Autumn Bradford Pear I

I've started a second one to go along with this one, but I have several major projects hanging over my head that absolutely have to get done first, so it may be a while before I get that other one done. Or I may continue procrastinating on those other things. You just never know. I gotta go with the inspiration when I get it. At least that's what I tell myself.

I found out a few days ago that a local newspaper is doing a feature story on me and my art classes. Today they interviewed me and took some photos. I think this will be coming out some time next week, so I'll share the article and pics with you then.

Regular school is done on Friday afternoon, but I really don't get to completely let my hair down for several more days after that. A teacher's work is never done, and the cover of the yearbook is due, so I'm going to be concentrating pretty hard on that until it's done. It would be simpler if it were just dependent upon me getting things ironed out, but I am also dependent upon submissions from others, and those items are just not dependably forthcoming.

I can't really even think about Christmasey plans yet. I was hoping I'd get to do some Christmas baking for the first time since we moved into this house 2.5 years ago, because today my oven finally arrived (!!), but Rick fell down the stairs the other day and broke some ribs, and he's absolutely unable to do the labor required to remove the drop-in cooktop so we can install the stove. I've waited this long, I guess I can wait a little longer. He really is in a lot of pain, so I'm not going to be mad. At this point, I'm just hoping to have a working oven by January 1. If it happens before then, I'll be pleasantly surprised.

We've been really struggling with the chaos of living with a mentally-ill teenager, too. It will be necessary for us to do as little socializing as possible during the lead-up to Christmas because it just sends her over the edge. After the Big Day, it will be easier to deal with her, but she just can't cope with anticipation and expectation and excess. Her moods have been pretty severely swinging. Right now we have given her only five changes of clothes to manage, because there are some pretty unspeakable filth issues she refuses to deal with (including her own body). Limiting her choices is pretty much our only option in this matter. I wish things could be different... I wish she could be like the other kids her age and have a celly and go have sleepovers at friends' homes and things like that. She just can't cope; she loses all mental cohesion and slips into complete delusional mania. What's the most frustrating is that she SEEMS like any normal teenager to everyone else around us. Nobody sees the transformation but us. So we seem like irrationally restrictive parents. I really don't care what most people think, but it's tiresome when we have to continually re-argue the point with her because she can't remember and learn from past experiences. Every day's new, and if she's been "good" for the past hour, that should be enough to make up for everything. Then when we don't give in, she begins swearing like a sailor's parrot, and then later remorsefully cries and insists she can't help being that way, so we should give her what she wants because she can't help it. It wears me down.

I need a private vacation. Preferably one involving warm sunshine and a massage therapist named Viktor who specializes in River Rocks and Aromatherapy.

Fun guys!

Shelf fungus and toadstools seen here at the Ballyhoo Headquarters this morning...

Peaches!

We haz dem.

Eees hawt!!

It's like a sauna or somethin', y'all. I love Texas. No shivering or chillbumps for ME this time of year. I'm in heaven.

But the icemaker in the freezer can't keep up with me. I supplement it with six ice trays, and I still run out of ice. Hey, I can't complain. At least I get ice, right? Ice is a GOOD THING. As is iced green tea.

It's prolly a good thing there's not internet access in the bedroom, where there's a window-unit A/C. I might never leave that room. Meh, who needs food?

Speaking of food, I made a crockpot full of ratatouille yesterday that was super-tasty. Crockpot meals are what works best when it's like a steam-room in the kitchen, and the yummy eggplant and zucchini and bell pepper and tomato was actually sort-of refreshing. I sliced up some beef and stir-fried it and laid the slices atop the ratatouille, and served all of it with some crusty Fwench bwead. YUMMEH

Happy little tomatoes

We've harvested some of the grape tomatoes already, but the larger slicing tomatoes are coming along nicely. If we can just keep the birds off them...

Good morning, y'all

Isaac is out of school for the year, since he passed all his classes and aced his state-mandated exams (literally; I think he missed one question on the whole exam). But he got up this morning at 5AM to get dressed and go down to the school to start a summer running regimen. The cross-country coach has the kids running all summer long in preparation for the season, and even though Isaac won't be old enough to compete formally next year, he's going to spend the summer running with the team anyway. They leave the school at 6AM for the next two weeks, then at 7AM for the rest of the summer.

Yesterday Mom treated him to a new pair of running shoes, which he was itching to put on. "They feel bouncy," he insisted.

In a school that's as small as Ballyhoo, there's a definite divide that shows up between the "athletics" kids and the "PE" kids. I have seen evidence of both groups, and I see that even if he's not particularly wonderful as an athlete, he does NOT want to be lumped in with the "PE" crowd. He probably won't ever be much of a football player, and I know there's no way on God's green earth he'll be able to do basketball, but I figure he can run. So that's where I'm steering him. I told him that even if he's never very fast, it's very important that he do this.

I think that if I'd had to do some sort of athletics, I might have been a little better off physically, but I went to a much larger high school where I was able to track in a different direction (band). Just goes to show that there are benefits to each sort of high school -- even though this place is small, there are some definite advantages.

I like it here, regardless. It's a good fit for us, I think. I just wish the house was in better shape and that we were in better financial condition. Maybe someday. At least we have a few tomatoes in the garden.

Spring is springing up...

More fun little appearances in my yard this morning:

A happy little grape hyacinth peeks its head up.



And promises of a silky white iris in the very near future...

ZOMG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11!!!!1!!

Guess what we got here at the big yellow house in Ballyhoo?


CROCUSES!!!!

That picture was taken on Thursday. Here's what they look like today:



It's a brilliant, sunshiny day... just the sort I needed after last night's unpleasant shenanigans. And to have little yellow non-dandelion flowers popping up in my yard? Priceless. And sooooo necessary to my mental health.

And then, I rounded a corner and saw this:



Yep, that's right. The first daffodil.

ZOMG, people. Spring really IS coming.

Looky!!

My BFF drove by my old house in Des Moines yesterday and took a picture of it. AWWW!! I miss my quirky, crazy old house! It was too small and had a weird layout, but I loved it just the same. I miss being right in the middle of the city. I miss seeing my BFF something FIERCE.

I do NOT miss the snow, though. That is entirely too much. I mean, really!

No more snow

Well, I can't actually predict that there won't be any more snow this winter here in Ballyhoo... I *wish* I could say such a thing, but I can't... but I *can* say that there won't be any more snow blowing in under the back door thanks to BlogDog, who took pity on me after reading this post.



Hey, thanks, dude! I LOL'd, of course, and my kids were all, like, "Hey, it's that thing from TV! The Twin Draft Guard! Awesome!", but it works beautifully and you have saved the day.

HGTV's 2010 Dream Home

This year it's just outside Albuquerque, New Mexico in a community called Sandia Park.

I'm going to be nice and provide the link here for you to enter the contest, but I'm going to be honest -- I WANT THIS PLACE. I love my old house in my tiny Texas town, but if I won this place, I wouldn't even bat an eyelash at the notion of moving to New Mexico. If you win it, I want visiting rights. Actually, if you win it and I don't, you might want to watch your back. Because I WANT THIS PLACE.

A mystery solved?

A few days back, my husband brought this little iron doohickey in from the front porch. "What is this?" he asked me.

"I dunno. Maybe one of my students thought it was funny and left it for me. They all know how much I despise skwerls."

I have kept it by the computer in hopes I'd eventually find out whodunit. Looks like maybe my benefactor has finally broken her silence in my comments section. :) Umm, thanks... I think. The two skwerls look just exactly like the ones in that horrid insurance commercial. You know the one, where they're high-fiving each other because they just sent a car careening off into the ditch. Rotten little tree rats.

Hehehe!!

Life in a century-old house

We're going to have to shell out about six thousand bucks to get this thing leveled. Until then, though, we have doorway issues. Most of the time they don't pose a huge problem, but on windy snowy days like today, snow blows in under the back door.

And you wonder why I'm always cold? Why I turn my electric blanket on high at 7pm every night so it will be roasty-toasty when I get into bed? Why I have absolutely no desire to step more than two feet away from our space heater at any given time?

BRRR! Merry Christmas, y'all!

No longer unemployed...

Rick started his job at the Winstar Casino tonight. This is a huge answer to prayer; he doesn't have to deal with any gamblers, he just has to help keep track of the people who turn loose of more than two grand in one visit -- this helps keep drug-money launderers from doing too much bidness there. Obviously they're still going to do what they do, but at least this way they are prevented from doing too much of it at once.

Y'all pray that he is able to manage the all-night-long thing, at least for ninety days when he can then put in for a different time slot or job.

Our finances are still dire, but this will begin making inroads and helping us begin to catch up.

Foodie stuff

I went to Sam's Club a little earlier to pick up my very favorite pita chips:



These have become my favorite substitute for corn chips or potato chips. These have no hidden "food starch" or "corn syrup" or any of those super-secret additive things that turn my GI tract inside out. They're tasty and they're not so brittle that they fall apart when I dip them into my homemade hummus.



I lurve them.

So I'm walking by the cheese case at Sam's, on my way back to where my beloved pita chips live, when I spot something I also lurve very, very much.

Manchego cheese. Truly wonderful stuff.

So you know I had to have a nice wedge of that.

And that's what I'm having for supper tonight. Pita chips and slices of Manchego.

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And now for the bad news. Our refrigerator is going out. [sigh] And Rick still doesn't have a job. [double sigh]

Never ends, does it?

Kindness

An anonymous person just gave us a new window unit air conditioner.

Someone else donated two boxes of food to us yesterday.

God is good, yanno? These are very real, tangible answers to prayer.

Rick is probably going to lose his job at the end of this week, so we're hunting pretty hard for something else for him to do that will provide for our family. We probably have twenty-five or thirty thousand dollars a year in medical expenses, assuming there aren't any catastrophic events, because of our children and their special needs. So even though we have had a decent income, our outgo is pretty steep.

I am grateful to God for continuing to provide for us. He has never EVER failed to do this, not one single time.

To RedFish and my cousin Heather: do NOT read this post.

You were warned.

I smacked at a moth a few minutes ago and missed. He fluttered onto the windowsill, where he was promptly attacked, much to my delight:



Gotta love a zoom lens, right? And I love me some good bug beat-downs... anytime a bug gets an asswhoopin from a friendly neighborhood spider, so much the better.

And I should be ashamed of the cobwebs in my windows, but there's just so much other crap needing to be done in this house, I frankly haven't bothered.

But then I looked a little closer.



Unless I'm quite mistaken, this is a REALLY BIG female brown recluse spider.

Oh crap.

Okay, I have lost the irrational spider fear I used to have -- honestly, I really have -- but this is just not going to work for me. Rick will be spraying and vacuuming all the windowsills immediately. As in, this minute. As in, I ain't fixin' lunch for NOBODY until the windowsills have been cleared of this menace.

Mama ain't happy, folks.

I'm putting the "pets" tag on this post because this spider is roughly the same size as my dog.

The evolution of a garden, part the first

The cost of restoring the in-ground liner swimming pool in our backyard was prohibitive, both in the actual cost of the restoration AND in the cost to insure and maintain it. I wanted to keep it, but we just don't have the money. I also want a vegetable garden, and it just so happens that the pool is in the precise spot which would be perfect for a bright sunny garden. So we're having it filled in.






Notice Isaac on the far left... as any self-respecting little boy would, he wanted to be right in the thick of the action:















This stuff is hugely fascinating to him:



The dump-truck guy climbed into the uptilted truck to kick out the remaining bits of fill dirt, and I got him to smile and wave for me:


He and his dad are also probably going to be building us a new fence along the back and side of the house to replace the falling-down rotted mess that's currently there.

Tomorrow they'll finish with the fill dirt, then come in with real topsoil to finish it out. I'm already planning the garden: tomatoes, squash, green beans, blackberry vines along the back fence... it's all just so yummy I can't wait.

Baby birds

I haz dem.


Three amazingly ugly baby cardinals in a tidy little nest in a honeysuckle vine. Faces only a mother could love, no?

Water blessing

I realize that some folks are a bit over-blessed with rain, but here in North Texas, we're turble dry. I was sure glad today for the abundant, copious rain. Yes, the Weather Channel keeps texting me with flash flood warnings and severe thunderstorm warnings... but I'll take the warnings and pray for the folks in the flood plain. I hope they all got outta the way after the floods a couple of years ago, but when folks are desperate, they'll live anywhere.

And desperate is a pretty good description of how a lot of us are feeling right now, with the bad economy and the horrible taxes. We had to pay lots of penalties and extra crap because we had to pull money out of Rick's retirement just to live on this past year. It isn't how we wanted it to be, but we don't really have a choice anymore. The medical bills have literally killed us this year and we have nothing left. It was our choice to adopt special-needs kids, and neither of them was through the foster care system so we're not eligible for any kind of governmental assistance for their care. Nor do we really want governmental assistance. But a little governmental "step-asidedness" might help.