something from somewhere landed on his shoulder. Ahhh good times. Okay, I now leave you with a small gallery of pictures from the last 5 weeks. Wow, it seems more like a year.