SQUATTER [skwot-er] – a person who settles on land under government regulation, in order to acquire title.

Well, ok, so the official definition isn’t exactly what I’m talking about.  You may have heard the story that was in the news a month ago about the elderly man who couldn’t get the stranger out of his garage.  If you’re wondering how such a thing could happen in our wonderful country, read for yourself.

Apparently occupancy rights laws suck.  My dear friend is currently going through a situation as well.  I will spare the details, but the reason I’m writing this is because I desperately want to help and I don’t know how.  I find it amazing that there are other such stories in the news right now (click here for another one) – a side effect of the horrible economy, maybe?  It’s not so much the laws that are failing my friend, more likely it’s the fact that she is too nice and generous and doesn’t want to kick people out even if they are taking advantage of her generosity.  I actually haven’t talked to her about it in awhile, so hopefully the situation has improved – here’s hoping!

I could kick myself for not taking a “Before” picture of our game closet.  For  those of you who don’t know, my husband and I have a hobby of collecting board games.  We go to area thrift and Goodwill stores, and we buy every game in sight we don’t (think we) have.  It’s gotten out of control, really it has.  In our defense, we have a semi-regular game night with friends where we try out many of the games we obtain.  But the game collection outgrew its closet, and we began stacking games on the floor of the closet until even the floor started to overflow with games.  So, after we cleaned up what used to be the craft room in our house (gonna call it the ‘East room’ for now I guess – we can’t decide if we want it to be a family rec room or a kid-free parents’ cave), we decided to move the game closet into the closet of the East room because it’s bigger.  And now that phase of the project is complete!  And it’s awesome!

We threw all of our props and memorabilia from the community theater shows we’ve worked on in the East room.  Since my husband was the handsome ‘Dr. Sanderson’ in the show Harvey, we somehow ended up with the name plate for his office door.  We stuck it to the closet in the East Room, and that is where our game closet now resides.  Therefore, I’m announcing the opening of Dr. Sanderson’s Game Library!  Pick a game…  ANY game*!  However, the following picture is just a sample of the library – a fraction of the closet.  Not only could I not rotate the image (so imagine the scene as 90° to the right), but I couldn’t get much of the library in the picture!

*unless you are certain game night regulars who are known for kicking butt at the Disney Trivia game – we have “accidentally” misplaced that game, hehe!

These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise….

In 1966 the voyages of the Enterprise started. I was only a lad then, but I was glued to the set for 1 hour each week. Then this wonderful show went into syndication. For a time is was on every afternoon. It was on weekends. There were Star Trek marathons on the weekends. Then a cartoon, some movies, the Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise. Finally, this past weekend, another movie was released.

While I like Star Trek, I would not consider myself a die hard fan. After the initial run of Star Trek, I was no longer glued to the set. If it was on, and I happened to find it, I would watch. I wouldn’t go out of my way for it. Marriage, family and friends became more important than Trek. So you didn’t find me waiting for the midnight showing of this movie. I did want to see it on the big screen, with full sound and comfortable chairs. So I had some time available last Saturday, and I was near the multi-plex.

For those who don’t know, this movie goes back to the beginning of Star Trek. It starts with James T. Kirks birth and quickly goes to his first time on the Enterprise. I found the characters plausible for the Star Trek Universe and the story line seemed to be well thought out. Overall a good movie. Lots of action, reasonable storyline and good characters. Even for the non Trek fan, this is a good Sci-Fi action movie.

More than that I can’t say, without giving the whole story away. So if you don’t want any spoilers stop reading now……

S P O I L E R S

This started out as a standard Trek time travel movie/story. Someone goes back in time and changes the future of our intrepid Enterprise heroes. Kirk’s father dies in the very beginning of the show, making his upbringing quite a bit different than the normal Trek time line. In the TV shows and the movies, the crew of the Enterprise usually would go back in time to fix something (bring back whales, prevent a star from exploding, get the pilot back to his plane ect.). This time the people that did the time traveling either end up dead or staying in the future. Hmmm, does that screw up the time continuum? You bet…

This whole movie was one big screw up of the Trek time line. As of this movie, almost anything you thought you knew about Star Trek has been thrown out the window. They started fresh folks. Let’s see if I can touch on the basics.

Kirk was still an conceited, womanizing, know-it-all jerk (some things never change), but wow, Spock was made captain of the Enterprise before Kirk was. Kirk was marooned on a planet by Spock! He wasn’t even supposed to be on the Enterprise, he was under suspension for cheating on a test. Hmmm, he didn’t start out nearly as well in this ‘reality’.

Spock, still logical, still had problems as a child on Vulcan, but his choice is a bit different. It seems he chose to be a bit more human. In this show he had a human girlfriend!!! I think that is a good thing, since Vulcan was destroyed, he can never go back during Pon Far. He may need that girl friend.. Except now there are two Spocks in the universe. Old Spock who remembers all the stuff that isn’t anymore, and the new Spock who doesn’t.

Uhura, still bright, competent and beautiful, and she is Spock’s love interest!!!! Hmmm and in the 60’s the first inter-racial kiss between Uhura and Kirk was a major deal on TV.

I’m not sure that Dr. McCoy changed at all. This character seemed immune to the changes in the time line.

Scotty, well he was an engineer on some out of the way Ice World. I don’t recall enough of his history to know if this was happened or he was down on his luck too.

Chekov and Sulu, well Chekov wasn’t in the first season of Star Trek in 1966 (joined the crew in 1967) and Sulu was the pilot of the ship, so something changed here…

One final question… How the heck did everyone know about the Romulans? I seem to remember the first time they appeared, and everyone on the Enterprise was surprised they looked like Vulcans. Hmm something really changed in the time line. It seems the Federation knew about Romulans and the similarity to Vulcans before Kirk was born and before the random act of time travel that changed everything. Why didn’t the crew of the Enterprise know it? Hmmm?

The Graduation and Wedding days are fast approaching. There was an award banquet, and during the weekend one of my daughter’s wedding showers. Since my oldest threw the shindig, I got to drive my youngest to the party. I was supposed to have a day playing laser tag, but that was canceled. Too bad.

I’ve been a bit tired the past couple of weeks. Sometimes I wonder why. Then I think again and I’m wondering how I can spend as many hours awake as I do. Maybe things will so down, or not.

I have been able to get some ‘down time’ in. I’ve seen a couple of movies and was able to see the current play at WCCT. I’ve been listening to some ball games. I spent some time with friends and family. That is all good.

I’ve read that taylhis will be taking a bit of a blogging break, I guess I’ve been doing the same thing. I do want to keep some of my readers up to date on the various events with my girls, so I have some things I will need to blog about. So maybe not a total break. Star Trek review coming up….

I don’t know what’s happened to me lately.  For over a year, I was pretty diligent about publishing my 5 blog posts per week, one for every  weekday.  Sometimes I did more, sometimes less, but rarely as few as I’ve been writing lately.  I figured that if I were to lose enthusiasm for this blogging thing, it would have happened already and I’d be done with it.  But that’s not the case.  I’ve stuck through it while being pregnant (of course it was easy to sit on my pregnant butt in the summer heat last year and blog – didn’t want to do much else!), and I even caught up after having the emergency surgery and the recuperation period associated with that, also while caring for a new baby and 3 older kids.  And I also caught up after spending a week in Florida with no blogging!  So yes, it’s something I enjoy, and something I’m going to stick to.  I think I’m just going to back off a little bit for now and not publish quite as many posts as before.  I still have a lot to say, and a lot of things with which to bore my readers, so have no fear!

But the weather is nice, and I have 4 kids to deliver to places around town constantly.  We’ve had to recently make some sacrifices – I always wanted to give my kids the opportunity to be in every activity they wanted, but I’m finding out that it’s just not possible with 4 kids.  My oldest is in Girl Scouts, and she also wants to take piano lessons, swimming lessons, be in 4-H and be in plays.  Our very-soon-to-be 5-year-old is old enough for Safety Town class this year, and we kind of wanted to get her involved with swimming lessons also.  Not to mention all of the projects that Mom and Dad have volunteered to do; the list seems endless.  I think our summer is jam-packed already and it’s only May!  Plus, we’ve embarked on some rather large home improvement projects that need finishing…

So don’t wonder where I am or if everything’s ok – it’s GREAT to be Über-Busy!

Another weekend has come and gone – and quickly too, it was a busy one!  And this post title is already outdated because I’ve been so busy I  haven’t had a chance to write until 2 days after Mother’s Day!

Friday night saw me doing some volunteer work for a local theater board.  It wasn’t really work; basically it consisted of me making sure the audition process for our summer show (Joseph – my favorite!) was flowing smoothly.  It was fun, though I’d be lying if I didn’t express my concerns about my hubby giving his audition his best shot.  More about THAT later, based upon whether he makes the show or not…

Saturday was my daughter’s 5th birthday party.  As usual, none of the 18 kids from her class called to RSVP, but I was tired of worrying about it – been there, done that, ever since our oldest started inviting friends to her birthday parties.  I don’t know why parents can’t figure out how to RSVP.  The day before the party, when we hadn’t heard from anyone, I did make sure we called one friend of the birthday girl’s who always attends her classmates’ birthday parties, and luckily she showed up.  We allowed our older daughter to invite one of her friends, just so we could be sure we’d have at least some kids joining the lame birthday party crowd of Mom, Dad, Grandma, and Uncle Bud.  Thank goodness we did that, otherwise my daughter would have had NONE of her own friends show up at her own birthday party!  Luckily, she was fixated on the slumber party that would take place at Grandma’s hotel later that night, so she didn’t really seem to mind the one-kid turnout.  Of course, the one kid that could come was a very high-maintenance kid, and she also had an accident minutes after arriving at our house.  AND, in order for her to be able to come at all, she had to be dropped off at noon – 3 hours before the party was to start!  But like I said, it was all worth it for our daughter to be able to have a friend at her party.

Saturday night my mom was very generous with her offer to take all 4 kids in her hotel room!  Hubby and I  ran like the wind, seizing an opportunity to go to a drive-in movie theater kid-less, even though neither of the movies sounded very intriguing.  But we had never been to a drive-in together, and we found a place 45 minutes away.  It was so cool; it was out in the country; basically a farm that people converted into a drive-in.  A very far cry from the crowded drive-in I used to visit as  a teenager in a suburb called West Chicago – not a very good area now, and even  back then, there was always a squad car patrolling inside.  Not the case here – we were in the middle of the country, and this place even had a little snack truck and games you could rent for free while waiting for the movie to start (cornhole – a regional favorite and some mini-golf holes).  The movies – Wolverine and 12 Rounds – were not very thrilling, and the peaceful night air and late hour did us in and we both fell asleep.  Well, it had been  huge day and they can’t even start the first move until almost 9:30 when it gets dark enough, so no wonder.  And, Jill the GPS routed us into some construction on the way back so it took us an hour to get home at 1:30 in the morning!  Construction in the pitch black middle of no where late at night when you’re SO tired can be very  disorienting!  We didn’t have any kids all night thanks to my mom, but we had to get up early the next morning to get breakfast before church so by Sunday night, we were dragging!  I should have really taken a nap, but I was having such a great Mother’s Day…

We went out to breakfast Sunday morning, and then my mom and uncle stayed to check out our church.  It was a  lot of fun for the kids to show them around, and I loved Sunday’s message about motherhood.  It was punctuated by a few wonderful videos, and the pastor took a break from our ‘Fearless’ series to focus on mothers and our special day – I really enjoyed it.  Especially the surprise Willie Nelson song they played at the beginning of service!  The pastor made sure to mention how difficult Mother’s Day must be for those who have lost children or for those who can’t have children,  and I  couldn’t help but wonder about the people whose mothers have passed on – must be an extremely difficult day for them too.  I have a few friends in that position; including one who lost her mother not more than a few months ago.  So as much as I was enjoying my Mother’s Day, my thoughts and prayers were also with those who didn’t find the day a cause for celebration.  Here’s hoping you had a great Mother’s Day in 2009 with many more to come!

Unbelievable but true, a Findlay, Ohio senior has been suspended for taking his girlfriend to her prom.  Tyler Frost was warned by his school, Heritage Christian, to not attend his girlfriend’s prom at Findlay High School.  The fundamentalist Baptist school distributes handbooks to the students and includes rules that prohibit such things as rock music, dancing, hand holding, and kissing.  Whatever we may think about the rules, they were printed and distributed to every student.  Who can speculate on the student’s decision to attend the school: was he encouraged by his parents?  However, the more press I see about the incident the more I think Mr. Frost was just out to make a name for himself.  He and his girlfriend are on their way to New York to make the rounds on news programs.  However, he will not be participating in his high school graduation exercises but will receive his diploma following his final exams.  Honestly, it sounds like the old issue of rock and roll being the devil’s music.  Read more details here.

Yes, I saw the new X-Men movie (X-Men Origins: Wolverine) on the first day it opened. For you fans of comic books and haven’t seen the movie yet, I suggest looking at this as one of Marvel alternate universes. If you’re looking for comic book continuity, you won’t find it. The names have been kept the same, but the characters may be different.

That being said, I really enjoyed this movie (see other movie reviews for disclaimers on my liking this type of movie). And I have more than a few reasons

1) Character setup — In a very short time you were able to ‘know’ the characters involved. The back story was handled quickly and gave enough information for the rest of the film. I’m sure that most of this is because we were introduced to this character and the class of characters in the earlier X-Men films, but this is how all comic book movies should be done. Make sure the audience knows the driving force behind the character, and then get to the guts of the movie. People go to these movies to see the action and character interaction, without that, the comic book movies fall short.

2) For a comic book setting, the actions were believable. Yes, if we had those powers, those things could be done. I didn’t see much that was unbelievable from the aspect of what ‘powers’ the characters were given by the script writers.

3) Action sequences were very good, and well placed. The general rule was relax, action, relax and then more action. This kept the movie flowing. The action sequences fit in with the story line developed in those time of relaxing. Also there was a lot of humor in the show. Very important to have that in a comic book movie, in my view.

Spoilers—- Stop reading now if you haven’t seen the movie and might want to ————–

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This movie was a set before the other X-Men movies, and my biggest complaint is that some of the things that should have been kept consistent between the shows. While I liked the actor that portrayed Saber Tooth, he did not match the menacing form of Taylor Mane in the first X-Men movie. I think they could have used some makeup to get a better match. I also had a problem with Cyclops being captured. From conversation in the first X-Men Movie, Xavier found him soon after he had his optic blasts. He would not have been in a normal school, he would have been is Xavier’s institute. Nitpicking here, but I would have assumed some continuity between the movies. I don’t think I would have minded as much, but they did go through a lot of trouble to get Logan his leather jacket, and signature look. I’m sure if I see this show again, I will find more.

Another nitpick and I’m sure it was done to keep the PG-13 rating, but there was never any blood on weapons or blades used to stab people. Even with advanced healing, this gave the movie a strange look. I know a comic book, but I found it a bit strange.

I did find the way that Weapon X was able convince Logan to get the Adamantium fused was very good story telling. I was not shocked when his wife/girlfriend was killed, but I was shocked to find out it was all a setup and she was working for the project. Yes, in the movie Stryker was a very sick individual. I think even worse in this movie than in X2. A very sick, twisted mind. Other X-movies indicated that Xavier and Magneto knew about the Weapon X program, but it didn’t seem lie it in this movie (another continuity problem?) .

Other characters. Well I have a lot more to say on this, so for another time

There’s been a lot of buzz around here about a few new restaurants that are to be opening soon in our county.  One is a replacement for a restaurant that closed due to the tough economic times.  The old place had good food, but their prices were kind of high for the area, and their service was always very  slow – perhaps two reasons that led to their demise?  I don’t know much about their replacement, except that it’s to be called ‘Union Street Grille’ and will open in May sometime.  Hmm, grille.  Does that mean burgers and the like?

Next we will have a Sonic drive-in.  For those of you who aren’t familiar, Sonic is a fast food place, with burgers, french fries, chicken sandwiches and the like, but they also have outdoor booths where you can sit in your car and eat after your food is delivered to you.  I try not to eat too much fast food, but I do enjoy Sonic from time to time, and they have excellent slushies, ocean water, and especially flavored iced tea – YUM!  And Sonic has a Happy Hour from 2-4 when their drinks are half-price, so I’ll be there…

The other new restaurant in the area is a place called ‘4 Seasons’ and it’s about 20 minutes away.  They have (among other things) Greek food – my favorite!  Not a full spread, but enough to make me happy!  Their gyros are great (awesome tzatziki sauce), and they even have homemade hollandaise sauce for eggs benedict.  I think I’ve already rambled on in a few blog posts how important it is for good eggs benedict to have homemade hollandaise.  My husband and I have searched many states for good hollandaise sauce, and many places will say their sauce is homemade even if it isn’t.  I guess to a lot of people, “homemade” means that they’ve mixed the powder into the water.  But not to us – you can really taste the (ew) difference if there is powder involved.  The other night, we ate at 4 Seasons, and I made a comment – now we just have to ask them when they’re getting Saganaki (one of my favorite Greek dishes – it involves goat or sheep cheese, whiskey, fire, and yelling OPA!  Good stuff).  So my husband asked the waitress about it, and that’s when we found out that they HAVE it!  Of course – we find out when we’re way too full to even consider trying it, and on the eve of one of the busiest weekends we’ve had in a long time.  We will be up there to try it soon – no doubt!  Before that lovely piece of news, we thought the nearest Saganaki was Toledo or South Bend, Indiana!

Anyway, 3 new restaurants opening up within miles of my house is a big deal for us – especially for one to have THREE of our favorite dishes!  We eat out a lot, partly because the prices are reasonable in our area, partly because we’re very busy people and I’m not home a lot to cook, and partly because it’s really difficult to cook with 8 extra little feet in the kitchen to trip over!  Maybe some day I’ll have the time and the patience to cook more often, but until then, new restaurants opening in our area to give us more variety is a cause for celebration!  EUREKA!

Happy Mother’s Day to all those who serve as mothers whether it be in the traditional sense or less than traditional.  I am lucky to have had two extraordinary women to look up to and admire who have always been there for me no matter where I was or what trouble I have been in.  One, my fabulous mother whom I would not trade for all the tea in China.  The other one that I was blessed to “adopt” as the second mother I so wish everyone had (God rest her soul)… someone I could talk to and share private things with.

My mom is one of the most giving women on the planet.  She has three jobs: beautician, bus driver (morning, pre-school, and afternoon routes), and bookkeeper for volleyball, basketball, and softball.  The sports statistician position I think she does more for the escape from the everyday but she still gets paid for it.  She also is the best person to have raised her four children, husband (he is still being raised), and niece who had been tossed around from 3 foster families before ending up with us when she was in the second grade.  So many memories, I cannot pick a single one.

On the other hand, one instance sticks out clearly in my mind concerning Emily.  Following one of the performances of Joseph nine years ago, the two ladies and I went to McDonald’s.  We ordered and went to our table.  However, the orders were far from correct.  Emily went right back up to the counter and in her special way explained the situation.  By the time she was done, we had not only gotten our orders refilled correctly but a refund on top of it.  I sometimes wonder if the poor guy behind the counter had been employed there long.  No one wanted to be on Ma2’s bad side.

So… thank you to all mothers everywhere.  I’m sure that there is not a harder yet more rewarding job anywhere.