Another Brain Dump

What?  Two in one week?  Don't do it!  There'll be nothing left!

This is what happens when the boys are out of town and I'm home in a quiet house, with my thoughts.

Because the good thing about homeschooling and summer break, is that I'm with my kids all the time.

And the bad thing about homeschooling and summer break, is that I'm with my kids all the time.

So when they're gone all day (to Seattle, to see the Blue Angels with Uncle Dave) it's a good thing, but I kind of feel off balance.  Sometimes I get really motivated to Get Stuff Done, and other times... well... I putter.

• I could clean the living room - no less than ten books are scattered around, most left open.  Or I could clean the family room / play room.  It's a toy bomb.  But why?  The boys are going to Aunty Tami's on Sunday and they can't go unless they clean tomorrow.  I love motivation... for them.

• I did clean one of the kitchen cupboards after discovering another little bomb - a rotten potato.  It's a vegetable, for crying out loud, why does it smell like rotting fish?

• I also cleaned my bathroom.  At midnight.  And no - thankfully - nobody was sick.  For some reason Gunnar talked Kerry into swapping beds for the night so he could snuggle with me, then woke up - and I use the term woke very loosely here - and went into the bathroom to pee.  On the floor.  Beside the toilet.  It sounded kind of funny to me, but I wasn't exactly awake either, until I decided I might as well get up and pee, too, and found the puddle.  Guess how.  I didn't even tell him in the morning.  What would be the point?  He didn't do it on purpose, had no idea what had happened, and his brothers would tease him mercilessly.  *sigh*

• I accompanied my mom to her physical therapy appointment this morning.  It went longer than usual, which I wouldn't have minded at all, but for the two excruciatingly LMC* women in the waiting room with me.  Aside from their complete inability to discriminate between objective and subjective pronouns and to manage subject/verb agreement (Them candies Bobby-Jim brung was real good, wasn't they?) they carried on a running commentary about the misbehavior of their grandson/great-grandson, and what they believed to be his extensive vocabulary.  Which they seemed to find wildly amusing, and to take pride in.  It was all I could do not to put down the book I was hiding behind, fix them with stink-eye, and beg them to stop breeding.

• Going on with my mom, I scored three 'new' sweaters for this winter, for a grand total of about $10.   Three cheers for Value Village.  (Which sounds almost trendy with a faux-French accent.)

• And then spent entirely too much time in the blogosphere laughing at stuff like Catalog Living.  That wacky Gary and Elaine.  Here is one of my favorites.

 Gary has no idea what exactly Elaine does in the shower every day,

but he certainly knows better than to touch her wooden shower spoon or shower branch.

•  I almost forgot the story my mom told me, which concluded with her friend saying,

There's nothing more embarrassing than having the fire department show up and you're in your nightie and your hair's on fire.

            Well, I don't guess I would know.


* LMC - Low Marble Count - a slightly-less-than-official medical term used by the nurses I worked with to describe some of our patients, in a certain doctor's office where I worked before becoming a Herder of Grasshoppers.