We went out to lunch at the restaurant of Hazel’s choice - Mexican - where she gets a mini pizza. Then home for presents and chocolate cake.
She whispered, “I wonder what’s inside” as she was opening each present.
Archive for May, 2007
I’m officially on vacation! While there is always something that could be fixed up, our house is in “for sale” condition. Good enough, in other words. I can cheerfully neglect my good friends Hammer, Saw, and especially Paint Brush. Instead I’ll concentrate on the fun stuff I actually want to do, like playing guitar.
I used to play and record quite a bit, before Hazel was born and after the boys were old enough not to try to grab it out of my hands. I was never any good but just fooling around served as an awesome creative outlet and proved to be very relaxing.
One thing that was always a pain was setting all the equipment up. To remedy that I spent about fifteen minutes whipping up a little pedal board. Basically all I did was trim a scrap piece of wood, velcro the pedals to the board, and staple down the 9V adapter wires. I thought about making it like a “T” to fit my wah-wah pedal but decided not to because it might be uncomfortable to play raised an inch off the ground. So nothing fancy (or even original), but a fine utilitarian solution to my unwieldly pedal problem.
The last day of school for students was Friday, but I’m not quite done yet. For the past few years my district has had this goofy schedule with two post-planning days after Memorial Day weekend. They’re gravy days though. Some last minute paperwork, a checklist, maybe a little clean up, and that’s about it. We’re usually out of there by noon on the second day. And with the kids gone it’s practically not working.
This time it’s a little different because I have to move out of the lovely trailer I’ve been trapped in for the last couple of years. I get to return to the room I was in before my exile to the trailer park. I was supposed to be off today but Helen and the kids graciously helped me pack up most of my stuff to help with the transition.
Moving is definitely a hassle but I’ve got my operation pretty streamlined. Like a lot of teachers, I used to be a real pack rat. I’d keep anything that seemed potentially useful for a future lesson. But when I first relocated to the trailer I came to the realization that I’d never get around to using most of the crap I’d stored away. Some of it hadn’t seen the light of day for years. I ended up purging tons o’ junk and have been brutally minimalist ever since.
And made this dress for Hazel. I got the skirt fabric from a garage sale earlier in the day and the top fabric from Goodwill a few weeks ago. The pictures don’t show it that well because she was dancing like crazy the whole time Scott was trying to take a picture.
The last picture Hazel is holding a giant pokeweed that the boys found, they say it is the biggest one ever. . .
This batch of pesto kicks off the summer gardening bounty. The basil plants were started in my little greenhouse and planted into containers and finally moved outside last week. I’ve actually been picking it for about a month, but that was just a leaf or two at a time, pinching it back to make it bushy. It is working - I had about 2 cups of leaves today.
Sorry about the blurry picture - I need some practice with the new camera.
We don’t put a whole lot of stock into holidays like Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, and the like. About the only purposes they serve are to pile on meaningless obligations and create a sense of guilt if you somehow don’t live up to the expectations surrounding each “special” occasion. But that’s just how we feel, heh heh. Anyway, Helen noticed at Publix the other day that they were having a cake decorating special for Mother’s Day and thought it might be something fun for the kids to do that would also serve as a Token Gesture. I took them there after breakfast and they were thrilled to not only design the cake but also to present it to their beloved mom. They also loved helping her eat it.
While not exactly of Elwoodian proportions, we just upgraded to a Canon PowerShot A80.
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