Friday, April 30, 2010

tired, but in a fun way

I spent the afternoon at Safeway doing Cop on Top. It was a great time, people are so giving and it's always fun spending time with the athletes. A new addition to CoT this year is the dunk tank. Dave, our area director owns one, how can you not absolutely love a man who owns his own dunk tank? For $5, you got three chances to dunk whoever was in the tank, usually it was a cop who would come down from the scaffold and sit in the tank. But, due to a little taunting, harassment and someone offering $10, I ended up in the tank. Yep, IN the tank. That darn Chris got a lucky shot, blast him. But he redeemed himself afterwards by telling me that I won the wet tee-shirt contest. har-dee-har-har I had to call hubby to bring me down some dry clothes, but before I got a chance to change, Angel #4 said she wanted a chance to dunk me. Well, she failed, but Damion, one of the athletes, managed to sink me. I guess he's one of the reasons our softball team took 1st place at area games last month. I told him I was taking him down...so, is it right to seek revenge on a mentally handicapped kid? :p He was so proud of his throwing skills - he even managed to dunk a cop a little later on.

I don't remember them doing it last year, but this year, the cops are doing CoT in shifts and we've had between 2-4 cops on the scaffold throughout the day. Denny's restaurant is so cool, they've donated all the meals for the cops for the entire event. How cool is that? It's especially nice since Denny's is right across the parking lot from Safeway, so we just have a short little jog to pick the food up. I'm going back tomorrow afternoon - I'm bringing extra clothes with me this time. The girl Angels and their friends are going to go too. Hopefully we'll have another successful day and raise enough money to keep Special Olympics going for another year.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

back to writing

I finally got back to writing a little bit today. I've really been slacking in that department lately, among others. I'm still struggling with the plot a bit, but figure everything will pull together eventually, it always does.

Saw a sad post on an online forum I visit. One of the Romance Divas said she looked at her calendar and saw that she had noted that she was going to be going to the RT Convention, a get together for romance writers and readers. Instead of going to the convention though, she's going to be at the hospital receiving her first round of chemo from her newly discovered cancer instead. Cancer sucks

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

all kinds of stuff going on

We had a potluck here at our house yesterday as a goodbye to our wonderful friends Denis and DeAnne. They've been our best friends since moving down here and we're going to miss them so much. DeAnne is a traveling nurse and she may be heading up to the wilds of Alaska next, what a huge difference from Hawaii, eh? Anyway, we had about 25 total people here, our friends from the island as well as a couple from Illinois who are here vacationing and were at church with us. It was a very nice time with the perfect amount of food, which is always a relief. Whenever we have something like that at our house, I always feel responsible for making sure there are enough deserts, main dishes etc and I usually make one of each. Angel #2 made peanut butter bars (my potluck standby, easy and delicious) and I threw a batch of Shoyu chicken in the slow cooker. Shoyu chicken is a Hawaiian favorite and one I've learned to love since moving down here.

I've been busy getting volunteers together for Cop on Top, a special Olympics fundraiser. I'm the area volunteer coordinator and this is my first year doing it, so I feel especially responsible for getting enough volunteers lined up to collect donations. Cop on Top is a fun event. Three area police officers live up on a scaffolding set up in front of the Safeway grocery store from Thursday morning until Saturday afternoon. The rest of us stay down below and collect donations. There'll be a live radio feed there, as well as a dunk tank (with a cop or two manning the dunk platform) and a bunch of other stuff. I'm looking forward to doing it and also looking forward to it being over so I'll have one less thing to worry about. There's one more fundraiser in the middle of May, then the fundraising part is over for a while and it'll be back to what Special Olympics is really about, the athletes. Problem is, you can't have the events without the money and you need the fundraisers to get the money. It's a vicious circle. I think Safeway will be sponsoring Cop on Top nationwide this weekend, so if you're grocery shopping and see some cops up on a scaffold, give those volunteers a little cha-ching and make some very special people very happy.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

late in the thanking

A belated thanks for the birthday wishes everyone. If I had a scanner, I'd show you the picture my sister sent me, but alas, I have none. Maybe some day.

It's been so nice having hubby back once again. Since I was the one taking the animal stroll in the morning, making sure everyone was fed/watered/tied up or released, the critters were starting to become a bit attached to me. I turned around one day to see I was being followed by Jake, the wonder dog, Pickles, the pain in the butt baby goat, a couple random chickens and Charlie, the sheep. It was like some kind of farmyard horror movie.

In more good news, my van is finally fixed. YAY x7!! It's so nice to have my own wheels again and not be dependent on Angel #1 to cart me around. All that screaming in terror was giving me a sore throat. Other good news, I had the Angels plant the garden last weekend, so before you know it, we'll be eating fresh beans, radishes, corn and a bunch of other stuff - I'm not entirely sure what since I put them in charge of choosing what to plant. I've got to pick up some eggplant and turnip seeds yet, then we should be good to go. We had a nice rain this afternoon, so I'm sure those seeds were just germinating their little hearts out today. Now, if we can only keep all the critters out of the garden so we can do the eating and not them.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

that makes 2

Yesterday we had the 2nd highway death near our house in the last couple of months. We're perched on the side of a mountain and in many dangerous spots, there aren't any guardrails. A woman lost control on a curve, flew off the side of the road and landed about 50ft below where her car burst into flames. Another scary thing is that WE was walking home from school at that very spot about an hour before the accident, Angel #4 two hours earlier and me 4 hours earlier. Wonder how many people are going to be killed before they do something about it? Also wonder how many decades the highway has to be there before people realize they have to drive with caution.

I got a great birthday present in the mail from my sister yesterday. She'd found an old picture of the three of us sisters taken waaaay back in the day when we were playing dress-up at my grandparents house, I must have been about 8 or 9 years old. I hadn't seen it in years. She had it framed and sent it to me. We were some pretty classy lookin' ladies.

Monday, April 12, 2010

Yay us, we made the front page!

The torch run the police held for the Special Olympics yesterday made todays paper:
http://www.westhawaiitoday.com/articles/2010/04/12/local/local01.txt
Hopefully this will bring more interested people to Special Olympics - we're going to need lots of volunteers for the Cop on Top fundraiser being held at the end of this month. I'm in charge of getting volunteers, so the more people the better.

All I did for my birthday today was do the company's taxes at work. I hate dealing with the government and I'm so proud of myself that I actually bit the bullet and did the taxes for TWO different business this week. It's going to take a long while for my stress level to go down though. Turbo tax was NOT being user friendly and made what should have been a couple of 2 hour jobs last all day.

I got to thinking about something last night. You know how sometimes people (it mostly seems to be women) fudge about their age and try to tell people they're younger than they actually are? I can't help but think that's counter-productive. Okay, I'm 42 years old today and I look like I'm 42, it's life, I'm good with it. BUT, say I run around telling people that I'm 30 instead. People are going to say, wow, she's only 30! She looks like she's been rode hard and put away wet. Conversely, if I tell people that I'm 55, they think, man, she looks incredible for 55, I thought she was MUCH younger. Wouldn't you rather have people think you look awesome rather than just plain awful? At least that's my philosophy. As for me though, I'm just going to tell people the truth and let them think what they want.

time - it does fly

Almost a week's gone by since I posted last. I'm not sure if it's because my life's too busy to have time to post or if my life's too boring to find something to post about.

Tomorrow is my birthday - since it's already Monday just about everywhere but here, we'll just say Hey, today is my birthday! I love my birthday. It's not because I get presents, because I don't really get a whole lot, we don't make a deal about birthdays at our house. It's not the cake either, because actually, I don't really like cake. I think it's just the fact that it's my birthday and it's mine and mine only, besides the other 10 kajillion people whose birthday's are April 12. I just like having somethings that's all mine...maybe this can be traced back to the fact that for most of my life I wanted my own bedroom and I had to share with my sister who used to leave her dirty laundry on the bedroom floor and gross me out. I had to get my own apartment before I got my own room - I feel sorry for twins that have to share a birthday, because a birthday isn't something you should have to share. WE had a little money saved up and was going to buy me something, but this morning, I had some special Olympics stuff to do before church and the kids waited for me in the car, which I parked in front of a grocery store. He couldn't handle the pressure, I guess, because when I got back into the car, he told me he'd spent my birthday present money on a doughnut. But he assured me that he was thinking of me when he ate the doughnut, and it's the thought that counts, right mom? Uh, yeah.

The special olympics event today was a power lifting tournament. One of the guys bench pressed over 400 pounds! He just turned 18 a couple weeks ago, so imagine what he's going to be able to do in a year or two when he's fully mature. I think he'll be a force to be reckoned with at State Games next month. One of our other lifters won a gold a while ago at the National Games in China. Must be something in the water here that produces such awesome weightlifters. I'm still pretty wimpy though - I must not be drinking enough water.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

and he's off again!

I just got back from dropping hubby off at the airport. He's on his way to Washington DC to see a friend/do a job. He's planning on seeing the sights and, in true hubby fashion, has talked to one of his infamous contacts and is going to be rubbing elbows with some of the uppity-ups on capitol hill. He had to dig his suit out of mothballs for this one.

On the way home I stopped by Lowes and picked up a new faucet for our kitchen sink. Saturday night, ours broke off, shooting water across the room in the process. This happened not too long ago, which tells you that they either make them really chintzy or my family is really hard on kitchen faucets. Anyway, since this happened late Saturday night and the next day was Easter, there wasn't an opportunity to get a new one until Monday, which of course, I forgot to pick up on my way home from work. So I finally got around to getting one tonight. In the meantime, we had to use a substitute since otherwise the water shot out of the little hose thing at huge force and splashed all over the place. Hubby aka Mr. Fixit, discovered that it was the exact same fitting as the handheld shower head in our bathroom, so we screwed it into our kitchen sink hose and using our showerhead as the kitchen faucet. Then, when we wanted to take a shower, we had to unscrew it from the kitchen and put it in the tub. Of course, we'd always forget to do the switch until we were already standing naked in the shower about to turn the water on, so we made a few trips running from our bathroom to the kitchen wearing nothing but a bath towel. It's all good now though and we're back to having a kitchen faucet in the kitchen and a shower head in the bathroom.

Sunday, April 4, 2010

breadfruit anyone?

Hubby decided that he was going to find a recipe for breadfruit that the family likes. We've got a HUGE breadfruit tree in the backyard and the thing is just loaded with fruit. The only way we've had it was sliced thin and deep-fried into chips, which were okay, but not worth the effort of making again. So, today, he tried chips again, as well as slicing them into pieces and making them into french fries. He also stuck one in the oven, they're in there baking now. I think he's going to scoop them out and make them like mashed potatoes. He also cut some up and tried them steamed. Yep, all breadfruit all the time. The fries tasted good and the steamed stuff tasted like boiled potatoes, I guess we'll find out how the baked stuff tastes when it comes out of the oven. We're hoping we'll find a couple ways we like them because that's a whole lotta free food out there. Auntie Violet, our local native Hawaiian guru, makes breadfruit salad, which tastes a whole lot like potato salad. I guess I'll have to try that as well.

Saturday, April 3, 2010

It's become an obsession

The guys obsession with the bathroom at work has carried over to our staff. This was confirmed to me yesterday when I asked one of the guys if he'd heard what had happened Wednesday(someone had pulled a particularly successful April fools joke). He said: about the toilet paper? LOL

Angel #2 is a bit OCD - I tend to take advantage of this little trait of hers. When she starts on a job, she doesn't let up until it's done and done perfectly. Yesterday, I took her to work with me because we needed some sales booklets put together. It's not hard work, just slow and putzy and I don't have time to do it. Since we still don't have our van fixed, hubby took the car to go on a job and was going to drop it off for us when he was done so we could drive home. Well, #2 was done with the booklets and hubby hadn't shown up yet, so I put her to work scrubbing the floors in the showroom. Simple vinegar and water wasn't really doing the trick, so I sent her out to get ammonia and a scrub brush. Let's just say that girl puts the "O" in obsessive. She worked for hours on that floor and wouldn't quit, even after hubby dropped the car off and I was ready to head for home. We ended up working until 5 o'clock, just because she couldn't quit scrubbing. She wants to go back to day and finish up, but she hasn't gotten out of bed yet and I've got the feeling that when she does, her arms are going to be too sore to want to start scrubbing again.

WE caught a dove today and put it in a bird coop that he's been working on for the last few weeks. The cats are incredibly interested in this critter and are sitting outside the pen watching it. WE wanted to know what to name it and I said that if he asked the cats, they'd probably say "Lunch". So, we now have a dove named Lunch. I've got the feeling we won't for long though - I don't think that coop is as cat-proof as WE thinks it is.