Monday, February 22, 2010

19th – 22th of February 2010

IMG_0250And here sleeps the hand that feeds us, exhausted, and still a little twitchy, but sleeping. Kurt actually hates it when I take his picture…while he’s sleeping, but to me, capturing his hand was significant. It’s a part of who he is and what he does. Calluses, carbon stains, burns, scabs & scars, strong hands made beautiful by the sacrifice of their own comfort so that others will not have to work so hard to eat, sleep, play and learn. This was actually late on the 18th.
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It does count as brunch, even when served between 1 & 2 PM. Sunny Friday triggers allergy symptoms…countered by self pampering with sleeping in and having pancakes and coffee for a late lunch/brunch.
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By computer screen light. Not exactly romantic, but it is cool :D



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My Zipporah on the 21st at Sunset Beach! Isn’t she cool??






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Camden. Whining at Mr. Hinkel’s today. February 22nd.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

9th February – 18th - 2010

Look, I don’t even feel all guilt ridden about being BEHIND (again, some more, as usual). I will do my best to try to remember what’s been going on :)IMG_1590_2010-02-09_a480
Cam got a little lecture from the pediatric nurse practitioner on how not taking his allergy medication could have an adverse effect on his behavior, it could cause him to lose sleep and be unable to pay attention…and he could even have trouble in school. Go figure. His ear infection is gone though…and he said he’d try to be more responsible about taking his allergy meds and staying away from things he shouldn’t be around (anything fragrant basically…and tons of foods he likes).
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Wednesday we hit Mr. Hinkel’s room (again). We had stopped in Tuesday to check on Cam’s newly formatted old computer – and he was reading to celebrate…okay, so really he was reading because he figured out that if he DOES SOME WORK he gets to use the computer that now connects to the internet…which means he can watch Stargate…
I cannot for the life of me remember Thursday, February 11th. I wish I could…it’s that brain damage again.
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12.Feb.2010
Now, I still haven’t figured out WHY they set Camden’s computer up UNDER the desk, but there you have it, it’s under the desk instead of on it, usually they also have a pile of pillows and a blanket there…more comfy to feed the Webkinz that way.
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Very late when I finally got home from Gino’s, but I still wanted to frost our Valentine cake for tomorrow anyhow…but the kids had eaten the frosting AND the bag of butterscotch chips. REALLY?? SO…I dumped some brown sugar into a pan with a chunk of butter, added sweetened condensed milk and stirred for half and hour to make caramel sauce to dump on Devil’s Food Cake – and it was YUMMY.
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Folks, this is my Valentine, brought him to church with me ;o) I kind of like that streak of light :)





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Sushi. Now before you go all queasy like – hear me out. THERE’S NO FISH IN THERE (well, maybe in the seaweed, like essence of fish or something) – it’s just RICE, seasoned rice vinegar and green onion wrapped up in nori (seaweed). I was too lazy to even mix up some wasabi! AND IT IS YUMMY!! Now we’re out of rice vinegar and Abby is really irritated with me. 02.15.2010
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I had to take the car to Ford and have my oil changed (okay, 2,500 miles ago, but today I finally made it – on Feb. 16th). I was looking through a WIRED magazine and decided I should subscribe – there were lots of cool ads in it. I think I need one of these flashlights. It comes in chartreuse.


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FEBRUARY 17th, 2010… the day that changed history. Okay, not really, because it really got here on the 16th and I took the photo of it after midnight…but it is the night (early morning?)(cuz that’s when the battery was fully charged)  my EOS 7D arrived…and UPS tried to deliver it to my NEIGHBOR’s house at 9AM and she wasn’t home so they didn’t leave it because it needed a signature and when I tried to track the truck down I discovered UPS customer center has an unlisted number so I had to drive there and get the number and was told my driver would be in around 6PM!! So, I wait. ALL DAY. And at 6:30, my truck still wasn’t in. I finally got my 7D at 8PM. That’s right, night time. Oh well, it’s a sweet new body :D Someday I will have a lens worthy of it, for now, it’s wearing my super beat up cheap 70-300mm telephoto – and I’m okay with that :D
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Lobster Bisque. Since I had the evening off and this is what Sandy & I were going to do tomorrow…we did it tonight instead. Thursday night lobster bisque instead of Friday night and it was YUMMY!! (how could anything with a cup of melted butter, 6 cups of half and half and lobster be bad?) I only took about 10 photos of it – playing with the cool white balance adjustment on the 7D – you can set white balance using the color temp. adjustment!!! So much cooler than trying to choose between icons depicting lighting situations that usually aren’t all that accurate.
That soup might have been…unhealthy…just a teensy bit :) But it was after we went to the beach and the fog rolled in and we were freezing to death :D

Monday, February 8, 2010

February 7th & 8th, 2010

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Look at the sunshine through the curtains. Such a bummer this is the day we have to come home from Lincoln City – and the little sleepers are toooooo cute (and delightfully QUIET).
Now folks, I am usually a calm, safe, easy going driver…but I gotta’ tell you – THOSE FREAKS THAT DRIVE 30 MPH FROM LINCOLN CITY ALL THE WAY TO FLORENCE…need to take an alternate route. For crying out loud, 30 in the 45 and 40 in the 55 was making me INSANE! Frothing at the mouth insane, I am not kidding you. Pull outs all over and do you think grandma and grandpa BC would pull into one of them?? NO! I mean, goodness me, stopping would keep them from getting to the casino in Florence at least 10 minutes behind schedule!
Fortunately, at Florence, most of the freaks are out of the way (and there are occasional passing lanes) and I felt *home free.*
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Then this morning, we’re getting dressed and ready to go and Ruby comes out in this – tiered flippy skirt, cute bucket hat, shoes with shiny sparkly straps and a flower with giant (hideous) gem on top – and I said, “How cute Ruby, you fell out of the 80s.”
This puzzled her. Some day we will explain :D

Saturday, February 6, 2010

February 1st through 6th, 2010

Alrighty folks, this weekly updating is MOSTLY awesome, except that  I have been using Abigail’s camera and it resets the time/date that tags the image data…so keeping days straight is wretched :D I will do the best I can to keep it straight.
February 1st was my mother’s birthday, folks, she is officially 36 this year…(just kidding, it’s a joke, she skipped her 36th birthday and decided to be 37 twice).
OY! It is also maddening that due to operator error, my phone was saving my images to the phone and not the mini sd card, and those stinking images have to be moved one by one to the card! GRRRR!
0201102255c So, February 1, I find myself at Wal Mart after work, in thick fog…because we were out of milk at home AGAIN. Camden always gets the blame for drinking the entire gallon in one day, but he was innocent this time, he wasn’t home :)
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February 2, after picking Cam up from the pool, I made him show me all of his ribbons. He got three 1sts, three 2nds and two 3rd place ribbons! Amazing boy! His fly is AMAZING now and we were all very impressed with his 200 IM and hope to see him swim that again! No ‘A’ times, but we weren’t exactly prepared to go to state yet anyhow. He did an awesome job at this meet and we are proud of him!
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Wednesday, this photo is basically how I felt. Fighting off some kind of icky tummy bug for a couple of days left me wiped out. We met with Mr. Hinkel, left Camden’s computer there in the process of being formatted to Linux and updating drivers so he could get himself *back online*, however it stays in Mr. Hinkel’s room until Camden begins to show some effort in producing some kind of work. Camden still claims he doesn’t remember that part of the deal.  Remembered or not, that’s the deal (and all of the unreasonable, mean, brutal parents of teens say AMEN).
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Alright folks, the dude in the sailboat is CRAZY! It’s cold, it’s raining…and that’s Kurt. We caught him taking half a day off on Wednesday (we were on our way home from Resource Link) to sail the boat to the California Street public boat ramp to pull the Zipporah out of the water for a while. Seriously, blowing rain, we had to run down to the casino parking lot so we could find a place to stop the car and take some photos – his location when we first spotted him was in the area where all of the commercial boats, barges and tugs were, and on the 101 side, there was no place to pull over and flag him down.
Thursday, that would have been the 4th, and I remember having gone in to Gino’s at 3:00AM to roll dough, suspecting that it wouldn’t be there, and guess what…it wasn’t. So instead of rolling dough, I made dough – scared the daylights out of one of the Register Guard newspaper guys on my way out – went home and went back to sleep. Dropped Cam at swimming around 3 PM and waited around for him at Gino’s until Dad called and said he’d pick him up and keep him for the weekend, he had some chores to do. SO, back home and back to bed (to the best of my knowledge).
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Friday, PAYDAY. Okay, well, I nearly forgot to pick up my check. I rolled three tubs of dough and piled the car to leave for Lincoln City for the weekend. Hard to tell if we took photos on Friday because Abby’s camera time/date RESETS every time you shut the stupid thing off (yes, need to replace an internal battery because that totally BUGS me).  This suspiciously looks like me, on a last minute check of the *do I have everything we need* visual scan, before we head off toward town/gino’s/grandpa’s and then LINCOLN CITY…3 hours later than I had wanted to be leaving. Whatever. We got out of there and Angie knows about me and my straggling.
AND, I read several chapters in a really cool book, Rowing to Latitude, by Jill Freston that Mr. Hinkel suggested (and loaned me). It’s awesome so far…resulting in my not going to sleep last night until early Saturday morning.
Then for Saturday, February 6th…we have this STELLAR photo of Angie’s arm/hand, some 0206101328blurry rocks covered with mussels and a wave that you can’t see that caused the chaos. Okay, so I knew lying on rocks only exposed at low tide to get a photo of incoming waves was a little risky, but Angie was already soaked anyhow after trying out a teeter totter rock unknowingly, so what did we have to lose except for a handful and pocket full of electronic equipment. UM…wish I had a nice wide angle, that would have been MUCH more fun than cell phone camera. At any rate, nothing broken. Just a little spray on us. SO, we tried some more :D0206101329a  0206101329b




0206101559b(those are sandwiches they be eatin’)