Sunday, August 19, 2007

I will be taking a vacation starting this wednesday, for a little over a week. This will be my first real vacation in a few years, although working half time most of the time meant that I never accumulated my time off and didn't get as tired as I do now working full time. The kids and I will have some much needed time together, and hope to do some fun things. I have a free pass to Wunderland Nickel arcade , along with 100 free nickels. I hope to take the kids to Oaks Park on the tuesday two for one day, and probably a picnic to bring along. We may go to Bonneville Dam and the fish hatchery. There's a lot to do, and I've got a week left of summer to enjoy it.

Sunday, August 12, 2007

Clinton a Drag? Dems Fear Her Negatives
Hmm, and this they are just figuring out? That Hil is polarizing, and she sets some people on edge, causing republicans who might otherwise not get off thier bible belting, gun toting, conservative asses and vote? I thought that the lowest turnout of voters is in the young liberal crowd, the ones most likely to complain about the usurper in chief in office right now. I don't honestly know who she is supposed to appeal to most, who is her base? Is it feminists? Not a big voting segment, perhaps it is the balding, birkenstock wearing long haired aging liberals I see padding around Powell's, trying to look intellectual and sound cooly aloof yet compassionate. I would think she would be a big turnoff to most younger folks, probably reminds them of their owm mothers, what do you do when the up and coming generations reject you and your liberal ideals because you are the establishment? What a pickle! I dunno. I would not vote for her because she seems fake to me. I doubt her principles.

What I got for my birthday

My husband bought me an Enya CD, one we have not heard before, and a Reader's Digest DVD series of American Roadtrips. It is neat, we like roadtrips, it's like watching someone's tavellogue, or an extended ad for the chamber of commerce.
My mom bought me a digital photo frame. What fun, it is just like a little computer screen, and this one eats whatever memory I have, sc card, cf card, xd card, it even has a usb port I could use a thumb drive in. It plays music, has little built in speakers, so you can play mp3's along with looking at your pictures. Picture quality is fine, most of my pics are pretty good to begin with, a few look a little pixilated, but in general it is very sharp.

Ah, Finally some breathing room

It's funny how you can get so "head down, shoulders into the wind, focused on getting from here there" busy. Work really is going well but the long days, 10 hours which amount to 12 by the time you leave for work and pull back into the driveway, make me tired. By the time I get back home at 7pm or so, I just want to stare at the four walls and do nothing. We are trying really hard to plan ahead for things like dinner, and PCDoc is really pitching it to help. I appreciate that mroe than I can say, because it appears that no matter how much I work, everyone just assumes it's my job, to cook, clean, wash dishes do laundry etc. It's their default setting. The kids are, albeit unwilliingly, pitching in more too and it helps. It has been so long since I worked out of the house full time, we forget what that is like.

I haven't had much chance to take more pics, we haven't really gotten to go anywhere, although the Doc and I went up to Leavenworth for a day while the kids were away at camp at the end of July. It was a nice trip but long and kind of expensive. I found some cute little yellow Lemon Verbena soaps, just the size of an almond, or a little bigger, and bought a bunch, they look like candy in a bowl, and they smell wonderful. French milled soaps, lather great and your hands feel soft.
Speaking of hands, I have found my hands getting rougher and rougher as the days go on. That spray on hand cleanser they make us use is terrible, and summer just dries them out. I need to keep lotion on them.
It was my birthday yesterday and I had a great day. I cooked pork ribs and bought corn and melons, my mom bought a mocha cake from the Tollgate Inn in Sandy, which was wonderful, think of a cake that tastes like the best latte and that is something close, We expected it to have chocolate, but it didn't really, it was more creamy coffe flavor. Oh well, it was good. It's funny, the Tollgate Inn has been there for years, and they have no website, the best I could do was the citysearch site, places that we just know because they have always been there, like Calamity Janes, the Oregon Candy Farm, and so many others that we grew up with. The one I miss the most was The Carnival, a little flame broiled burger place, back when flame broiled meant cooked over a real flame, not a gas burner, that was the great grandpa to Fuddruckers, fix your own style, which is now, sadly, gone from the site. Not just closed, but the little corner of Sam Jackson Park Road on which it sat (it's just a wide spot in the windy road heading up to Pill Hill), is empty, wiped away. Sadly. I didn't mean for this to turn into a review of my favorite eateries in town, maybe that's what happens when you turn forty one, you go all maudlin.

The kids and I layed out last night of sleeping bags and watched the Perseids, although by midnight clouds moved in and obscured our view. What we saw were pretty. I like to think of themn as part of my birthday celebration. Celestial fireworks. Once when I was a teenager, long before ai got to know God better and was still just wondering if he was really there at all, I was sleeping out on our deck one night. As I was looking at the sky my thoughts turned to asking myself that question, and no sooner did the thought run through my head that the brightest streaking meeor shot across the sky, in perfect answer to my question. Not one of those little puny things, this was fireball sized. It took my breath away. I should have known then that God was more than willing to make himself know tho thos who sincerely seek him. Any way, the kidlings really enjoyed it and so did I.