-
About Table for Five:
First there was me and my husband, and then there were two wonderful sons. And then there was a new baby coming! One day, we walked into a restaurant, and the waitress asked how many? I said, table for four, please. Then I turned to my husband and said, when the baby comes, we'll need to ask for a table for five. And the rest, as they say, is history. I hope you enjoy my posts, reviews, photos, and giveaways!
Subscribe in a reader
Get my posts delivered right to your email inbox!:Delivered by FeedBurner
Oh sure, we have a garage. Big enough to fit one car in, too. But instead of a car, our garage holds, well, other stuff. Recycling and big empty cardboard boxes and the kids’ bikes and old toys and Chris’ table saw thingy, that sort of stuff. So we park our vehicles outside. Which means that on mornings where the temperature has been below freezing overnight, the windshield of my van looks like this:
In my 25 years as a Michigan driver (I don’t mind if you do the math in your head, really), I don’t know how many hours I have spent trying to scrape hard frost off my windshields. See, for those of you in warmer climates, there is slushy frost that just scrapes right off, and then there is hard frost, which is like little dry ribbons of ice stuck all over the windshield, and has to be scraped off in tiny sections, especially if you don’t have time to start the vehicle and turn on the defroster and wait the fifteen minutes that it takes for a van windshield to warm up.
Parent Bloggers Network sent me a product to try made by Prestone, called Windshield De-Icer, and, well, you need to click over to MomReviews to see how it worked on the above-pictured windshield. It’s pretty much the best thing ever. I also reviewed a fluid that goes in with your windshield washer fluid and boosts it’s performance, and you can read about that as well.
Unless you enjoy scraping your windshield, that is.
The old way-paying bills by sitting down with a checkbook and some address labels and writing the checks, licking the envelopes, and putting on a stamp.
My new way-Using my debit card, then forgetting that the payment needs to clear, and having our checking account bounce.
I don’t know, I am so frustrated by the whole bill-paying situation that I hardly know what to do. It is supposed to be my job to pay our bills, and I have tried all kinds of different methods-the envelope method, setting up automatic payments, keeping track of payments in notebooks, on spreadsheets, you name it, I try it. And yet, I still can’t seem to get a system that works. I’m seriously thinking about going back to old-fashioned writing checks, instead of using my debit card to have the payments deducted. Maybe if I had the check carbons to look at, it would be easier to keep track of how much of the money in the checking account is actually available to spend. I remember thinking debit cards were going to be so awesome, but now I think they just make bill-paying more complicated.
VistaPrint has cheap address labels, like 140 of them for $7.99. Maybe going back to the old ways isn’t such a bad idea after all.
Look at this sweet award that I was given by Anna-
Isn’t that nice? Thanks, Anna! I’m awarding it to five people that in one way or another, cheer me up pretty much all the time. I’m so lucky to have such great blog friends!
The award was created by Ann from A Nice Place In The Sun, and these are the instructions for the five people I’m awarding:
If you are a recipient of the You Cheer Me Up Award, please find the blogs that cheer you up, copy the code to post on your sidebar and pass Ethel and Lucy across the blogosphere. You can use what cheers you up in your post, or copy this one, but please send your award recipients back to the original post on A Nice Place In The Sun to get a copy of the award code, post the image and read the instructions. I want to try to maintain a page of original and ongoing award recipients, so feel free to let me know if you’ve received an award when you pick up the image code.
The five people I am giving this award to are:
Tanyetta for always having something nice to say in my comments!
Lisa for chatting with me on Gmail when we are going stir-crazy with our children!
Karen for chatting with me on Messenger at all hours of the day and night!
Loretta for always answering my IM’s that start with “can I ask you a question?” 
Graham a/k/a Jean-Luc for leaving me great comments and sending me funny pokes on Facebook!
Please go to Ann’s site for the award code. I hope getting this award cheers you up and have fun passing it on!
When a DVD of Eagle vs. Shark first arrived in the mail for review, I looked at the cover and said to my husband, “well, it stars Jemaine Clement of Flight of the Conchords, and we like him, right? So it’s probably going to be good, right?” He gave me quite the skeptical look.
And then that Friday evening I popped it into the DVD player and we settled back to watch it. I was expecting something odd, something that maybe didn’t quite make sense. I was wrong. Eagle vs. Shark is quirky, yes, and has no special effects, no car chases or gun fights or aliens, what it does have is surprising emotional depth, characters that you will love, and acting by Jemaine Clement that is so raw that it will make your chest ache.
As one Amazon reviewers puts it, “If you like silly funny movies that grow on you over time and turn into a cult classic…this is it”.
Writer/Director Taika Cohen is well-known in New Zealand as a stand-up comedian, won a Nokia film award for a part in a movie in 2000, and is also a painter, photographer, and fashion designer. I believe the name for him is “Renaissance Man”. Not surprisingly, he has also written and directed two episodes of Flight of the Conchords.
Star Jemaine Clement is, of course, the co-star of Flight of the Conchords, as well as a former TV writer and cast member of several New Zealand shows. I like how he describes his fashion sense-”Prince but when he’s just going to the store or something - casual Prince.”
So in the movie, Lily (Loren Horsley) is in love with Jarrod (Jemaine Clement), who she sees every day when he comes in to eat at Meaty Boy, where she works behind the counter. She gets herself invited to his costume and videogame party, which is where the movie gets it’s title and why the characters are dressed that way on the cover. After beating everyone else at the videogame but letting Jarrod win, the two of them hook up and eventually, he invites her to visit his family with him.
However, he has another reason for wanting to travel back to his childhood home-Jarrod has been in “training” since high school for a fight. His entire existence is focused around being physically ready to beat up the bully who picked on him in school. He has invited the bully to meet him at their childhood school playground for a showdown. Meanwhile, Lily is bonding with Jarrod’s father, brother, sister-in-law, and niece, while Jarrod seems oblivious to the fact that other people besides him might have problems of their own.
Lily’s yearning for Jarrod soon becomes a realization that he is deeply wounded and possibly unable to let her in emotionally, and yet she continues to stand quietly by his side as he makes realizations of his own. In the end, everyone is better off for having had Lily come to visit. Eagle vs. Shark isn’t a fancy movie, and viewers expecting sight gags or crude jokes or any of the typical comedy techniques we see in American films might be disappointed. If you liked Napoleon Dynamite because it was just what it was, nothing more, than you will more than likely enjoy Eagle vs. Shark. It quietly builds until by the end, you are holding your breath waiting to see how the characters will turn out. And it’s funny, I promise!
Eagle vs. Shark was released on January 8th, and you can get your own copy by using this Amazon link. Jemaine Clement fans, you don’t want to miss this movie.
Last night, we went out to eat (I know, I’m not supposed to be eating out) and Kaitlyn’s behavior was horrible. She didn’t want to sit in the highchair, she didn’t want to eat anything, she spilled Chris’ glass of water, etc. etc.
By the time I finally said I had had enough and let’s just go, I was in the foulest of moods. We came home, Chris dropped us off and ran back out for cigarettes and a fountain pop for me, and I settled down on the couch under our warmest blanket because it was freezing.
By the time Chris got back, I was sound asleep on the couch. I slept through him having Kaitlyn kiss me goodnight, I slept through he and Ryan playing HALO 3, for heaven’s sakes. At about 10:00 Chris woke me up and suggested I go to bed. I apparently stumbled into the bedroom, took off my slippers, and fell asleep under the covers wearing a long sleeved shirt and sweatpants.
I dreamed and dreamed and dreamed all night long. One bizarre thing after another, which I can now only remember in flashes. Something about working in an office, something about organizing a shelf full of tiny knick-knacks, something about hanging out with a group of actors talking about the movie they were making. But then the dream that I had just before I woke up, that one I can still remember, and when my eyes snapped open at the end of it, my heart was pounding and I felt like I was going to cry.
Chris and I were in a hotel waiting for the elevator. None of the kids were with us. The elevator came and I got on, but Chris was still gathering up our stuff and the doors were closing. I was trying to find the button to hold open the door, but there wasn’t any panel of buttons like on every other elevator, and the doors closed. I figured Chris would get the next one and meet me at the bottom. When the elevator doors opened, suddenly Kaitlyn was there, and she was running out of the elevator ahead of me. I can still vividly see that I was picking up my pair of black shoes and Chris’ tennis shoes and my purse, as Kaitlyn was running away. I got out of the elevator just before the doors closed again, and I watched as Kaitlyn ran down a little dock and jumped onto a tourist boat (maybe we were in the Venetian hotel in Vegas?). The boat started backing out of the slip, and I was screaming at the driver, “stop the boat, stop the boat”. He was looking at me and grinning like he didn’t understand, and I was watching as my baby girl was being driven away on this boat and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
And then I woke up.