Very Lazy-Mostly Pictures

The last few days in pictures...
Tim's brother Marc was in Boston for a day so we went down last Friday. The kids have never really met him and we spent a few hours at the Children's Museum there. They are always excited to ride the T because they can't quite believe they are underground.

Declan was more interested in smashing all the chess pieces down instead of playing. I have no idea how to play so we couldn't have anyway.
The 3 story climbing thingy was the first stop for Grace. She didn't get very high up-she suddenly decided she was scared of heights.
Today was costume day in the backyard. Declan put his usual Batman outfit together and accessorized it this time with yellow rubber boots. You can see from this picture that our backyard is just dirt and it can be blamed on all the big trees back there. It makes it very shady but in return nothing grows. Its very embarrassing. Good news today though-the neighbor told us the big tree you can see just behind Declan is coming down in about 3 weeks. My goal next year is grass in the backyard and the chain link fence gone. Then again that has been my goal every year for the last 10 years but it might actually happen this time. This is Graces Care Bear costume from the Halloween she was 3. Shes 8 in 2 weeks but still wears it. She is doing much planning for her birthday sleepover. I am dreading it but I guess it is payback for all the sleepovers I had that seemed to go all night. Our 11th wedding anniversary was Saturday. I bought an old postcard of the Rangeley Country Club off Ebay and framed it as a present for Tim. This was were we had our wedding reception. Of course you have to understand when I say "country club" in Rangeley that means moose heads over the fireplace and plaid couches. We chose it for the view over the lake anyway. I've started some of the projects I'm going to try to do on my vacation. So far I've been better at buying the things I need more than starting them. I did begin my blanket-I got about 10 rows knitted. Only 50 more rows to finish this square and then about 7 or 8 other squares to go.
I bought this toile fabric yesterday so I can learn how my sewing machine works. I have a jar full of balsam fir potpourri so I think I am going to try to make a little balsam sachet out of it. I think I can sew a square and stuff it.


One thing I've been wanting to try are these honking big needles that you can knit a scarf on in a day if you have that kind of time. Who knows if it will work but I'm going to try.

I almost finished cleaning the basement this morning and the kids discovered my old marble collection and are busy sorting through them and naming the prettiest ones. I was quite the marble freak at Williams-Cone School. We used to dig holes in the playground and sort of play. I don't think anyone ever knew the rules. We mostly just saw marbles we liked and tried to hit them so we could keep them. Declan wants to make blueberry muffins so have to get going.

I'm Free

At 4:30 today I started my 2 week vacation.I get 5 weeks vacation every year(union job) but this is my long one. I made a promise to myself that I would spend my time doing to the things I never get to instead of doing things around the house. I do have to clean out the basement but besides that I'm not doing anything around the house. Of course I say these things but they never actually happen. So I'm going to make a list of things I want to do.
-Learn how my sewing machine works and make something on it. I made a skirt in 8th grade Home Ec so I know I can do something.
-Start knitting my blanket and finish my scarf.
-Watch the movies I always mean to but never do.
-Take the kids strawberry picking and possibly make jam?
-Learn how to make jam.
-Hike Bald Mtn. again when we go to Rangeley for the 4th.
-Make some earrings.
-Cook something-maybe dinner?
-Try to take the kids to the beach even though I will be miserable. They need to make up their own minds about the place.
-Finish reading the 10 books I've started.
-Don't watch the news(this probably won't happen but I'm putting it down anyway).
-Get a shorter haircut and wash that gray right out of my hair.
-Go the library by myself.

Now there's pressure to actually do these things now that I have written them down and sent them out into the world. I'll let you know how I make out.

If You're Ever In Brunswick...

***UPDATE*****
Everything I wrote below-just ignore. I was just told today by my mother that my brother quit last week. So it's still a nice place but the food won't be as good. There goes my free meals...

If you're ever in Brunswick, Maine and you get hungry, I would suggest stopping by The Sweet Leaves Teahouse on Pleasant St. Try and look past the name-it's not a fru-fru Victorian doily place. The chef there goes by the last name of DeGroot and the food there is awesome. It's all healthy and even I like it. I don't remember him ever cooking anything growing up though...

http://www.sweetleaves.com/

http://www.boston.com/travel/explorene/maine/articles/2007/12/19/the_city_of_ships/

http://entertainment.mainetoday.com/dining/review.html?id=343

I Think I Can Do This

As I find myself turning into an old lady, I figured just go for it, and I am going to try to knit a blanket. So far I've just made scarfs but I figure this is just a wider version of a scarf. I've found this pattern which looks idiot proof:

http://acmoore.lionbrand.com/patterns/60160A.html

I bought 2 blue yarns that seem to go together but it was hard to tell after standing in the store aisle for 20 minutes-Declan was very patient with me. I figure it will take me 6 months or so to do it if I don't get carpal tunnel. So stay tuned-if I can keep this blog going you might see the finished project.

Things You Forget You Have To Do For The Second Child

When you have your first child you go through all the major milestones for the first time and they are all big deals. Declan has always been the baby to me and nothing major has happened beyond potty training. It's just started to occur to me that he hasn't been a baby for a long time and I have to start getting my stuff together for all the things I need to do for him.

-He will be starting Kindergarten in September so he needs all that important first day of school stuff. This is old hat to Grace but its all new to him.
-I just realized in the past few days that I will have to start talking to him about the facts of life soon. I got through it with Grace but she wasn't even very interested. I talked to her and bought her the awful 1970's-ish where did I come from book which she now reads all the time since she can actually read now. Its also this same book by the way, that she took to school a few weeks ago without telling us and we only heard about it from the bus driver after it had been passed around to all the kids on the bus.
-He probably won't start loosing his teeth until 1st grade if our family genetics hold up but I got worried he might start early. With Grace I got a little wooden box and painted it and added fairy decals to make a tooth fairy box for under her pillow. Declan and I went out yesterday to pick out his box and decals. He had no interest in fairies so his tooth fairy box will be covered with little insects.

Stealing Ideas

We finished our playroom almost a year ago but I never got around to putting anything on the walls. The walls took so long that I didn't really want to deal with them again. Underneath those Wellington Blue walls, there is the 1960's fake wood paneling with a layer over that of shiny 1980's blue and pink wallpaper that the previous owner put up. I guess it was an improvement over the paneling but not by much. We put up with it for 9 years but finally covered it last year. It was a long process involving putting up paintable wallpaper and then painting that. So anyway I was looking at the Soulemama website and then I got her book free at work. I would link to both of those things but I have no idea how-I will learn soon. Her site is in my list of places I visit everyday. The book is crunchier than me but has so many good ideas. She also lives in Portland so its sort of cool to keep up with her. She has something she calls an "Inspiration Wire" which is just a piece of wire strung on the wall that her kids hang things from. I saw that and decided it was the solution to the piles of artwork I live under. Grace loves art and could spend all day doing it. Declan loves it a little less but still manages to produce quite a lot of it. I went to Staples and discovered it was my new favorite store. I just had to buy wire and clips but the clips were so cute! I held back from spending over $10 on the fancy decorated ones and just bought plain old green ones. It took about 2 minutes to hang the whole thing up. I also decided to add 2 canvases that Grace painted when she was 3. They are either brilliant modern art or the work of an average 3 year old-I'm too biased to decide. No one else seemed to care that I did these things but I'm glad it finally did it.

It's hard to see but the wire is to the right in this picture. I also cleaned up all the bins and tossed out about half a recycling bin of old plastic toys. Don't tell my kids! I'm hoping they never notice and the truck has already taken them away to be made into other useless plastic toys.

These are 2 of Graces watercolors. One is some sort of bird and the other is a frog on a lily pad. The first thing Declan noticed was that it was mostly Grace's stuff up there so I'm sure he is already planning in his little head what he needs to make so he is represented.

These Are A Few Of My Favorite Things Part II

Not feeling very original tonight so I thought I would go through the rest of my photos from around the house. This is for all you voyeurs out there.

This is my Titanic poster that I bought at the Titanic exhibition in Greenwich, England in 1995. Its not very practical to buy a poster when you are backpacking but I managed to keep it safe. It is a strange European size so I have never been able to fit in into a proper frame because we are not metric. Right now it actually hangs in my bathroom because that's where I had an empty space. Once I put it up, I realized my wallpaper in there has air balloons on them so I guess you could say the theme of our bathroom is 19th and 20th century transportation.


We bought 8 or 9 of these bookcases from the unfinished furniture store when we bought the house 10 years ago. We always meant to paint or stain them but it never happened. Last year we realized we had to downsize the books to make the room a playroom but we kept these 3 in there for the books we were keeping. It took a few weeks but I finally managed to paint them. Then we were stuck trying to figure out to fit the books back on because a lot of Tim's books are very large. Our old bookstore habits die hard because we have to arrange them alphabetically by fiction and non-fiction. We finally decided to divide our books and put Tim's books on the bottom 3 shelves and mine on the top shelves. Grace actually came up with the idea of putting all the photos on the middle shelve. I'm just happy to have painted shelves.
This is my flat surface stove. On our old stove, Tim could not make a meal without overflowing something into the burners and they would never come clean. I think most people choose their stoves based on its cooking performance but I choose mine solely by its ease of cleaning. I also went with all black appliances even though people warned me to go with basic white. I love them still but do get nervous that they will become the avocado green of the 2000's.
I just bought this print off EBay. I love EBay. Its a 1898 print of a camp on Rangeley Lake. Its in the white birches like ours is.
This is the family picture wall. I had all these pictures of the kids and really no place to put them so I bought the same frame in several sizes and hung them all over the sofa.
This is my dishwasher-excuse how dirty it is in this picture. I'll clean it when I am done with this. We gutted our kitchen about 4 years ago. Our house was built in 1928 and it seems they never built a proper kitchen in it. When we moved in, we had half homemade cabinets and half rusty metal ones from the 60's. Also from the 60's was a dishwasher that didn't work and was attached to the sink unit so we couldn't just buy a new one. It just sat there for years taunting me. Anyway, it took us almost 6 months to finish the kitchen and in that time I did the dishes in the bathtub every night including baby bottles. As a result of that experience, I am in love with this machine and put all sorts of stuff in it to clean. I will never be without one again. You can also see that we still have things to finish in the kitchen. To the left of the dishwasher you can see we have the cabinet baseboard in but to the right you can see it is still open. We have them in the basement-we'll put them in one day.
This is a picture that Declan drew when he was 2. It's of his head and his legs and I will keep it forever. Tim framed it for me for this Mothers Day after it hung on my wall for a few years. I want to make a t-shirt out of it.


My father used to have an antique store and I think he gave each of kids a Singer sewing machine. I once tried to figure out how to thread the 1910 machine that's inside it but decided it was best to use it to keep stuff on it. The drawers are stuffed full of my grandmother doilies and sewing supplies from 100 years ago. I have no idea what any of it is for but I like having it. There are some rare wedding pictures of me on it and a wooden cutout of the church in Rangeley we were married in.

This Is Why The Cat Runs Away From Me

Here is the hell that Peter has to go though twice a day now. His diabetes is not under control yet so we have to keep increasing his dosage. Every morning and every night around 7, he gets his shot and he hates it but is being very good about it.

These are the needles and insulin from the pet pharmacy. Yes, there are millions in this country without health care but rest assured there is a place to turn to if your dog needs Prozac. I know the pharmacy is important to pet owners but it just seems a little silly to me that you just can't buy these things straight from the vet.
This is the needle for his injections. I thought it would freak me out to give him shots but so far it hasn't. Its a very small needle but he still flinches. Afterwards, I just toss them in the trash but I'm starting to worry the garbage men will think we are heroin addicts.

It's hard to see in this picture but he has a small shaved spot below his neck to make it easier for us to see where the shot is going. It was freaking Declan out but its started to grow back in a little. The vet called yesterday and seems optimistic about how he is doing. I'm not so sure on this end because he still seems very lethargic and he hates his special diabetes food. Owen the healthy cat on the other hand loves it so at least someone is eating it since it costs more than my food.

Tim Russert Has Died 6-13-08

How can this be? Who will explain politics to us?

Things I Need To Stop Doing

There are too many to actually list but here are some things I need to stop doing:

-Checking my bookmarks all day long.
Some of you with your own blogs may have noticed that I visit several times a day. Please believe me that I am not a crazy stalker but an obsessive compulsive checker of my bookmarked pages. This can get especially bad if I am really bored at work(that's basically every day). I know you aren't updating 10 times a day but I still have to check in. I will try to stop.

-Cleaning up my house every night.
Not to say that I am vacuuming and dusting every night but I do tend to put the house back together once the kids are asleep. Who am I doing this for? I am gone all day and I didn't make the mess. I know I feel better when it I can see the floor but I bet I would feel better if I spent that time reading a book instead.

-Drinking Dr. Pepper for breakfast.
It goes without saying that I know its bad for me. I have the ingredients for a healthy breakfast in my refrigerator. I just need to give myself 5 extra minutes to put something together.

I know there are several more I could add to this But one of the other things I need to stop doing is not sleeping enough so I am going to take a nap. I miss naps.

High School Deja Vu

I graduated from high school half my lifetime ago and I've managed to put most of it behind me but I had the strangest case of deja vu Friday night. Now I know my high school friends, Heather and Lisa, are reading this and this concerns you two as well. When we were juniors(I think), we spent the night in an empty apartment in Portland. Looking back now I have no idea how I got my parents to agree to this so I can only assume I lied to them about it. So it was a bunch of 17 year old girls in an apartment that Heather had use of somehow. I seem to remember the usual sleepover drama and at one point Lisa and I went out and came upon an overturned truck just hanging out in the middle of the road. So anyway, the point of this is, I went to a baby shower Friday night at a co-workers apartment on Commercial St. I wasn't really paying attention to exactly where I was going and it was only once I made it to the front steps that I realized this was the same building from high school. The lobby was exactly the same but unfortunately it was no longer 1989. My friends apartment is on the top floor and totally different from the one we stayed in. Anyway, the point of all this is, that overnight was when I decided I really liked Portland and wanted to live here someday. I actually didn't move into Portland until after my junior year in college and I've been here coming up on 15 years! Of course I always think about moving away. I've lived in other places (NJ, Alaska, London) but I always ended up back in Maine. Is it because this is the best place for me or am I just not adventurous? Probably a lot of both. I know its a very good place for the kids to be. Sometimes I do think about just selling everything and moving somewhere we have no ties to anything or anyone and seeing what happens. Tim would move to the Southwest for the heat but he would have to go alone because there is no way I could survive that. We would move to Manhattan in a second but that could only happen after winning the lottery. I made 1 trip to the South and that was enough for me. I haven't really been to the Mid-West but it seems awfully flat and full of tornadoes. It would be weird to live somewhere without an ocean nearby even though I hate the beach. Who knows, maybe one day I'll be writing to you from Minnesota or Nebraska.

These Are A Few Of My Favorite Things

In my continued attempts to figure out our camera and all the little buttons on it, I was taking pictures around the house so I decided to turn it into a post. So here are a few of my favorite things around here.


This is the silhouette of Grace that I made a few years ago. I was remembering making them in grade school and I didn't think they did that anymore so off to the craft store I went. I just bought a shadowbox, a mat and some think black paper and got Grace to sit still for a few minutes. Her brother was another story when it came to cooperation so I bought the exact same supplies and have been holding on to them for 2 years and hopefully soon he'll let me do one of him.

This is my Grandmother DeGroots jewelry box that I have had since I was little. She lived with us and died when I was 4 and I'm sorry to say that I really don't remember her at all. I do remember playing with her jewelry though so I have always kept mine in it. Its sort of a mess at the moment. I also have her bedroom set from the 1930's. How I got that out of the house past my mother I will never know.
These are my new sock monkey slippers. $2.98 at Target!! One day I'm going to get a sock monkey kit and make one.
This is my WW1 wheelchair that sits in my dining room. My brother bought it at an auction for something crazy like $20 and then he moved to Wisconsin for a while and left it at my parents house. From there I stole it and its been in my possession ever since. We actually had a roommate in college that we convinced the wheelchair used to belong to FDR.
This is my TIVO. Its not a real one, its the Time Warner Cable version but that's what I call it anyway. I will never be without one and I don't know how I existed before it was invented. Think about what it was like to get that first VCR and this is 1000 times greater.

This is my balsam fir incense burner from LL Bean. I had one when I was little, bought from some little shop in Rangeley. You light the little balsam incense thingy and put it inside the house and the smoke comes out the chimney. Declan agrees with me that it makes the house smell like Rangeley.

Dr. Oz Would Be Horrified

Did you ever have one of those days where every single thing you ate was junk? I can't even think of one thing I ate today that had any nutritional value. Now I am the first to admit that I have a terrible diet but today was especially bad. I blame one of the cats. My whole day got off to a bad start when Declan woke me up at 5am to help him go potty and I got out of bed and stepped directly on a fresh, wet, warm hairball that somebody coughed up while I was asleep. Never really got back to sleep after that and as a result was in a really foul mood. I usually head straight for work and exist on a Dr. Pepper for breakfast but this morning I headed for McDonalds even though I knew it would make me late for work. So breakfast was a bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit and a sweet tea. The McDonalds sweet tea is evil-its huge, sugary good, and only costs a dollar. I could have 5 a day. I also still had a Dr. Pepper when I got to work and as the morning went on I had some Twizzlers and some Hersheys chocolate with almonds and toffee chips. Lunch was really unforgivable. I went home for it and could have had a sandwich there but instead I stopped at Libs which used to be the local Dairy Queen. My lunch was a peanut buster parfait. Its so big you need one of those extra long spoons to eat it-layers of ice cream, peanuts and hot fudge. You would think that would be it but when I got home tonight I was in no mood to cook anything and the kids(who knew exactly what they were doing) started talking about how much they would love to get one of the Indiana Jones toys they are giving away at Burger King. Well you can guess what happened next! Kids got the kids meals and I got fries and a bacon double cheeseburger. I sound like one of those food addicts or bulimics they show on Intervention who spend their days going from drive-in to drive-in. I'm sad to say that I topped off my day by having some mint Oreos dipped in milk right before I started this post. The sad fact is this whole day will have no effect on my stomach-its practically cast iron by now. So like I said today was one of my worst food days in a long time. I promise tomorrow that I will have some grapes or yogurt. I can say my fast food cravings have been met for the time being. If I ate like that all the time I would end up being 800 pounds and Richard Simmons would have to come rescue me by taking the side of my house off so I could get out.

This Is The Week That Was

So... another week went by without a new post. I don't know where the time goes. Every day I mean to write something but then, by night, I have no energy to do it. I'll try to be better. I do have a good excuse though. I have been at work almost every day for the past 2 1/2 weeks practically working the desk alone. Everyone that works on the desk has either quit or gone on vacation. Have I ever explained what "the desk" is exactly? It the very original news name for the assignment desk and I am an assignment editor. Basically we are like the dispatch center for the newsroom. Its the crappiest job in the newsroom but the newsroom claims they would be lost without us. We find out about and organize the story options we have and then assign the reporters and photogs to cover them. Its all very easy and boring but its something that confuses the producers so they think its a more complicated job then it is. I let them think this so they leave me alone. So anyway, I was it and all the desk assistants were gone too so I had to cover their teleprompter job as well. I actually like doing prompter because it gets me away from my desk and into the studio. Its only when we are live on air and I get to be a part of it that I remember why I work in TV. I just wish I worked in TV instead of news. I really should look into jobs at PBS. But I digress-I don't want to turn this into a big whiny post about work.
I actually did get 1 day off last week so I could go to Declan's pre-school graduation. As you can see from the picture below he choose not to participate in it at all. He was fine in the classroom when they were rehearsing the program but he shuts down as soon as he sees us in the audience. Its very embarrassing. All the other kids were signing their little songs and dancing and Declan sat there pouting and playing with his teddy bear. He refused to wear his little graduation cap and when it was time for him to get his diploma I had to carry him up there. I chalk it up to being 5 years old-if I have to carry him up to get his high school diploma then I'll know he has a real problem.

He did recover in time to enjoy the make your own sundae party afterwards. Maybe we should have fed him the ice cream first.
Grace spent her week working on her jump rope record. Shes up to 25 jumps in a row. She says to add that she was going to go for 26 but she forgot to jump again.
Somehow in the midst of practically living at work I managed to go to the movies twice this week. I don't know how it happened. With the exception of movies like Cars or Horton Hears a Who, I have seen about 3 movies in the theater since Grace was born. I was determined to see Sex and The City and Tim had Sunday night off so I went to the 10pm show in Falmouth. I figured the place would be empty but unfortunately there were some groups of giggling girls there. The movie was OK-it was like watching 5 episodes of the show in a row. I felt really old after it was over, leaving the theater alone with all these teenage girls and getting into my minivan and driving home. Last night I went out again to the 10pm showing of Indiana Jones and I was much happier. I guess Tuesday nights aren't big movie going nights because I had the entire theater to myself. The last movie I saw totally alone was Twin Peaks in 1991. I felt bad making the projectionist work just for me but I loved the movie.
So to end my week I got to have today off and I hopefully won't have to work this weekend. I managed to talk the union guy into letting us post overtime for those desk hours and letting a producer take it. Usually the union freaks out about having someone in another position do another job but they are nicely looking the other way on this. People are back from vacation and new people will be hired so my hours will go back to normal. We have a busy weekend ahead. Its Tim's b-day on Saturday and my niece graduates from high school and Grace has her school fair. As for me I am going to get my children to fall asleep early tonight if have to dose them with Tylenol and I am going to make earrings while watching my new DVD of the last season of The Vicar of Dibley. That makes me sound a million years old but I have been looking forward to it all day.