Dan's been keeping busy with quite a few jobs.  Here he is in the basement shop preparing for tomorrow:

I've had a ton of work myself, which is excellent.  Maybe next month will be a little easier on the wallet!

Rebecca's version of Butter and Bannana Bread:

Yes, that huge glob on top is BUTTER!

This week has been an auto repair kind of week for my dear hubble (Dan called me Wiffle when we were first married and so I began to call him...).  We have Shell's Jeep here while she is off globetrotting and so DH decided to take advantage of the extra vehicle and do some transmission type work on his 4Runner.  Well, as soon as he had the truck apart, the Jeep refused to stay running.  It started okay, but as soon as you took your foot off of the accelerator it died.  Made for a hairy drive home apparently!  Anyway, poor DH has been in repair mode all week!

Now all he has to do is put it back together in the morning!  Hopefully his transmission will be back soon and then the tools can be removed from the back of my van!

Dan, Rebecca, and I went to the State Championship for FLL today at Georgia Tech.  It was fun to see all of the teams that beat us at the superqualifier!  I wish I could post pictures.  Unfortunately my camera has disappeared.  I was in the middle of documenting a future Tightwad Tuesday when it just vanished. 

I haven't called an all out search yet, but we might start on Monday with a clean-till-we-find-Mom's-camera chore day.  We've had these in the past, but usually a school book (MATH) was the object of our cleaning binge. 

Anywho, back to the championships.  We stayed until the award ceremony, but after an hour of waiting for judges to bring out the results we decided to just check the website for the winners.  Of course who knows when that will be!  Rebecca is really rooting for the Transformers because she has a good friend on that team. 

Elizabeth got back safely from an overnight camping planning trip.  She is old enough to be a junior counselor at summer camp this year and a group went up there to scout things out and to plan the activities.  Apparently the camp is quite luxurious--to the point of having CARPET in the cabins! 

Josh is starting to get more hours at Target, which is a great relief to his checking account.  His last paycheck was less than $35!  He turns 18 this week and has asked to be trained in other areas so he can get a bit of a pay raise hopefully. 

I have made no advances in knitting mostly due to the fact that I haven't picked up my nicely rolled ball of yarn from the spot it rolled to under my bed.  I was pointed to some videos that just might help, however!

Today was a van-schoolin' kind of day.  As I was preparing lunch, I got a phone call from a friend who had a spur of the moment, last minute opportunity I would not want to miss.  She had found out about a Speech and Debate Club for high schoolers being started and would any/all of my children be interested? 

I hung up and queried the kiddos and got a lukewarm response.  I decided that, yes, this was an opportunity we would go for, so I called Martha back and we arranged for me to pick her daughter up (their house was on the way) and I would carpool us on over to Dunwoody for the intro meeting.  This was wonderful except that the meeting started at one and it was after noon and Dunwoody is a good thirty minutes from our house!  Yipes!!  I left lunch on the stove and we sprinted out the door. 

Well...I had Mapquested the directions and let me tell you, Dunwoody must have been nutso when they named their streets because in one intersection there were SEVEN signs with DIFFERENT street names on them!  I called Martha, hoping to get some help in finding the dadgummed church, but she wasn't sure, so she called another friend who called me and finally, we arrived! 

We were a tad bit late and the room the club was meeting in was small, so I decided to wait in the next room where a bunch of kids were eating lunch and having "study hall".  The meeting was an hour and a half and for the first hour I sat in a not-so-soft folding chair and read a PG Wodehouse novel I happened to have in my purse and all was calm.  In the last half hour there emanated from the drama club room a series of thumps, some of which reverberated through the floor quite strongly. 

I immediately wanted to burst into the room and yell at my dear son because I just knew he was the source.  But I held my seat and spent the next fifteen minutes or so wincing whenever another thump shook the floor.  What on earth requires an earthquake simulation in a speech and debate class?!

Finally, the director of the home school program asked me if I'd like to accompany her into the class to hear the spiel she was going to give the kids about attendance, fees and such.  I walked into the room expecting to see some blood or at least a few bruises, but all of the kids were seated, angelically listening to the young college student who is their instructor.  He was assigning homework and ALL of the kids were feverishly writing on the papers he had given them. 

I figured I would get the story on the way home, so I held my tongue and listened to the director.  After she was done there was some spirited discussion about where they could possibly meet the next time because the room was just too small.  Apparently speech and debate needs space to move about! 

Finally we left and all four of the children bubbled over with enthusiasm.  My lukewarm children were on fire to come back for the next class!  And the thumping, I'm still not sure where that came in, only that it DID involve my child who was apparently miming the ogre Shrek saving the princess, Fiona.  I'm not sure I want to hear the rest of that tale! 

After returning home I ran Josh to Target because he actaully got some work hours this week--YAY!  Rebecca and I then took off for Robotics at 5:00.  She had a great time and I met up with the coach for her FLL team and we heard more of her plans for expanding the program.  She wants to rent a space and she's found a couple of possibilities.  I'm REALLY glad because part of the expansion is an FTC team and Rebecca is really excited because she ages out of FLL this year. 

I wanted to leave the meeting early, but Rebecca had prepared cupcakes to share with her team members, so I waited until they were passed out, consumed, and then we left and rushed over to our church.  They are holding a series of "Preparedness" meetings to help members and the community to prepare for emergencies and such and to help build food storage. 

Today's topic was storing the government recommended amount of water for each family member.  It's really not so hard!  Here is a web site that was recommended. 

http://www.ready.gov/

And here is a phone number you can call to get a handy-dandy book entitled,  Are You Ready?"
that walks you through the whole gamut of being prepared. 

1-800-BE-READY

You could download it here:

http://www.ready.gov/america/publications/allpubs.html

...but it is 204 pages long, so you might just want to call and order it!

Today I was wondering what a cashew tree looked like.  They're pretty nifty, but the fruit of the cashew tree is even cooler!  The nut is the brown thing on top and the yellow fruit is called a "cashew apple" and can be consumed as well!.  Is this not most excellent?

I would love to have a cashew tree, but alas, frost is a no-no for them and the weather has been quite glacial around here lately!

In fact, we normally go through less than half a cord of wood in our stove each WINTER, but this year we're down to just a few puny sticks left at all.  Here the puppies cornered a critter, probably a ground squirrel, behind the wood pile a couple of weeks ago...

...and now, there is no wood pile and we're thinking about getting more wood because there is still lots of winter left!

I spent waaaay too much time just surfing the web today, but I came upon what appears to be the most awesomest of sites!

http://crockpot365.blogspot.com/

Check it out if you ever crockpot at all!

Today felt like the first day back to school because every one was finally healthy enough to stay awake all day.  YAY!  Rebecca is still coughing, but only in the evening, though she still sounds a bit hoarse, so we're not rushing her out of doors in this cold weather.  Josh came down with the bug last Friday and slept what seemed like the whole weekend. 

This morning I played drill sargeant because I was determined everyone would be on track today and we pretty much completed all tasks.  I also got a lot more organizing done--yay me!

Josh is going to Italy with his Aunt Shell in April, so he's taking a break from Spanish and Latin until he gets back so he can pick up as much Italian as possible before he goes.  I've decided to just use Plimseur from the library for this purpose because I suspect Italian isn't too different from Spanish AND he actually NEEDS all that travel vocabulary this time around. 

Rebecca was feeling much better today, although she sneezed about a thousand times yesterday!  We gave Dayquil a try because NyQuil performed wondrously the night before.  Unfortunately, the poor child was MISERABLE and I was afraid to give her anything else because DayQuil has such a laundry list of drugs in it. 

This morning we went to Wal-Mart and picked up Benadryl and Zyrtec and Jolly Ranchers.  The Benadryl I chose because it works great for me, the Zyrtec because it worked wonders for her allergies several years ago, and the Jolly Ranchers because when in doubt, try hard candy for a cough.  The Zyrtec finally kicked in after about three hours, but the Jolly Ranchers were a hit with Rebecca's cough and her buddies at Robotics this afternoon. 

Yes, the girl made it to a meeting today--yay!!  It's a good thing, too, because no one else is so good at putting together the stinky "polluted water" experiment as yours truly.  I did them for the last competition and the honor was reserved for me once again, lucky me!  You see, each team has a table where they display their research and everybody has some sort of give away/handout type thingy for visitors who come to see their work.  Well, Coach Nichelle, our truly inspired leader, found simple experiments for each team to assemble and hand out.  These are extremely cool!

Fireball, Rebecca's team, has an experiment where you show how contaminants in water can make it into the air.  The only thing we have to assemble is the polluted water.  Coach Nichelle had a bottle of essential lavendar oil left over from soap making she and her children attempted several years ago for Christmas gifts (she is a fellow homeschooler, just so ya know) and decided that would be the perfect pollutant.  Well, all I got to say is that by about the 20th vial, that stuff is foul! 

I learned last time that 20 vials were all I could take before the onset of head pain.  I guess I'll never get into aromatherapy!  It only took five batches of 20 vials, but I got them filled, tagged, bagged, and boxed.

As to the burned grilled cheese, Elizabeth learned last night that it's better to cook when you're fully awake.  Please note the timecode!

Well, this bloggy break turned into a summer vacation!  Life has been more than full lately.  The economic toll has hit our family and I've been taking in more transcription leaving even less time for fun stuff like blogging!  Yech!

I am, however grateful that while times are thin, they are hardly tough as I'm blessed with an extremely talented flexible hubby!  He lost his job a couple of months ago (I think the company is tanking in slow motion!), but has kept quite busy with odds and ends.  For instance, this week he is doing sheet rock and mechanics and while he enjoys the variety, he would really like to get back into the computer game. 

The kids have been keeping busy as well.  Rebecca is on a new Robotics team and she is really enjoying that.  She has been quite ill this last week, however, and hasn't done much of anyything.  I took her to the doc on Monday and he did a rapid strep and some test on her ears to check for fluid and then basically said she has some sort of "throat virus" and to take it easy and return Friday if there was no improvement.  The child has mostly slept this past week missing all activities and not caring one whit.  She has improved the slightest, itsy bit each day, but Friday she tried to do school with us and made it through scriptures and some spanish stem changing verb review.  After that she took a two hour nap.  She's more chipper today and wanted me to get her up on time tomorrow.  YAY!

Elizabeth is in the advanced guitar class and is feeling a little overwhelmed now.  She has asked for private lessons on top of the group lesson she is taking through our homeschool band.  I told her to find out how much her teacher charges and where he does the lessons and then we would see.  I would really like to see this happen, but it will depend on the cost and how committed the dear child is to REALLY practicing. 

Josh STILL does not have his driver's license.  A year ago I was pretty okay with that because I wasn't totally comfortable with him  driving without me.  Now, as he approaches his eighteenth birthday, I'm wishing he had it or at least was motivated to get it because he is very nearly an adult and driving is something adults need to do!  Also, it would really help me out if he could drive himself to work sometimes.