A Lot To Do

It's been over a week since I last posted. You maybe wondered if I was sick, or on vacation (in January?), or had amnesia, or broke both my hands and couldn't type, or the internet was down in the whole town, or I've been audited, or serving on jury duty.

The truth is not nearly so glamorous. I've been:

1. Helping Kiah get her passport. Turns out for reasons I never knew or have long forgotten, her birth certificate was not registered for 14 months after her birth. Passport people don't like things like that. It's okay for President Obama to have birth certificate issues, but not okay for law-abiding 20-year-olds. So we're needing to come up with a Plan B and find acceptable secondary confirmation of her birth. I am not organized and this is so not fun.

2. Learning to Cross-Country ski - I've wanted to learn but didn't want to learn in public. A friend who lives in the country offered to teach me. The plan was to practice in her field until we didn't look like idiots and then we'd go out in public. This was a lot of fun until I fell down and had trouble getting back up.

3. Watching Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman reruns. Nothing like catching the wave fifteen years late. I never watched this show when it was on TV. I got Season 1 from Netflix and my youngest three and I have enjoyed getting up to speed. We're learning all sorts of useful medical knowledge. For years I've tried talking Keith into growing his hair longer. He says he's in the wrong profession to have long hair. When I suggested Keith grow his hair long like Sully's, he said "Fat chance."

4. Cleaning more dog throw up, once for each dog. Keith cleaned up a spot when Tucker threw up outside our bedroom door early in the morning and I pretended to be asleep.

5. Helping prepare for Youth Sunday at our church. We had two slide shows to prepare and the girls had to pick out music and practice and all that took an enormous chunk out of the week. The service went well and the kids really enjoyed themselves. It was fun to see them take ownership.

6. Working on a Shutterfly Digital photo album for Erica who graduates this spring. I had a free 20 pg. album offer that expired today. I did 100 pages total and placed the order thirty minutes before the deadline. When Keith complained about how much time this took, I explained that these same amount of pictures could easily have taken me a year to scrapbook the regular way and would have cost at least twice as much. A week of me being glued to the computer is a good trade-off.

(I'm getting tired all over again just listing this stuff. I'm reminded of a line in a children's book, Harry Goes to School - "A lot. A lot. Harry had a lot to do."

7. Celebrating the 28th anniversary of our first date. Our first date was at the YMCA and Denny's afterwards. This year we went to a local Italian restaurant and out to a play.

8. Shoveling snow in my plaid Christmas jammies - You can take the girl out of the country but you can't take bad habits out of her when she moves into town. I debated long and hard about the odds that one of the hundred people I know in this town of 9,000 would happen to drive by and see my crazy get-up. My kids would have had a fit if they'd been home. (Of course if they'd been home, they would have been shoveling instead of me. )

Would you want your mother in front of your house wearing these? (I'm the one in dark blue)

All of this may have been more than you wanted to know. I will try not to take such a long blogging break in the future. Have a good week and remember if you shovel snow in your pajamas there is a good chance they'll get wet and you'll need to change them which is what you should have done in the first place because normal people don't shovel snow in their pajamas when they live a block off main street.

Signing off until next time. Thanks for stopping by.