Stealth trip to the stomping grounds

I made a stealth trip to my old stomping grounds last weekend to do a Pampered Chef party at one of my oldest friends' parents house in the nearby town of Freetown. I didn't even bring the kids, or tell mom (it wasn't personal- I'll be back in a few weeks!) because the trip was going to be so quick Because it's a long enough drive I didn't want to do there and back in one day I surprised my nephews and watched them for my sis in exchange for free room and board for the night. Her friend stopped by and kept me company and when the sis got home we hung out til 1 or so playing goofy ringtones on our phones and relaxing. The next morning I talked my sis into going for a walk because it looked gorgeous out and I wanted to take pictures before I left just after lunch. Come to find out, the wind chill was brutal, so I took only 2 early in on our trek, and we looped around by my old school onto the main drag and back to the house where we promptly blew our noses because neither of us thought to bring tissues.. Team Blonde FTW! Anyway, here are a few pictures from my stay. They were all taken with my phone.

The view I saw every ding dong day growing up. It's also the view my mom still sees.

Do you see how the ocean has ICE? yeah it was *that* cold. Also when I was a kid I got a rash from swimming here

Showing my nephew a fun feature of my phone! moving photos!

We were practicing his math, and I taught him some old  "pager-talk" like: 07734 flip it upside down and it says "hello" he thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread

BIL and I played a game with the kids.  I think B was thinking here!

This was funny. J had the bright idea to "butt brawl" . You can't tell but they were  hitting each other with their butts

here they are being cute :)

Boy am I glad that's over with

And by that I mean "The Holidays" which means the holiday Trifecta from Hell: Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years. ::breathe::

Thanksgiving is normally my most favorite holiday. In my youth we used to travel an hour to my grandmother's where, depending on if it was the year the alternating branches of the clan were there or not, we would all get together (sometimes 25+ people I think) and hang out and the cousins would go run amok and play and have a grand ol' time while the adults did... something.... and we had and prayed for  Eddie Jones to have the bones, because he don't eat no meat, said what we were thankful for and dug in to a glorious meal. My favorite part was the dish of little onions, and EVERYONE was sent home with leftovers.  For the last several years we haven't been able to get together with my half the family for Thanksgiving even though the goal is to do the every other year thing. Our rotation got off and we haven't been able to get it back for one reason or another.

Our tree just after Santa delivered. He says Hi.

This year we thought, for a change, we'd offer to host Thanksgiving at our house. Normally when we spend the holidays with the hubster's side we go to his aunt and uncles with his parents, grandparents and a cousin (the aunt and uncle's son and gf who are in the area). It's usually a pleasant time, but seeing as how I make my own turkey dinner anyway as a result of not being able to take leftovers we thought the change would be welcomed. Well when we invited people, no one wanted to come :( and so I made turkey dinner just for us. For my two kids and husband turkey dinner is not a favorite meal, so they didn't really eat much of it. I got all the leftovers I needed to keep the yummy part of the day lingering for several more, but the day was unsatisfying without the extended family. So my Thanksgiving was pretty "meh" and put me in this weird funk where I didn't really care about upcoming Christmas and decorating, or anything really family oriented. This has never really happened before. 

Christmas break was good. I went into work a couple days, and thanks to university negotiations with the holiday schedule, I now get the 2 work days prior to New Year's off (instead of Evacuation & Bunker Hill Day) . I ended up working on Friday but not Monday or Tuesday and ended up with a 4-day weekend!

auto setting with flash

With my money I earned from Pamered Chef I went out and bought myself the new phone I have been wanting! yay! Aaaaaaaand. I love it. One thing that is awesome is that the touch screen works wearing gloves (yahoo!) and the camera just rocks. The the left you will see 2 photos. They were taken about 9pm at night back to back looking at the same thing. the bottom picture was taken in it's "night" setting and the the top was taken using just the flash on auto. 

This phone really touted the low light picture taking functionalitly and dog-nab it, it works wonderfully. And boy oh boy did I miss that little camera button on the side of the phone. Having to tap the screen to take a picture sucks donkey balls. I don't ever want to have to do that again. 

Night Setting!

I took the kiddos sledding and had a grand ol' time on the hill at the kids' former preschool. We also went one day to the town's favorite sledding area near the hospital and I will never take them there again! It was chaos city.

Growing up we had some pretty basic common sense rules for sledding:

1. Wait until the person at the bottom of the path moves out of the way before heading down,

2. Don't walk up the path to return to the top, walk off to the side

and a couple others which were applied based on the path used for sledding: 

3. If your path exits you into the street do not sled without a minimum 2 spotters at the bottom of the hill to check for traffic,

4. roll off the sled before you crash into the tree

sledding at the preschool!

While rules 3 &4 didn't apply here, rules 1&2 certainly did, and NO ONE was following them. I was freaking. out. The hill was high and steep (it was an old toboggan run that used to have a different path to get to the top, no longer in use), the snow was as hard and slippery as a sheet of ice, and there were a ton of people. There is also a bunny slope off the parking area where Liam was going down on the neighbors slow sled. He was fine. 

People were flying down this hill without a care in the world. Everyone was returning to the top walking in the path of the other sledders. big adult types were way at the tippy top waiting for the path to clear "enough" so they can zip down without "hopefully" wiping anyone out on the way down. I watched one teen head down from one of the mid point launch areas and wipe out an adult man and is 2-3 year old child. They were stupidly just standing there in the middle of the sledding area and then the teen didn't even go and apologize to the guy and instead ran off to mommy who was sitting in her car and wasn't watching watching.. all sorts of effed-upness going on here and I was NOT happy about it. we left shortly after and heading to the preschool for a few until we realized the temps dropped and we were soooo cold... On the way back from that sledding trip I told them that I would never take them there again because it was too dangerous and I was really anxious about it because someone is going to get seriously injured there. They said okay without a fight. I think they thought it was scary too.

Now that it's a new year and the Holidaze are long gone, I can get back to normal. yay! My hope is that in the next month I can get my mother her belated birthday present that is now just about 2 months overdue. *sigh*

Heeey Geeky laaa-day!

So for the last few months my inner geek has been going crazy loving all this stuff that I had forgotten that I really enjoyed. I have added some new links in my reading list as it is often where you can assume I'm occupying my straying mind when it's not working. The hubster has been trying to get me into Doctor Who the past oh... 10+ years and I've resisted, until this season, and the consensus is that I really like it. I did watch  some of the previous doctor also and thought, well this is weird.. but it grew on me and is just pretty damn cool.

I have been more active on Twitter, which I have found to be quite enjoyable! There is a button on the right side of your screen if you want to follow me. I follow a bunch of celebrities, and famous geeky people. Mostly I retweet awesome things hey share but sometimes I come up with my own things.


I have been wasting time watching YouTube, specially on channels such as Geek and Sundry and The Nerdist. There is some seriously funny shit there, people. Felicia Day (@feliciaday), Wil Wheaton (@wilw), and Chris Hardwick (@nerdist). Need I say more? The Guild, TableTop, All-Star Celebrity Bowling are just some of these guys current work, and some of my favorite ways to waste spend time. They do a TON of other stuff too, but I only wanted to share a few things.

(subscribe to Geek and Sundry here)

Make everything cute OR creepy!

My favorite shopping website to browse is Think Geek and recently I have discovered Archie McPhee where you too, can purchase your very own VandalEyes starter kit. Where if you need some ideas go to VandalEyes.net. This is an activity made famous by Anne Wheaton, (Wil's wife) and I am thinking I may need to start participating, but it's hard to find stick on eyes and then this happened.... so.. it might happen..

I've been really into techy news lately and thought the other day my next job could be some company's social media maven.. These positions do exist- I just need to find one

so much awesome in one day is awesome

So first THIS happened:




do you see ME?! I'm there, and I get to talk with one of my favorite authors and it was AWESOME!

And then while that was happening, I had a tweet get retweeteed on Twitter by Jenny Lawson... which is just awesome. Because she is also famous.. maybe not to most, but she is to me.. and I am just all excited now!

 

It's your birthday?! here! have a broken arm!

Friday... could've been better. Liam and I raced off to North Adams (a 1.5 hr drive) to rescue some friends whose car died 2 days prior (as in the water pump exploded and bore a 1/2 inch whole in the engine where it is) because it was the closest hospital that accepted their insurance to pull out my friend's husbands' teeth- got them all taken out. poor guy :(

so I'm on my way, and I get a call from my friend where Evan was supposed to be sepnding the night because it was Evan's friends birthday party. He hurt his arm. CRAP. And he is screaming bloody murder. The boys were playing and Ev tripped and fell and landed poorly on his arm. awesome. We didn't know it was broken at this point. I tell her Jason is on his way home from the eye doctor which was running late, and he will be there in a few minutes. Evan insists that Jason take him straight to the ER.. I get a call some time later on my ride home with my rides that he broke his arm. *sigh* 

Here are pictures from the last few days. The first one is from Weds, I think, after he got his first birthday present, in the mail, from his Gram. Right now it's happily residing among the clutter on the coffee table. Then we have a couple from the ER while the X-Ray technician was trying to get an xray.   oh! and a picture of initial plaster cast.And we have a couple from the party on Sunday when Evan was still in a good mood. and the final in the series was taken today, just a little bit ago. I finally got him to put a shirt on normally AND he is now able to handle the XBOX controller on his own!! yay!

Santa talk...

As posted by my husband at http://altonfreth.wordpress.com/

So my wife and I decided it was time to have the Santa talk with the nine year old because he had been hinting that he doesn’t believe anymore. So on our way to Staples I decides was time. Here is how the conversation went.

Dad: so what do you think about Santa?
Boy: He’s real.
Dad: Even though your friends told you he isn’t?
Boy: yup
Dad: what if I told you he isn’t?
Boy:  I would still believe.
Dad: why?
Boy: because my presents always say from Santa.
Dad: what if I told you that mom and dad just write that?
Boy: well, the presents are still wrapped in Santa’s special wrapping paper. It has his picture on it.
Dad: what if I told you mom and dad buy that too?
Boy:  Well there is still the video on the computer.
Dad: what if I said that was mom and dad too.
Boy: I would still believe.
We enter staples and he sits down.
Dad: So let me get this straight. I am telling you there is no Santa, but you will still get presents and you are saying that you don’t care what I say, you still believe?
Boy: yup
Dad: and your not upset?
Boy: nope.

We then discussed what Santa means and why parents pretend he is real and he is now playing with friends like we just talked about his homework. I was expecting tears or the "no crap, dad I knew that a long time ago. "This was one of the strangest conversations I have ever had with my son. I was afraid to upset him but I guess there was no need to worry

Timey Wimey & Robots

Here we are at the Downtown Trick or Treat last night. We had a pretty good time! Can you guess the costumes? My attempt is quite poor, but if you get Evan, you can use the power of deduction to figure out my costume. The people that got Evan's were very pleased, but he did have to explain it a few times. Every seemed to love Liam's outfit (yay!) Lots of work went into it Mon and Tues night. No better way to spend a hurricane, than to make a costume, right?

A key piece to Evan's costume was held up in shipping due to the storm. Thankfully it arrived at noon on Halloween so there were no meltdowns! At the end of the downtown event they do a rag shag parade and costume contest. The kids didn't want to do the parade and Liam didn't want to compete (rats!) I bet he had a good chance in winning too. Trick or treater volume at the house was light too, probably because the downtown thing was on the same night, normally it's not.. But that's cool because now I have my own pot of candy to munch. nom nom nom....