Things have been up and down these past few days for me. Semi-enjoyable day Saturday with the filming of the Clinic (see posts from others). Very nice evening Sunday watching my daughter in her show choir. Monday I was able to ‘Save the Day’ by delivering some Fruit Loops… 😉 However, (you saw this coming with the title) things aren’t good.

A good friend’s son died over the weekend. Young with his whole life ahead of him. Sad, so very sad. The other thing in my life that happened isn’t for blogging.

There are times when things just seem to stack up, and this is one of them. Up then down. Down then up. Mini Roller Coaster compared to other times in my life, but uncomfortable anyway.

Just my time to vent a bit.

I was feeling rather curious to tonight and I decided to check out celebrities who celebrate (or celebrated) their birthday the same day as I do.

• I have known for years that Fred Gwynne (Herman Munster from The Munsters and Judge Chamberlain Haller from the hilarious My Cousin Vinnie) was born on July 10th.
• Phyllis Smith who plays (ironically) Phyllis  on The Office.  Isn’t it curious that many of the supporting cast members share the first name as the actor playing them?  For instance, Oscar Nunez plays Oscar; Angela Kinsey plays Angela; and perhaps most ironic, Creed Bratton plays Creed Bratton (but has his last name on the show ever been established).
• Jake LaMotta the boxer who was the basis for the movie Raging Bull.
• Jonathan Gilbert (Willie Olsen from Little House on the Prarie who is the brother of Melissa”Laura” Gilbert and half brother of Sara “Darlene #1 from Roseanne“).

There were 3 pages full of celebrities who share my birthday.  Some I would call infamous and some I have no idea who they are.  Follow the link to see who shares your special day.

I was recently ammused when a few of my blogging friends were talking about which post had the most comments.  So, this morning I thought I would quickly look for a cool image (below) that everyone would have to comment on…  I think I found one!  What is the boy in this picture doing!?!!?

Now, after seeing the photo, click here to hear a sound effect that will answer the question – WHAT is the boy in this picture doing?

Well… after a long and blessedly eventful weekend, I had my regular Monday off.  I usually spend an hour or two cleaning my mother’s beauty shop.  I did not mind today since the weather outside did not look to inviting after a decent Saturday and Sunday was a blah one, too (I guess the old adage that if it rains on Easter Sunday you can expect 6 Sundays of the same does not mean the same if it is opposite… meaning: If it does not rain on Easter Sunday, you can expect 6 Sundays of no rain.  Kind of like a groundhog predicting the weather).

So after spending some time chatting with a sick friend hoping to dispel some of her dreariness and getting to see a teaser of rhe short film we began shooting on Saturday, I read a bit while the suds were on television (YUCK) and found that the Yankees were on tv tonight.  After the first series at the new stadium with the Indians ended in a 2-2 split (we WILL NOT mention the happening of Saturday afternoon.  Remarkably, they now stand at a 7-6 record), I was looking forward to the beginning of a new round with the Oakland As).  Hopefully, the announcers would be a bit more even in their commentating than the seriously one-sided announcers on the Cleveland net.  I may sound biased but those announcers were terribly pro-Indian.  Unfortunately at 7PM, ESPN announced the bad news: The NY/Oakland game has been postponed due to rain.  Guess I should have kept a better eye on the weather in the Bronx: at 2:00, it was cloudy, but rain was forecasted.  I was in the same predicament as Taylhis last night.  Maybe I will catch up on some of the 70+ Simpsons episodes I have waiting on the DVR.  Honestly, who has time for regular tv viewing anymore?  Well… the occasional Thursday night from 8-9.30 but aside from that…

As you may or may not know, my husband – the almighty admin – wrote a play called “The Clinic”.  We spent last Saturday turning it into a short film.  Here is a teaser…

Well, ok, what disease is NOT awful?  But ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease) robs a person of his or her motor skills and leaves their mind intact.  So essentially, ALS victims are imprisoned in their own body.  And ALS often strikes at a young age, and most people struggle with it for less than 3 years before it takes their life.  We watched my husband’s father struggle with it for over 2 years.  We watched as it robbed him of his ability to walk, talk, eat and pretty much everything else.  He passed away very peacefully, a week before Christmas.  We were all in the room with him, and a hospital volunteer was playing Silent Night on the harp as he passed.  It was beautiful, but it’s still hard for me to hear that song.  The reason I’m bringing this up is because the most famous victim of ALS, besides Lou Gehrig himself, is Stephen Hawking, and I was sorry to read in the news today that he is very ill.

Stephen Hawking is a brilliant scientist and an inspirational man – he has lived with ALS for over 40 years.  Lou Gehrig had it for nearly two years before he died at the age of 37.  Gehrig’s was a New York Yankees player, and he was forced to retire when he was diagnosed with ALS.  His record of most career grand slams still holds at 23 today!  We watched The Pride of the Yankees (which tells the story of Lou Gehrig) with my father-in-law after his diagnosis, and that was tough.  Same thing with Tuesdays With Morrie…  why did my father-in-law want to do that to himself?  To get a better grip on what was happening to him, maybe?  I don’t know.

My father-in-law was a remarkable man.  He had the biggest heart of anyone I’ve ever known, second only to my husband.  He was kind, generous, smart, and funny.  He knew a lot about everything; especially movies and religion – he had the Bible practically memorized.  One of my favorite memories of him was when we took him to the zoo.  It was after the ALS had already taken hold of his body, but his humor was still intact.  As we were wheeling his wheelchair over a bumpy bridge at the zoo, he said, “Ahhhh” – not because the ALS had taken away his speech (it hadn’t yet) but because it was a bumpy ride and he was jokingly letting the bumps affect his voice.  He was taken from us too soon; I wonder what he would have thought of having 7 grandchildren?  He’s been gone longer than I knew him now – over 8 years.  His funeral was on our oldest daughter’s first birthday.  But anyway…  I don’t know why I’m going into all of this now.  Let’s pray for Stephen Hawking.  ALS is a terrible disease.

I will spare you the details, but apparently I’ve caught some sort of stomach virus (and it causes stomach pain – OUCH!).  Of course, I can’t call in sick to my job as a SAHM (stay at home mom), and just my luck that my husband has work today, so I’m stuck with the two little ones.  Actually, they’re stuck with me – I don’t feel well enough to go to Walmart or to take them anywhere else, so I can’t even kill time that way – I’m grounded.  And I do need to go to Walmart – I’ve already endured one tantrum about our lack of fruit loops.  I don’t think I could handle another one.  Is there fruit loops delivery?  I actually want to go to Walmart – like I said, it would kill the time anyway.  At least I can blog like a maniac right now while the baby is napping.  When he wakes up, I will be at his mercy.  He gets really bored around the house and wants to be held all the time.  But when I hold him, he just wants to grab things he shouldn’t and bang on my computer keyboard.  I guess I might say I’m bored.  It’s not that I have nothing to do; there are always blog posts to write (I’m sitting on 14 drafts right now!), newspapers from weeks ago to read, thank you notes and birthday party invitations to write, a messy house to clean, laundry to do, an anniversary photo album to put together…  it’s just that I don’t feel like doing any of that.  Or feel like doing much of anything, for that matter.  I guess I’ll sit here and watch Dora the Explorer all day.  I’m getting hungry, but I’m scared to eat anything because of my stomach.  I have a meeting I’d really like to get to later…  sigh.  Being sick sucks.  I hope I feel better for date day tomorrow!!!

(continued from a previous blog post)

So here’s a recap of Sunday – church, brunch, Hannah Montana movie – and that is where I left off.

So we get to the Hannah Montana movie, and of course our 9-month-old son wakes up from his nap just in time for the movie (couldn’t be awake to play at church, couldn’t be awake to indulge in brunch, alas – that’s always the way when you have kids – they sleep thru everything good, and I swear it’s a rule – they always wake when the irony is thick!)  But, because the Hannah Montana movie is a musical, our 3 youngest were kept too busy to perform their usual awful antics at the movie theater.  It was a girly movie, especially with a double love story plot, but our little boy is only 9-months-old, so he didn’t notice the girlishness.  Instead he loved the musical interludes, and he clapped to each one enthusiastically.  For some reason, and I’ve written about this before, the movie theater turns our normally sweet 2-year-old into a little stripper.  Luckily, by the time the idea to take her clothes off occurred to her today, it was near the end of the movie, so she only got as far as taking off her socks and shoes – although she did make sure to note (yell) while doing so, “Don’t look at me – I take clothes off!”  Ok, Disney, if you don’t want people looking, why are you taking your clothes off?  Such is the logic of a 2-year-old, I guess.
We had no major spills this time ( I’m referring to our last experience when we saw Monsters Vs. Aliens and we somehow dumped an entire soft drink into the lady’s purse who was sitting behind us – major oops!), and today our baby was on his best behavior as well because of all the music in the movie – something that I think saved us as far as our 3 youngest kids’ behavior at the movies today.  As for the movie itself, I enjoyed it more than I did Monsters Vs. Aliens, probably because I actually got to watch this one.  But an extra nice surprise for me was the country music add-ins – surprise performances from Taylor Swift and my favorite group, Rascall Flatts.  They sang one of their best songs acoustically as if they were relatives just sitting around jamming at a family get-together (can this be MY family get-together?), and it was thoroughly enjoyable.  Miley Cyrus even  showed her country roots in a song which attempts to revive line-dancing; I guess kids these days (now I sound like I’m 80 – GREAT, when did THAT happen?!?) have a dance they do to this song, but whatever, I kind of liked the song.  Overall, I truly enjoyed the country theme that was abundant in this movie – groovin’ country music, gorgeous farm fields, cowboys ropin’ horses…  what’s not to like?  There was also a surprise (for me) appearance by Jan Levinson Gould from the tv show, The Office.  Of course in this movie, she wasn’t Jan – she was some southern belle who played Miley’s dad’s love interest – almost as far away from Jan as one could be, but I still enjoyed the Office reference.  Also, keep in mind that this is a Disney film, so there are LOTS of prat-fallish types of humor, as well as recurring movie themes.  For example, ‘lobster trouble’ (ala Splash, circa 1984), ‘switching identities for different dinner dates’ (ala Mrs. Doubtfire, circa 1993), ‘major celebrity comes in to save a town’ (ala Wayne’s World 2, circa 1993 or ala Mystery, Alaska circa 1999), it’s always best to be yourself’ (ala…  wow, WAY TOO MANY TO MENTION – take your pick…)

So anyway, I have to (reluctantly) admit that I was pleasantly surprised with the Hannah Montana movie – plenty of stuff in this one for the parents as well as the tweens and even the stripping two-year-olds.  But the movie wasn’t as plot-less as I had hoped –  in other words, we didn’t get home until 2:55 – just 20 short minutes before we had to leave for a class we had signed up for through church.  So for the next 20 minutes we scrambled around – letting dogs out, repacking diaper bags, changing diapers, etc.  We arrived at our class pretty much on time, though a bit exhausted, thank you very much!

The class was great!  We learned a lot about our church – their beliefs, their history, as well as their foundations for building a relationship with Christ – a very well-spent 3 hours.  And we got to meet other couples at our table too – which is memorable for me because they were surprised to learn we had 4 kids – and I quote, “You don’t look old enough to have 4 kids!”  NICE!

Following the class was a great dinner of homemade pasta provided by a local chef.  Following the delicious dinner was a tour of the north campus of our church – we worship in the south campus, so it was nice to learn the ins and outs of the north campus – so awesome!  Our oldest daughter was so excited to show us where her Sunday school was held, and their rooms for youth were VERY impressive!  There was a room with a stage for youth productions, and it even  had backstage areas, which is almost more than I can say for one of our community theater’s stages, haha!  Also, there was a game room with multiple foosball tables and ‘carpet ball’ – something new to me, but a game I’d definitely like to try!  One of the youth rooms had state-of-the-art stage lights and restaurant-style booths for kids to ‘hang out’ in…  Overall, it was a fun evening, and I learned a lot.  But, as became common for today, we had to rush from the church class in order to be home in time for the community theater’s play reading committee meeting and my much anticipated Cubs game.  I was looking forward to this game for days.  It was a long series (most are 3 game, some are 2 game, this one was 4 game) against the Cubs rival – the St. Louis Cardinals, with whom the Cubs are vying for first place.  The game was at night, which is rare for a Sunday, so I was VERY excited about rounding out my weekend with such a game.  But alas, the darn rain had its way, and the game was postponed.  So only play reading meeting to look forward to for me – at least I didn’t have to rush the meeting and kick people too hard to leave my house since there was no Cub’s game!  And for once, I think we actually achieved a lot at the play reading committee meeting.  Probably because of the fact that there were only 4 of us in attendance – but hey, maybe that ‘s what needs to be done in order to achieve something…  too many people get in each others way, I guess.  It will be interesting to see what the absent members think of the decisions the four of us made while they were absent – I hope the decisions stick!

In summary, a great, if extremely exhausting weekend.  Come on now, would I have it any other way?

Whew!!!  It’s Sunday night – the finale of what just might be our busiest weekend ever!

Friday night we stayed up late to tie up loose ends and organize our film shoot scheduled for Saturday.  Christopher,  our 9-month-old, has decided to start waking up in the middle of the night again, so despite our best efforts (and going to bed early didn’t work out either since there was SO much work to do for the film shoot), we did not achieve the much-needed good night’s sleep on Friday night after not getting very much sleep Thursday night either.  Saturday we were up bright and early to take the kids 20 miles into the country to their new babysitter – our regular babysitter had stopped doing weekends some time ago, and it finally became time to find a weekend babysitter.  I know what you’re thinking –  a new babysitter in a different town = scary!  But of course we had met with her beforehand, and we liked what we saw.  Not only that, but she lives in a very small town, and her husband’s a teacher (so he had an established reputation, and also would need to protect it) AND she is a friend of a very good friend – ie, she had awesome references that checked out, and when it was all said and done, the kids had a GREAT time over there.  As for us, we had a VERY busy day trying to shoot our “short” film.  I put ‘short’ into quotes because the short film took so LONG to film – at least in some of the cast members’ opinions.  I actually thought the shoot went quite well, considering certain factors.  But the bottom line is, it was a heck of a lot different than doing live theater (how didn’t some of us see THAT coming – it seems obvious that film and stage would be like comparing apples and oranges), and we did not wrap all of the scenes in one day.  So guess what we’re doing next Saturday?  No complaints out of me,  as long as attitudes stay positive…

Saturday night after the shoot we were exhausted.  We were going to take the kids to the park, but it started to sprinkle, and so we were able to catch an AWESOME Cubs game on tv instead.  This entire series with the St. Louis Cardinals has been  so great to watch, even though I’ve actually only caught parts of two of the games – more on that later.  Saturday night saw us staying up too late again because it took awhile to settle down the kids after their big day.  And, lo and behold, Christopher was up all night again.  Right when we flopped into bed, he sat up in his crib.  I pretended like I was sleeping for a few minutes so I could be a fly on the wall and see what he did to entertain himself.  I almost giggled as he sat up and clapped his hands to himself – it was adorable!  I must have fallen asleep though because the next thing I knew (after a few hazy awakenings throughout the night when kids were crying), it was morning and time to get up and get ready for church.

Church this morning was entertaining (I always find it entertaining and enlightening, but I really do need to get some more sleep – I SO don’t want to be known as the lady who dozes in church!) as always, although our usual pastor did not give the sermon.  I liked the sermon, but not as much as when our usual pastor does it… oh well.  After church, we went to our usual brunch and there we decided to take the kids to the Hannah Montana movie.  Except that once we decided, we had only 20 minutes to finish eating, get to the theater, and find a row of seats – what it takes to hold our family at the movie theater nowadays.

Come to think of it, it was such a busy weekend,  and Sunday was busiest of all, so I think I’ll end the post here and make it a two-parter.  My regular readers can  consider this a cliff-hanger because they know that any time we take all 4 kids to the movie theater, it’s nothing short of an adventure…  Until part two…

Well, that Thursday entry was less than exciting I think.  Hopefully this will be an improvement- 8th grade.  In near-city district.  At the end of the year.  When another job popped up in a different district I was tempted to dump this one for it, but in the end I didn’t have any issues thanks to required worksheets to be filled out while watching a movie.  It was a social studies class, but she also taught one literacy class- I think all teachers teach one class outside their specialty to save on paying for another teacher since the numbers allowed for this.  Obviously, if this would cause the class sizes to be 35+ they would probably pay for an additional teacher.

So I arrived in the morning to handwritten plans, a videotape, a few stacks of papers, and two machines I could play the tape in- one a TV on a cart, the other a projector with a combo DVD player/VCR.  Being the tech person I am, I chose the projector, but first I had to hook everything up.  I plugged the projector and DVD player in and connected them with the supplied A/V cable.  Well, finished connecting- for some reason some connections were already there while others were not- interesting.  I had time to test it out, so I did.  Eww, was that it for volume?  I turned the projector volume to max but then it just sounded bad.  Hmm.  Wait, there is an additional speaker on the bottom of the cart, but how to plug the video into the projector and the audio into the speaker?  The cable was such that it couldn’t be split.  What was this?  A second audio cable!  Only- no.  It had a mini-end to plug the computer (also on the cart) into the speaker, but neither the speaker nor the player had a place to plug in the mini end, but all was not lost- the projector had an audio output and it was a mini- problem solved.  The player went to the projector, the projector to the speaker.  Done.  The only issue I had all day with this setup was the speaker A/C plug kept coming loose, but fortunately not during the video.

So in the end four classes saw the video ( a very unexciting one about Congress), the one literacy class had a quiz and a reading assignment from their books, and the tutorial (study hall) was… very small.  Only a handful of students apparently had tutorial with this teacher.  I caught up on some book-reading during this time.  Then I was done with an off period.  Or not.  The office called me and had me watch over a group of kids in the gym where they had some free-time (it was an LD class, but I saw a few friends from the BD/ED class there as well with another teacher).

So that was my week in review, in five posts.  How was yours? 🙂