June 2006 Archives

I have been doing something I didn't tell y'all about. I took a course like this given by one of these. I purchased and learned to handle this. I passed the written test with a 100%. I passed the field test with a 98%. I am a member of this and this. I applied for this. Why? My husband spends alot of time working away from home during the week. I am not frightened but I do want to be sure my children and myself are safe at all times. I also want one of these.

I am at Mamarazzi today.

(Summer Project #1 was the photos.) In an ongoing and nearly impossible attempt be better organized I chose for my next Summer Project of 2006 to take better care of my table linens. My table clothes, placemats, napkins and table runners have always been kept in a small chest in my dining room. With ever increasing amounts of people at my table and my habit of purchasing said linens from estate sales they long outgrew the little chest and needed a new home. This week I pulled them all out. Sorted them. Checked for spots and yellowing then starched and steam ironed them all. I had been saving the papertowel cardboard tubes to use for ths project and finally felt I had enough to accomplish my task. The tubes were split then placed over the bottom section of the coat hanger. Then the table clothes neatly hung so as to not sustain permanent creases. Then each hanger was covered with a drycleaners dress bag and knotted at the bottom to keep out dust. This is about half of my table linens. Most often we use placemats and paper napkins at the table especially for dinner. On Sundays I like a properly set table. On special occassions (Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas) I pull out all the stops with the extra water glasses, bread plates and dessert spoons. Most common table setting in my house.
Mostly used at supper and sunday breakfast. I did not grow up in a house were fine linens were used on the table. At my grandmother's table I can remember mostly the vinyl type table clothes that could be wiped off with a dishrag several times a day. If the main dining table were to be used I do remember a white table cloth with a white sheet under it to protect the table even more so from spills. My mother used mostly placemats, the plastic ones when we were younger and quilted ones when we were teenagers. I recall she had two white table clothes for the nice dining table. One was on it at all times for looks then other was actually used. I find it much more work for myself to go to the extremes using damask and linens on the table. It is also a very nice treat to sit down at a pristine and well set table and dine like civilized folks. I don't put on airs. I like the pleasantries of dining well. I want my children to experience fine dining in our home. It teaches them proper manners for times when they are out of our home. I don't want them to come across like country hicks and not know which fork to use or which bread plate goes with their place setting. I have also taught my children how to properly set the table. I am always amazed by the number of people who do not know which side the fork goes on or where to place a napkin. My children also take turns asking the blessing and saying the grace. Colby loves books on butlery and etiquette and has a nice collection of books to refer for social occassions and reference. It is a finer thing in life that she also enjoys. One of our favorite books was written by a butler retired from the Queen's service. There are those who might call this 'highfalutin' and wonder what's wrong with a paper plate, a dixie cup and scott napkins. There is nothing at all wrong with paper goods if you are having a cookout or picnic or have a house full of kids who mess up plenty and you have to put their name on a Dixie cup and make them use it over and over all day long so that you are not constantly washing glasses or have a sink piled up with dishes. (This happened to us as kids when there were 6 to 8 of us running around my grandparents house.) I find there are few real pleasures in the world that don't come with a price tag. For us mealtime is and always has been a social occassion. It is the time of the day we all come together. No one is excused from being present at supper (within reason). I take pride in serving Steven a good meal at least once a day which is normally our evening supper. He works so hard and provides for our every need and want. I do try to cater to him and provide him with pleasant respite daily. He deserves it. The only way to teach my girls this is my showing action. How do children learn? By what they see every day. I want my chldren to see that when a man works hard for you and provides for you that you should offer him some comforts at home and go the extra effort to show him in return how much you care by similarly working hard at home. That sounds very 1950's, the man is king of the castle, etc, etc, etc. So be it. I won't ever have to worry about his bread being buttered at some other table because nobody butters his bread the way I do. :-) Anywho ... Your local drycleaner will sell you a full roll of bags if you ask. They run between $28 and $48 a roll depending on the length of the bag. I purchased the longer dress bags. Today I will be working in the closets to bag winter dresses and coats to prevent those dust stains that can happen to the shoulders. Chop. Chop. Let's get busy. We are burning daylight. What little chore have you been putting off? Why not buckle down and get it done? Then you will have the entire summer to play!

The water is finally warm enough that the baby could play in the pool. But first I had a check list: Baby Sunblock SPF 2000 Little Swimmer Sun hat Onesie (just incase the sunblock failed) Baby boat with canopy Cutest
Baby
Ever
After a couple hours of sun and fun: Brought the baby in Bathed the baby Fed the baby Baby takes a three hour nap An excellent day.

I have always had a secret crush on Keanu Reeves. My love affair with him began before he appeared in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. I mean way back in that little known movie Youngblood with Patrick Swayze and Rob Lowe. That long ago. SShhhhh. Don't tell. And don't laugh. People magazine named him one of the 50 most beautiful People of 1995. To me he always was and still is. That same year Empire magazine named him one of the sexiest film stars of all time. Yes, he is!! I have willingly forgiven him all of his weird idiosyncracies. Even when he was drunk and/or stoned and hanging out with homeless people sleeping on the streets. Even. Then. Something about him pulls on my heart strings. I imagine had I lost not only my baby (Eva Archer Syme Reeves, born stillborn a few weeks before delivery date) and then my fiance, Jennifer Syme, both in tragic situations I might have spiraled down to the deepest pits of depression and gone insane or had a major nervous breakdown myself. Suffice it to say, I understand and have loads of empathy and sympathy for him. I am willing to forgive him many things. So yesterday I went to see The Lake House. No spoilers here. If you like Jane Austin and Persuasion. If you are a hopeless romantic. If you can believe in the magic and not look for the strings and zippers. You should go see this movie. Keanu has gained a little weight which I think looks good on him. He is not cut like him the Matrix movies. He looks his age, which I think is a good thing. I want to see the men I like age with me. (I think that is why so many Hollywood types do not appeal to me. They don't let themselves age and they screw it up trying to be teenagers or 20-somethings. Bah.) On the other hand, Sandra. Sandra, Sandra, Sandra. Too much makeup. Way too much makeup. She is aging and her face really shows it. Despite the fact that she and Keanu are the same age (both 2 years older than I am) she looks old. Almost too old to play this part. They needed to wipe off some of her makeup. She didn't look natural in any way. Far over done. And what the heck is it about her nose that bothers me? Go see the movie. It is a fairly good movie if you can believe in the space-time continuum, time warp romance. It is not a great movie. It is not a blockbuster. The outcome was somewhat predictable in the first 10 or 15 minutes of the movie but that was okay. The movie isn't about the ending but the journey that gets you there. I took Steven with me. He was very quiet when awake, sitting up and starring at the screen. I sat about 3/4 back, no one sat behind us. I let him nurse and nap and got lost in the movie. I enjoyed it. I would watch it again. I might even be willing to buy the DVD when it comes out. Because I am a Keanu Reeves fan. It fed the romantic in me. I am glad I saw it. I don't think the price of the matinee ticket was wasted. With that I'll leave you with a Keanu quote ... "It's always wonderful to get to know women, with the mystery and the joy and the depth. If you can make a woman laugh, you're seeing the most beautiful thing on God's Earth." ... what's not to like?

Dear Contest Winners, The jelly has been made. I will be boxing it up this weekend to mail to you on Monday. I hope you enjoy every sweet bite! Love, Angie **** I am at Mamarazzi today. Come see me talk about Britney -Again! Sigh.

629 baby photos of Steve and I alone have been scanned. That is what I have been doing all week. This has been a HUGE undertaking but I am so glad I started and am now near finished. Since marrying Steve his mom has occassionally brought things to me. A baby picture. A shadow box with his hospital photo, silver spoons, cigar and a flower inside. An artistic characature done when he was two years old. Since the baby had been born she has brought even more. His silver piggy bank. His baby shoe planter. 2 hand fulls of baby photos from newborn to early childhood. I am beginning to think she likes me. These are things she would NEVER have even considered giving to his exwife. Not in a million years. There would have been no respect or appreciation for them. The photos have spent their life with us living in a photo box. I really had not had time to sit down and organize them. Plus our old scanner would not talk to our laptops and the whole thing frustrated me and made me angry about it all. Now with a new scanner (and Digital ICE technology) I feel like I am in heaven while tackling this large job. The baby photos of Steve and myself was a huge undertaking alone. All of the photos were sorted by date. Each photo was then scanned as it is. Then scanned again as restored. The photo was then placed in an acid free, pvc free photo album with memo notes or whatever caption might be on the back. Once all of the photos were in the album a cd or dvd was burned (depending on file size), placed in a protective sleeve and put into the photo album. A second cd/dvd was then burned and placed in a masterfile for safe keeping. Then I did Colby's. and J's. and Gracie's is in progress. and Stevens is on the schedule for this afternoon. I did my sister's baby photos too. My mother brought me her baby photos as well. If you haven't already, I urge you, please. Sit down with all of your photos. Assess what needs to be done to preserve them. Get them out of those old photo albums with the sticky gooey pages that eats holes in them and turns them yellow. If your photos are already in archival type albums "Yayyyy!" for you. Scan your photos and save them to digital media. Digital media (cd and/or dvd) will not last forever either and you need to check them every few years to insure they have not sustained damage. This is a very small price to pay to know your memories are safe. Consider yourself your family's historian. Preserve your family history. Sit down together with your children as you sort photos and talk about what was going on at the time or answer questions they have. Make a giant job a fun job. I have had so much joy talking with my kids about their baby pictures. They see how important what I am doing is and they have not interupted the process and have been extremely helpful with Steven during the day. I can't promise you it will not cost you money. Over the past three months I have purchased a VHS to DVD converter, a new scanner and 8 acid free, pvc free, archival photo albums. I have spent the better part of two weeks working on these photos. This week I have devoted most of each day to the process of preserving the photos and burning the cd's and dvd's. It has been worth every $$ and every minute to me. Maybe someone else wouldn't cherish these things as much as I do. Maybe more for others. I don't want to wake up one day and say, "I wish I had ..." and there is nothing to be done. Neither do you. Come on. Spend some time with your memories. Make them available for your grandchild and great children. Write the notes, make the lables, take the time. In Septemeber my Aunt will be coming home from Washington state. I will be going back home then too. We will be spending 4 days at my grandmother's home. Each and every photograph will be scanned. DVD's will be burned and available for each family member who wants a copy. What shape are your photo collections in? Are they in the old style sticky paged books? Are they in boxes? What about your negatives? (Todays new scanners can copy your negatives and slides as well.) What are you going to do to preserve your family photo history?

I was thirteen when I first saw the boy who made me blush and left me breathless. It was with baited breath that I stood near my stepfather and heard him contract the young man to come back and bale the back hayfield in those giant round bales that were just making the scene way back then in 1978/79. I had the mother of all crushes on that blonde haired, blue eyed boy. The following year again he was engaged to bale the hay in the back fields into those big round bales. I had a birthday and was now fourteen and he was everything to my young heart. I spent time riding on that big John Deere tractor as it pulled the bailer. I was willing to do anything just to have time with him. Over those first teenage years I saw him off and on. Sometimes because he was doing work for my stepfather. Once because he showed up on our doorstep on Valentine's Day evening with a box of candy for me after months of not seeing him or hearing from him. I stood blushing and stammering and not knowing what on earth to do as my parents and little sister looked on. I never had a real boyfriend and only dated sporatically because I always held out hope he would notice me more. I was always second place to another girl also named Angie but I always held out hope he would see she was just there because he had a truck and wealth. Though I never met her I always got the impression from others who knew her she wasn't really interested in him it was more about what he had or better stated what his family had. For a while he did take a real interest in me. When he entered GMI I went with his mother to visit. I watched him graduate. We wrote letters all the time. On the weekends he was home I spent sunday afternoons over at his house to see him off for the week. His mother even held out hope that one day we would get married. We were just teenagers but it was said. My parents let me go and do more because of him than I had ever been allowed in the past. Our families were farmers. Simpe people making a living off the land. We worked together and played together and went fishing and hunting together. In my stupid girlish dreams and my stupid girlish heart I truly believed I would grow up to marry him. He was my first crush. He gave me my first kiss. He was my first love. I kept away from other boys because my heart ached at the thought of him and I always told myself if I had a boyfriend when he came around I wouldn't be able to spend time with him. In eleventh grade I asked him to go with me to my high school prom. I had a beautiful yellow dress and he was to wear his military school uniform. A few days before he called and cancelled. He said he couldn't come home that weekend. The commander had issued orders that everyone was to remain on campus. It was supposedly for some type of discipline or punishment I can't remember the details, it seemed odd but I believed him. I held it together until we got off the phone. The huge hot lump of tears in my throat couldn't be held back. I cried myself to sleep that night. That is the last time I talked to him. The last contact I had with. I saved every card and letter he wrote me. I tucked them away in the heart shaped candy box long since empty of the chocolates sweets. For one little instant I had been his valentine. I would pull them out and read them over and over again. They were hidden in the bottom of my closet in a box filled with a big sweater and a heavy blanket. Those were my love letters. The one real proof that for a while he loved(?) liked me a whole lot too. I kept those letters until they began to fall apart and the ink was fading. A freak accident with burst water pipes and a septic tank flooding brought an end to those letters. For many years they were the most important things I owned. It was when I was 9 months and bursting at the seams pregnant with Colby that I happened into an old country store and ran into him. My cheeks turned red. My heart slammed in my chest. I was breathless. As we pulled away from the parking lot I had a hard time pulling my eyes away. Once my sister ran into him. Then again he came into the place she was working. I will NEVER forgive her for trying to get a date with him. Red corvette or not. Me married with a child or not. All those years later were of no concern. He was my first love and she had no business sniffing around him. It was and still is a hurt I can't explain. His grandfather was killed in an aweful farming accident a few years before my divorce. Just aweful. I sent a flower and a card as is fitting. I know his grandfather meant the world to him. I never received a thank you or any type of acknowledgement from him or his family. I often was on the road that passed his family lands and watched sporadically as he built a house near the tree line at the back of a field. I always scolded myself and felt ashamed for the thughts that jumped into my head when anything stirred the faintest memory of that blonde haired boy. I had a dream about him last night. In that dream he treated me like I always wished he would. He even apologized for the prom incident. This morning I woke up wanting to cry. I woke up confused as to why I would dream about him all these many years later. I googled his name. The #1 googled entry for his name is the post on another blog that asked about a first kiss and young love. I have a giant fear that he might google his own name and find the comment I left. Maybe I can get her to edit out his name. They say you never forget your first true love. It is true. At least for me. My heart has never forgotten either.

I am over at Mamarazzi today. Come see the new nanny.

My momma was here two weeks ago. She had not seen Steven since his birth and the changes in him really surprised her although she knew there would be huge changes from the newborn baby she had last seen months before. While she was here she would often look at the children as played and comment on who liked whom or note the resemblances in the way some spoke or their body language. On this trip my momma brought up photo albums for me to scan and video tapes for me to convert to DVD. I have been working on those the past few days. Angie, newborn Before I could scan the photos I had to purchase a new scanner. Nothing that we know of is wrong with our old scanner. It just won't interface with these new laptops and Windoze XP. It has been very frustrating and I have cussed so many times in the process of trying EVERYTHING at least 100 times. No dice. I went online monday and ordered a scanner. I ordered a middle of the road, moderastely priced scanner. It was a Microtek Skanmaker s400. I opened the box. Laid all the pieces and parts ut on the table. Opened the plasticbag with all of the instructions and software. Angie, 5 months old #1. Unpack box. Done. #2. Install software. O'kay, simple thing to do. Insert CD install software. #3. Plug in scanner and connect to PC. Easy. Done. #4. Follow the prompts and begin scanning your photos. Yayyyy! This is the part I am WANTING to do. Popup indicates the need for a missing DLL file. Easy Peasy. Off to the Microtek website. Download the file. Still doesn't work. Angie, 10 months old Search the support section of the website and see there is a new installation file with packaged drivers and dll files for XP. I downloaded and installed the file. Machine needs to reboot. Okay, reboot. Machine turns off. Machine turns on. Windoze begins to load. Machine shuts down. Turn on machine. Windoze begins to load. Machine shuts down. Huh? Turn on machine. Windoze begins to load. Machine shuts down. No. F'n. Way. Turn on machine. Windoze begins to load. Machine shuts down. WTF?!?!?!?! Lots of cussing. Angie, 13 months old Turn on machine. Windoze begins to load. Machine shuts down. Begin melt down and tears because .... Every photo take of Steven in the past four months is on this machine and not yet burned to CD. Frantically try to boot machine. After 52 tries I get it to boot in safe mode. Spend 4 hours burning photos to cd and dvd. Spend 2 hours restoring machine to last fully working settings. Uninstall all of the scanner crap. Angie, 15 months old Listen to me, please! DO NOT BUY A MICROTEK SCANMAKER s400 and try to install it before you have saved everything you want from your machine!!!!!! I will NEVER trust that brand again. NEVER. EVER. I returned that machine for a full refund plus the cost of shipping. I called around and found an Epson Perfection 4490 WITH a rebate from Office Depot and carried myself there yesterday morning as fast as I could. They only had one left. I asked them to hold it for me. Brought it home. Unpacked it. Installed software. Plugged in scanner. Scans the first time like magic. The photos in the post are things I have been scanning. Momma brought me my baby photos. Something I have never had. Steven's photos, and Colby's and Gracie's are burned to CD and DVD. The only photo of my mother holding me as a newborn baby.
Angie, 3 days old. Make it a priority to save your photos. Take the time (and expense) to preserve something you can never replace. If you need a new scanner and you buy one ... back up your machine and save everything to another machine or to cd/dvd so you don't spend hours crying thinking you have lost your precious memories. Updated: In the middle of trying to redo my kitchen, house cleaning, the last days of school, a teething 4 month old, driving school for Colby, Classes for me and a thousand other things, I am spending however many days it takes in a row to get all of my photos in order. I won't ever go through this again if I can help it. I have blank, cd's and dvd's, a new scanner, and a VHS to DVD converter. I have no reason to put this off any longer. Think about it. I encourage you to do the same if you have not already. Please don't put it off if this is something you need to do. Please. Don't leave yourself in a position to regret having never taken the time. And I do mean taken the time. Everything in this house will fall by the wayside until this job is complete.

My post isn't finished. Come back in a little while. It is the last day of school and I am running behind this morning. Please, come back in a little while. In the mean time hop over to MommaK's and enjoy Mere's blog baby shower.

After my divorce I went through the I-am-never-getting-married-again stage. It took a while but in time I came to my senses and realized that I could not hold every man accountable for the shitty way my marriage left me thinking and feeling. So then I stepped into the I-will-marry-again-one-day but it quickly transferred to the but-he-can't-already-have-kids subdivision, which quickly was upgraded to a-man-who-has-never-been-married-before department. I had convinced myself from observing those around me that I wanted NOTHING to do with baggage from a previous marriage. Mine was enough and I certainly didn't want to help tote anyone else's bags around. I was steadfast in my determination to not get involved with men who may have been married before and those who had children from previous marriage(s). I especially gave wide birth to those who had kids but had never felt they needed to marry the mother either. My pickiness good sense left extremely slim pickings in the single men category. That was perfectly okay with me. However it didn't take long to realize that most of those men were only interested in tiny blondes with big boobs and no sense at all. What was left wasn't much to write home about. It was my experience from those I met that women with children were not a top choice either but if you were only interested in some recreational sex then you were a red-hot commodity in the single world. No, thank you. You have to marry this cow if you want milk. I don't give nothin’ away. So being single again, with children, living in the boondocks, not putting out and not caring to be a Sometime Sunshine for a good ole boy, left me sitting at home a lot on Friday night date night. Saturday night, too, if you want the complete honest truth. Sunday nights as well if you want the brutal truth. Which really was no big loss to me anyway. I just hated the looks from other single people. I also hated the thoughts I could read on their faces with them thinking pathetic thoughts about me rarely having a date. That was okay, too. I would rather be dateless than stoop to the I'll-go-out-with-anyone-just-so-I-have-a-date that many of them did. I shiver thinking how low several stooped just to not be at home on a Friday or a Saturday night. There are a couple times I stumbled and didn't realize I stooped until it was far too late. I seriously hang my head in shame and hope to god no one ever finds out the complete details of those few times. I had had enough of all of the varying degrees of single men (and one who wasn't single but wanted to pretend he was) by the time I met Steven that a divorced man with a child from a preivous marriage wasn't such a taboo thing after all. Today that divorcee and this divorcee are the happy parents of a four month old baby boy. Steven, 4 months old today Life doesn't get much better. ***** There is breaking news on the internet this morning )and no it isn't that baby picture - let's move on from that old news). This is big news. This is beautiful news. OMG is she beautiful. And she has her own newspaper column. Go see. Go on. Oh. And it is her birthday. Go party. Happy Birthday, Lucinda! This is a big bonus day. Lucinda is posting on Mamarazzi today. Make sure you check her out.

Have you seen Brad and Angie's baby photos yet? I have. You can too. Check out Mamarazzi. Someone paid $4.1 million for the photos. You don't have to pay anything. Go. Now.

Much to my surprise last weekend was a very enjoyable weekend with my family. My sister was NOT her usual loud, rude, obnoxious self and that made for the most amazing treat! I actually could like her a lot more if she was that way all of the time. Please do NOT confuse like and love. I love my sister ALL of the time even when she is driving me insane. I do not always like her and I think that is very o'kay even with your husband, children, parents and anyone else around you. You do not always have to like people all of the time. So anyway - We swam. We rode around. We did target practice. We cooked. We ate. We made margaritas. We laughed. We joked. We napped. We went to bed at a descent time. We rose before 8am. We ate alot. We shopped. We talked. We did it all. They are planning to return in July. Thank you for the notice. I have plenty of time to plan for it. On Saturday night I took all of the kids, including baby Steven to the movies -by myself. Me, Colby, Gracie, Amber, Cyle and Steven. To the movies. At 10:40. PM. Yes, I did! We had a good time! We had popcorn, candy and cokes. Steven watched the first 20 minutes of the movie with alert fascination. I marveled at his facial expressions. The he nursed for 20 minutes or so in the bearly empty and very dark movie theater and slept through the rest of the movie, the ride home, the clothing change and being put into his bed. He was a real trooper. Never made a peep in the theater. I was so pleased. He acted like a big boy. Which shocks me really. I have never given birth to a baby that acts like a baby -or my idea of what babies should act like. What was that? What did we see? Over the Hedge. This was a cute movie. Alot of the comedy is lost on children. If you have ever lived in an HOA community you will be right at home and the endless bits and bites of humor will tickle your funny bone. Now on the BigRedCouch rating scale for movies in which Shrek is the measure by which all animated movies are measured. Shrek being the whole hawg with extra-buttered popcorn, gummie bears AND peanut M&M's mixed together with a giant coke to wash it all down with in my kids fashion of creating a perfect movie viewing treat I give this movie a popcorn and coke rating. It was cute entertainment appealing to the children because of the talking rodents and whatnot. Go see it. Take your kids. Buy popcorn. Have fun. Do not be like the parents sitting in the row ahead of us with their two children probably 10 and 12 years old. No drink. No popcorn. No nothing but some leftover food of some sort the mother had in her bag that the little girl chewed on. I mean really. These people were well dressed and looked as if they could have affored at least a small popcorn for their kids to share. Am I the only person who doesn't make their kids sit through the movie with no popcorn? Am I the only parent who doesn't think the movie is the entire treat? I am sorry but movies without popcorn is just no fun. It might be like mama without the razzi. Which you should check out. Susie Sunshine is posting over there today. Go on. Go give Susie some comments love. Please.

I am over at Mamarazzi today. Come sip a margarita with me and we'll chat.

Someone recently accused me of making everything I do look graceful. I need to dispell that myth. Here is a secret: I don't have a lot of grace unless you consider my youngest daughter, Grace. That's a lot of Grace. Otherwise, very little grace. Maybe because in my posts I don't complain (too often) I give the appearance of things being a little too perfect. Oh believe me, things are not perfect, unless you consider I am perfectly happy in this point of my life. My days are just like yours. I cook. I clean. I do laundry. I change poopy diapers. I get tired. I dream of housekeepers and personal maids and a team of gardeners and handymen. I do try to put a good meal on the table every evening. Sometimes it might take me ALL DAY to actually get the meal prepared. There are even times when supper isn't on the table when Steve comes home. I might even serve him breakfast for supper because it doesn't take long to whip up some eggs and biscuits and or maybe sausage and pancakes. Remember after we eat there are dishes to wash. I might occassionally wash dishes as I cook, I also have a dishwasher but more importantly I have a daughter whose sole chore is to clean up the kitchen after meals. I have help. If I didn't have help these days the dishes might sit on the counter or in the sink for a quite a while before I get to them. I clean a little everyday. House work is a never ending chore. But my house is not spotless every minute of the day. Maybe because I have been doing it longer than most I make it look easier? Right now I am sitting with a puddle of papers at my feet and a stack of bills to pay. I have a baby fussing and a teenager complaining. I have a dog begging to come in and a cat terrorizing the dog. It is hazy, hot and looks like storms coming. It is early and I am tired already. It's hot and looking like rain. The pool temp is at 74+ ... maybe I'll have a pool day until the rains come. Too bad it is too early for margaritas.