It's Here

At the rate I have been blogging, you should probably not read this all at once. Maybe you want to pick a paragraph per day for sustained reading enjoyment. Maybe someday I'll get dedicated enough to just cut and paste a portion so I post each day. But until that time...

It's here! Today finally came! No, not the middle school band concert, although I'm sure that will be swell, too. 24 Season 6! Netflix has it all queued up and it should arrive in my mailbox today! See, once we started, we couldn't stop. And then that fateful day came when we had seen them all. We did not appreciate that we should have been TIVOing last season to save for later. So it's all new to us. DON'T TELL US WHAT HAPPENS!!!! Drew is psyched, too. We figure that we'll be finished well before Christmas. Two blissful weeks on the couch watching the bodies fall. Umm... 24... (Said with my best Homer Simpson impersonation.) Can't wait until the band concert is over so I can start watching! I'll try my best not to watch all by myself this afternoon and then sit through it with Drew and Andy pretending that I don't know what is going to happen.

In other news... Last weekend ended up being very quiet and enjoyable. We had a little ice on Saturday and rain on Sunday so we stayed home. We decorated Friday, except for the tree. That is because the tree is about as available as our Christmas cards - which is not at all. We made cut out Christmas cookies on Saturday. I was reminded that there is an inverse relationship between the age of the baker and the amount of sprinkles applied to a cookie. Sunday the kids munched cookies and drank hot chocolate by the fire while watching The Polar Express. We won't tell them that it was 57*. By the time the movie ended the front had passed through and it was 39*.

This weekend I made the worst culinary mistake of my life. Thankfully, it was nothing life threatening. I'm not a very good cook. I'm impatient and get in trouble when I try to speed up the process. Grilled sandwiches almost always involve scraping the blackened bread crumbs into the sink before serving them anyway. (In my defense, it is easier to use a smaller frying pan then to try to get the griddle to a consistent temperature across 2 burners.) So I was quite smug about the state of the grilled cheese that I was making for Andy on Sunday. It was heating slowly and turning a nice golden brown. He stepped in to check on the sandwich. He's been around for a long time now so he knows to be wary. When he lifted it to inspect the bottom, he came away with just the top slice of bread. How does this happen when melted cheese is sticky? Well, when you don't put the cheese on the sandwich. And yes, it was just a straight grilled cheese. It's not like I forgot one ingredient of many. I made a sandwich that consisted of just bread. You would think someone would be motivated enough to step up and take over the culinary responsibilities. But no.

Sunday afternoon we watched the Giants. Wow, they are hard to watch. Painful! With 7 minutes left in the game, Drew asked if he had to ride the bus on Monday. (Lots of Bear fans in this neck of the woods.) Luckily it all turned out OK. Off they went on the bus donning all their Giants gear. However, ALL the Bears fans are CERTAIN that the last touchdown pass hit the ground.

Toward the end of last week I got inspired to rearrange the furniture. I pondered it all weekend and had to move things yesterday. It wasn't a one room operation. I shuffled the office, living room and family room. It also involved swapping out some items for other treasures in the basement. Note to self: Move heavy furniture when there is someone to help who is older and stronger than an almost 3 year old. Any idea how heavy a 4 1/2 foot upright piano is? Me either, but dang heavy is my answer. Heavier than anyone should attempt to move by herself. I could feel the stiffness setting in before the kids got home from school. However, I'm happy with the results. The office is more office like. The piano is in the living room. I traded the seating in the family room and living room. (I did wait to move the large couches until Andy got home because one of them needs to be turned on it's side to fit through the doorway. Now I want to paint. We haven't done that in the 2 1/2 years we've been here. I like the yellow that we moved into but who uses flat paint!? Yes, I like the look but I have 4 kids. They think about the walls and it leaves dirt. They look at the walls and it leaves dirt. They walk past the walls and it leaves dirt. They don't even notice the walls and it leaves dirt. Every piece of furniture that brushes against the walls leaves dirt. And when you scrub it, the paint rubs off but you can still see the dirt. But painting is for another day. I don't think I could lift a paint brush over my head today and the living room and dining room are like 12 feet high. I'll post pictures when I finish.