My husband rarely smiles for the camera.
The more I bug him about it, the more he just won’t do it. Personally, I think he scowls everytime I have the camera in my hands just to mess with me. He’s feisty like that.
Cute, but feisty.
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July 2006.
On top of our triple digit temperatures this week, we’ve had voracious winds and several lightning storms causing two very large fires to erupt in our area. (By ‘our area’ I mean one fire is an hour south of us, the other fire is two hours north of us.)
(The smokey sky at sunset, looking out our front door.)
It is bad enough that we have to deal with the smoke-filled air, but a lightning storm several days ago decided to freak out my beloved PowerBook G4. I had left her hooked up to the power cord all night, thinking I would eventually get back to the project that I was working on (removing red-eye from some pictures of the dogs) but a particular demanding little person insisted that I lay in bed next to her while she fell asleep, which meant that I ended up falling asleep. After 2 minutes with my head on the pillow whispering "close your eyes" in a quiet voice, doing my best to imitate those creepy trance-inducing hypnotists you see on television, I could barely get three squares filled in on my Sudoku puzzle before my heavy eyelids forced sleep upon me.
When I woke up the next morning, my laptop had been zapped with a surge of electricity from the lightning storm, causing her to wander around dazed and confused, not knowing how to pull herself out of the funk. This was serious business and called for an emergency phone call to the Apple Care Center. Luckily all is well now and my beautiful PowerBook G4 is back to her old self again. Whew!
But that’s not all I have for you today.
Other exciting things are happening at The Valente Family that you need to know about. You see, it’s my orchid. The one that Jody got me for mother’s day three years ago that has since refused to bloom, even though I have nurtured it and watered it and repotted it and talked to it (because my mother taught me that plants have feelings too!) for the LAST THREE YEARS.
It seems that this stubborn plant might be thinking about blooming this year. Can you believe?
If and when the expected event occurs, I’ll be sure to let you know. In the meantime, we can all hold our breath and hope for the best, right?
Today I am supposed to be cleaning and organizing my house. There’s a pile of clothes sitting on the top of Janey’s dresser that has been there for at least 4 weeks, waiting to be bagged up and taken to the local Salvation Army.
The coffee table and end table drawers are full of toys, loose change, scraps of paper and other miscellaneous items that do not belong in there and need to be returned to their rightful homes before I have a nervous breakdown. And since the only child in our house these days is too young to blame for shoving crap into the drawers when I ask for the living room to be picked up, I can’t start ranting and raving and screaming, "WHO PUT THIS IN HERE?! THIS DOES NOT BELONG IN THIS DRAWER!" Because even though I run around screaming things like this to my children, acting like I have no idea how something got somewhere, I really do know. Sometimes, you just need to scream, you know what I mean?
On top of all this organizing I should be doing, there’s three loads of laundry upstairs in the kids’ rooms that needs to be brought down and washed, and a red Dodge Grand Caravan in the garage that needs to be vacuumed.
So far today all I’ve managed to do is water the plants and browse through my photo archives on the computer. Because really, how can I even think about cleaning out drawers when I can look at pictures like these:
And laugh at pictures like these:
And then of course, I can’t leave out these doozies:
So there you have it.
My day so far.
I wish I could tell you that I’m off to clean my car, but I have the latest episode of Project Runway Season 3 on Tivo, waiting to be watched. That and 36 episodes of the Dog Whisperer. There’s only 6 hours until bedtime so I had better get to it.
A couple years ago, Janey sent this message to Bree and Bailey while they were in Hawaii for the summer.
Today she tried to make a new, original message, but it didn’t quite work. Sort of like how you think you remember blowing out the candles on your third birthday cake, but really you’re just envisioning the pictures you’ve seen in your mother’s photo albums. The mind can be tricky in that way.