A******* Family Tradition

I've written about this before, but I like it so much I'm going to write about it again now and then. We have waffles for Sunday dinner almost every week. Tonight's waffles were whole wheat and they were light brown, tasty, and delicious. I served them with maple syrup and chopped walnuts. They were outstanding.

We just might have a house

Saturday we put in an offer on a house and Sunday it was accepted. The sellers are highly motivated to move out and we as the buyers are highly motivated to move in. Good combination, don't you think? We have only about four weeks to make this happen without having to move our household goods into storage first, so cross your fingers for us.

The house is lacking a couple of things we were trying to get, namely a bit of acreage and a top-notch school for the girls. It is in a normal neighborhood, so we are right next to the neighbors on either side and the school is rated a 7 out of 10. Not the 8, 9, or 10 we were hoping for, but not bad.

The things it does have are 4 bedrooms along with both a living room and a family room. It also has a swimming pool and what dh calls a "pool house" which is a small bedroom with a bathroom that opens onto the pool area. It's attached to the back of the carport. I can see a certain 17 year old boy having it for his bedroom this summer.

Dh has his work cut out for him now--he's going to push everything through just as fast as he can!

I love my shredder

I was looking for some papers in my filing cabinet and came across a thick file. Not the papers I was looking for, but some I was happy to dispose of. It was more than a year's worth of old bank statements and the paper checks that were returned with them. I've been good about saving such things for seven years and then ditching them, and I was surprised to see these had postmarks around 2001. I fired up the ol' shredder and made myself a little space amongst the files. :-)

The end of the school year came again

The last week of school was a blast for the girls. C & E had a field day, a pajama day, a board game day, and lots of cleaning interspersed with movies and giveaways (also known as teachers thinning out their collections).

S had a pizza day, an ice cream day, and a pajama day and she goes only three mornings a week! I must say I shed nary a tear at being done, done, DONE with preschool. I've loved the preschool all three girls attended, it is a five-minute walk from the house, the tuition was reasonable, the teachers warm and caring but . . . after four straight years of being on the board and the constant worries about money and the fundraising that went along with it, trying to come up with good snacks when those obligatory days came along, and just the general hassle, I was delighted to say a warm good bye to the teachers. I brought them each a little gift, which was a batch apiece of homemade chocolate chip walnut cookie dough frozen into a large log so they can make cookies at home with their children.

For C and E's teachers I wanted something kind of consumable also because I know teachers get a lot of cutsey things. I'm sure they would have liked a gift card to some place but that would have been too obvious, right? I know E's teacher likes to garden (I know this because she's one of my friends in my ward and I've been to her house many times) so I chose some vegetable starts for her: a tomato, two kinds of peppers, and a lavender plant.


I don't know C's teacher too well but figured a pot of cheery geraniums are always welcome, so I got the supplies . . .
. . . and assembled them into something *I* would like to receive, so I assume the teacher did too.
I took the plants to school while the girls were out at the field day and put them on each girl's desk with a note so she could present her gift to her teacher.

Let summer begin!

Missing my camera

I love to take pictures of the things I'm doing every day and it's killing me not having my camera. I gave it to dh to take some pictures of this and that for me and I haven't seen it in weeks! I do have another camera here at the house but it's not as easy to use as my own.

I found out a neat trick when I went to the optometrist yesterday: if you are having age-related problems reading up close AND have a strong prescription on your glasses, you can move your glasses toward the end of your nose and it sharpens the focus on the close-up print. I know, I know, probably everyone reading this already knew this, but I didn't and it's nice to have some small advantage with this ultra-strong prescription I wear. :-)

Strange weather

Well, for us anyway. May is usually still cool and dry. We had several weeks of weather in the 80s, then it's rained at least part of every day for the past five days. We sure need the rain so I'm enjoying it. All the humidity is making my two curly-haired girls look like Shirley Temple!

Sad news story from Korea

Korean former president Roh committed suicide on Saturday. He was in office until February 2008 and ran a campaign and a presidency that was considered to be very clean in a country where bribes and scandals in the government are common. About six weeks ago it came out that he and his wife had taken bribes to the tune of at least $6,000,000 USD while he was president.

Today he and an aide went out for a walk in the mountains near his home and he threw himself off a 100 foot cliff. He died of head trauma.

One of my students was/is a strong member of his party (she's a polititian) and I know this must have affected her badly. I know what I'll be talking to my students about tomorrow . . . .

Champagne tastes, (root) beer budget

AKA "house hunting." Ugh. I just called our future renter and asked her what she thought about pushing the move-in date back a couple of weeks. I'm kind of glad there was no answer so she can listen to her message recorder and think it over without being in the spot. It would be cheaper for them since their current place is about 2/3 the price of ours, and she doesn't think their current landlord is going to rent the place out immediately, so HER landlord might not mind.

It's all very frustrating. Dh and I have been working full-bore on finding housing in the new location, but are coming up against roadblocks every way we turn, it seems. Now we're having to try to get a construction loan for the house our offer's been accepted on simply because one bathroom is gutted and there is no stove or dishwasher. Tell me how many homes there are out there that have only one bathroom and no dishwasher and require you to bring your own stove. MILLIONS??? Of course, but this one can't get a conventional loan. So we press on.

How I spent my Wednesday morning

One of the older ladies at Church is a genealogy buff and told me one of the many things she does to make information available to others is to take pictures of headstones in cemeteries, then upload the pictures and the information from them to http://www.findagrave.com/. This gal uses a walker and I figured she couldn't get around to take pictures very well, so I offered to pick her up and go to the cemetery and she could tell me where to take pictures.

I've been to this cemetery before and let me tell you: it is no easy "walk across manicured lawns, pausing to bend down and take a picture every few feet" kind of task to photograph there. It is a hard scrabble cemetery on a serious hill. The roads between each long row had been recently graded and the dirt was soft. I climbed up and down the hills and up and down the graves to get the pictures. There were many unmarked graves and ones with 35 year old funeral home markers that were almost impossible to read. There were many homemade grave markers as well. It made me sad that many families can't afford or don't choose to buy or make even a tiny headstone to mark their loved one's burial place.

This unflattering picture of me shows what happens when someone says, "Oh, just plant a bush on me and let me go back to nature." I had quite a time getting in to photograph the business side of that stone. There were a few like that.

I took about 225 pictures today and I was beat! It was getting hot and I'm, ahem, not accustomed to all the climbing and crouching I did today. I hope to get back at least one more time with my friend before we move.

Dh was a busy guy!

Dh and I want to make sure our house is in as good a condition as possible when we rent it out. We want to put off the "The xxx broke, who do you want us to call?" calls as for as long as possible after we leave.

Yesterday dh:

1. repaired two gutter sections so they won't leak
2. changed an outdoor faucet so a hose will connect to it (poured a concrete patio under it last summer and then the faucet was too low to the ground)
3. unwinterized the swamp cooler
4. helped me clean up the collosal mess we always get from turning on the swamp cooler for the first time--mineral dust in the extreme
5. replaced the bathtub faucet
6. supervised some day laborers who worked on the backyard

I'm very pleased with all the progress. Next Saturday will involve Spackle and paint.