Veterans’ Day

Grant made this float out of a shoebox for his school’s annual Veterans’ Day parade.  Being new to the school, we didn’t realize that kids (or the parents?) go all out on these floats.  Grant had a specific plan as to what he wanted and I am still proud of him even if his stayed simple compared to the mini-aircraft carrier and razzle dazzle sparkly ones.  His was heart felt and a clear tribute to his dad, great-grandpa, and all Veterans in general.

 

There were many veterans, ranging from WWII to present day soldiers, sitting in this hallway as special guests to the school that day.  By the time the third graders got through their patriotic songs and these fifth grade kids pulled their floats through, I had tears trickling and I don’t think I was the only one.  It was the best Veteran’s tribute I have ever seen in a school.  Again, simple but so meaningful. 

So then next day, on actual Veteran’s Day, the kids were off of school even though the veteran in our house was not.  (Boo.) I made the most of four hired hands minus the hired and we got some yard work done.  We had three huge stands of cannas that had been hit by the frost and just needed cleaning up. 

We used machetes and shopping carts. Talk about making work fun!

After that, we did some raking of leaves and I set some on fire on the driveway.  Here’s Caroline, miffed that I won’t let her roast marshmallows

 

and here’s Supervisor Grant continually expressing his disapproval that I, the adult, would start a fire anywhere near our fence.

   

Sam and Caroline are looking like it’s summertime!  Really, it was a warm day.  All the machete use had me sweating. And gave me a blister. 

I wish I had snapped a picture of the kids playing in the shopping cart.  You’ll have to just picture this:  Sam in the basket, in his muscle shirt, hanging on tight with Grant steering him down the steep hill in our front yard with me yelling at them both to stop playing with the danged thing!   

Just when you think we can’t get any more redneck.

MusicMonday—My New Game

Yes, I am days away from my mid-40’s and I still make up games.  Maybe that stems from being an only child growing up in the middle of nowhere where self-entertainment was an inevitable part of life.  I don’t know, but I still look down any avenue for fun.  Last week I started playing this in the van:

• Turn on the radio.
• Listen a few seconds. 
• Hit the next pre-set.
• Listen a few seconds.
• Hit the next pre-set.
• Continue until you go through all the pre-sets.
• Choose your favorite sound and that’s the winner. 
• Listen to the winner until over.
• Hit the next pre-set.
• And on and on.

It is permitted to skip over commercials, radio talk, etc.

I actually wrote the song titles down as I played.

I’m a very safe driver.

Here’re the results.  I know you are hanging off the edge of your bucket seat. 

You’ll see the choices listed and then you have to scroll down to see the winner. How’s that for creating big suspense??

All the songs are linked, and no, I don’t have tons of laundry to do or floors to mop, why do you ask? in case the mention stirs your need to hear it or you want to make some comparisons yourself. 

And you gotta remember the winner was chosen for at-the-moment radio appeal and had nothing to do with the video form. 

Ok, here we go!

 

ROUND 1----------------------------------

Whole Lotta Love—Led Zeppelin 

I Will Survive—Gloria Gaynor

Only the Good Die Young—Billy Joel

If It’s Love—Train

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WINNER

NOTE:  Simply gotta go with the rock classic.  Easy choice.  Shake for me, girl!

ROUND 2--------------------------------

Song 2 that I like to call the WooHoo song—Blur

She’s Got A Way—Billy Joel

Love in an Elevator—Aerosmith

Cooler Than Me--Mike Posner 

Come on Get Higher--Matt Nathanson  Confession:  I didn’t actually know this song but wrote down some key lyrics and Googled it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTE: Ok, I am feeling so vulnerable here, revealing this.  I don’t know why I picked this one.  Maybe because I have heard it only a few times and the newness got me?  I just couldn’t get off of it.  The Woo Hoo song by Blur was a close second for sure.  It’s infectious, also. 

ROUND 3---aka Slim Pickings---------

Crystal Ball—Styx

Shake Your Booty—KC and the Sunshine Band

??? –some lame-o Whitesnake song

 

NOTE: OMG, thank goodness we had some KC Sunshine to brighten up the selection.  I am now realizing Crystal Ball should be added to my shut-off-the-song-as-soon-as-I-hear-it post.  Sorry, Styx fans, but the older I get the less I like Styx, even though I thought they were THE band in 1981.  I even sent Kasey Kasem a long distance dedication request for Best of Times dedicated to my 8th grade Xenia graduating class (no joke).  Now I am wondering just how long distance that really was considering we were all in Xenia and I’m not sure it’s really a “group” song.  Did I even listen to the lyrics?

ROUND 4--------------------------------

Won’t Get Fooled Again—The Who

What Goes Around…Comes Around--Justin Timberlake 

Jane—Jefferson Starship

Remake of The Cure’s Love Song which you know I enjoy muchly—don’t know who it was by

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTE:  This would have been a tough call if it were between JT and the original Cure.  Being a remake version made it easier to pick Mr. SexyBack.  Not saying I am a big fan of him, but this song I’ve always liked.

ROUND 5----------------------------------

King of Anything—Sara Bareilles

Breakout—Foo Fighters (which is, I think, literally about acne, “I don’t want to look like that.  You make me breakout.)

Jack and Diane—John Mellencamp

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTE:  Jack and Diane is good, but Foo Fighters totally rock!  Had to go with Jack and Diane, though, just because of family love, you know. 

Hi, Jack!  Love, Mom Diane

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In summary, I realize my van could be better equipped for this game. In Gary’s truck, his radio display shows the name of the song and artist.  That’d be great!!….if I wanted to drive a huge dull-eggplant- pick up with going-on-200,000 miles just to know the Whitesnake song. 

I’ll just stick to my good time family van with a great radio. 

This week, you should play Radio Game.  Let me know your winners and losers! 

Scooter’s Twin

As we were driving home from the camp out last weekend, we noticed these huge tan ears flopping out of this vehicle ahead of us. 

Could’ve sworn it was our nothin’ but a hound dog, Scooter….

   

but this dog’s ears were even bigger!

Family Camping, Cool Style

It was Family Camp with Jack’s Boy Scout troop this past weekend. Believe it or not, I used to be semi-hard core in the camping department in my travelling, single girl younger days, but I haven’t been camping since, like, 1995!  The two youngest kiddos have never been camping, ever!  And this was their introduction to camping:

Night time temps of lucky-if-it-was-30 degrees. 

And we had no cold weather gear.  Well, Gary has one mummy-style sleeping bag that keeps that one soul that’s zipped into it toasty as can be, but that’s it for warm stuff.  Grant got to be the mummy.  Lucky dog. 

I noticed as I made up our bedding for the night that our tent, while nice and roomy, is constructed of nylon and mesh.  Mesh.  Mesh is great for summer time camping when you want/need some breeze to be able to pass through, but when you want to keep in any warmth five bodies might possibly generate, and block out wind, let me tell ya, mesh is the pits. 

I had borrowed our neighbors’ air mattress because I was concerned about sleeping right on the ground.  I knew it was going to be cold and the idea of being on the ground just gave me mental shivers.  I didn’t really think it through, though, as I guess the ground was probably warmer than the air temperature once that cold front came through, as luck would have it, just in time for the camping weekend.  I swear we have had weeks of exceptionally great weather in October and then when I decide we should do the camp-out thing, it suddenly turns freaky cold. 

So there’s Gary and I with our air mattress on the right with two heavy blankets, and Sam and Caroline each were on a cot, inside their kiddie sleeping bags that were stacked atop with every blanket, afghan, and quilted piece Grandma Barbara has ever given us.  It would have worked better for them if I would have foreseen the blanket stack sliding right off their slick sleeping bags with the first roll or flip over they made, but that was, unfortunately, invisible to me in the darkness.  All those covers kept the tent floor nice and toasty, I’m sure.  You can see, on the bottom left, Grant’s awesome mummy bag with a dark blue wool blanket covering it.  It’s an official Army “extreme cold” bag.  It says so right on the fabric.

Yard sale in Collinsville!

I went to bed with sweat pants, two pairs of socks, a shirt and sweater, a wool hat, a scarf, and a pair of gloves.  I kept it all on all night and still can say I wasn’t exactly warm.   Plus, I had Gary right there by me.  And maybe you didn’t know it, but I am known as The Nuclear Furnace in bed.  Now, don’t immediately be yelling TMI.  Seriously, Gary calls me that, only because I am usually very warm to lie next to.  I just wasn’t that night.

Well, the night was ok, in that we survived and everyone slept, but I have to say the days were beautiful.  We went from freezing in the early morning to shucking our coats, heck, even jackets by mid morning once the sun came out.  What a huge difference just a couple of hours can make.   

And, to the credit of my kids, no one complained that night!  Caroline said once matter-of-factly “I’m cold” but there was no whining or begging to leave or any of that. 

From the kids.

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Here’s proof we had fun:

 

Jack is in here resting.

   

Added by Grant:

The mummy bag didn’t really keep me that warm because you can’t entirely close it.

Monkey bridging:  Where you can go from this…. to this in a flash.       

Packing up and time to go….  

Jack earned his Polar Bear Patch out of the deal. 

I guess his face hadn’t totally thawed by this point. 

Halloweenies

 

Halloween isn’t just a day in this house.  It’s a season.  They start out regular kids,

 

a little goofy no doubt, 

 

and by goofy I mean, who goes to a fall fest and asks for his face paint to be a snowman??!! 

But then the Halloweenie season starts and we have… the costume changes, the candy, the dramatics.

 

Yes, sweet child o’ mine/star of Goshen Elementary’s Wednesday after school drama club is holding a bloody heart.

Thank you, Ross!  CAN’T WAIT ‘til you have kids.

And then Sam gets to “experimenting.”

 

Oh, and no surprise, but Caroline had three costumes this year. 

Day 1 at the school Halloween parade and party, the kitty cat:

  

Day 2 for trick or treating, the cheerleader: 

Did you know 20 trash bags, scissors, and tape equals two totally, literally last-minute pompoms? Helps immensely to already have a skirt and pompom appliqué as Halloween hand-me-downs from Aunt Deb!

And then Day 3 when Daddy says “You know, you could look like Sarah Palin” and she says “Who is Sarah Palin?”  We show her a picture and she insists she can come up with a costume  right from her closet.  And that she did.

Sam repeated last year’s knight costume and his mom lavished him with kisses and said, “Thank you, kid. Here, have some candy.” 

It was specified no weapons allowed at school so the dashing knight’s sword stayed home, but you can see he got right into the part nevertheless once they gave him a stick of licorice and the teacher’s back was turned.

By actual trick-or-treat night, the handles had fallen off the hand armor, but no one noticed the blue rubber bands, right? 

Or the black sweats with dress shoes?

Grant’s costume was fairly last minute.  He became Secret Agent Man at bedtime the night before he needed a costume to take to school the next morning.  Pulled it off ok, I thought.

     

And Jack was even more last second as he wasn’t going to trick-or-treat at all and had no costume until a friend called that afternoon on Halloween Day and asked him to go around with him in our old neighborhood.  Jack came down the stairs looking like this…whoa!  Good one!

   

Buckling a baby car seat is he** when you are a knight with hand armor. 

And so is trying to stay awake after all the fun. 

MusicMonday—Frankie Valli

Well, this kinda spun off out of nowhere other than I heard a particular song on the radio yesterday and it started a conversation between Gary and I about who sang it. 

He looked it up and said it was the Four Seasons.  I didn’t know that!  And I was confused.  It didn’t sound entirely like Frankie Valli.  Hmmmm….what’s going on?!

I knew Frankie Valli as the singer from the Four Seasons since I remembered my dad to like this music when I was a kid.  Songs like Sherry and Big Girls Don’t Cry, and Stay (this version is not what I was wanting but all I could find to link to) so Frankie’s falsetto is what I associated with the group.  Then of course, I knew Frankie from his role in Grease, one awesome movie and one of my all-time faves.  And then I was going next with this:  Did you know that before he had success musically, Frankie Valli worked as a barber?!  And isn’t it so ironic then that he played the beauty school teen angel from Grease! EXCEPT, hello, that was Frankie Avalon.

My life is one big string of mistaken thoughts, I swear.  And then I eventually find out and wonder how much of my brain is filled with this apparently  interchangeable babble that isn’t accurate in the first place.  And I tell people stuff all the time. 

But then I realized Frankie Valli did have a tie to the movie Grease and, no, maybe I haven’t completely lost my marbles because, hello, he sang the title song!  You know, that 70’s disco intro, written by Barry Gibb speaking of falsetto!, to the movie that’s a musical all about the 50’s with the 50’s music?  But you know, I can’t imagine it being any other song.  It totally works.

 

 

So anywho …. the song that started this whole crazy thing off in my brain.  I’m sure you know it even if I don’t really know much of anything at all.  And, turns out, it was sung by two other of the band members. You got the drummer and bassist and front man Frankie singing, so that help explains that. 

And the title is actually December 1963, what I probably always thought in my crowded, disorganized, messed up head was “Oh, What a Night!”

And also, I never quite grasped the song’s meaning until now. OH!