I had a wonderful Mother’s Day weekend.  We decided to celebrate Saturday in order to avoid the crowds at all the restaurants and other establishments; also it worked out well because my kids often need all of Sunday as a rest day to recooperate from the previous week and the weekend before returning to school on Monday.  So, I slept in Saturday until I was awakened by the idyllic crow of a rooster…  wait a minute… we do live in a rural area, but that was no rooster – it was a screaming parrot and it wasn’t the least bit idyllic, just horribly annoying and not a fun way to get woken up.  But, it was nearing 10 am, and I figured I had left poor dad with the kids long enough.

I was making myself some oatmeal for breakfast when I was greeted in the kitchen by cute little girl #1.  “Happy Mother’s Day Mom!”, she said, and gave me a stuffed animal she had found in her room.  I find the re-gifting really cute; it’s her way of sharing what she has and also displays her thoughtfulness in wanting to get me something but being too little to go out shopping on her own.  She also gave me the most adorable essay she wrote in school – I will share, though it’s much cuter to see it in 8-year-old handwriting:

Happy Mother’s Day!  I love my mommy for many different reasons.  One reason is that sometimes she gives me what I want at the store.  Another reason is that she helps me do stuff around the house like make soft crunchy cookies.  The last reason is she lets me have fun a lot like at the park!  I think that my mommy is triffic, wonder ful, and vary funny.  by Taylor

Daughter #2 was next, and she handed me a singing gorilla from her room.  “Happy Val-tine’s Day, Mom!”, she said, hugging my leg.  She is almost 4 and apparently forgot the name of the day, only remembering that she was supposed to give me something and be well-behaved, but that’s all that mattered to me!  Don’t be fooled, however…  they are not perfect angels ALL of the time – my kids’ Mother’s Day sweetness was promptly followed by a HUGE knock-down, drag-out, screaming at the top of their lungs fight…  The first of many throughout the weekend.  We still had a great time though – my husband always does a great job of keeping his cool which is more than I can say for myself…  but there was something going on with my oldest this weekend, and it showed!

Next, we decided to go to a neighboring city to go swimming in a hotel – my husband can get GREAT hotel rates online for most places, and the overnight getaway was exciting for the kids and around the same price as driving somewhere far away (insert gas price gripe here) and spending $ for other entertainment.  Besides, being in the water felt WONDERFUL for my aching pregnant body…  I would love to have access to a pool during a whole pregnancy sometime; it’s amazing how the sensations of all the aches, pains, and extra weight just melt away when under the water.  The kids had a great time, and we all got some exercise also, plus when we got home on Sunday, they all took at least a 2 hour nap – can’t put a price on that!  My husband of course, catered to their needs all day too, so really I got a whole Mother’s Day weekend out of it – 2 days when I was supposed to get 1!  I only hope I feel up to it enough to give my husband as great a Father’s Day as I got a Mother’s Day.  But since I’ll be even more pregnant by then, we might have to reschedule…  ever heard of Father’s Day in August?  😉 

I don’t know if anyone noticed the sunset I have on my blog page. This is a picture I took years ago on a late winter or early spring day (notice lack of leaves). This was taken on one of those old Sony cameras with the floppy disk to store the pictures, and also one of my early attempts at using the camera. I had 3 floppies of sunset pictures, this was one of the last and happened to be the best one. 1024×768 Jpeg file with a size of 110 Kb.

You may ask why I’m explaining all this today. I would ask that if I didn’t already know the answer. So I’ll tell you.

This picture was one of my wife’s favorites. She put it on our computer as the wallpaper (until she took many pictures of her chinchillas). I was happy that she liked my first attempt at digital photography. Anyway I now use this picture on almost everything that needs my personal stamp. I have it on my computer wallpaper, my cell phone wallpaper, I panel on the front of my laptop has this picture and so on. It is one little memory I have of the good times I had with my wife. And it is a picture in our woods that we purchased (a long way around) from my parents. It was my mother’s wish to live in the woods as long as I can remember. When I was in High School, she finally got her wish. So that picture also reminds me of my mother.

So for the two mothers in my life that I have lost, and for all other moms reading … Happy Mother’s Day.

After the whole family (siblings and their children) all took Mom out for Mother’s Day brunch HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY TO ALL! I decided to tag along and watch Speed Racer…. following a brief play-reading meeting. Going in, I had little expectation. I only vaguely remember seeing repeat episodes of the 60s Japanese animated import. I most remember the little brother and the chimp popping out of the trunk of the race car. And since this was another Wachowski brother production, I was expecting a visually dazzling display with little plot, or character development much like the Matrix trilogy of a few years ago.

Here we have the Racer family (Pops, Mom, Speed, his girl Trixie, little brother Spittle, mechanic Sparks, and cute chimp Chim-Chim). Speed is offered the opportunity to race for a huge racing team that is reknowned for dirty racing. In fact, those who do not take the opportunity usually end up regretting their decision. In order to reveal the racing cartel, Speed joins forces with the mysterious Racer X (Matthew Fox from Lost) and a Japanese racer (whose name I do not remember).

The stylized fighting with Ninjas is comical. Watching John Goodman twirl one above his head as if he were tossing pizza dough created a huge roar from the audience. The entire production design resembled a comic book come to life. The colors were all super exaggerated: the sky a bright, bright blue. The sets all appeared to be futuristic… especially the racetracks). The races were fun to watch with the gadget enhanced speedsters flipping, swerving, jumping over each other, etc. In short, it was a fun movie to LOOK at. One of the downsides of the movie is the length. It ran over 2 hours and 10 minutes which is just too long for a movie to run aimed at families and there was a lot of downtime that would probably be a distraction to younger children. But, if you are a fan of the computer generated wizardry of the Wachowski brothers then Speed Racer is fun to watch.

On a tangent, the Wachowski’s must know their Bond flicks. One of the racers is poisoned by a Ninja in a scene which is played identically to one in You Only Live Twice.

I was taking a look at Teachertube today and found something interesting. Now this is something I have yet to have to do as a substitute- play a video from the teacher. Apparently this teacher left video instructions on what the kids would do in class that day. If I were his sub I think I might appreciate it as he was able to go into some detail on how to navigate a website on the Pilgrims. Sure, I could follow written instructions and show the kids myself, but in case of an internet-illiterate sub this would be the next-best thing to the teacher being there. Take a look for yourself. Teachertube is not yet a valid site for embedding so you will have to click the link:

Substitute Teacher

Oh, and while you’re there check out The Amazing Dancing Sub. Now I once sang a bit for a class after I told them I was in a show and they wanted a sample, but dance? I don’t think so… This guy definitely has a unique calling card for teachers (note the end of the video). 😀

Link for our admin (hint,hint!)

How long does it take you to “run in” to a store?  I suppose it depends on the size of the store and what you need.  If you’re running into the gas station to pay for gas, then it will probably take a fraction of the time it would take you to “run in” to a Super Walmart and pick up milk, diapers, and say, deoderant, or something else that is usually located all the way on the other side of the store. 

But apparently the phrase “running in” has different meanings for different people.  To me, it means ‘get in the store and get what I need as quickly as I possibly can’.  To my husband, it means ‘get some shopping done so my wife doesn’t have to get out of the car, and we don’t have to bother unloading the kids’.  The problem here lies where my husband is the slowest shopper you will ever meet.  This is not an exaggeration.  I’m very thankful sometimes that I was blessed with a man who doesn’t mind shopping, in fact, he even likes it, depending on what we’re shopping for, of course.  But it takes him forever to get anything.  I still can’t figure out why…  is it because he reads every package of every brand of every product in which he’s interested in order to comparison shop?  Is it because he is unorganized and doesn’t remember what he’s at the store to get?  Is it because he gets sidetracked and ends up shopping for three items when he’s in the store to buy only one?  It could be a combination of all the above; I haven’t figured it out yet.  But what I have figured out is to no longer put myself in the situation of being the car babysitter while my husband’s 5 minute “run in” to the store turns to 10, 20, sometimes upwards of 30 minutes!

Now that I’m in the third trimester of my pregnancy, I don’t always want to go in the store, whereas normally, I don’t mind…  like most women, I don’t mind shopping, even if hubby is taking forever and a day in the electronics section.  Which reminds me real quick – TANGENT ALERT – a brand-new Super Walmart in a town nearby has the right idea.  They put a really nice big magazine section right by the electronics department with benches in between for the wives to park themselves while the husbands wishfully browse the electronics – Walmart doesn’t often earn my kudos, but this is an example of some good store planning!  Anyway, back to my venting…

So before the pregnancy, for some reason I was never the one who got to “run in” to the store – I always got the ‘babysit-for-the-3-bored-kids-in-the-car’ job, ugh.  I finally put a stop to it because hubby’s “running in” took so long, and then I got pregnant and don’t have the foot power to last very long in stores anyway.  So the other day, we’re coming out of a store, and he says, very smoothly as he’s already walking toward the Office Max and away from the car, “I’m just going to ‘run in’ real quick and check for something.”  Uh-oh.  Did he say ‘run-in real quick’?  You may take me for a fool, but I believed him.  I thought he would be really quick because we had a meeting with a start time about an hour away, and he knew I wanted to make a few stops before the meeting, so surely he wouldn’t jeopardize my errands by letting Office Max take too long…  So I was under the impression that after I waddled to the car and pulled up to Office Max, he’d be ready to go…  WRONG!  I’ve been through this enough by now to know not to worry…  I used to sit there and seriously think, ‘what if he’s being held hostage in the Office Max or what if he’s passed out and gotten hurt or something?  But we’ve been together for over a decade, so I now realize he’s just a “forever shopper”.  I finished reading the daily newspaper and glanced around – no husband.  I put on the radio and listened to a song or two…  no husband.  I checked the time and started to get irritated, dreaming of the ice cream stop that was going to be one of my errands before the meeting…  no husband.  I put on the mp3 player and listened to about 3 songs, trying to keep calm and not cry out of frustration (impatience+pregnancy−ice cream = easy tears) …  no husband.  Now our new car starts to rumble and shake.  Since we got rid of the Ford months ago, I didn’t think it was a mechanical problem…  then I remembered that the gas light had come on earlier, before my husband “ran in” to Office Max.  I turned off the car, and waited some more.  Finally he came out of the store – empty handed.  I hadn’t thought to turn off the car while waiting for him since he was just “running in”, and now we were out of gas after idling for a good twenty minutes or longer – I hadn’t been keeping track.  Luckily there was a gas station right across the street, and instead of walking there and having to buy a gas can, he pushed the car and I steered it over to the gas station…  it gave us time to blow off some steam…  well, me anyway.  I was also wondering what could possibly take a person so long in a store only to have them come out with nothing?!?  But, I was literally too peeved to ask and I didn’t want to talk about what happened at Office Max.  All I knew is that my errands weren’t going to happen and I was going to the meeting ice cream-less.

In my husband’s defense, he doesn’t do this because he’s not thoughtful or considerate; it’s actually the opposite.  He wants to save me from having to go into the stores, and save me from the trouble of having to deal with shopping hassles…  and he takes long in stores even when I’m with him, that’s just how he is…  He just doesn’t have a very good concept of time, and he doesn’t realize that I’d much rather entertain the kids and myself in the store than in the car.  Also, being a woman makes me prone to thinking ahead, while he is impulsive.  If he had thought ahead about the Office Max errand, we could have discussed it, and I could have planned to get my errands done at the same time, or even gotten gas while I waited.  Instead, since the Office Max errand was brought up at the last possible second when I couldn’t even say no because he was too far away to hear me, I thought it’d be quick enough where I could leave the car on and not run out of gas.  The good news out of all this is that the meeting ended early enough that I was able to get my daughter’s birthday party stuff before that store closed, so really the only errand I missed that day was my ice cream.  And I can do without putting more weight on my poor feet right now anyway, I guess…  And this experience reinforced my mantra that I will NOT wait in the car while my husband “runs in” to anywhere ever again.  At least not without a full library of reading materials or a laptop so I can blog about him while I wait…  In case you think I’m being too hard on him by the way, I told him I was going to be blogging about this incident – he took so long we ran out of gas, for crying out loud!!!  And NEVER will I wait in the car for him to ‘run in’ anywhere while the kids are with us!

I’ve been subbing for a few years, and I have to say that Friday was the first time I ever subbed in the sort of position I was in.  The teacher seemed to be like a glorified teacher assistant, though of course I don’t know the extent of her duties outside the realm of what I did so this opinion of mine doesn’t mean much.  My main duty in the morning was following a diabetic student from class to class.  I had to make sure he got to the nurse as needed.  Apparently even though he’s in 6th grade he doesn’t have a good handle on managing his condition, and his parents I’m told are just as lost in handling it.  In any event, when I wasn’t involved with taking him to the nurse and waiting for him to test himself, snack, and retest, I helped out as needed in the classes.  There were some students on behavior point sheets (including the diabetic boy) and when I worked with them I could easily see why they needed them.  Trying to get them to work was often a challenge.

In the afternoon I wasn’t with the one boy until I had to pick him up and take him to the nurse during the end of a period.  Then, the school being short a sub, I had to sub in an eighth-grade class for one period causing me to lose one break, but that’s the way it works sometimes.  I have avoided working in eighth grade at this school all year due to some troubles I had last year with the then-7th graders, so I prepared for the worst and was pleasantly surprised when it didn’t come.  The read the chapter aloud nicely, then did their work though admittedly some needed prompting.  I ended the day with a tutorial (study hall) with just six students, about half of what one student told me I should expect.  One I knew where he was.  Another was absent.  The rest I didn’t know who they were let alone where they were.  I wasn’t left a class list.

On a non-school note, I have kept forgetting to mention this, but on Wednesday I was coming home from a drama rehearsal when I turned on K-Love and heard a woman telling about a supernatural healing experience when she was being prayed over.  She had lost hearing in one ear and vision in one eye and she suffered pain in that side of her head.  Then this one time she was miraculously healed.  The station started asking her questions about it and then the station just went completely dead.  When it came back a couple minutes later a song was playing.  Was I just going through a blackout area for that station (other stations worked- I checked) or was the evil one trying to keep people from hearing more about this healing?  I guess I won’t know for sure.  I just thought this interesting to mention.

Most memorable movies have at least one promotional ad campaign that features a catchy phrase that in some instances have become ingrained in the world of pop culture.  Some of these are: “A Long Time Ago In A Galaxy Far…Far…Away,” and “Don’t Go In The Water.”  See if you can match the tag with the movie.  Heck, I’ll even throw in the year some of the movies were originally released.  Isn’t that just so nice of me?

1.  “Be Afraid.  Be Very Afraid” (1986…. there may or may not be more than one correct answer so look at the date)

2.  “An Adventure 65 Million Years In The Making”

3.  “The Human Adventure Is Just Beginning” (1979)

4.  “This Time…It’s War” (1986)
5.  “The Adventure Takes Off” (1995)

6.  “He Is Afraid.  He Is Alone.  He Is 3 Million Light Years From Home”

Answers will be forthcoming after enough time has passed to see how many readers attempt to respond. I will try to keep it fair to everyone by monitoring the post and deleting the guesses.  Good luck.

It’s no secret who one of my favorite popcorn munching, thrill seeking, Saturday afternoon movie actors is. However, like most actors worth their salt, Harrison Ford does have a repetoire that extends far beyond two of the most successful film franchises in movie history and as I have been mentioning in probably half of my posts, he will be returning to the silver screen as a certain globe-trotting, snake fearing, bullwhip cracking, Nazi despising archaeologist. Below is a List of some of my other Ford favorites.

Witness: His first and (so far) only Academy Award nomination and it features a very cool song from days gone by.

The Fugitive: The best motion picture based on a television series.  Tommy Lee Jones’ Best Supporting Oscar winning film.  Excellent cat-and-mouse chase of the on the lam doctor and the obsessed federal marshal tracking him down. Also believed to be based on the actual case of  Cleveland, OH physician Sam Sheppard.

What Lies Beneath: Hitchcockian in its suspense without the blood and gore.

The Jack Ryan duology (Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger). Alec Baldwin started the franchise in The Hunt for Red October and Ben Affleck concluded it in The Sum of All Fears.  I know it is another series but Harrison’s two films are the best.

Air Force One: Flawed, cliched, but seriously, would it be so bad if he were our president?  Another good popcorn film.

I know I am forgetting a lot so please feel free to comment on some of your favorite Harrison Ford movies.  Any will do.

Today is the Mother/daughter banquet at church. I am not very thrilled about it. Firstly, because I had to pay $11 for a stupid ticket even though I will not eat the food they are serving. I asked if I could pay for the child’s ticket, since I most likely would be eating the kids food and about as much as they would eat, but of course, that did not go over very well. And I had to buy a ticket because I have to be there! I am in a women’s enasamble at church and we are singing at the Mother/daughter banquet, so it would not have been very good if I did not show up. 🙁 Then I have to wear a dress or skirt to this thing. The theme is God’s Little Princess. Well, God loves us even if we do not wear pretty dresses and stuff. He made us all different and yet, we all are supposed to wear pretty clothes to this banquet. Though it is giving me another excuse to make a new memory with my prom dress!

Though that $11 for a stupid meal is still getting to me! I do not eat very much and I am a very picky eater. I saw the meal menu and what can I say besides… EEEEEEWWWWWWWWWWW!

This weekend at the movies you can either set off the summer blockbuster popcorn season by catching up with the number one movie Iron Man. You can take in the new Ashton Kutcher comedy What Stays in Vegas… or catch the animated series turned big screen live action extravaganza Speed Racer. These are the wide release features. However, if you live anywhere near the burrough of Manhattan you may want to check out the very limited release Poulrygeist: Night of the Living Chicken. It is described by the New York Times as a “satirical sexploitation zombie chicken gross-out musical extravaganza” with such characters as “Wendy,” “Micki,” “Arbie,” “Paco Bell,” (anyone seeing a pattern here), and “Carl, Jr.” (there is a fast food chain by that name, correct?). As the writer who reviewed this fine piece of cinema stated “it is just about as perfect as a film predicated on the joys of projectile vomiting and explosive diarrhea can be.” That sounds like a crowd pleaser to me…. or at least part of a good game of Balderdash.