all is calm

Last night both girls had friends over - the house was in giggle overload. It didn't help that we went back to Target to buy more candy, so they were all sugared up. Both sets of girls bought gingerbread house kits, so the kitchen is sticky with frosting and candy.

Tonight we're not really doing anything for new years. The family was invited to the annual shoot-em up New Years Eve paintgun war/potluck dinner, but it was held at a friends house a 2 our drive away and I really didn't feel like traveling that far. Angel #1 went there with friends though, he just can't resist a good paintgun war. Angel #2 is roaming town with her pink-haired BFF, then spending the night, WE is enjoying the holiday vicariously through a fireworks display on World of Warcraft. Angel #4 and her buddy were going to spend the night in the treehouse, but hubby deemed it unsafe, so the venue changed to the trampoline instead. We were just starting to take bets on how long they'd last out there when they came tromping into the house with all their gear claiming it was too cold to sleep out there. They made it to 9:00.

We can hear fireworks going off all over the place. I hope people are careful. We've got a bit of a drought going on right now and for the last few days, there's been a wildfire burning about 20 miles away from us - the 3rd in the last 2 weeks. They're having trouble putting this one out because it's in an inaccessible area - the only roads leading there are 4WD only and the forest canopy is so thick over the area that's burning that they can't dump water on the fire from helicopters. Every once in a while I catch a whiff of smoke in the air, though not as bad as the fire from 2 weeks ago - that one stunk up all the clothes I had hanging on the clothesline. Fireworks on New Years is one of the Hawaiian traditions we've had to get used to. You don't hear too many fireworks going off in Wisconsin on midnight of New Years, instead, everyone just hugs each other, thrilled that they made it through another year without freezing to death or being drained dry by F-16 sized mosquitoes. But in Hawaii, there are more fireworks on New Years than on July 4th. We'll be able to see the big displays the hotels put on from our front lanai - we've got a view of the entire town from there.

Anyhooters, I'm not planning on staying up til midnight unless the fireworks don't let me sleep. It's only a little after nine and I'm ready to hit the hay already. I DID watch the ball drop in Times Square though, courtesy of Hulu. One of the benefits of living in Hawaii is that I'm still awake to see that event since it happens at 7pm our time.

Happy New Years everyone - see ya in 2010!

lovin' those clearance sales

Hubby and the boys went camping today and Angel #4 is at a friends house, that left Angel #2and me home for the day. We decided to do a little shopping, she needed some new clothes. Well, we didn't get a whole lot in the clothing department, but as we were wandering around Target, we noticed the clearance signs. Never one to pass up a sale of any sort, we wandered over and saw all their Christmas candy was 75% off. We were only going to grab a few things, but before you knew it, I had to send the angel off to get a cart because we ran out of arm room. We're celebrating our quiet night at home by eating chocolate covered cherries, peppermint bark and candy canes. Life doesn't get any better.

The caffeine is getting to us though, as evidence by this conversation:

Angel (laughing while watching a movie on Hulu): This guy just confessed that he tossed his fiance's dad at his bachelor party. His fiance's dad is a midget.

Me: What in the world are you watching?

Angel: It's a romantic comedy.

Me: What one?

Angel: I don't know, there can't be that many romantic comedies with midgets in them...and all their roles are small anyway. *snerk snerk*

Me: There are no small roles, only small actors.

Yeah, I know, we're laying off the chocolate now.

reaping the rewards

Yesterday, I was in a baking mood. I started it all by making 4 loaves of bread, then figured since we were all going to be home this morning, I would make some cinnamon rolls, put them in the fridge and let them rise this morning so we could have warm rolls for breakfast. Then, the thought of those rolls made my sweet tooth act up, so I made a double batch of ginger snaps. So today, the house was full of yummy food.

Other than feeding our faces, we didn't do much today. We don't celebrate Christmas, so we pretty much always spend the day being slugs around the house. Since everything closes down for the day, there's not all that much for us to do anyway.

Our dishwasher still isn't working right, so the kids are still busy building character. They're not too happy about it, but at least with them handwashing, our dishes are clean. I suppose I'll have to call the landlord tomorrow and see if he can do something to get it working right or bite the bullet and just get a new one.

sometimes you've got to change the details

We've got the holidays all mixed up around here. Today Wormeater and I went on an Easter Egg hunt, only it's a few days before Christmas and we were hunting pumpkins, not eggs. I'd planted a pumpkin plant quite a while ago, but was having problems keeping the snails from eating the blossoms off the plants before they had a chance to become pumpkins. I pretty much ignored the plant and the area where it was planted and it became overgrown. You know how you start a project, then you get sucked into another one? That's what happened to me today. I was going to weed out the area I'm turning into an herb garden, but needed the shovel first. The shovel was lying by the poinsettia bush (which is in full bloom, btw). While I was grabbing the shovel, I pulled out a few weeds by the poinsettia and went over to throw them where I usually do by the pumpkin patch. Then I started pulling at weeds by the pumpkin patch, not seeing a single pumpkin. The lack of pumpkins made me think that maybe I should just pull up a lot of the vines and get rid of them so we could go over the whole area with a weed whacker. I started pulling at one vine, which was rather heavy and I saw there was a big orange pumpkin on it. In order to get to it since it was down on some rocks, I needed to weed my way down and while I was there, I saw there was a green pumpkin there as well. Nestled in the rocks under the green pumpkin was another orange one. WE came out to help and I sent him on the search for the great pumpkin as well. In the end, we found 2 green ones and 3 orange ones. The green ones got pulled off the vines, so they're sitting on the porch next to the ripe ones. Does anyone know if pumpkins will ripen off-vine like tomatoes do?

The microwave that stopped working when we de-cockroached it has been sitting on the porch for the last 2 weeks. I was going to have hubby haul it to the dump today, but thought I'd plug it in, just to make sure that it was still dead. (you know what's coming here, don't you?) Yep, the dumb thing is working just fine now. So, the dilemma, do I take the new one back to the store and use the old one again, or do we stick the old one down in the basement in anticipation of some day needing another microwave? Angel #1 is graduating this spring - he may need a microwave if he moves into an apartment on the island. Of course, if he moved off-island, which he's talking about doing, it won't be worth it to take the microwave with him. Ah, decisions decisions.

As sands through the hourglass, these are the Days of our Dishwaher

We had the "yay, the dishwasher's fixed" party too soon, I guess. The dishes were dirty again today. Hubby took it apart and supposedly fixed it this time, we'll have to see. Once it was all in pieces, he forgot how to put it back together again, which caused a few problems. He needed some tools and asked for a straight screwdriver - Angel #2, being the kind of kid she is, told him we only have gay ones. I think the fumes from the yellow Playtex gloves I gave her were going to her head...or maybe it was all that yellow hair dye. Anyway, hopefully, things are going to work properly now because I'm sick of whiney dishwashing kids.

Since my computers been fixed, my touchpad has been really sensitive and when I type, my cursor keeps jumping around the page, making doing a blog entry a bit annoying. I also found out that the headphone jack no longer works on it, so my kids had to listen to me listen to Castle tonight. Not that anyone could complain about hearing the wonderfulness of Nathan Fillion's voice, but they'd rather hear it as Captain Hammer, not Richard Castle.

what is it with hair in this household?

Tonight, Angel #4 and her BFF were in the bathroom and they came over to me looking really upset. BFF decided to "trim" her bangs and she's now got 1/2 inch stubby flyaways sticking out of her forehead. It was the old trying to even them out trap. Her dad is taking her to the hair place tomorrow to see if it can be fixed, but I told her it was going to be a case of sucking it up until they grow out and it's probably best if she have a responsible person cut her bangs in the future.

Our landlord fixed our dishwasher today. It's been broken for the last three days and I've been trying to tell the kids that it's character building to handwash dishes, but they're not interested in building any, I guess. We also had to get a new microwave. Ours had cockroaches living, not inside the microwave itself, but behind the keypad in the electronics part of it. We knew they were there because they would crawl around between the glowing numbers and the glass part. V gross. Hubby took the machine apart and used bug killer to get rid of them all. It worked, but also wrecked the microwave. Between my computer, the dishwasher and the microwave, it hasn't been a good month for appliances around here.

it went crash

Very much sadness in my house this week, my computer died. If you want a sinking feeling in your stomach, try looking at your computer screen and seeing nothing but a black screen and a cursor. Yep, that's all I had. Angel #1 finally got around to fixing it today, after I'd been computerless for an entire week. My life is just full of tragedies.

It's not like you missed a whole lot this week with me not posting. It's just been the usual around here. Angel #2 came home last night a strawberry blond. She and her best friend colored their hair. At least the angel's hair is kind of found in nature, her friend's hair is dark pink (yes, on purpose).

It was death to mongooses (mongeese? mongi?) this week as well. We're trying to get them out of the area since the nasty things will eat baby chickens and eggs is we let them. So we got a trap and got 4 of them got caught. Nothing's been caught since, so we'll probably move the trap further out and see if we can get some more. The island is crawling with mongoose and they're a real nuisance and trust me, no one is going to miss them.

There was a bad wildfire about 30 miles from here this weekend and our house was smelling like woodsmoke in the mornings. It was really getting annoying. Fortunately, this morning we had a really wild rain storm which hopefully put the fire out. We were at church during the worst of it and there's a metal roof on house where we meet and the rain was so loud we couldn't really hear what anyone was saying. We all pulled our chairs close together so we could get as close as possible. It was kind of nice. We got home to find the top of a papaya tree lying in our driveway, so it must have gotten pretty windy here. We don't usually get storms that have thunder and lightning, so it was kind of neat hearing it all, it was kind of like a summer storm in Wisconsin (except in WI, they don't really have the papaya tree problem).