I am too tired and too brain-dead to make an intelligent post tonight.  In fact, this is usually the case by the time I get any free time, which is why I don't post nearly as often as I'd like, despite the myriad of potential blog entries constantly floating around in the cavernous reaches of my brain.  But I really would like to blog more often, and so tonight I am just going write a bunch of random comments and call it a post.  Here goes...

*Two things I learned this week:
-----(1) Always make sure the fireplace flue is closed before running the whole-house fan.  That is, unless you enjoy cleaning up fine ash soot from all over the living room.
-----(2) A great way to bake sweet potatoes on a hot day when you don't want the oven on is... in the slow cooker!  Wrap each potato in foil and cook on high 2-1/2 to 4 hours.  They come out fabulous.

*Biz is home from college for the summer as of last week Wednesday, which makes life that much more interesting.  Monday he started a full-time day job as a "marketing intern" for a business owned by a friend of Huz.  I am really proud of him, and he seems that much more of a "man" to me, working an 8-5 job-- and in his chosen field no less.  Sure beats working nights at Pizza Hut.  And now I am back to cooking dinner for 6 instead of 5.

*Cheez leaves Saturday for a missions trip to Mexico with her school.  This doesn't faze me at the moment, but it will probably seem odd once she is gone, just knowing she is so far away.  (I think Huz is going to go absolutely nuts.)  So I will be back to fixing diner for 5 for a week, but at least I have a substitute dish-doer while she is gone.  (It was Biz' job for 6 years before he went to college, so hopefully he hasn't forgotten how to do it.  And now you know why he lives on campus :-).

*My excitement for the week was ordering some books on artists & composers from amazon.com, yay!  I did my banging around and finding them on Sunday night after everyone was in bed, but by the time I was ready to place my order, I was literally falling asleep at the computer.  I do that from time to time.  (Did you wonder about that "40winkzzz" business?)  I have been known to do some really odd things while falling asleep at the computer, so I wisely decided to print up my shopping cart and begin again the next day.  Of course I found Monday that amazon had been kind enough to save everything for me so i wouldn't have to start all over, and of course I was ME enough to go bombing around the site again anyway tweaking my order.  Never mind that by the time I actually got a chance to get back on amazon on Monday, it was late afternoon and I was supposed to be fixing dinner.  When it comes to a choice between brain food and stomach food, brain food almost always wins.  So yay, I will have books coming in over the next couple weeks.  Life doesn't get much better than having a box of books arrive at one's doorstep.

*I think my slider screen must have a hole in it, because there are a LOT of mosquitoes hovering around my computer screen.  I suppose I should be glad it's not the computer screen that has a hole in it.

Well, I had a lot more random thoughts floating around in my head waiting to jump out onto the keyboard, but I think am out of time.  I got back from Spaz' soccer practice at 8;30 and have been stealing time here while he & Fuzz are occupied playing outside together.  They've been doing that most evenings now that the weather is nice and the days are longer.  So much for trying to get them to bed a bit earlier.  Even thru the winter, their bedtime is fairly late; by the time we go thru bedtime routine and then read aloud for 20-30 minutes or more, they are rarely settled for the night before 9:30, and often it is closer to 10.  I have been wanting to get them settled in bed earlier because I am just so tired by the time I finally get any time to myself.  But now is really not the time of year to try to start doing that!  I told Huz the other day that I am not going to read to them on any given night if I have to start any later than 9:10.  But tonight we are going to finish the first part of Redwall, and Hubby (who loves listening to me read as much as the kids do) will not be in from his shop until 9:30.  So I decided to take some "me time" NOW and let the kids continue playing outside for awhile.

...And I just finished the above paragraph as tho I were still writing it at 8:45 when I sat down at the computer.  Truth is, partway thru it I was interrupted by husband & children coming into the house and getting ready for bed and demanding to be read to.  (So yes, we are all read up now and they are in bed.  And I'm still tired.)  That was after I'd already been interrupted partway thru my random comments by Cheez, who needed me to help her get some things ready for her trip.  *Sigh* No wonder I don't blog very often.  Down time is indeed elusive.  (I don't get a quiet house in the mornings anymore either, thanks to Biz & Cheez' newly evolved routines.)  That's motherhood.

Life was busy when I just had little ones, but I think it consumes even more time & energy-- mental enrgy as well as physical-- now that I have a college kid, a high-schooler, a pre-teen and just one "young'un".  It is a unique time of life, and I need to remember to enjoy it, draining as it may be.  I will probably have more "me time" than I could imagine by the time I am 52.  That's only a decade away, so I guess I will survive until then.  And I may as well savor this journey called raising kids, long though it is.

And that is about as much as I have brains for tonight.

OK, here's the fluffy, light-hearted post I promised.  And speaking (ironically) of secular media... 

It's BeeGees night on American Idol, and oh my, does that bring back memories.  Scary ones.  Big-haired guys in tight white pantsuits singing falsetto.... the stuff of which nightmares are made.  UGLY nightmares.  It's a wonder my psyche wasn't permanently damaged from exposure to such stuff.  :-) And it stays with you, you know.  I have been known in recent years to strut around the house around singing "Ah ah ah ah, stayin alive, stayin alive" in my best falsetto, for no other reason than to drive my kids nuts (and remind them that I'm not a total stick-in-the-mud).  They never have quite understood why Huz & I mimic these guys with such derision.

But now, finally (thanks to my lamentable failure to guard their precious little hearts and minds from the dismal drivel put forth on the television on Tuesday & Wednesday nights in the spring), they get to see the REAL BeeGees.  Well, one of them, anyway.  And oh my goodness, has Barry Gibb aged.  Predictably so, I suppose, considering that nearly 30 years have passed since his Saturday Night Fever days.  Much less hair now, and it's gray.  He's only slightly less scary to look at now than he was back in his big-hair-and-dazzling-white-teeth-to-match-the-suit days.  (And to think I had that poster on my bedroom wall.  What were my parents thinking?)

It reminds me of the time a few years ago when I walked into the room where Huz & Biz were watching the halftime show of the Super Bowl.  (No, not that half-time show; thank goodness they didn't see that one.  This was a different year.)  I watched the singer for a few minutes thinking, Who the heck is that OLD guy singing Beatles songs?  Then I realized it was Paul McCartney.

Anyway, I have many more random fluffy comments floating around in my brain hoping to jump out onto the keyboard, but as always, duty calls.  AI is over, and I need to read two more chapters of Redwall and get the kids to bed.

For whatever it's worth, American Idol is actually the only TV show we watch.  (We've never really been big TV watchers.)  And it wasn't my idea.  But I have to admit that I enjoy it for the most part.  Gotta love Melinda Doolittle.  And Blake, too.

Apparently I'm not QUITE as much of a sluggard as I had feared; I only lost EIGHT months of pictures, not the 13 I had originally quoted.  I knew that I remembered backing up some pics in mid-December last year so that I could clear my memory card (!! grrr !!- too bad it was the last time I stuck with that policy).  However, the CD I had thought they were on only went thru early July, and I had feared that the December backup had gone awry (or that the memory was just a hallucination).  Today I picked something up off my desk, and lo & behold, there underneath it sat the CD with my July-thru-mid-Dec pics.  Yay!!!  I do know for a fact that I did not put any pics on CD after that.  So even tho I lost last Xmas, I still have all my kids' birthdays, which I had feared were gone.  I may also find a few pics in my email files, which had been transferred to our new computer before the old one crashed.  Fortunately, I am also a sluggard about deleting old "Sent" emails, and I know I emailed pics a few times in the last year, so I am hopeful.

I know this is not really important to anyone besides me, but I thought I'd post it anyway-- AND go back & edit my figures in the previous Sluggard post.  Then when I re-read that post I will not seem to myself to be QUITE as sluggardly.  (I read everything I write about 73 times; yes, I know that probably means I'm a tad narcissistic.)

Speaking of photos, I am currently shopping for a good camera (1 step below a dSLR).  Well, actually I am still in the research/analysis stage.  I don't take hubby with me when I look at cameras because, as he reminded me, he does not go thru a research/analysis stage and does not go "looking and comparing".  With him it's usually a matter of "I came, I saw, I bought".  Different styles.  After 20 years we're finally learning to appreciate those differences.  (Well, sometimes.)  After all my hours researching on the internet and making comparison spreadsheets and visiting stores, the camera I buy will probably not be any better than one that he would have bought spontaneously.

The camera is his 20th anniversary gift to me (that milestone occured a couple months ago).  No, we don't normally spend that kind of $$ on anniversary gifts, if we even get them at all; he'd been saving up from cash jobs for quite a while to do something special.  Cool, eh?  I told him that it should also suffice as my Xmas gift.  Actually, we discussed having it be our gift to each other-- but then I would have to share it with him!!!  So I think I will be buying him something else that he can open Christmas day, while I capture the moment with MY new camera.  (If he's good, I might let him touch it.)

And yes, I promise not to delete any pics from the memory card until they are on a CD!

Five great cameras I'm choosing from:

1.  Fuji S6000 / 6.3 mp

2.  Fuji S9100 / 9.3 mp

3.  Sony H5 / 7.2 mp

4.  Panasonic FZ-30 / 8.0 mp

5.  Panasonic FZ-50 / 10.1 mp

As I mentioned in a previous post, the Lord has been convicting me lately of being a sluggard.  Our pastor preached on this a couple weeks ago as part of his series, "Practical Living from Proverbs", and I really did see my self in that sermon.  It was confirmation of something the Lord had been trying to tell me for a few weeks.

It all started the day I found out that the data on my old hard drive, which crashed in August, could not be retrieved.  This hard drive contained all my photos from the last 3 years, some homeschool writings & projects of my kids' that I had never printed out, and about 5-1/2 years of documents and Printshop projects I had saved because they either were useful or had sentimental value.  I like my computer (well, I used to!), I do a lot on it, and I save most of what I do because I like having it.

Well, you are thinking, no problem.  If all that stuff is that valuable to you, surely you have it on a backup CD or two.

Uh, no.  Thankfully I do have all my photos up thru mid-December of last year... but nothing else.  I, who had followed a strict policy of not deleting pics from my memory card until they were on both my puter AND a CD, had grown lax.  I had not put pics on a CD for 8 months, and since I fill up my memory card every few months, most of the pics taken since then had long been deleted.  As for documents, well, I didn't put those onto a CD either.  It's not that I don't know how to do it; I just never got around to it.  Nor did I back them up onto the new family computer when I decided to retain said crashed computer as my own personal machine (because after all, "it has all my stuff on it already").

Stupid, stupid, stupid.  What makes it even more stupid is that this is not the first time my hard drive has crashed.  Last time I was lucky and our friend was able to recover the data.  You'd think I would have learned.

So I am bearing the consequences of my sluggardliness- my tendency to procrastinate on nearly everything that doesn't have an "Urgent" label slapped on it.  My lack of follow-thru on things I know are important.  My oft-misplaced priorities.

As I was lamenting this unfortunate turn of events, the Lord gently prodded me and said, "What in your life is most precious to you?  Yet do you not also neglect to take care of some important things there?  Do you not think that a little more preventative maintenance now would avert some future heartache?"  Ouch.  I knew exactly what He was talking about: my relationship with Him, and my family.

Now don't get me wrong- I don't neglect my family.  But there are too many times when I "let something go" that I shouldn't, or fail to follow thru on a concern, or set a bad example in the Temper Department, or major on minors while minoring in majors.... you get the picture.

Likewise my relationship with the Lord.  It is too easy to take it for granted, neglect it, let other things take priority.

And what might be the eventual consequences of such carelessness in these areas?  Far worse than losing some pictures & documents; that much I know.

I have many more thoughts on this, many real-life parallels that I have been drawing.  But my youngest needs some attention AGAIN, and so does my #2, and they are infinitely more important than my blog.  (See, I'm learning. :-)  So I will end this without my usual 5 positives, and maybe come back to edit later.

The Lord has really been convicting me lately about being a sluggard.  I was going to blog about it, but I've spent the last couple hours looking at and commenting on other people's blogs instead, and now it is 1 am.  (See what I mean?)  Well, on the positive side, I made myself do some needed tasks before I sat down at the computer, so I guess I am improving on my sluggardliness a little.  I'll have to do that post some other time.

5 good things I made myself do this evening after hubby & ygr kids went to bed:

1.  Cleaned all the old leftovers out of the frig.  (And none of them were green and fuzzy yet!)

2.  Talked to d16 about why I am concerned about what kinds of things she listens to, watches, and reads.  It was like talking to a brick wall, but at least I made an effort.

3.  Cooked some pasta for said d16, which made her really happy  (and took care of the brick wall. :-).

4.  Got some things ready for tomorrow.

5.  Folded the laundry I washed on Saturday.  (Wow, only 1-1/2 days in the laundry basket!  I am getting better!)

OK, so I am improving.  There was a time not so long ago when i would have gone straight to the puter and left all those things undone, rationalizing that "this is my down time".  I am encouraged.  Of course the downside to this is that... it's 1:00 in the morning!

5 Reasons I should go to bed instead of blogging:

1.  I have to get up in 5 hours.

2.  I don't need any more reasons!