Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Poor Snakey...


100_3985
Originally uploaded by mlochk22@
I really really really wanted a snake in my backyard, mainly because I've had a horrible mole problem since last year, when my other garden snake disappeared.

Too bad they hide so well in the grass, otherwise this one might not have become food for the lawnmower. Which was REALLY sad, considering we are only able to mow about once every 2-3 weeks because of the excessive rain we've had here. At least the plants are doing well with all this rain, even if the rest of us are tired of being drippy!!

On another note, I'm learning how to knit, so don't be surprised if a dishcloth/washcloth is made for you as I'm learning my new hobby.

And no, I haven't forgotten about learning how to machine sew. It's just been put on the back burner until I can find some cloth that I really like...

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Flowers from the backyard


100_3987
Originally uploaded by mlochk22@
While I have a million things I could be blogging about, like whats up in my life, mikes life, alex's life, etc. I'd rather just stop and smell the flowers and enjoy their beauty.

I hope you can enjoy the beauty too.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

After 15 long years...


tattoo
Originally uploaded by mlochk22@
I finally got my old tattoo covered up!! A few people can totally understand why I'm so darned happy about this, since they have seen my old one!

Just chalk up my old one as "youth's mistake", since I was 14 and thought I knew it all! LOL!! About a year after I had that done, I wished it were something else!! So, I guess, "after 14 long years" might be a more appropriate title!

If you look closely, you can still see the other tattoo (it scarred, so look for the scarring) underneath the new one. I'll have to take a pic of it once it is healed over (this pic was taken the same day it was done) and see if you can still see the scarring from the other one.

I had this done at Fat Tobe's in Osage Beach (at The Lake) by Kent, who did a fabulous job. I can't even begin to express how grateful I am that this skilled man worked there and was able to do such a great job.

I have much more to post about, but have to either a) take the pics or b) upload the pics to my computer or c) upload the pics to flickr! LOL!!
Just wait til you see my garden and my mother's day present!! I also need to take a pic of my valentines day gift! I just find it so hard to find anything to blog about during winter, so now that the beautiful weather is here, I keep remembering things I need/want to do!

Wednesday, May 07, 2008

And the Answer is...

I just don't know but it's getting close!! I mean, really, at what point does one stop drivng their cars and go for alternate means of transportation? And yes, folks, I'm referring to the ever rising price of gasoline. Last week Wednesday gas prices jumped up 10 cents to $3.48 and to day it jumped...get ready for this!!


17 cents!!

In one damn day!! That's just crazy!! At this point, I'm super glad that we planted a garden and that we eat mostly venison (really cheap compared) or turkey/chicken/fowl of some sort...and that I live only 1.3 miles away from work. I keep thinking about riding a bike to work, but that would be really weird to bike to work with my dress clothes packed up in a backpack.

But, what else is a person to do when filling up the car will now cost around $53 dollars? For our Subaru?? A compact?? I mean, what are other people doing? And food cost? OI!!!

Ok, there's my bitch session for now.

I think I'm going to go crochet now...it's soothing, compared to worrying about this stuff!

Monday, May 05, 2008

Day in the Life of me...inspired by Crochet by Faye blog

I just got done reading the crochetbyfaye blog with her rendition of "a day in the life of me" post and since she invited her readers to do the same, I thought...well, what the heck! This is my boring day, since I don't have a lot to do on Mondays, but this will still be fun!

so...here it is!

5:15 am: First alarm goes off and I groan trying to get out of bed to shut it off. I think that maybe I should stay up since it took me 2 minutes to get up out of the bed (after working on our garden all day saturday I'm stiff and sore in lots of odd-ball places), but decide I'm too tired to get up now. I collapse back into bed.

5:45 am: Second alarm goes off. This is the get up and get up now alarm so that I don't have to be rushing around the house and still get my "me" time. Get up, painfully yet again, and stumble into the bathroom with my robe and towel. Drop those off in the bathroom and go get on of my cleaning clothes to "swish and swipe" my bathroom ala FLYlady. Realize yet again that my clock in the bedroom is off by ten minutes, so it's really only 5:35, now 5:40, when I get up. Wonder...am I ever going to get around to changing the time on my alarm. Decide no, cause I do too much in the morning to sleep and extra 10 minutes.

Jump into the nice warm shower and pray really hard that my muscles loosen up a smide, otherwise today is going to really suck as I move around. Good thing my butt stays firmly planted to my office chair the majority of the time.

6:00 am: Go into kitchen after my shower and put up last nights dishes, which I forgot to do last night. Oh well, it's not that big of a deal. Start breakfast for me. I have natural peanut butter on wheat toast, a 12 oz glass of 2% milk, and a mug of hot jasmine tea.

I also stick my head in Alex's room to inform him its about 10 or 15 after if he wants to get up now! He groans and rolls over...ah, wonder where he get that from? LOL!!

6:30 am: Go back in and get alex up now. He's got the tv on cartoon network while reading an old value tale of mine. He seems to enjoy them. But then again, he's a bookaholic just like me and he NEEDED something to read and this was the best I could do for him. Any ten year old with a post high school reading level is certifiably a bookaholic. And these particular book do challenge him, not so much in the reading department but in the thinking department. Anything that challenges your thoughts are good! Also, I stare out the back window enjoying the nice look of our garden that we worked so hard on.

7:00 am: Time for Alex to wander in for a shower while I wander off to get dressed. I really should try to lay out my clothes before hand, but this time of year you never know what the temp will be...Saturday it was 60, today, 80. Yeesh!! We'll all be sick before long.

7:11 am: Remind my DH Mike to call the tattoo place about their hours, so Thursday we can go down and get my old funky ugly ass tattoo covered up. Go and comb out my hair from the attack of the tangles, and pick out clothing for the day. A comfy pair of khakis and a shirt. I choose to wear flats because, well, the back of my thighs HURT!! Yes, I'm whining I know, but I don't think I've worked this hard since I did tae kwon do!

7:30 am: I'm dressed, Alex is dressed, Mike is passed out on the couch. He got off from work a bit ago (7 am) and now he's snoring on the couch. He wakes up and asks me if I'll take Alex to school this morning. Not a problem!! I started my laundry with the eight hour delay, so it should get done right before I get off work. I think about taking my homework with me and laugh. I'd never get a chance to work on it at work, since I'm a day behind at my job as it is! Sign Alex's friday folder and realize I only have a week to find the child a costume for his history class. He's a civil war general and of course he's outgrown the only pair of navy pants he had. I'm thinking black will work and if I can find an old jacket somewhere...decide to worry about this later! Don't have time to now!

8:00 am: show up to work, talk about our respective weekends, get water, say hi to all I meet and settle down to work for the day.

10:10 am: Get a call from the medical clinic. "Hey, do you know what the code for "difficulty concentrating" is?" Look for a while before asking the other two coders in the office. Yeah, that didn't happen, so if anyone out there knows the code for that, let us know would ya? Four of us couldn't figure that one out! You would thing out of the thousands of ICD-9 codes there would be one for "difficulty concentrating"!

10:12 am: Go the bathroom, and realize how stiff I am from sitting all morning. Think about ice cream. Specifically, Haagan Das Vanilla Honey Bee. Yummy and it uses more honey than sugar in it, so that makes it just that much better for when I'm really craving some ice cream. Check out a coworkers online store and laugh at some of the pics of him. He's so goofy. But to plug his site, it's www.crowclothingcompany.com

10:40 am: Eat a snack of wasabi peas. Yummy!! Keep coding away.

12:08 pm: Learn a new word from Dr P. Always learning stuff from him! This time it is "anergy". I'm not telling what it is, you'll have to look it up yourself. I will tell you that it is in the same code with malaise and fatigue.

12:30 pm: Eat lunch, which just happens to be the same damn thing I had for supper last night!! Grrr. Listen to Lucy tell stories about her daughters prom this weekend. She's suffering from culture shock by living in the "big Fulton" after leaving St. Louis. Poor woman, she doesn't know what to think about this town!!

1:43 pm: Post-lunch snooze time. I forgot and ate sugar at lunch. Now I just want to curl up under my desk and sleep. *YAWN*

4:00 pm: Another half an hour to go. Not caught up yet, however I did start on the stack I should have gotten finish today. *sigh* ahh well, that after lunch slump did not help AT ALL!! I can't wait to get the heck out of here. Although, I have a lot to do when I get home!

4:40 pm: Get home, go downstairs to reboot the laundry, realize I left a load in the dryer all weekend, and start another load. Go back upstairs and fold laundry. Start thawing out supper (ham steaks with carrot and asparagus) and working on homework. Listen to Mike talk about how cold it is in our 73 degree house...think he's either crazy or getting sick. Not sure which. I'm going with "crazy" for now!

6:00 pm: Start supper for real now, while still trying to do homework. Mike is keeping Alex amused for me by playing video games with him (one of the few times I'm okay with video games...). The cats think that supper is for them. It's not...but they don't understand that at all apparently!

6:40 pm: Sit down to eat supper together while modern marvels is on in the background.

7:15 pm: Back to my stinking homework. I have too much to do this week and not enough time to do it in.

8:45 pm: Still working on homework, but it's about time to pull it in cause if I look at this stuff much longer I might just puke!

9:00 pm: Get Alex going on getting ready for bed. Go and tuck him in and talk for about 10 minutes or so. Mike's on floor sore, stiff and freezing. Literally shaking with the chills. Get his temp, he's at 100.9, although I think he did it under his arm pit, so add a degree to that. Tell him to take some benadryl for his sinus headache, which is probably a sinus infection (he doesn't drink enough water to keep the snot moving), but forget to tell him to take tylenol or something for his fever. By now its

10:00 pm: Turn on the news, like I could get away from it. Mike's got a journalism degree, so therefore he loves all things newswise. Groan...not my thing. LOL!! Tired of hearing about the body they found and about the accident that killed a lady form town. Just ready for bed.

10:40 pm: Bed time!! Mike is already out cold and I'm ready to be that way myself. I put on my Burt's Bees lip balm (original) and some Burt's miracle salve on my hands, lean over sleeping beauty to turn off the light and go to bed. I use my regular meditation to fall asleep, even though I don't mean to...

11:50 pm: OUCH!! I just got smacked in the face by a very heavy, very *ewwww* sweaty arm. Mike's not sleeping well and is tossing and turning, and apparently breaking his fever, cause he is really, really, really sweaty!! GROSS!! Ah well, such is life and besides, he's slept next to me when I've been sick like that. I get him to roll over back onto his side of the bed, I roll back over and go back to sleep, grateful that it is not even midnight yet.


*Overall*

My basic day by day activities. Pretty boring, eh? Hmm, just a tad bit I suppose. I hope it was somewhat amusing for you guys! Just be grateful I left out the other boring household activities like washing dishes, picking up the house and putting stuff away, etc. Hotspot fire drills ya know! Gotta keep the shiny sink! Work, work, work!!

Sunday, May 04, 2008

Backyard Gardening Spring 2008


Backyard Gardening Spring 2008
Originally uploaded by mlochk22@
Here's what we've been up to this weekend!

We busted soil and asses in order to have our own gardening space in our backyard. The prices of food just keeps going up and up and personally, I'm just tired of paying so much for good, healthy foods.

So, we planted some things that we will have to freeze, can, pickle, or whatever later on this year, but that is what weekends are for! Especially Saturdays and Sundays.

We've worried that they might not do well, but we'll keeping hoping and reading and such that this will work out! If it does, I'm looking forward to fresh beans and lettuce and such to eat whenever I want. Also, no chemicals if I can help it, so then they'll be even better!!

More discussion about this as time goes by. Here's hoping that next week this time or a few days after we will have some new little sprouts from the seeds we planted! Keep your fingers crossed for us!

Saturday, May 03, 2008

Frog catchin'


100_3821
Originally uploaded by mlochk22@
Some group or another has put face on the trees around the walking trail here. I just found them to be too cute and made the family go back a few days after discovering them so that I could take pictures of all of them.

Well, THAT didn't happen!! My cameras battery DIED!! So there are about 20 more faces that I didn't get to take!! So, I guess at some point I'll go either by myself, or maybe with the other goobers in my house to get pictures of the rest.

That being said, I did manage to get a picture of one of my favorites. When Alex and I found this one, I laughed out loud at the absurdness of it all. Where else would you find a tree face EATING a frog?!?! LOL!!

Wait til you see the pics of what we've been up to this weekend. Last weekend we repotted my houseplants (see previous entry...) and this weekend, well...I guess you'll see!! LOL! Be on the look out for pics later on, probably tomorrow or sometime next week!

On other sides of my life, I am working on household helpers on my crocheting, such as reusable swiffer covers so that I can mop with it (and it works well, since I used it last week and it was so very damn easy!!) and some "sponges", pics of which I still have to take and share :) .

On another aspect of life, work is good...we've had our hours cut down some, but I'm alright as far as that goes, as at this time I'm gaining more PTO time than I'm having to burn. Whatever, I'm doing better than lots of others at the hospital are since I never really use my time.

And the last bit, school will be done in about 9 more weeks and graduation will be in August. I'm looking for a tiara (albeit, a small one) to put on under my cap as a great laugh for all of us! After this long, we all deserve to be "queens of the day!" and the tiara would be a great way to remind everyone of that fact!! LOL! I can't wait to see everyones reactions! And the pics will be great! And if I could find them in bulk for cheap, I'd buy them for all the girls to wear! Hmmm, better get to looking...

Also, while I'm thinking about it, I didn't like baking soda only...too much of a pain and it caused me to break out. I found a powder that works well, but I'm not sure how much safer it is than deodorant. The recycling thing here at the house is going good too. I'm still finding that I throw some things away that could be recycled, especially if I'm in the bathroom, such as toilet paper rolls or the plastic packaging the toilet paper comes in...but it's getting better. Our trash has went form two or three bags per week, to one with major recycling to be put out every week.

Now if I just had a compost pile for the food scraps...Hey hun, I know you'll be reading this later...so, you want to start making me one? I know you can find a good tutorial online somewhere with some research! How bout that for a mothers day or anniversary present? Or for graduation? LOL! But seriously, that and a sewing machine would make my domestic life loverly...