saturday things

looking through
today's pics from Oak Glen. it was such a sweet day out, we had a picnic and the boys picked pears and fed most of them to a very sad looking goat with no ears :(

hating
my stupid hair that gets in my eyes all the time. i have grown it for 2 entire years (admittedly i have occasional fits of pique and hack chunks off in the bathroom)... i really don't think i will ever like it long-ish, short-ish just works better

waiting for
Aaron to arrive home with dinner! i have been craving El Pollo Loco all day long...

counting down the days to
the next trip to Vegas... and it is going to be a just-the-two-of-us trip (thank you Grandma and Grandpa xox)

gazing
at pictures of a gorgeous little baby boy posing with his toy rats :) thank you Tarnya, my boys loved your sweet notecard! and your birth announcement... just lovely and such a sweet sentiment

looking forward to
taking pics of the rattie boys on their new little rattie skateboards :)

wearing
dunkin donut inspired nail polish - orange and pink :)

listening to
she's a rainbow by the rolling stones... i love it, it reminds me of nice people who are like rainbows:)

twenty four hours

spent last night
at disneyland :) a quick spin on the mad hatter's tea party (yellow teacup mandatory), a ride on casey jnr's zoo train (wild animal cage mandatory), a quick flight on an elephant (yellow...), a cloud of cotton candy and a slushy lemonade later, we were off to california adventure to watch the electrical light parade. how i loooooove that parade to pieces! it's just the best! all 4 seconds of it ;)


spent this morning
with our adorable 'new' neighbors (they moved in around 2 years ago:) at our favorite park, riding the little train and teaching this attractive-mother-of-8 goat to talk :)



spent this afternoon
making 5 little pots of raspberry jam with Sam, with fruit picked with our own hands :) then we made perfectly amazing scones to eat the jam with... cooked the catfish the boys caught with their fair hands last week (who are we???!) and real life potato pancakes and even baked fresh bread :| either this has been a very uncharacteristically productive 24 hours or we are on the 'no hands' part of the bipolar-coaster ;)

the key is to spin <----- thata way ;)

caution: this is really hard to do in a skirt with a daredevil 4 year old and a strapless camera :|

and one might even lose one's beloved Black Dog shoe charm :( the three strikes rule means i MUST return to Cape Cod to collect one replacement starfish necklace, one replacement dotty mug and one replacement Black Dog jibbit (that's the singular of jibbitz, right...?) :)


we even squeezed in a little rock climbing before the parade started... no wonder it was hard to get out of bed this morning :)

love this new color action and it was entirely free! if you want it, email me your address and i will pop it in the virtual mail :)

shh don't tell this train conductor but i absolutely LOVE him <3

cougars united!! and cougar moms - rarr!

rachel ray - swwww-ptew... that was me spitting on her. classy, huh?


zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz - i feel exactly the same Danny Boy

dear computer

i hate you. if you were a person and if i had a gun you would be riddled with bullets, driven back and forth over repeatedly (it's my wildest dream to do this!) and then set on fire, and i would be faking temporary insanity in a police cell. but you really asked for it today, keep resetting and sorting by file name instead of by rating. that is grounds for murder in my book.

and shredded wheat minis are NOT a snack. no sireebob. and seriously... could our toaster burn toast any s-l-o-w-e-r-?-?-?

and how come on the very day the new library opens there wasn't a single book on rats, never mind photographing rats... sure, books on reading to bunnies, training your hermit crab and raising earthworms for profit but nothing on rats :|

i was sure the bike ride around the park would release the feelings of overall sassiness and malice from my system but alas it didn't help one bit, so i am going to sit in bed watching movies in a mint julep mask

our evening at the park - his birthday gift from Grandma. he loves it, thanks Grandma!

he was quite safe on the handlebars, honestly ;)


comparing smiles...pretending to be pigs... LOLing - what we do while our children play well with others (the others soon ran away...)

the lake that i am deathly afraid to ride my bike by, it veers towards danger and there is nothing i can do about it... i am sure it is possessed like James Dean's car was....

feeling

like lime basil and mandarin don't really go very well together actually...

determined
to find my longlost cape cod necklace today and move on...

eating
burnt english toast with a little too much butter...

looking forward
to a weekend of just us time with no-one else to rain on it...

feeling like
some people take too much and give too little....

wondering
why people preface questions with "question: what is..." isn't that what a question mark is for?

not so much feeling like
walking the dogs this morning. they are staring at me waiting on baited dogbreath... but it's my first morning alone for a long time and sorry dogs, it belongs to me and the toast...

looking
at these very strange pants and wondering who/why/what on earth. and ditto with the christmas tree womens' legs.....?

random pics...
one pic from last night's park playdate

he loves his "wwestling men"

dumbo is cute

clearly the inventor of this playground does not have children... this thing is stitches waiting to happen :|

wednesday (because i hate the word humpday...)

i am sooooo beat today no matter how many gummivites i eat.

i have been looking, fruitlessly i might add, for a freaking monchichi monkey for weeks now. now i notice her name has two h's in it. arghhh, damn you monchichi monkey..... and the english spelling is even more confusing, it can be chicaboo, chickaboo or chic a boo. it's official, i will NEVER find her :( true, the nice man at south coast plaza is helping me find one, i know, but i need her TODAY really.... and he doesn't seem to understand my desperate plight

i am quite sure i am going to fall asleep on the 405 this morning. please don't let there be traffic.... i am far too tired and heavy hearted for traffic

i have blisters all over my hands and wicked carpal tunnel syndrome... all from constructing the three storey rat townhome, it's very hard work on delicate ladyhands :| the tiredness/heavy heart/sore hands - doesn't this all mean i should be tucked up in bed watching 'flipping out' and 'dragon's den' with a diet coke and a big pack of cow tails? i think so

i already destroyed my dieting efforts for the day by dunking two mcvities digestive biscuits in my coffee for breakfast.... so i might as well go all out and visit the indian buffet for lunch :| sigh.... it's going to be a good day (repeat a million times)

a big huge sigh

today i dragged my boys back to south coast plaza, via the bridge of sighs or whatever it's called from crystal court, in search of my beloved toy of yesteryear, monchhichi monkey (girl with pigtail ONLY).

the puzzle zoo people mentioned that their computer said they had 12 in stock and so i begged them to look through their entire stock room for the missing monkeys.... but sadly the stupid computer omitted to mention the 12 are in valencia NOT costa freaking mesa. valencia is the other side of LA (ie. the world), where i am pretty sure the streets have no protected left turns, so i just can't go to there. even if they have my beloved monkeys in stock :(

anyway long boring story short, the monkeys are being shipped to costa mesa and will arrive next week! when i asked the poor manager if he checked on the gender of the monkeys, i saw the last remaining ounce of lifeblood leaving his body. that poor deflated sad little man. to bring him back from the brink of death, i lied and told him any monkey would do but heck, i really want a girl one :| i told him to underline "girl with pigtail preferred" on the post-it with my number on it, but the truth is it must be a girl with a pigtail ONLY! i refuse to adopt a boy monkey :|

then we continued to tiffany, the coolest, most reflective, most perfect place on earth (retailwise). Danny told me i could pick out anything and he would buy it for me <3. Sam said he would spend his birthday money on me. awwww, how i love my boys... and shiny things from tiffany&co. i searched high and low and could not find the mini silver starfish pendant anymore :( which only means one thing. i need to go back to cape cod to get it there :|

but i did see this and i love it and i don't just want it, no... i neeeeed it, if it's possible to truly need a necklace :)

i don't know
who any kardashian person is, what made them famous or why i should care to keep up with them...

i spent all day
researching religious dos and don't online and it's all even fuzzier now :|

i told the cashier
in target THREE FREAKING TIMES that i had 5 boxes of diet coke.... and he still only charged for one....

which means that
i technically got an entirely free I HEART MJ teeshirt :)

i debated at length
with the sample lady in costco that just because something has 'salad' in it's name, it doesn't mean it's slimming when it is plastered in mayonnaise :| she forced me almost at gunpoint to buy some - terrified, i carried it away and hid it inside the yogurt fridges and ran :)

i designed and created
a new york inspired three storey rat townhome.... and i have the blisters and hammered fingernails to prove it :| power tools, you suck!

i have
four very happy boys (two of the rattus norvegicus variety) who adore the new cage ;)

i am listening
'relax' by frankie goes to hollywood. i was listening to chicago by frank sinatra prior to frankie saying relax don't do it (how did they know what i was about to do...?) i hate chicago for soooo many reasons... even a frank sinatra song about chicago sucks :| ' i saw a man, he danced with his wife' - seriously, it's that bad, that is all he could write about?

it's bedtime... not only that but dance your ass off time, no less! back in the morn with pics of the rattie townhouse and more xox

right now i'm.....

loving summer

and listening to:
'i guess i've come to live here in your eyes' by willie nelson on my shuffle

smelling like:
new west for her and sunblock. 100% summer

waiting for:
bedtime, it's 7:43 and that means there are 17 minutes to go and roughly 5 songs to go til we head to bed to snuggle up to watch taxicab confessions together

chewing on:
pear and apple gum, it's good but it lasts about 10 seconds before i need another burst of pear/appleness

wanting to:
drive to vegas with my boys on thursday and just stay till friday....

happy that:
school doesn't start till next month

loving the:
facebook hide feature ;)

thanking my lucky stars for:
my 70-200 f/2.8 and the heavenly tree bokeh in today's very happy birthday pictures. and a hubbie who thinks the 70-200 f/2.8 is a necessity for a mama who just loves beautiful snapshots

planning to:
make jam tomorrow, yes sireebob. watch this space for stories of burnt/chopped off fingertips/entire projects dumped in trashcan in despair :|

hoping to:
squeeze in a quick ride on the mad hatter's tea party at disneyland this week... and maybe some cotton candy :)

iSaturday

i wonder
why our school district never has anything at all on their website about what school supplies parents need to buy... but then on the first day of school they are all pouty because no-one has brought anything...

i have been pondering
who on earth Greg Laurie is... for the longest time i thought everyone here must be a big fan of this guy who really isn't that famous, but i recently noticed his name is Hugh Laurie not Greg... so i am off to look the Greg guy up now...

i love
finding something i covet priced wrongly at target and scooping up their entire stock before they realized their goof :) case in point: neutrogena shampoo for $1. ONE STINKING DOLLAR! ahhh neutrogena, it just smells cleaner... (i should be writing their jingles :)

i don't like at all
cavemen beards... man facial hair in general, if not sculpted and groomed and more 2-day-old-shadow than woolly 'private area hair' is nasty. just nasty!!
an example of perfect facial hair (and perfect so much more)


i hate
the f word when used to express positive emotions... i find it offensive :)

i dream
of a breezy all white A-frame beach house weekend with my quiet REM playlist on repeat

i wish
i knew how to make salted chocolate cupcakes. i wonder if simply pouring salt all over the frosted chocolate cupcakes would work ;)

i am craving
freaking fried eggs over medium with baked beans and wholewheat toast. AGAIN. what is up with this obsession??!

some days are better than others....

today was one of them:)

new friendships




sweet faces

sweet moments - the squirrel in the tree was dropping apples on us and he had a very good aim and a wicked sense of humor :)

and freshly picked sweet raspberries


... oh and no traffic on the 91 fwy:)