Jon’s birthday was filled with so much joy and excitement that I can’t put it all down into one post. For part 1, I will focus on the “water” portion of our day.

We went to a local amusement park called “Lagoon” on Wednesday. That morning we all slept in a little late so we were really scrambling to get ready in order to get to the park, before noon, with our Coke cans, for the $5 off Early Bird special. So Jon was calling to the kids “Put your swimsuits on and give me the clothes you want to wear after. I’ll put them in this duffel bag.” Ever the responsible parent, he was packing and making sure everything was in order for his birthday outing; a job I should have already done the night before, were I a better spouse. But that’s neither here nor there… Zoe’s swim suit and my swim suit were still very damp from swimming the day before. I laid mine out across the bed to let it air dry a little before we left. Zoe, well, I’m not sure what she did with hers, but she put on shorts and a shirt, and then proceeded to give Jon another set of shorts and a shirt to put in the duffel bag. Needless to say, we got 15 miles up the road before we realized that neither Zoe nor I had a swimsuit. Jon vowed that we would all swim together on his birthday. So we stopped at Ross Dress for Less in Centerville. Zoe and I were told to “tuck and roll”, find two girly swimsuits, and get back to the car pronto so we would still make the Early Bird Special. The boys waited in the car and talked about how silly the girls were to forget their swimsuits on the way to a water park. Zoe and I combed the ghetto racks at Ross for some suitable swim attire. What crap. There was nothing. Number 1, I will not let my five year old wear a bikini. Number 2, I don’t WANT to wear a bikini. And what do you know: bikini’s, bikini’s everywhere. I found one Ariel suit in a size 6, yanked it off the rack and proceeded to tell Zoe how cute it was, and reminded her how much she likes Ariel. She—in actuality—is very neutral to Ariel, but it was the only size 6 one piece in the store. I didn’t care if it had a picture of dogs urinating on hydrants, that’s the suit she was getting. Then we moved on the ladies suits. I had two choices: XXXXL suits that were made for the over 60 crowd (think very LARGE, PINK hibiscus flower prints… the kind of swimsuit you’d want to use as a jimmy-rigged parachute if you were jumping from the 40th floor of a blazing skyscraper), and two racks of bikini’s. Nothing matching, either. Just a row of bottoms and a row of tops. I am imagining Jon in the parking lot laying on the horn, so I find a brown and pink bottom that looks like it just may cover most of my ass, and then searched for a top that also has some brown and pink. I find a top…in a large. People, I am only a medium top on my very best day, usually a small… but never, ever a large. But whatever. I take it, and I grab a white dress/swim cover-up thingy. $54 later, Zoe and I are racing back to the car with our ghetto suits that we will probably only ever wear this one time.

We get to Lagoon in time for Early Bird, we get our locker, get changed, and rent two tubes. We get up to the little height marker posts at the front of the tube ride lines and learn that Zoe is about 2 inches too short to ride any of the tube rides. Poor Zoe. So the boys grab the tubes, yell “sorry” to us over their shoulders, and run for the tube ride lines. Zoe and I look at each other and frown. I remind her that it is Daddy’s birthday and that he needs to have a good time, and that she and I will find something else cool to do for a little while. Well, as it turns out, she wasn’t really tall enough to do anything cool. Except the Lazy River, and we had no tubes in which to ride the Lazy River.

Wow.

So I sucked it in, shoulders back, and thought skinny thoughts. Zoe and I got to the top, and I put Zoe in her tube and she started freaking out a bit. I assured her that it was going to be sooooo much fun. They sent her down first, and then me. I should explain here that this particular slide had a series of short “drops” and then little pools. So you would kind of slide, then a pool, slide, then a pool. Well, at the first “pool”, Zoe’s tube overturned and she went under. She was caught under her tube for a second until I got to her and pulled her up. She completely freaked out. I mean, screaming like she was dying. People just kept coming down behind us on their tubes, and I tried to kind of move us and our tubes out of the way, but there was a current, and it was tough. There was a kid lifeguard there who tried to help me get Zoe back on her tube. Well, there was no friggin way that she was letting anyone put her back on a tube. At this point, the kid said, “Well, do you want to walk her down?” Huh? You can walk down? I suppose it makes some sense. How did this kid-guard get here without actually riding a tube? So he climbs up over the side of the tube and tells me to hand up Zoe to him. There is rotting, rickety, wooden scaffolding all around the slides, and on this rickety scaffolding are some rickety stairs. Really steep, shaking, rickety stairs. Zoe flipped out about have to walk down these stairs. I tried to—calmly—explain to her that there were only two ways down: rickety stairs or on a tube. She chose the stairs.

I now give you this mental image to ponder: me, in a string bikini (a LARGE top, no less), climbing some scaffolding with two inner tubes and a child who is screaming: I’m going to die! I’m going to die!  

I gave up the whole “suck it in, shoulders back” thing right about the time I was lifting my child up to a stranger standing on rickety scaffolding.

Zoe has vowed to “Never ride a tube slide ever again in her whole, entire life. Whole. Entire.”

When I’m done cutting up and burning this damn ghetto bikini I will pause to write Part 2.

I feel like perhaps my son got a bit of a bad rap in yesterday’s post. Sure, he teases the crap out of his little sister. But it’s usually quite harmless. And when I said she “cries”, perhaps I should have, instead, used the word “whines”. Take a closer look at those pictures from yesterday and you will find zero tears.

The following picture shown here was taken approximately 38 seconds after the “puppy dog eyes” picture in the other blog.

She’s fine.

Today is my sweetie’s 34th. Happy Birthday, Love! May your day be filled with rollercoasters and $4 hotdogs! (We’re going to a theme park, people.) You are a good daddy and a cool husband.

I love you!

Boy is bored. Boy teases girl. Girl cries. Boy is happy.

 This is my life. Everyday.

(The following is a question you won’t find on the SAT, but maybe they should put it on there.)

Quick, do the math:

If the public pool opens at 12:30pm, immediately granting entrance to 500 local moms and children, how many gallons of kid-pee and snot are you wading  in by 2:30pm?

I just took a nice loooooooong shower. With bleach.

Serenity is one of THE coolest sci/fi movies of all time, in my book. (If you have not seen the movie, skip this post, because you won’t get it. But for heaven’s sake, go buy the movie ‘cuz it’s awesome.) Originally I found this little quiz on Nathan Fillion’s Myspace page–where, much to my delight, he added me as a friend. Okay, okay, so he has, like, 19,000  30,000 friends. But if you think that’s going to dilute my bliss, you are much mistaken.  In my mind it’s just me and Nathan. Nathan as “Mal”. And we are riding around the universe kickin the butt of injustice. (Yeah, I’m neurotic, what’s it to ya?) So when you have a moment, take the quiz, just for fun, and see which Serenity character you are secretly meant to be. I confess that I was kind of hoping to be “Saffron” so Mal and I could be married. Plus Saffron is just hot. And yeah, I can say that and still remain completely heterosexual because have you seen the girl???

But Zoe is honorable and pretty and tough, and completely monogomous to a cute, hilarious pilot… so I’ll take it. And hey, at least I wasn’t a Reaver.

 Your results:
You are Zoe Washburne (Second-in-command)

Zoe Washburne (Second-in-command) 65% Wash (Ship Pilot) 65% Derrial Book (Shepherd) 65% Malcolm Reynolds (Captain) 55% Kaylee Frye (Ship Mechanic) 55% Dr. Simon Tam (Ship Medic) 50% River (Stowaway) 50% Alliance 50% Inara Serra (Companion) 45% Jayne Cobb (Mercenary) 40% A Reaver (Cannibal) 20%

Dependable and trustworthy. You love your significant other and you are a tough cookie when in a conflict.

Click here to take the Serenity Personality Quiz

 Alas, dear readers, have you abandoned me? When we last spoke, I gave you nothing more than mere computer code drivel and a couple pictures of adorable kittens. I could almost hear you screaming “Get out of here with that weak sauce!” at me, through my monitor. Your lack of commenting spoke volumes, and I deserve it. Leslie, you’re too kind. You don’t have to comment on crap like that, but you did. *sigh* You’re a true friend in blogasphere. And then, as if the n00b kittens thing weren’t enough, I up and disappeared for a couple days without so much as a comment on someone else’s blog. It’s true. I haven’t even turned on my laptop for two days, which is unheard of in this house. Normally the kids are used to seeing mommy wake up, crack open a diet coke, and check her email in the soothing blue glow of the laptop light. Sad.

But so much has been going on in RL! (That’s “real life”.) So much that I don’t think I can get it out there in one post. So in this particular post I will just focus on the fact that we cleaned out the other half of the garage and now BOTH of our cars are in the garage. It’s a miracle. Angels are singing. Birds are singing…they’re singing sad songs, though, because they can no longer crap on Jon’s car while it’s parked in the driveway under the big maple tree. (So take THAT, stupid, crapping birds! In your little, tweeting FACES!) We also gave away the couch that had been sitting in parking stall number 2 for the last… well, since we moved in in October. The girl who ended up taking it was so happy. I felt like Santa. It was time for the couch to move on to some cruddy UVSU student apartment, where barrages of horny teenagers will be making out on it for weekends to come. Poor little couch wasn’t seeing that kind of action sitting in our garage. So I felt giving it away was really a win-win for everyone.  Oh, and also while cleaning out the garage, I found more boxes of long-lost books! Yippee! Now I can finally take down the Christmas themed ‘pine and holly berry” crap that still adorns the long plant shelf over the family room. Seriously. I still have pine and holly berry decorations up and it’s June. But I had nothing else to put up there, until I found four more boxes of books. *ahhh* It’s all coming together so nicely.

Other good things that came out of the garage cleaning: I smushed one big, juicy black widow (one down, 73 to go); we plugged in the extra fridge, which is now the “beverage fridge”. A beverage fridge… how excessive and awesome. I feel like Paris Hilton. Before incarceration.

And yes, the fridge is filled with Diet Coke… and Capri Suns for the under 16 crowd.

I am not computer programming literate. I vaguely remember a little something from 6^th grade “Eco-Com” class (that’d be economics and computers… not sure why those two go together…lack of school funding, perhaps).

I recall something about :

10 You are cool

20 goto 10

run

Or something to that effect. Mostly I remember my friend, Shiloh (who was a computer guy way before his time), as he handed out the 5 1/2″ floppies labeled “Boot up”. He handed them out, one by one, to each kid, from the bottom of the stack in hand, while he palmed a magnet. Ha-larious. Also I remember playing some game called Oregon Trail while in that class. Oh, and I also remember learning the proper way to write a bank check. (That was the “Eco” part of “Eco-Com”.)

Anyway, I am no programmer. I’m still, in fact, trying to get my husband to help me insert some “Adsense” code to my blog so I can start racking up those pennies each month. (Momma needs a new pair of shoes. Really cheap ones. Used, even, perhaps.) But then I read my hubby’s latest post about this new programming language coming out. First I’m thinking, boring. Geek stuff. Scan ahead. But then I notice that it has some kind of cute, funny commands. And then I click on a link and Awwwww, cuuuuuute! Kittens! And not just kittens, but kittens in precarious poses with cute and hilarious captions! Now this, I’m thinking, is a programming language I can really get behind. Presenting: LOLCODE

 Can you haz cheezburger? Yes you can, you cute little rascal. Yes you can! You can have anything you want.

I can’t tell you how much I love this guy. I bought this CD a year or so ago and it disappeared in the move. I’ve been soothing myself by listening to little clips of his songs that are available on his MySpace page. Sad. But I finally broke down and repurchased the CD the other day, and it came today. *sigh* So wonderful.

Your assignment, pupils, is to go out and buy this album, Acoustacism by Kalai–and then immediately fall in love with it as I did. If you don’t love it, please lie to me or remain silent alltogether. My heart couldn’t bear a harsh word about Kalai.

Tracks you must hear: On My Mind, Divide Me

One bio written of Kalai said this (and I would agree): If Dave Mathews, Paul Simon, Ben Harper, James Taylor, John Mayer, Bill Murray (Yes, the comedian.) and Béla Fleck had a baby it would surely be this guy!

This is not my original idea, but when I saw it done over on Notes From The Trenches I thought what an awesome idea! A list of 40 things to do before I turn 40… and the clock’s a tickin.  I made it a page so it would always be right there in front of me, reminding me to get out there and get ’er done. ———> Check it out. It’ll tell you a little more about the kind of person I am, which may or may not be in my best interest for others to know…

Think about writing one of your own.

Enjoy.