Valentine's Date

For Valentine's (technically the day before), I went into the city on Friday to meet Trent after work. We had a delicious dinner at "The Brooklyn Diner" and then went to see "Guys and Dolls" It was AWESOME!

What a turkey!

Now I know where that saying came from. We see wildlife around constantly, but the turkeys always surprise me. Here was one that came waddling through in the middle of a good snow. They are often noisy and a whole group of them came through on Thanksgiving (dumb huh?)

Respectable Snow people

We had our first "respectable" snow. By that I mean it was the first snowfall all year where it was the perfect consistency to roll and make a "respectable" snowman. Even though we have had lots and lots of other snows -- they have been near impossible to make snowmen from. My kids loved rolling the balls to be huge and then telling me to pick them up -- Ha! They were so heavy! My kids were quite dissastified with my strength and lamented that as their limiting factor in their snowmen production! ("If only Mom were stronger, we would have awesome snowmen!")

Putting my kids to work

Many people have asked why on earth I started a little business. Well, here is one of my favorite reasons. My shipping department. Julianne and Catherine get paid a handling fee for wrapping the stamps and affixing the postage and running them out to the post office. They love doing it; they love really earning money; and I love the lessons it teaches them.

The coldest it got

I tried to document the weather by taking pictures of our temperature / clock on a regular basis. This was the coldest morning we had this winter (I am hoping that this kind of weather is long behind us!). The crazy thing is that when it is this cold how much it affects the indoor temperature too. Our indoor guage is not right by a heating vent so even thought the heater is set at 68 degrees -- if you move too far away from the vent it is bound to get significantly colder.

Just what am I thinking . . .

Here goes

• I am back in business. My computer is back and it seemed that the whole time it was gone I thought the most amazing thoughts that would have made amazing posts and now that it is back, my mind is a blank canvas.
• Please, please everyone stop reading and take a moment to back up your precious data on your computer. I got my computer back with a new motherboard and new hard drive. I (of course) had all my photos, documents, and music backed up. I knew there was a chance they would lose everything. Here are the things I forgot about. . . my Microsoft money software (I downloaded it online and don't have hard copies -- i have the data now, but not the program), FONTS -- all my favorite fonts I have downloaded over the years that used in my stamp designs are gone and I cannot remember their names
• I found the coolest program online to help you identify fonts identifont.com I was able to find and download all my missing fonts by just answering a few questions about each one. It would then give me a list of possibilities and I could usually recognize the name when I had only a few to choose from
• I found a program I like better than microsoft money mint.com I can never lose the program or the data -- I can see it from anywhere -- it is user friendly and very cool to look at -- it does have one drawback -- you cannot (yet) include transactions that are not cleared but the help section said it is coming
• Is it just me or does anyone else think that nearly all of our economies woes can be simplified into 1 word FRAUD? I am shocked at the magnitude of fraud reported on everyday. . . in short all our growth over the last 10 years was based on money borrowed against lies and robbing peter to pay paul and now we are paying the piper. It is a sad statement of everyone's greed and the idea that such things are victimless. Well, it is not. The average person is being robbed three times. First, they have been robbed by the companies they invested in when the company chooses to pay exorbitant salaries and bonuses instead of investing the money into the future of the company. Each massive salary payment, extravagent party, or unreal bonus lessens the value of the company and robs the shareholder by reducing the value of the company. Second, they are robbed when the company goes bankrupt, the stock price drops and the investment becomes worthless. and third now the same person will bail out the company through their taxes thanks to the government bailout. No victims????? I think it is time we all realize we have all been victims over and over.

. . . still no computer

but at least it is the weekend and I have Trent's to use (as long as I can get him to stop working on it)

First, the blogging class was kind of crazy . . . we covered lots and lots of topics but so quickly I am not sure anyone could repeat them all at home -- I had a outline ready, but there were so many questions which led to so many questions and so on . . . I hope it helped. We covered the topic of feed readers (which I love to help me read blogs) and so as everyone was setting up theirs, they wanted to see if it was working. That meant someone had to post something new on their blog. So I quickly had everyone subscribe to my blog and then I posted a ridiculous post -- called just for ember (the other lady helping me do the class) to see if her feed reader was working. I fully intended to delete that post, but quickly forgot and then of course have not had a computer to use until now -- so I have not lost my mind -- the post was never intended to do anything except see if the feed reader was working for others.

Second, I really miss chick-fil-a. Tonight we were babysitting 2 little girls so their parents could have a night in the city with friends I figured I would make the kid friendly "chicken nuggets". But I gotta tell you -- with no fast food places within 20 minutes, and the fact that I hate most frozen chicken nuggets, I decided to look up the recipe for chick-fil-a chicken nuggets and make them myself. They were really good -- not quite as sweet as the real thing, but when you haven't had them in so long -- they were PERFECT. The kids devoured them too.

here is the recipe

1 cup flour
1 1/2 cups cracker powder (i took a bunch of saltines and blended them up)
2 tsp McKormick season all (i didn't have that so I used lawry's season salt)
1/4 tsp paprika

also the recipe stated that you should cube the chicken and soak it for 12 hours in 2 cups of cold water and 2 cubes of chicken boullion and 1/4 tsp of that same season salt which I did not have -- BUT that would have required planning ahead by more than 1 hour which I rarely do -- so even without doing that part they were still great -- and they might have tasted exactly the same as the real one if I had had exactly the same ingredients -- but my life is never exactly anything so oh well.

third, I put the 2 little girls to bed in the guest room. I had to lay with them for about 20 minutes. They finally fell asleep about 9:15. I head upstairs where Trent has been busy putting our kids to bed. This is the scene I found. All four kids on our bed with Trent. Superman Returns is on TV and all four kids are wide awake. . . and Trent is sound asleep. Do you think they might be working him a little too hard at good ole EY?

fourth, I SERIOUSLY MISS MY COMPUTER. I am in severe, severe, severe, withdrawal. Do you know how many times a day I think -- Oh, I'll just go google that -- or let me check their web page, or ???? It has not been shipped back yet -- that is the most info I can get off the status check. The estimated arrival date is feb 10 -- and that is 3 whole days away. I hope I make it.

fifth, I SERIOUSLY am so sick of winter. If you were to come here to CT you should be able to see a lot of people whose pants are on fire. You know, all the ones who told us about the mild winters and rare snowfall. They were so wrong. We have had 2 snow days, 1 early dismissal, and 3 delay starts. We have piles of snow where the snow plow clears the driveway that are as tall as me. What is worse is how everyone else in the world seems to be moving toward spring (all our houston friends and family are out washing cars in bathing suits and complaining about the heat -- and even our Utah family let us know that despite their snow, their tulips are budding.) I even planted tulips. And I went out to check on them. I can't even find them under all the snow.

sixth, I can't think of anything else -- so good night!