8/30/09

What in the heck ??!?!?!?!  Where did summer go?  It's supposed to go down to 48 degrees tonight !!  It's still August, for Pete's sake!  Randy and I were sitting outside talking this afternoon and we realized that we hadn't seen any robins for a while; the cedar waxwings came thru early to clear out the cherry tree (even before they were fully ripe!); the burning bush is thinking about changing color; we've noticed trees starting to change; and one of my mums is already blooming.  **sigh** I guess it's inevitable.  Fall is lurking.

 
I had a good birthday yesterday!  Randy and I went to Downtown Detroit and did some wandering around.  Mainly we went to Joe Louis Arena for HockeyFest.  It was kind of neat.  First we walked around the outer area where the concession stands are (photo ops!).  There was all sorts of stuff to do down in the arena.  They had mini-arenas set up so kids could play goalie (in full goalie pads, too) and have whiffle balls shot at them; see how hard you could slap the puck, all sorts of fun stuff.  They had a band playing a bunch of cover songs, too.  We went back to where they had past players giving autographs, but we'd never heard of the guy there.  We even got to tour the locker room!  That was pretty neat.  The tunnel is awesome! 

I got Kronwall'd

Stanley!  Stanley!  Stanley!

Us & Al

Outside the Olympia Club underneath the stands

Randy on the Zamboni!

Us on the bench.

Leaving the locker room to the tunnel to the ice.

It was generally a very neat day.  I enjoyed my birthday very much.  The weather was perfect, we got to sit and watch freighters go by on the Detroit River, we strolled the Riverwalk again.  Nice.  I almost was able to forget that I turned 36, even tho my boss thought I wasn't even 30 yet.  She just apparently can't add, or she forgot I was in the Navy for 8 years.  I'll take it as a compliment.  Oh yeah, Randy got ne a nice new radio for my car.  A Yaesau FT-7900 R/E dual bander.  I'm going to like it.  I actually read the manual and figured out all the buttons & stuff.  I'm going to have him mount a mobile speaker on my dashboard so I can hear it better. 

 

So we're officially on vacation now.  We'll both go back to the grind on the 9th.  Monday the 7th is Labor Day, and Tuesday the 8th is Angel's first day of Junior High ~ sniff ~.  I have to be home for that!  We have some ideas of what we're going to do, but nothing concrete. Like the Henry Ford Museum, Greenfield Village and the Renaissance Festival. Jim, AB8JR is going to come over one night to help put an antenna on the roof.  Then that's probably about all.  Angel has orientation at school on Wednesday evening, so we won't wander far that day.  But first order of business tomorrow morning - grocery shopping.  I cleaned out the fridge tonight & it's pretty empty.  Yay.

I took some time off Weight Watchers.  My current membership was up, so instead of renewing right away, I decided to wait for a couple weeks.  I'll go back on the 10th.  The reasoning behind this is for me to recharge and get my head back in the game (cue High School Musical song).  Then I'll go back in there all refreshed and ready to get back on track.  My leader told us one night just recently that she'd had a woman who'd lost 100 pounds come in and pretend like she was starting WW for the very first time - just to break a plateau.  I thought about it and it's a good idea.  I've been getting way too complascent.  It's funny that now I can see little things that have already become a habit!  Not a bad thing at all!

Alrighty then.  I need to go put some sheets on the bed and hop in the shower before crawling in them, so I need to take off!  Later all!

The Diary of a Mad Ham's Wife

OMG, this is hysterical !!!!

http://www.arrl.org/news/features/2009/08/20/11030/?nc=1

8/22/09

TGIF !!!

It's such a quiet, peaceful weekend. I had such grand plans to get so much done outside, especially since it's so cool & comfortable. Today I got a book read and Randy & I went out to dinner. Yup. Really productive. Oh, some laundry, too. Laurie came by about 2 to get Angel. They were on their way to a pool party and then to a Peter Frampton concert. Angel and Lisa were both like "Peter Who???" I had Randy look him up on YouTube so we could figure out some of his songs. I think I know 3.

Last weekend we had a painting "Hobo Weekend" at Laurie's. Of course it was 90+ degrees out, but there was a breeze so we only got sunburnt, not baked. We had to do one entire side of the pasture and the inside of the front. The fun wore off after the first couple hours. But we got the whole side done Saturday and it only took a couple hours Sunday to do the front. Saturday night we went for a walk around the block at like 11 PM. It was pretty entertaining, except when we got to where the trail was washed out over a culvert in the last big rain. The ditch was probably 15 feet across and maybe 12 feet deep. It was tough getting the dogs across, at least Jack. Morgan is big enough to scramble up the other side, but Jack needed a boost. We couldn't even get decent pics, because our flashes wouldn't light up the area enough! Then we went back and we camped in the barn. We threw a tarp over the hay and the girls put their sleeping bags on it. Laurie and I used my air mattress in the aisle outside the horses' stalls. It was funny, we had a discussion about whether or not horses snored. We never did find out, because I don't think they slept much. Every time I looked up, there were eyes looking back at me. I'm sure they were wondering what the heck we were going in their house.

Sunday after we finished up and got most of the paint cleaned off, we went to the little podunk water park near Laurie's house. There's one pool, divided by a bridge. One side was basically a kiddie pool and the other side had 2 water slides. It went from ankle deep to about 3 feet by the slides. I haven't been to a water park since I had gone to one in Pensacola right after bootcamp. It was pretty fun. There was a lifeguard flirting with Angel - heehee! He'd messed with her before about not going on the straight slide, she only wanted to go on the twirly one. Last time she was there, he'd told her that she couldn't go on the twirly one any more until she went down the straight one. She turned around and went back down the stairs. Really made him feel bad! It was funny that he remembered her and messed with her some more.

Not much else is going on. Only 5 more working days til vacation! I do believe we're going to the Renaissance Festival one day, probably the Henry Ford Museum to see Rock Stars' Car & Guitars, probably Greenfield Village to see the Thomas Edison stuff we missed last time we went. basically we're going to get the girl sick of us so she's ready to go back to school on the 8th.

Speaking of school, we still haven't heard anything about what kind of supplies she'll need or even when she has to go in for scheduling, etc. It's getting close!

I was rather ticked this week. We'd stopped over to visit Mom & Dad and while on the way home I was rear-ended again while sitting at a light. The sad part is, I could see her coming and couldn't do a damn thing about it. I was able to pull up slightly in an attempt to get into the left turn lane, but I was too close to the car in front of me. Guess I should be glad I didn't get shoved into them, too! Apparently the bimbo had screaming kids in the car - 3 girls all Angel's age and younger - and was distracted. Nice. At least she had more damage done to her car than I did on mine. Her fiberglass bumper had 2 obvious tears in it, while I just have a couple minor creases on the bumper, about the size of a silver dollar. I am never going to get rid of this car! I think Angel can expect to inherit it when she's old enough to drive. It just rolled to 100,000 miles about a week and a half ago. I was on an empty stretch of road, so I drove back and forth for a while so I could get pictures of it at 99999.9 and at 100K. But my pretty new license plate got messed up! It's bent & the paint is scraped off the letters. I could have cried! Randy got it straightened out somewhat, but I'll have to take blue nail polish to the letters or something. *sniff*

I do have some good news!  I think I may have broken my plateau!  I lost 1.4 lbs at weigh in Thursday.  I'm still not down to my all-time low, which was on June 11, but I'm close!

So anyway, that's all the excitement here. I have further confirmed that Mother Nature and Aunt Flo in particular are horrid little bitches. Yet again, I'm on a 21 day cycle. It really sucks! I was looking at my calendar, since I highlight this time of the month to keep track and noticed the timing. I wish I could remember the name of the horse on Ren & Stimpy. He always sat up, rubbed his chin with a hoof and said "No sir. I don't like it. Don't like it at all." Amen.

8/12/09 The Bitch Session

This is just going to be a rant of everything that bothering me at this moment. Maybe once I get it off my chest, I'll be HAPPY ! ! ! ! These, of course, are in no particular order.

1. I really wish someone would voluntarily help me out around the house. I know it doesn't help that there just isn't any place for all the STUFF we have. It's a big clutter issue. But no one helps take out the trash. No one helps with dinner. No one helps with loading/unloading the dishwasher. No one else cleans up the bathrooms. No one helps with laundry. No one takes the returnable cans out to the garage, even when they're falling all over the floor. You get the point. The girl will half-assed do what I ask her, but she won't do it on her own. A lot of people fantasize about sex - I dream about a house (gasp!) with closets and a laundry room!

2. Let's see. I don't know what my beef is with this one. A girl I graduated with is on FB announcing that she's pregnant with #3. I'm just jealous, maybe? Everyone I know has herds of kids. Even when I was a scout leader, Angel was the only "only" in the troop of like 12 kids. I've been off the pill (except for the couple months after my D&C) for 2 years now. Not a sign. Kind of makes me wonder which of us has the problem. Most likely me . I'm jealous, but I also have mixed feelings. Confoosed, I suppose. Right now, it's so easy to throw some clothes in a bag and ship the girl off to Laurie's or Linda's for the weekend. I can send her off to her room to entertain herself and even leave her at home while I run to the store. She can fix her own snacks. I only have to worry about after school activities for one. On the other hand, a little one is much higher maintenance. They expect to be entertained, they need to be watched, can't shower themselves, have to be dragged along on errands, have to be a logistics pro if we want to go on vacation. The plus side ~ little baby feet, sweet little hugs, the innocence. The down side - middle of the night screaming fits, diapers, car seats. And if I have another one now - Angel's almost a teenager. Talk about a HUGE awkward gap in ages. I just don't know what I want. Guess if we're not able to have any kids, I can pay another visit to the Humane Society!

3. I hate the living room set. The sofa sleeper and loveseat are GINORMOUS and the living room itself is not. The living room is totally stuft and there's no way to move anything around or even open the front door! I'd love a new (smaller) set. But Randy gets weird sentimental attachments to inanimate objects, so we'll never get rid of those damn things - just like those obsolete college textbooks that he has out in the garage that haven't been touched since he finished school over 15 years ago.

4. It's depressing that I see people from high school on FB that are still friends and still hang out. OK, I have a couple old friends, but none of them live near me! Ann is in Kentucky, Tami is in Massachusetts, Laura's in DC, Renee's in Arizona. I guess a few quality friends are better than quantity. But it would be nice to go hang out once in a while.

5. I feel like a cow. I don't know what the deal is, but I'm bloating and I'm sick of this damn plateau I'm stuck on. I was the same weight on May 14 as I am now, within the same 4 pounds! I truly dread going to weigh in tomorrow. I may cry if I go back up. There's no way in hell I'm ever going to lose another 50 pounds!

6. When I was at my annual torture appointment last month, she decided to put me on prenatal vitamins, just in case. Those damn things have made my face into an oil slick. It's a good thing I don't put a lot of effort into my makeup, because it was washed off at 10 am this morning. About every 2 hours, I had to go wet a paper towel and wipe the grease off. It feels nasty, too.

7. I really wish to hell Randy would make an effort to lose some of his belly. I was hoping when he saw me losing, he'd get inspired. Guess not. Don't get me wrong, I love him dearly, but I worry about his health. He sits there at a desk all day and stares at a computer monitor all day. He used to get out and walk a couple times a day and played golf once a week. Not anymore. I did manage to drag him out for a walk around the park last weekend. But there's no way he could have kept up if I was walking like I do when it's just me. I don't race-walk either. It's just fast enough to get my heart rate up and keep it there. It's cliche, but even after only losing 10% (26 pounds for me), I felt a million times better. I bet it would really help with his acid reflux. He just found out yesterday that his blood pressure was high, and I sent him 3 emails and a text today (which I've gotten no answer to any of them) about making a doctor's appointment. I think he's avoiding me - LOL! But that's OK. I know where he sleeps!


That's all I can think of right now. I may be back to edit this post if something else irks me. I have to go make dinner now.

8/9/09

Whew, is it hot out! Summer has finally arrived to SE Michigan! It's barely been in the low 80s all summer, then a warm front brought us 3-4 inches of rain yesterday and now it's like 91+ degrees and it says only 59% humidity. Whew! And I just looked and the forecast for beginning of next week has changed, too. 97 degrees tomorrow & 93 Tuesday! Thank God for A/C !

Anyway....I went and helped out on the K8M Special Event Station for Saint Kolbe again yesterday. We didn't get a lot done in the first couple hours, because of the dumping rain. Then we went out and got the G5-RV strung up (while random people came out of church after mass and looked at us like we were nuts). Oh yeah - I didn't mention it before, we were in this huge, gorgeous fancy Catholic Church in snobby West Bloomfield. www.qrz.com/KA8O So about 9 PM we finally messed around with the radio enough to make some digital contacts, which is basically IMing (don't tell Randy I said that, but it's the best way to explain!) except you can see on this grid thing where you're most likely to make a contact. And it's all over the computer, in fact, all you had to do was create messages and save them, then click the appropriate button to make it type out what you want to say. It's kind of neat. We were making back to back contacts for over an hour - that sounds like a lot, but there was I think 15.

It was fun. I enjoyed getting out there and helping hang the antenna and it still amazes me that a simple length of wire hanging in the air has the power to pick up signals from a thousand or more miles away. As Jim put it - it's part of the magic of ham radio.

So anyway, I'm supposed to be straightening up the house. You can see how well that's going - LOL. I actually have to say that the FlyLady site really works. http://www.flylady.net/ I made a list of stuff I wanted to get done today and I will work on it 15 minutes at a time. Using a timer and a short block of time, it really forces me to concentrate on what needs to be done in one area, instead of getting distracted and working in the kitchen for a bit, then taking something to the living room and doing a little there. Nothing gets done that way and it makes me feel overwhelmed. I have my list broken down into manageable portions, too. My bathroom, the hall bathroom, the kitchen table, the counter next to the fridge, etc. Little things, but once they're done - they make a difference. I was happy last weekend when Ted and his family came over, I had worked for about 15 minutes in the kitchen before they came over and I totally wasn't embarrassed when Annette came in to get a drink of water.

We went to go see Dad yesterday, too. He managed to come home for a couple days, then went back in because he was coughing up blood and it really scared Mom. Guess it was because he was getting dry down in his lungs. He's up and down and wandering all over, so he;s not near the humidifier. So they scoped his lungs again Friday and thankfully didn't see anything. But he's still in and is being a belligerent ass to Mom. She broke down while we were there. Dad's roomie got to go home, so he thought he should, too. So he's copping an attitude at Mom, like she's forcing him to stay there and it's all her fault that he went in this time. Uhhh, no! The doctor's told her that he's not going to get better, they're just trying to keep him comfortable until the inevitable happens. It's sad, but I'm glad they let us know, so we can mentally prepare ourselves. It probably won't help, but at least it won't be a surprise.

Wow, I just realized that I'm totally rambling. Guess I should go get busy, so I can have my "chores" done fore Randy gets home and we have to start dinner. Hope they're making lots of contacts today!

8/2/09

I did my first public service via amateur radio yesterday! It was the first Saturday of the month, so I went and "checked" a "hot" tornado siren. First of all, a "hot" siren is one that the county really wants to make sure sounded when it was supposed to. It must not have gone off last month or something. So they assign a ham to go check it. All that is required to "check" a siren is to drive to the location, take a good look at it (as much as possible from standing on the ground) to make sure there's no damage or nests inside, then sit in the car and wait for it to go off. It either does, or doesn't. Then you call in your report to the control operator, who in turn, calls it into the county. They want to make sure all the sirens work during the test so they know it will go off when they really need it to. I've ridden along with Randy a million times to do this, and once checked one and called him on the Nextel, then he called in 2 reports. This was my first solo trip using the radio.

Yesterday I also got introduced up close and personal to contesting. Again, I've seen Randy do this a million times. I could never figure out how he could sit at the desk for hours on end with his headphones on and do this. The deal this weekend was a special event celebrating the feast day of Saint Maximillian Kolbe, the patron saint of amateur radio and the only saint who was a licensed ham. Google him, he's pretty interesting. Anyway, I let Randy handle the actual contacts, which is a good thing. I had headphones on, but he can obviously hear and understand voices thru static a lot better than I can. He would write down the callsign and other certain info and I'd enter it in the logging program. We had a run of about 20 contacts ~ boom, boom, boom ~ mostly from Europe, a few from Texas, Missouri, and a couple lighthouses along the East Coast. Oh, and one from Panama. I have to admit it was kind of fun. I'll definitely stick with the logging part for a while, since sometimes I was sure I was hearing the contacts say something different from what Randy wrote down, but they'd say "yes, my friend!" Obviously it's a talent that develops with experience.

Randy has been sad this weekend. He sold his old Ford Taurus to a buddy of his. He's drove a lot of hours in that car. Another guy, Barry was selling his 2001 Chevy Malibu and Randy really wanted me to buy it. I just had a really hard time justifying buying another car to replace one that I'm perfectly happy with. Besides, that Malibu has a lot more miles than my 2000 Escort has. He tried to sell me on it, by saying my Dad drives a Chevy and it doesn't have a cracked windshield (mine does), it has the same name as my favorite alcohol, etc. Sorry. No. So he bought it instead. It's not a bad car. I think once he gets used to it, he'll be happy. Until he sees Ted in the Taurus! Heehee!

Speaking of cars, I got my new ham radio license plate! I had to wait until I got the actual paper ticket from the FCC to apply for a ham plate, since I had to mail in a copy to the state. So it's on my car, all nice & shiny. I have truly entered the special world of the Geek.


Anyway, everyone else seems to be fine. Angel is spending the weekend with Aunt Laurie & Lisa. They went to the water park yesterday and added to the sunburn that she started Thursday during the Club field trip to Red Oaks. Dad went back in the hospital late this week for an infection in his legs. he was only supposed to be in a few days, but is still in. I'm sure Mom is finally getting some much needed sleep. Dad doesn't sleep much, so he's up and down - in bed, in the living room, out on the porch, back in bed, in the chair, all night long. And he basically needs to be watched all the time, so poor Mom is feeling the toll.

So school will be starting in a little over a month or so. 9/8 to be exact. We haven't started school shopping, yet since the kid is growing like a weed. It's pointless to start getting school clothes yet. I think I'm just going to take her to the Salvation Army and let her loose one afternoon. She always finds good stuff there! We have 3 big ones in the area, so she should be hooked up. No one is in the office of the school until 8/12 or something, so we don't know what kind of supplies she's going to need. Oh well!

I have another complaint to add to my earlier TMI post. Aunt Flo is a bitch and I don't want her to visit anymore. She decided she wanted a 21 day cycle this month instead of 28. It's just too soon. It's not painful, I haven't cramped any at all - it's just ANNOYING!!!! We're not trying to a kid, but we're not preventing, either. It's OK if it happens. Right now it's looking like a real big IF. Oh, and I got the results of my annual torture exam back and all was normal. So what is up with this cycle??? I hate it. Sometimes it really sucks to be female.

Anyway, I do believe I'm going to make a Dunkin Donuts run - there is a large French Vanilla iced coffee calling my name........