There’s a celebrity across the street putting up porch railings.  Perhaps a close relative? Cousin?

At least we know who Joaquin stole his new look from.

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…It wasn’t pretty.

There was foul language.  Spelled outloud.  My kid won’t know the words, but he’ll be spelling them.  Or saying one particular word beginning with S and ending with T in German, because somehow that makes it not a bad word.

There were hours of frustration.  Six to be exact. (That’s just the failing icing, not the entire cake.)

In the end, the fondant won.  I threw in the towel.  I was trying to make marshmallow fondant in five colors.  Red, blue, white, gray, and black.  Red and black were the death of me.  I had no gloves to wear, and if you’ve used Wilton Food Coloring Gels before, you can imagine how my hands must look.

I can feel every tendon and muscle connected to my fingers or my right hand.  My fingers and fingernails are rainbow colored.  And when I bent my finger, my knuckle split open (you have to knead it forever).  That was when I gave up on the fondant and decided to stick with buttercream.  I am my own worst critic.  I hate the way the cake looks.  Believe it or not, I feel like I disappointed him.  I know that sounds crazy.  But he had ideas about the cake, and I just knew I could do it.  And then it didn’t work.  So yeah.  That sucked.

Pictures are coming.  I promise.

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Would you believe me if I told you, I’m really not that indecisive about clothes.  More like, throw on a sweat shirt, hair in a pony tail, I really just don’t care.  This is my fairytale.  I’m the princess.  And the princess wears enchanted sweatpants and glass sneakers.  Only, down here in the South, we call them tennis shoes.  Beam me up What Not To Wear.

Instead I choose to spend all the time I could be working on my atrocious tinkering with my website’s dress code.  But I think I really like this current scheme.  I got all snazzy with some rounded corners, and then gave up quickly on figuring out how to round the corners of the white background space.  I’m trying to simplify.  Websites get cluttered just like every other corner of our lives.  Even made myself some buttons for all of my three adoring fans who likely have no interest in having a button on their website for my blog.  But it is cute, right?!  I’m have been thinking about some type of weekly events to liven things up around here.  So look forward to….something!  I’m feeling a bit vague tonight, stringing thoughts together out of left field.

I did my grocery shopping at 10:30pm alone.  It was quite strange to be out…after dark or without child, take your pick.  Caleb has been sick this weekend.  First time since last January (as in 2008), so I can’t complain too much.  He had a fever Friday night and a weak stomach for the last 24 hours.  Let’s just say I spent the entire day cleaning the carseat.  Handwashing the cover, wiping off straps without submerging them, had to breakout the dustbuster as there were enough crumbs in that thing to build a sandwich.  Who am I kidding, crumbs rule my life.

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How about this…

Yesterday, yesterday, I bought the Wilton Cruiser cake pan off ebay to make this infamous Herbie cake.

Today, not even 24 hours later, I find this newly listed, apparently extremely rare, not to mention highly detailed cake pan (I say rare because I searched high and low for a VW cake pan already).

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Rooms that is.  I finally pushed through the kitchen today.  It is probably 90% complete.  I know there are still some boxes in my car with my knives and, gasp, dirty dishes that were put in boxes on the last trip (more on that later).  The dishwasher is currently sitting in a corner, hubby hooked it up last night, but it has to have a cabinet built around it, so we put a box on top of it to weigh it down so we could use it without it tipping over.  Because the world was coming to an end without the dishwasher.  And you can’t really eat cereal off paper plates that I strictly ordered kindly requested everyone please use.  There are a few things lurking on top of the cabinets (that I cut out of the picture on purpose).  But I’m quite excited to eat our first meal at the kitchen table, without things falling off and having to rest my feet on a box.

But what you can’t see lurking around the corner…it decided to rain today, thus I had to clear off the outdoor storage deck of all the things that I didn’t want wet.  So I put as much as I could in the storage building and the rest ended up just inside the door blocking my washer and dryer and one bathroom.

I hope you’ve been enjoying all of the pictures, aka scheduled posts.  I sat down last Thursday night and scheduled posts for the next six days.  Thus all the one liner/picture posts.  I do have a few posts floating around in my head.  Don’t worry, I’ve made notes so I don’t forget them!

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We are in the midst of this move and to be honest, I can find the time by procrastinating, I just can’t find the energy.  I’ve been feeling ‘blog guilt’ since the new year about not posting frequently enough, and I plan to get back in the swing of things once we’re over this hurdle.  We start loading up on Friday and unload Saturday.  I think the last three months have been more of an emotional/mental drain rather than physical. Hard to explain.  Anyway, I’m not dropping off the face of the Earth, I won’t even say I’m that busy in the grand scheme of things, but I’m just struggling to hold onto a shred of my wittiness and creativity that inspires my writing at the moment.   I’m thinking about posting pictures too, I just haven’t gotten there yet.  Have patience with me.

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So we had our storage building moved to the new house today.  My brother inlaw was kind enough to ask his friend at the lumber yard (who has experience moving buildings) if he could cut us a deal to move it.  Goes back to what I said before, moving in the South is always cheaper!  Further proof.  Anyway, I asked Scott how they were going to move it.  His response and I quote “He’s going to pick it up with a forklift and set it on a trailer.”  Oh okay, I thought, trying to picture this in my head.  Quite frankly, just the mental image of $1500 of blood, sweat and tears balancing on a forklift didn’t sit well with me, nor did it make much sense.  I’m thinkin, now what kind of forklift is this?  I’ve never seen one that could just pick up a building.  But in my mental picture, this is an approximation of what I saw:

A very lowboy trailer

And a very heavy duty forklift

So when a flatbed, not to mention a tall flatbed and

a bobcat arrived…I was feeling a bit skeptical.  And by skeptical, I mean nervous.

Caleb and I took our seats in the spectator box – aka in front of the huge pane glass window of the living room.  We raised the blinds all the way as if we were drawing back a curtain and settling in for the show.  As I clung to Caleb, I said “Oh man, this is making me so nervous!”  He looked at me and said “It’s alright Momma” and covered my eyes with his hand.  Attempt one failed.  The building shifted and fell.  Yes fell.  Luckily, my husband happens to have built a very structurally sound building.  Of course every time the truck pulled forward trying to get lined up correctly to back the bed underneath the building, he got stuck and spun tires.  So they kept having to hook a chain to the Bobcat and pull the truck back up the slope.

Does anything look amiss to you in this picture?

Here, this illustration should help.

They were able to get it loaded on the second attempt and tossed two straps over the top.  When we reached the street, a tape measure was stretched from the top peak to the ground.  Seems we wouldn’t be going under any bridges, as we were exactly at the bridge clearance for most bridges.  So our convoy left.  Truck with gigantic building, truck pulling trailer with bobcat, van pulling trailer with lawnmower and tool box, Ford Explorer hauling 35lb. child.  It was like we were told to get in line according to size of load.  Then we came to the bridge.  Up the on ramp we went.  Across the highway.  And back down the exit ramp on the other side.  Everyone pulled over in a gravel lot at the bottom of the ramp to walk around the truck and gawk at how it looked like it would tip over at any given second.  The decision was made to press on, as it looked no worse a few miles from the house than it had looked pulling out of the driveway.

We have conquered…building.

At that point, I had to turn back and head home to retrieve the money to pay this poor man for his troubles.  I raced in the house and back out as fast as I could.  There is a very steep hill between here and the new house.  Each curve I came around, I kept expecting to see the remains of our storage building and a truck tipped over on its side.  When I reached the hill, I thought surely I would have caught up with them, but they were nowhere to be seen.  I breathed a sigh of relief that they actually made it to the top of the hill.  But when I reached the house, they weren’t there.  I called my brother inlaw to check on things, and they had taken a detour around the steep hill.  I don’t blame them.

They did arrive safely, and in one piece…right side up.  Scott said he thought for sure it was going to fall the whole way.  I think everyone  rode leaning to the left, trying to balance out the building leaning heavily to the right. The poor driver, who drives a semi for a living by the way, said he tried to talk to my brother inlaw the whole way there so they could keep their eyes off the wobbling building in their side view mirrors.

Once there, everyone stood around and cringed some more as we debated how to get it off the truck without dropping it or rolling it over and destroying it.  The decision was made to go back and get the bobcat and suddenly the whole damn thing started rolling backwards.  You have never seen grown men move so fast.  Catatrophy was avoided.  It was unloaded and everyone breathed a sigh of relief.  Or as my brother inlaw put it best…”Do you have a hammer and a straight pin?”  Um, why?  “Because you couldn’t drive it up my butthole right now.”

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My mom sent me this absolutely hysterical email the other day.  I think I actually cried I laughed so hard.

A Harley

A bass boat

A grill

Horseshoes

A lawnmower

The weather station

A pet carrier

Hands down the most hilarious gingerbread house ever.

Wedding Reception

Guest bedrooms

A palm pilot

Powerball winner

Above mentioned winner on vacation

Yacht

A little rain never spoils a good day for fishin’

You where this shirt in your engagement picture…”If I throw a stick, will you leave?”

Wedding cake

Doghouse

A pickup car truck

This hunter is obviously a conversationalist.  He could have just had the deer’s head mounted, but that is so wasteful.  Why not make a doorbell?

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If you stick around long enough, I’ll teach ya how we do everything down here in Nascar country.

    …It ended up bein the Clampetts go to Maui!
    Cuz you get my family together and there is an empty K-mart somewhere!
    They showed up at the airport they were usin coolers and grocery bags for luggage
    The sky cap was like “which ones yours? the Samsonite?”
    They were like, “no we got the igloo with the duct tape on it and the 5 piggly wiggly bags right there!”…     -Jeff Foxworthy

So we’re moving.  You already know that.  Scott walked by when I was editing these pictures and said “Sure, sure.  Make fun of the rednecks.”  Nah, seriously we’re not rednecks.  I’ll show you more proof on that subject next post.  But moving is always cheaper in the south.  Seriously.  Proven fact.  Know why?  Because there’s a 95% chance most of your family lives within 20 miles of you.  And a 99% chance that most of them have trucks, trailers, and brute strength.  So when Scott’s boss offered up a truck to move our storage building contents?  Well we jumped right on it.  There’s no better price tag than “Free!”

Take a very old…

…very rusty…


truck

Drive it home…

Just don’t count on it cranking right back up.

As an added bonus, it is a dump truck, so we were able to just back up the the porch and dump everything out!  Okay okay, so we didn’t really do that.  But it would have been cool if we did!  And I definitely would have taken pictures and video.

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He is actually napping!  Faster than one could say SkippyJon Jones, SkippyJon Jones, SkippyJon Jones plus one hour, he fell asleep.  I explained to him what a promise is last night.  I asked him to promise me he’d nap.  Then when naptime rolled around, I promised to read three books, and gave a warning after each one.  Two more books, then it is naptime…one more book, then we go to sleep.  Finally after 45 minutes of wrestling and me struggling to keep calm, we agreed that we would play in the sandbox when he woke up.  And he finally fell asleep.

Did I mention we like SkippyJon Jones over here?  The first book we checked out from the library last summer, I think it took me 40 minutes to read it.  I don’t speak Spanish, and it has a lot of Spanish in it.  A lot of flare if you will.  I felt like a fish out of water trying to read it, but I have honed my Skippito skills and now it is a lot of fun.  Right Mr. Fluffenutter?  Si, my little crumb cake.

Yes, if you can’t tell, today is going much better and things have quieted down.  I am catching up on the piled up laundry.  I’ve vacuumed, the kid is squeaky clean after a 40 minute bath.  Hopefully we will be able to make a decision about the house in question tonight.  I disinfected the bathroom floor at 11:30pm last night.  I was angry at the mess, so I figured I should use that to my advantage and tackle it head on.  Do you get a lot done when you’re mad too?  I know I do.  I become very efficient, and usually feel much better afterward!  I’m weird.

Anyway, this picture flipped by on the screensaver the other day, and I tracked down the file to blog it.  I just cracked up, because he looks like a little alien!  I think this was taken two winters ago in early 2007.

All I can think is Wow Wow Wubbzy…”Just say BEEP.  Beepbeep…beep…”

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