Bigfoot lives

It was a Sasquatchy sort of day today. It started last night when WE was hiding in the bushes and jumped out to scare his friend. The little boy said he thought it was a sasquatch. Then, this morning, Angel #4's friend called Angel #2 a sasquatch. This afternoon we were talking about the strange noises I heard last night (more on that later) and our friend, Chris said that maybe it was a sasquatch. Finally, #4's friend's dad came to pick her up. He was talking about mythical creatures, unicorns, WE being well-behaved, Pegasus, sasquatch. Seriously, how often do you hear sasquatches mentioned? Maybe every 6 months? a year? None of the four people that mentioned them today heard the others talk about them. All the mentions happened hours apart when the other mentioners weren't around. How weird is that?

As for last nights weird noises. I was lying in bed around 10pm, when I heard this thumping noise, like someone walking back and forth across a room. I thought it was the boys, though they were up in their bedroom, so it really didn't make sense because they're in a different part of the house than me. After about 10-15 minutes, the noise stopped, which was good because I really didn't feel like getting out of bed to yell at whoever was making the thumping noise. This morning, the mystery of teh thumps was solved. Angel #2 said she was walking 'the ramp' last night. Instead of steps leading to our basement, we've got a ramp. Walking on an inclined surface is a good workout, according to #2, so she walked up and down the ramp to get exercise. The ramp is situated directly under our bed. I told her in the future to start exercising a little earlier in the evening. Tonight, at 9, I could hear here thump-thumping up and down the ramp.

Poor little crippled kid

WE has decided that he needs a wheelchair. Since we don't actually own one, he's using a roll around office chair. He announced: can't you people see I have medical problems? Uh yeah, could he leave that one any more open for discussion? There is a small snag in the plan, since it's bedtime and his bedroom is upstairs. You can't expect me to just jump out of the chair and walk up the stairs like it's a miracle, he says. Life with the handicapped, it's not easy, lemme tell ya. Sad thing is, hubby and I are just sitting here in the living room with our feet up, like it's perfectly normal to have your 12 year old son getting pushed around in an office chair and getting slammed into walls by his siblings.

I had a moment of thankful silence this morning that the kids are back in school and I survived 2 weeks of spring break. Hallelujah! My life is once again my own.

Getting back to nature

I planted part of the garden today. I now have cucumbers, green beans, zuchinni, onions and pipinola growing away. The place where our garden is is the original garden spot was for the house way back in the old days when this was a working farm. It's a walled in spot that's been neglected for 5-10 years and was way overgrown with grass. This isn't regular grass like we had in Wisconsin, this is huge, 10 foot tall blades of death. Hubby and the boys hacked away at it with machetes. Then we hauled all the downed grass away and have been trying to dig the roots up. The roots are so tight and compact, that we're using a pickax to chop away and loosen it before chopping chunks of it loose with a shovel. It's hard work, but we're getting there. About 2/3 of the garden area is cleared out now and I wanted to get things growing. Hopefully we'll get the rest cleared out in the next week or two and have the whole area ready to go. It'll be nice to have fresh veggies again.

The flowers must be peaking lately or something. Every night the air is just heavy with the smell, it's just heavenly. I wish it was a little bit warmer outside so we could open the windows and let the scent flow through the house. Instead, we just stand out on the porch and inhale. Life is good.

What a crazy random happenstance

Today I was at the grocery store, looking for a can of black beans. I knew I was in the right aisle, but not exactly sure where the black beans were. Then, about 10 feet away, a can fell off the shelf onto the floor. There was no one near the shelf where it fell off and no one had been near it recently that I had seen. I thought that was rather odd, but wait! It gets odder. When I walked up to the possessed can I read the label and it was a can of BLACK BEANS. But those alert readers out there probably already guessed that. I picked up the can and tossed it into my cart and went my merry way. Strange thing, when I was in the produce aisle about 10 minutes earlier, I was debating if I should buy another bag of potatoes or not and, wouldn't you know, there was a bag of potatoes lying on the floor in the middle of the aisle in front of me. One more odd shopping experience. This morning, Angel #2 was telling me about a dream she had about making 3 angelfood cakes (1 for starving kids in Africa and 2 for everyone at church). We love angelfood cake, so when I saw it on sale today, I decided to buy all the mixes they had. There were, you guessed it, exactly THREE boxes of angelfood cake mix on the shelf. *insert Twilight Zone music here* I think Safeway is haunted....maybe by the ghost of Mr. Whipple, though I didn't buy toilet paper.

Another funny thing that happened at Safeway about a month ago. I was half listening to the PA and it was playing an ad for some kind of contest the store chain was putting on. It must have just been a canned announcement that the main office put out because it was telling me that some lucky person could win a trip to Hawaii! I was less than excited. I think I spend too much time at Safeway.

Pit

I see from Deb's comment that, to my shock and disbelief, not everyone is familiar with the card game Pit. Pit is an old game - not sure how old, but I DO know that we learned how to play it when we were little kids with the old deck at my grandparents house. I know of people who've played Pit that think it's an "ok" game - they've obviously never played with my family. Let's put it this way, my family (meaning my siblings & I) are about the most non-competitive people you could ever find, until you put a Pit game in front of us. Then blood will spill. To help you understand the bizarre hold the game has on us, we (no lie) played the game the night of my mother's funeral. It's based on the stock exchange. Pit has 9 cards each of 8 different suits (corn, barely, wheat, etc) and you have to trade cards with the other players until you have all the cards of one suit in your hand, then you yell Pit and that hand is done. Each suit is worth a different number of points ranging from 50 to 100. If you're not the winner, you don't get any points, UNLESS you end up with one of the two specialty cards, the bull or the bear, which is where WE's struggle comes in. He ALWAYS ends up with either the bull or the bear, because each of those cards are worth -20. There are a few other rules, but that's the basic jist. It's the trading of the cards that gets everyone excited, because you have to call out the number of cards you want to trade and find someone else who wants to trade the same number of cards. It sounds complicated, but it's actually a rather easy game to play and SO much fun (at least if you're playing with my family it is). Here's the Wikipedia entry explaining the game.

This day is so annoying

April Fools day is such a pain. When something legitimate actually does happen on that day, no one believes it. I even got caught a couple times. Our friend Mark called to see if we were selling a moped; he needed new transportation because his truck started on fire. Since that is exactly the sort of thing that would happen to him (he's the guy who accidentally drained our water garden a couple months ago and killed all the fish), I gave him some sympathy, but also laughed. He continued with the story and I said, that's unbelievable! He said, of course it is, it's April fools day. Grrr Then I asked him if the story his youngest daughter told me about being bridesmaid at her older sisters wedding to another woman was another April Fools joke, that though, is true. I guess that shouldn't surprise me either.

some people just don't learn

We played Pit again tonight. Out of pity, when WE hit -140, we brought his score back up to zero. He still came in last place with -20. The kid REALLY sucks at Pit. Since it's a game we play a lot, our cards are starting to get a little beat up, especially the bear card, which gets used and passed around the most, so tonight, after WE failed to ditch the bear card because we all recognized it and wouldn't trade with him, we modified one of the other, little used cards and made that our new bear card. It'll put things on a little more even playing field again. We had to do this with our last Pit game also, actually we had to modify a new bear card twice because the originally modified one got as beat up as the real bear card did. We eventually retired the whole game and got a new one. If you haven't noticed, our family really likes to play Pit. It was our favorite card game when I was growing up and I passed the love of the game on to my own kids and husband. My family loves the game so much, that one time, back when my little brother was in his mid-20's and still a bachelor, he came over to our house to play. He kept getting phone calls from his friends wanting him to meet him someplace or go to a party somewhere, and he kept turning them down so he could continue playing. I think it's a sickness.

Due to the lack of a ride the NOT boyfriend didn't come over today, but is supposed to come tomorrow instead. We'll see how he handles things here. He's an only child and our family is a bit exuberant...we may be too much for the poor kid.