11 Things I Learned This Month

1. It is extremely annoying when someone texts you the alphabet. One.letter.at.a.time.

2. It is even more annoying when two someones do it at the same time. From two different phones.

(And I don't think I need to specify who the two "someones" were.)

3. Squirrels are acrobats.

4. The Keurig is my friend. (Why did I wait so long to introduce myself?)

5. Airborne is also my friend. It really does work at fighting off/reducing the life of colds. At least for me. (Why did I wait so long to introduce myself?) 

6. Boys' basketball is pretty fun to watch when your kid is enjoying himself instead of standing on the court with his hands in his pockets and his lip stuck out, begging you to quit after every game, which was the case the year Dracen played when he was only five. He never had an interest again until this year (he's now 10). What a difference five years can make in the life of a boy. And his relationship with basketball.

2009

2014

7. I'd rather watch a basketball game than a baseball game in the month of February because COLD.  Gyms are heated. Outdoor bleachers are not. Hurry up spring! 

8. The next four or five months of my life will revolve around baseball. High school season just started, Little League is just around the corner with Babe Ruth to follow. (And I'm not even counting  fall baseball)

9. All that expressing of my lifelong intense hatred for algebra over the years may not have been a wise choice since Devin is now in the same high school algebra boat I floated around in back in the day. "I'm never going to use this in my life anyway" is a debate I am continually ill-prepared for since I was always in agreement with that statement. Right on up until I found myself the parent of a high school algebra student. 

Well-played, ALGEBRA. Will you ever cease to haunt me? 

10. While grocery shopping will never be on my things-I-do-for-fun list, it is quite a bit less painful when one has a pantry to put the stuff in. Yes (thanks to my husband) I now, for the very first time in my life, have a pantry in my kitchen. Thank You, Jesus. And Charlie.

11. Snow in the south is so great because it comes seldom enough to bring the magic and knows just the right moment to leave, before it has overstayed its welcome...

Flashback Friday?

Well no more than I'd gotten the blog here to wake the heck up, it went and dozed right back off again. Kinda like Dracen in the mornings. And (to be fair) me too.  I have to set my alarm for 15 to 25 minutes before I actually need to be up. Oh yes, the old snooze feature (formerly known as the snooze button) and I have been on a first name basis for decades.  But I really don't want to get started on my and Dracen's borderline disabling morning incoherence because heaven knows, I have spent enough time rambling on about that little issue in the nearly four years since I started this blog. 

It seems I had a lot more to say four years ago than I have as of late and I have thought many times over the past year of just putting my blogging pen back in the drawer and retiring it for good. Something, however, has not allowed me to do that just yet so maybe I've got a few things left in me to say after all...

The weather we've been experiencing over the past week has been a story in itself...biggest snowfall we've seen here in ten years last Wednesday and Thursday accompanied at one point by some "thunder snow" (that I didn't hear), an earthquake (that I didn't feel), temps. reaching 70 degrees this week and thunderstorms with strong winds and pouring rain this morning that I most definitely did hear and feel, thanks to an early morning awards ceremony at Dracen's school.

It was the awards ceremony from their last nine weeks of school that was originally scheduled for the week we had the first (little) snow and got cancelled due to a three hour delay that day, rescheduled for last Thursday (the day of the BIG snow) and of course, canceled again. So finally today they had it, in spite of the thunder, lightning and pouring and blowing-sideways rain. That's always fun. Especially at 7:45 a.m. 

But Dracen was acknowledged for making A honor roll. I'm, of course, proud of him for that but I'm hoping, wishing, praying, and crossing my fingers that the good behavior award is not a thing of his distant past. This is the first year he has not received it (either of the two nine weeks they have completed so far). 

I've nearly given up my lectures on why he should not be doing so much excessive talking in class. His most recent reply to me was, "I just can't help myself. I AM A PEOPLE PERSON." 

I cannot even attempt to relate since I was (and pretty much still am) the polar opposite. I only recall ever getting in trouble once in my entire twelve years of public school and that was in middle school band. I was in there with all my peeps (fellow band geeks) and we had a brand new band teacher who had recently relocated to Georgia all the way from Michigan. He had absolutely no control over his students, for reasons I could not even tell you, but that's just the way it was.

Somehow I managed to crawl out of my shell on this particular day and hop up on the chairs to join the let's-see-how-close-we-can push-this-poor-soul-to-the-edge-today party that was well under way around me. I will never forget him stomping off to his office all red-faced and leaning over his desk to scribble out notes for all us little troublemakers to take home to our parents. 

This was completely foreign and uncharted territory for me as I was suddenly aware when he handed me my very first (and last) naughty note. I can't recall what my mother said when I showed it to her but I think she was so shocked and bewildered that she didn't know whether to be mad or relieved that I had finally emerged from my shell in a public setting. She didn't need to punish me anyway because I sure enough did not like that feeling I had in the pit of my stomach about the whole incident which is why I never allowed myself to get in that sort of predicament again (at least not at school).

Anyway.

I had not planned on taking that little blast-from-the-past-stroll all the way back to 1984 this morning but sometimes the blinking cursor and keyboard just have a way...

(1984, 7th grade band)

(and my eyes were closed)

(must have been morning)

So glad I was smart enough back then to write "me" and draw those pointing arrows on every single photo of myself in all those yearbooks else I may not have remembered who I was {eye roll}.

Waking Up

I think I accidentally allowed my blog to go into hibernation mode. Once I realized what had happened, I prodded and poked at it on a few different occasions but it just would not wake up. So I just decided to leave it alone for awhile, telling myself it would wake up on its own eventually. Or die. One or the other. 

It's finally awake today though I can't promise I'll be able to keep it back on its feet full-time. 

But while it's awake...

***The Sony Vaio laptop finally bit the dust (courtesy of Dracen) a few weeks ago. I went to plug it in when the low battery light came on, but nada. Nothing. No connection was being made with the still-new battery I bought just a few months ago, even after the wiggling and jiggling of it, and the eventual taking-apart-of-it by Charlie. Dracen finally confessed that he'd dropped it earlier in the day. 

Like I was at all surprised. 

But we did have a good long run and I had been secretly (okay, not so secretly) coveting the Mac for a sweet forever. The practical side of me would not, however, allow myself to go there when I still had a perfectly good functioning laptop at home. 

I went with the Macbook Air and I think (after almost two weeks) I am finally fully on board. I won't lie though, it was a little slow-going there for the first couple of days. At one point, I may have even declared to myself that I'd just made the biggest purchase mistake of my life. But now? I am perfectly pleased with the Mac. 


*** My boys are still being "my boys". And if you have spent any time at all in their presence (or simply reading this blog) then you have a pretty good handle on what all that entails. They still bicker like the dickens and argue with everything that comes out of my (or Charlie's) mouth. 

But Dracen did get straight A's this past nine weeks (though his grades have never really been a problem...I'm holding out hope for the behavior award this next 9 weeks) and I walked by Devin's cracked door last night and had to back up and take a peek in to make sure I was really seeing what I thought I was seeing. And I WAS. He was, for the first time I can ever recall, sitting at his desk (Remember the one that belonged to Charlie that I slaved over making over a couple years ago?) doing homework.

ALGEBRA homework. 

I poked my head in to find that he was none too happy about the Algebra homework, and just Algebra in general (and I truly felt his pain on that so, so, so deeply) but he was doing it. On.his.own. 

A little while later he walked into the living room and handed me a sheet of Science vocabulary words to quiz him on. It was like I was in an episode of the Twilight Zone. I almost cried happy tears. 

***Dracen was sitting beside me on the couch last night when I plugged my iPhone into the Mac and began transferring the humpteen gazillion photos I had on there. He was watching them whiz by on the screen during the process and at one point yelled out, "Who's that hippie?!"

Say what? I had no inkling whatsoever who he could have been talking about since I could not recall hanging out with any hippies recently (or in the past 30 or so odd years).

We sat and flipped back through them once it was done and the photo he was referring to was of Darin and me, (taken on Halloween night, 1998) that I must have scanned on there for some reason at some point. Probably to post here on the blog though I'm pretty sure I never did. (I think I would recall putting this little gem out here)

I'm fairly certain I was still in a state of shock since I'd just that day taken a (positive) pregnancy test and Darin had just that minute announced it to his parents. (Yes, Devin was about the size of a grain of rice here) We had stopped by their house on our way to a party where I sat staring out into the wild blue yonder sipping on a can of Sprite before cutting out early.

Darin was in full "Rilo" character mode here. A few years before, he and I and another couple, who were good friends of his, all dressed up like hippies for a Halloween party. He gave his character a name (Rilo) and from then on out, you never knew when or where Rilo may just up and make an appearance. 

  

(The Elvira witch had a real short run since we never saw hide nor big black hair from her again.)

How's that for #throwbackthursday?