Busy Friday.

A cool picture my daughter took of a sunset a couple of weeks ago.

I had to work today and then we had the Friday guitar lesson and then we killed some time in town to save gas money by going to the library instead of coming home and then we went to a birthday party.  It was a basketball party for a boy in our homeschool group who was turning 15.  Needless to say, I didn't play basketball.  Some of the other moms, my daughter and I played Upwords Scrabble while they played basketball.  We had a really good time.  One of my friends carries a Scrabble dictionary with her all the time, just in case she gets to play a game.  How cute is that?  So I brought the game, she brought the dictionary and we kept score on the back of a coupon I had printed out to get a 7.99 haircut.  (Like Smart Style on Facebook if you want one too.)  Everyone kept asking me how I am doing since my oldest son went to Mississippi and surprisingly, I'm doing okay.  :-)

Keeping busy and making some changes.

A picture my daughter took of our driveway, unrelated to the post below.  :-P

My oldest son has been in the path of the hurricane, but he's okay.  They cancelled classes for 2 days and today, they start back.  I've been keeping up with him by phone, email and Facebook, which has helped me a lot.  These kinds of things are hard on moms.  I've been keeping busy by typing a lot since I'm trying to make up the time that I was off for the trip and then the computer crash.  My husband has got my computer going pretty well at this point, so that's good.

In homeschool news, yesterday, there was quite a bit of whining from my daughter about Life of Fred Geometry and she and my husband decided to put her in Teaching Textbooks Algebra 2, which we already own, instead of switching to a different geometry course, which we would have to put out money for.  Youngest son likes Life of Fred and so he's going to keep doing that.  So, for the first time since we pulled these 2 out of public school in first and third grades, they won't be doing the same math book.  My daughter is going to have to get by without her younger brother explaining the problems to her.  That should be interesting.  We'll see how it goes, I guess.

Today's my day off from work, but I'm going to work anyway.  The only indication that it is my day off is that I haven't started yet.  I've given myself permission to start a little later than usual and I slept until 9:20 this morning.  It was great.  So I guess I should get started now.

Have a great day everyone. :-)

Just plugging away.

I'm working today, plugging away at the backlog the hospital got while I was gone and plugging away at re-entering all my PC Shorthand speed typing entries that I lost.  As I was bookmarking this page of writing prompts.  I realized that I have lost all my bookmarks as well as photos, documents, curriculum/notebooking things that I've gotten for free and everything else that I felt was worthy to save on my computer for the last 2 or 3 years.  It's frustrating. 

A crab.  That's what I feel like this morning.  I need more coffee. 

A quote from each of my children.

My kids still say some of the funniest things.  These are excerpts from yesterday.  The oldest's quote is per Facebook, since he is in Mississippi now.   He said "The sky was clear earlier but now it's getting really cloudy and dark.  Tut, tut, looks like a hurricane"  He does already have a friend's storm shelter to go to so I'm trying not to worry, but classes were cancelled for the next 2 days.  Kind of disconcerting for a landlubber like myself.

Anyway, onto the next one.  Last night, when we were very, very tired, listening to our nightly audio book, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, my daughter and I were both lying on her huge bean bag chair.  I wasn't looking at her, so I couldn't tell that her head slipped off the chair (there really wasn't enough room for both of us), I just heard her say kind of pitifully "My head fell off".

And finally, the youngest, who always has the best quotes.  He was reading, for fun, the Book of Revelation.  He said that every time it would address a group of people as "you", he would change it in his head to "ya'll" and asked me, "I wonder what is the ancient Greek word for ya'll?"  We got silly with this one later and were saying things like "If ya'll don't change your ways, ya'll are going to be very sorry." 

So anyway, I think I'm adapting a little bit better to my oldest son being gone.  He's so happy and having so much fun and of course, we have the phone and email and Facebook. 

The promised pictures. What a week.



Kentucky State Fair concert picture, Newsboys. This was Monday.



 On Tuesday we went shopping, cleaned the house, took out the trash, froze the taco meat, made arrangements for all 5 pets to be fed and cared for and I cried quite a bit.






Then on Wednesday we went to Mississippi.

On Thursday, we had a tiny 1-day mini-vacation.

My daughter wanted a pretty shell and I picked this one up for her and carried it around for quite a while, before realizing that it was actually occupied.  There was a little crab inside!  I'm so glad I didn't bring it back to the hotel.



Ocean Springs Mississippi Beach.



Beach.  It's a pretty area.

 

Mellow Mushroom pizza.  This stuff is WONDERFUL.  This picture was taken to show how big this slice is, but you can't really tell unless I tell you that this is a normal size plate, not a saucer. 


On Friday, we moved our son into this dorm and came home.

My son's dorm.  He's on the second floor.





On Saturday, we picked up our dogs and started trying to fix the computer and the car and started with our new normal.  I'm not sure how I feel about it yet.

The New Normal.

So, now that one of the kids is out of the house, temporarily at least, we begin our new normal.  We have 2 homeschooling, which is the same as last year and they are in 9th and 11th grades.  Youngest son was telling some people at our party last week that he had no idea what grade he was in.  That really makes homeschooling seem so positive to all the public schooling relatives and friends (Sarcasm)  ... but I was able to overhear, tell him he's in the 9th grade and give a little speech about how his education is personalized and that he is in 11th grade math and science and 3rd grade spelling at the same time, so it's no wonder the boy is confused.  Really though, he should know we call it the 9th grade.  :-P. 

The oldest boy is alive and well.  I have seen evidence of him on Facebook, though he did not call me last night.  He starts classes today and hopefully will get the ball rolling on his work study job because he's going to need that.  He spent the weekend at an event for freshmen called Survival Weekend, where they do a lot of team building and getting-to-know-each-other activities and he's making some friends.  His roommate arrived yesterday and is from Belgium, so that should be interesting.  I hope it goes well.  I got a little teary in the milk aisle of the grocery store yesterday because I didn't have to buy Lactaid milk for him.  It's funny how his food intolerances are something I miss, but I have spent a lot of time and effort, not to mention money, trying to properly feed the boy for the last few years. 

The girl woke up yesterday with a sore throat and does not feel horrible, but doesn't feel great either and has spent a lot of time lying around and sleeping this weekend.  

My job is a mess because my computer crashed on Friday night just after we got home and I posted my last update here on this blog.  My husband has been working frantically trying to get it set up again, but I have lost my medical dictionary and all my work files, so I can't work until that gets fixed.  Honestly, I enjoy not working, but we seriously need the money after the Mississippi trip. 

We booked a hotel on line, site unseen, with decent reviews.  Our main goal was to be within walking distance of the beach, but that shouldn't have been our main goal.  The hotel was not nice.  The sheets were kind of brownish and someone's taco was in the fridge.  We ended up leaving there for another hotel and haven't heard yet if we will get our money back.  It's my fault.  I thought it looked okay, but then the longer we were there, the less I liked it and my daughter HATED it.  On a scale of 1-10, she rated it a 1.  I personally rated it more of a 3-4.  I was just too exhausted and emotional to be confronted with making a decision about a hotel.  Anyway, we called and got another hotel and moved at 10:00 p.m. on Wednesday night.  It was not fun, but we were relieved once we got to the new place.   We found out after we got there that the beaches in Mississippi are not good swimming beaches.  It was okay for walking in the surf and looking at shells and stuff, but that's it, so we took a mini vacation on Thursday, walking on the beach, going to the Barrier Islands National Seashore which sounds more impressive than it is but was free and eating at the Mellow Mushroom.  Then we got up early Friday, moved the boy into the dorm and drove 9 hours home, only to find that we were too late to pick the dogs up, my husband's car battery had died while we were gone and my hard drive had erased itself.  Good times.

There were good times throughout the week and my youngest son provided quite a bit of comic relief while the older 2 kids were just sweet and my husband was a hero, driving us all down there and back, fixing the car and the computer and getting up and going to work at 4:00 am on Saturday when I could barely even open my eyes. 

Pictures to follow.

Road trip.

We took the boy to college in Mississippi.  It really is a long, long way.  We went down to the gulf coast on Wednesday and Thursday and then today, we brought him to the college and moved him into the dorm, then drove 9 hours + back home.  I think he's going to do great.

Me, maybe not so much. :-(

Kentucky State Fair 2012.

We went yesterday to the state fair.  It is an excused absence in Kentucky for school kids, I guess since it happens in late August and most of the school districts start back in early August, they kind of have to.  Anyway, we went.  We left our home at 1:00 p.m. and did not return until 11:30 p.m.  It was long but it was very good.  They have stopped giving out the big booklets that tell you when all the shows are, so we weren't as organized in our approach to the fair.  We didn't know what shows were when, so we only saw one show.  Then we kind of wandered around and looked at things, ate fudge, sampled the dips, got a really good deal on yarn, tasted country ham and sorghum, saw the animals, climbed in the TARC bus, rode rides, toured the house they build inside the fairgrounds each year, got a massage, had a stare down with an owl, put on drunk driver goggles and attempted to play corn hole, and marveled at the fun food offerings like fried Oreos, fried Kool-Aid and pork butt on a stick, which makes me laugh.  We went and looked at my daughter's 4H entries to the state fair.  She had 5 entries and won 4 red ribbons and 1 white.  I think she was disappointed she didn't get a blue.  I was really hoping the crocheted mat she made would win something big, because it was very cool.  Then, we had a picnic in our car and went to the Santus Real / Newsboys free concert.  It was really, really good.  Now I can barely walk.  I have sore muscles in my legs and shoulders and a really giant blister on my big toe.  It was fun though.