My So Called Life

Birthday 4.1

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Since it is difficult to coordinate everybody getting together for Evie’s birthday, this year we decided to split it up. So we celebrated Evie’s birthday on Saturday with Sara’s family.

I have to say, the day was about perfect. I don’t know if Evie would agree, but I think she got exactly the right amount (and right type) of presents! Just a handful of homemade and re-used gifts, and yet, probably some of the best gifts she’s ever gotten.

I hadn’t gotten wind of the fact that Anna was making anything for Evie, so I was quite surprised when she showed up with the most amazing doll I’ve ever seen. It’s perfect! You would never guess it is homemade, but you would definitely know it was handmade, by the quality if nothing else. It is a mermaid, which is perfect, because Evie has a long obsession with the Little Mermaid (the doll was named Ariel immediately) and yet she doesn’t have any other mermaid stuff. Also, Anna customized it with eyes to match Evie’s. It’s so nice that I’m kind of worried about her playing with it. On one hand, what’s the point if she doesn’t get to play with it, on the other hand, it’s the kind of thing you keep and give to your children, and I don’t want it destroyed. So Anna, I think you really hit a home run with that one, so I’ll thank you more thoroughly than an almost-four-year-old can!

And that wasn’t even the only homemade gift. Barb made clothes for both Evie and Oliver, with matching owl pattern. Evie’s dress is cute, but in my opinion, Oliver’s shirt stole the show. It was reminiscent of the tie shirt, except in the shape of an owl, with button eyes. It is adorable. Both Evie and Oliver really liked the clothes, and we couldn’t get them to take them off (not even Oliver, who was wearing a long-sleeve, black shirt in 90 degree weather).

And while I’m on the topic, Barb, I never really got to thank you properly for Oliver’s handmade lion, the way I did for the mermaid above. So hopefully the fact that he sleeps with it every night will demonstrate the proper appreciation! We are very lucky to have crafty family on both sides, and I’d like to think that our recent “gift mandates” have really inspired people to new artistic heights. I can’t even tell you how much we’d rather have one high-quality, homemade doll, then 1,000 factory made, licensed characters.

For our part, we wanted to get her a “big girl” bike, with actual peddles. She was doing so well with the balance bike, that we thought she would be able to ride a regular bike, with no training wheels, no problem. We had planned to buy a new bike, but then we saw and advertisement for a bike that someone was giving away for free. The bike was very used (the lady had gotten it used from someone else, even before her two daughters had used it) and my consumer-culture background made me feel bad for a second about that. However, we definitely made the right decision: Evie couldn’t have cared less, and even insists that the places where the paint has rubbed off were intentionally painted to look like that.

So we got the bike for free, but it needed a little work. In particular, both tires were flat. We bought two new intertubes, and I changed them myself. It was a lot harder than I was anticipating. Don’t you hate when you spend a really long time working on something, only to have it blow up in your face? Literally, in this case, and it took me a few hours to get the hearing back in my right ear. Somehow, when I was inflating it, the tube ruptured with enough force to blow a hole through the thin tires (and it was only inflated to just over half of the recommended psi).

So we ended up taking the bike to a repair shop and getting new tires, and another intertube. All told, we spent about $50 for our “free” bike. At first I felt silly for spending that much on a pretty used and abused bike, when I could have gotten a new one for not a whole lot more. But on the other hand, we did save *some* money, and more importantly, there’s one less bike in the world, and one less piece of junk to end up in a landfill.

As documented, it took Evie about an hour to become a peddle-bike pro.

Evie had very specific requests for her birthday lunch. She wanted, “fruit salad with mangoes, strawberries, and blueberries”, “the apple muffins like Grandma Kathy makes”, “kale chips”, and “chocolate cupcakes with pink frosting and red sprinkles”. This seemed pretty reasonable, so we obliged her. With all the goings on, we didn’t have much time to prepare supper, but both she and Oliver enjoyed our impromptu picnic in the winter garden on the Midway.

All in all, a good birthday weekend for the little miss. She worked it to her full advantage. She got us to sing Happy Birthday to her multiple times, convinced Aunt Anna to take her to the park at 6:10 a.m., and showed off her bike riding skills to everybody she could find. At one point she interrupted a bike-tour-guide’s speech by riding through the middle of the tour singing, “Look at me! Look at me!” She’s all moxie, that one.

Tommy Tutone can save you money

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Sometimes you run into the grocery store and you don’t have your little “money saver” card with you. Or maybe you’re on vacation and you hate to not get the sale price, but you’re not going to sign up for a store card to place you’ll never be again. Well, in that case, just remember Jenny.

In most stores they can look you up by your phone number. So make like Tommy Tutone and use 867-5309. It works every time, because some other ’80’s loser signed up with that number to avoid giving their real phone number. And you’re definitely not going to forget that number. If you think you will, go watch that video a couple more times. It will be burned in your brain forever.

Link via Sara.

Garden, 2011 Style

/ Shane / 1 Comment

I realize I have been slightly remiss in my garden posts this year. I mentioned what we had planted, but haven’t given any updates on how things are going. (Thanks for reminding me, Alexis!)

We’re midway through the growing season, and its going pretty well. So far, we have had a good crop of strawberries, lettuce, and our eternal chive plant.

As we expected, year 2 of the strawberries was much more productive than year 1. We got somewhere around 100 strawberries, and it seemed like we never failed to find more every time we went over there. Unfortunately, the ants also learned of our wonderful strawberry bounty, so we had some stiff competition for those berries. It’s actually kind of interesting; the ants locate a ripe berry and then mound up dirt all around it and sort of suck it into their home, whole. It seemed like it was going to be disastrous, but actually, the ants didn’t really get all that many berries. So we didn’t really do anything to try to control them, but it worked out okay. Maybe next year we might put some straw down so they can’t suck the berries underground. Overall, it was a very successful crop!

A few years ago we planted lettuce, and we had more than we could ever possibly use. This year is the same, however, we have one major improvement: no slugs! Our last lettuce was so sluggy, that it discouraged us from planting lettuce after that. However, this year is totally different. I don’t know why that is exactly, but there are a number of things that are different: we’re in a different location now (the other lettuce was at the old garden), we’re picking more in the heat of the day, rather than dawn or dusk, we have a different variety of lettuce, and it’s just simply a different year. The year we had the slugs really bad we had heard that everybody was having a slug problem. Maybe it was just a little more damp, who knows. Anyway, this year’s crop of lettuce has been amazingly successful, and we’ve been chowing down on some awesome salads.

Our other plants are looking good. Our tomato plants are growing out of control, and our peppers and eggplant look like they’re going to do well. Unfortunately, we did lose one tomato plant (that Mortgage Lifter I was so excited about). I’m not really sure what happened there, it just never took off. Maybe we didn’t water it enough right after we planted it. I think we were gone for a few days around that time.

We hadn’t gotten around to planting the pole beans, even though we had the poles in place for them to climb. We lost the seeds somewhere and never did find them. Finally we bought some new seeds and planted them. We were worried we were planting them late, so we used my grandma’s trick of soaking them for a few days first to get them to sprout before planting them. They are just coming up now, so hopefully we weren’t too late on that.

The only thing that didn’t grow were the sunflower seeds we planted all over the place by the train tracks and the fence in the back. We figured it would be a cheap way to spruce the whole place up. We planted two packets of seeds worth, and I don’t think a single one came up. Certainly plenty of other enormous weeds came up, so it’s not like the area is infertile. I don’t know what happened there, but it doesn’t look any worse than it did before, so I guess we’re not out much.

So, with the exception of the sunflowers and one tomato plant, everything is going well!

(By the way, I know a garden post is a little lame without pictures, but I don’t actually have any! The garden pretty much looks the same as it has the past few years, so it’s not exactly inspiring me to take pictures. I could have gone over and taken some for the post, but it just didn’t get done in time. Sorry! Maybe I’ll post some later.)

3 Things I used to think

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  1. I used to think my dad was the WWF world wrestling champion.

    My dad told me that when he was in high school, he was the state champion. All I heard was “wrestling champion”. I thought that he beat Hulk Hogan AND Andre the Giant, and I told all my friends so. How else could you be a wrestling champion, if you never wrestled Hulk Hogan?

  2. I used to think my dad knew everybody in the world.

    I guess every little kid thinks things like that about their parents, but then again, my dad talks to anybody like he’s know them for 100 years. He would go in to buy milk and come back with the life story of everyone in the store. He still does this now; if anything, it’s worse. So after the 50th time or so you see some random person walking around and your dad just happens to know that his wife died 4 years ago and his oldest kid lives in Texas, where he runs a successful underwater basket weaving business, you have to either accept the fact that he knows everybody, or you have to acknowledge that he’s psychic. He’s not though, he gets his information the old fashion way: by talking your ear off. (Something I would never do, for the record)

  3. I used to think I knew all there was to know about fashion.

    I’ll wait for anybody who knows me to stop laughing. I remember being about 5 and giving my dad a lesson on how to look cool: Step one, you pick out socks with colored bands on top that matched your shorts. Step two, you pulled them up as high as they could go. Step three, walk around like the coolest cat in the neighborhood. Actually, that look probably was pretty cool in the ’80’s, so maybe I *did* know all there was to know about fashion back then. That would certainly have been the last time.

Holiday Weekend Wrapup

/ Shane / 3 Comments

First off, happy belated 4th of July to everyone, and happy belated anniversary to Sara and I!

We continued the tradition we started last year, and headed up to Michigan for the 4th. We again stayed at Lisa and Orlan’s house, and Evie again had the time of her life. Sara and I had a good time too, but there’s something about watching your kid have a great time that just makes it impossible for you to not enjoy yourself. Evie loves playing with Kaycee, who never seems to get tired of playing with her (I hope…and if not, sorry Kaycee!). Randi, on the other hand, has to do practically nothing to gain her adoration.

Oliver was sort of terrified, sort of curious about their dogs. I would say he wasn’t as terrified as Evie used to be about them, because whenever they weren’t looking at him, he wanted to go investigate and keep an eye on them. So he was very interested in them. But if they showed an interest in him, he would run screaming and sobbing, as absolutely terrified as anybody could ever be about anything. 10 seconds later the dogs would be off somewhere else, and he’d be begging to get down again.

Evie warmed up to the dogs quite a bit. The turning point was after she got out of the pool and was shivering cold; “The dogs have very warm tongues!” After that she seemed to have no problem with the dogs at all, and she was only really scared of them when Oliver was getting a lot of attention for being scared of them. She even mentioned on the way home that she likes their warm tongues. This is a complete 180 reversal from her previous stance on dogs, which was that she wants no smooches from them under any circumstances.

We ended up at the lake both Sunday and Monday, which worked out good because there wouldn’t have been enough time on Monday alone to satisfy all of Evie’s lake demands. She had such a great time! We couldn’t keep her off the lake: if she wasn’t in the boat, she was on a tube. If she wasn’t on a tube, she was swimming in the water. This is all fairly surprising, since she freaks out if any water gets on her face or head (especially ears!). So I’m kind of impressed that she enjoyed the water so much.

Oliver thinks the boat is a magical sleeping machine. 3 rides on the boat, 3 naps. Every time, he was out almost as soon as we pulled away from the dock. He was sort of obsessed with the lake, and keeping him from running over and diving in was sort of a full time job. He did take some breaks to play in the wading pool, where he mostly enjoyed watching the water drip out of his swimming trunks.

Evie also insisted that Aunt Pat take her for a ride on the “other boat” (a.k.a. the wave runner). She enjoyed that just as much, taking the driver’s seat. She has no problem being in charge of driving either of the boats. The only mishap was that one time her hat blew off into the lake, but they were able to retrieve it before it sunk.

We spent a lot of time “tubing”, or foolishly being whipped around at high speeds behind a boat on a flimsy inter tube. Evie thought it was the best thing ever, even though the boat was going as slow as it was physically able to go while she was on there. Even Sara went, which really surprised me. That was probably the highlight of the weekend for me. It seemed somewhat out of character, but she was grinning her head in two the entire time, and it seemed like she was really enjoying herself. That makes me happy. 🙂

As for myself, I tried tubing as well. What I learned was that tubing is not for whiners. Well, guess what? It’s my blog and I can whine about whatever I want to. Tubing is harrrrrd! My arms huuuurt!

Look, in my defense, even though I wouldn’t consider myself old, I was at least twice as old as anybody who was out there tubing with me, and probably weigh twice as much as well. My arms are definitely not used to hauling that kind of weight around!

I was on the side of a 3 person tube, and I felt like I was practically falling off the tube to begin with. When we got out there and really started whipping around in the chop, I was holding myself on with sheer arm strength (what precious little I have) and will power. I can’t even count the number of times I thought to myself, “Oh, man, that’s it, I’m going off!” but I never did. At one point, towards the end, I slid almost all the way off the back of the tube. Orlan said he felt the boat slow down like he was dragging a big-fat-pasty-white anchor (those weren’t his exact words). I knew I had to pull myself back onto the tube, but my arms were so tired, I seriously considered just letting go. So maybe that final pull-up was when I pulled a muscle in my arm.

That night and the next day my right elbow was so sore that I had trouble shaving. They kept trying to get me to go again, but I’m telling you, I was physically unable. And I admit, I felt kind of silly complaining about it, since there were about 8 other people who went a lot more times than I did, and *they* weren’t complaining. I have to assume I was doing something wrong, though I’m not sure what. My arms are still sore today!

So that was pretty much it. I can only think of three things that were even remotely bad:

  1. There was a lot of construction both ways that added some significant time onto our trip,
  2. We bought hamburger buns from the bakery on Friday and they were moldy by Monday, so that was a big fat waste of money,
  3. My phone fell out of my pocket, and we left Lisa’s house without it. Luckily I realized this and we were able to stop by and get it on the way home (it was in between the couch cushions, under the giant stuffed frog of course)
If those are the only things that went wrong, then I think it was a fairly successful trip!