Swimsuit Identity Crisis

29. March 2008 · 3 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags:

So — the first day of Spring has come and gone.

What does that mean?

Flowers, April Showers coming, pollen, allergies, deciding between Zyrtec, Allegra and Flonase…

Oops, sorry, not the direction I was headed.

It also means that when you go to the clothing retailers, the first items that will catch your eyes will be SWIMSUITS. I’m still shivering in a sweater…how do they expect me to be in the mood for trying on a swimsuit?!?!?

Or worse yet, appreciating how I’d look in a swimsuit?!?!?

I told Dave yesterday that this year I need to get at least one new bathing suit.

“What’s wrong with the ones you have?”

Where do I start?

I have 3 bathing suits. The elastic is going bad on my favorite one (circa 2002, got it at Land’s End overstocks right after Jacob was born). Ever had elastic go bad on a suit? I don’t mean the waistbands or arm holes, either…I mean, you give that Lycra a good stretch across your backside to put it on and when you take ’em off, the fabric doesn’t retreat….

So I want to replace the Land’s End one.

When you look in the stores, here’s what is available (courtesy of Roxy):


Sorry folks, I’m TOO OLD to be dressing like this at the pool/beach now. I can’t tote around 3-year-olds, don an inner tube alongside Jake and jump into the pool in it, either.

Here’s more my speed:


Like the skirt?

Cost-wise, they’re about the same. I’ll end up spending about $100 no matter what. Dave can’t believe that. But if I can get 5 years out of it, then it’s like buying a $20 suit every year for 5 years, right?

My Pez Peeve

28. March 2008 · 1 comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

My boys love Pez.

“Hey, I love Pez, too…I don’t see anything wrong with that.”

Yeah, I remember getting Pez dispensers when I was little, and I remember loading it up with the candy, and then gobbling it down.

“Those were the days, indeed. They seem like reasonable gifts for the boys…”

I got each boy an Easter Pez dispenser for their Easter baskets. A Pez dispenser comes with 1 or 2 blocks of candy, then I also stuck a “refill pack” of 6 more blocks into each basket. Really, it isn’t that much candy. Trust me. 150 calories total.

So here are the Pez dispensers…cute, huh?

From 2008 03 27 Pe…

I guess I’m not as young as I used to be. Jacob is pretty good at loading his dispenser, but Timmy needs help. Timmy’s gone through 3-4 of his 8 blocks of Pez, and I SWEAR, with every block since this past Sunday, I’ve been plagued with the VERTICAL PEZ. Allow me to demonstrate:

So here’s one of the Pez dispensers…this one happens to be Jacob’s:

And this is an example of the “Vertical Pez”:

Usually I end up with the vertical Pez when I’m just about done with loading, and all those other candies end up popping out while I’m adjusting the vertical one.

And finally, here I’m showing that Pez dispensers must have shrunk over the years — I can’t fit my fat fingers into the dispenser to adjust those $%^& Vertical Pez! My pinky barely fits.

Jacob’s received several Pez dispensers over the past couple years — Disney characters, Halloween, Christmas, etc. He probably has 4-5 of them. He never really had any problems.

Now that I think about it — Jacob never asked me to load up the dispensers…he merely ate the candy straight out of the packaging.

This Easter Timmy received his first dispenser, and the very first thing he did when he was given his first loaded up dispenser Easter morning was flip the head up and attempt to suck the candy out with his mouth. All he did was gum up the dispenser.

“MOMMYYYYYYYYY! It’s BROKENNNNNNNNNNN!”

So I fix it. Remove the slobbery one, wipe down the offended area…queue up the remaining Pez.

Then, about 2 minutes later, he somehow got a Pez candy way up into the Lamb’s head (imagine a Pez shoved up into your brain!).

“MOMMYYYYYYYYY! It’s BROKENNNNNNNN! AGAINNNNNNNNNN!”

When you brain your Pez dispenser, the head stays in the “up” position and you can’t advance the candy until you get the one out of the head. I had to use a seafood picker-thingy to break the candy into pieces and shake the pieces out. Sigh…

And all the while when I’m loading, cleaning, breaking, shaking with Timmy’s dispenser, he’s hovering over me: “Are you done yet? Are you done yet?”


I don’t remember Pez being this difficult…really!

HEY! I’m trying to sleep here!

14. March 2008 · 3 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,

In part because I’m sick of all the references to Terminix and Ant Farms for sale at the top of my page, and in part because I’m tired today, allow me to vent!

For the unaware, Apex, NC is this “special” location on the former Seaboard Air Line RR: the highest point on the line between Washington, D.C. and Miami, the two ends of that particular railroad. So…over the years, as railroads have been constantly taking each other over, it has fallen into the control of CSX. CSX continues to operate a depot and switching station in old historic downtown Apex. Helper engines are permanantly assigned to Apex to help freight trains up and down the grades…it’s uphill to Apex from both the north and the south.

Hence the town’s name.
Our house is about 2 miles from downtown Apex. When the winds are from the west, you can hear the train whistles pretty loudly from the switching operations. Since the engines have to cross several streets in downtown Apex, they have to sound off their whistle several times. For some reason, 3-4 times per month, CSX finds some reason to do all this switching in the middle of the night! And when the winds are right, you can hear a lot of whistling! Incidentally, my bedroom has windows that face towards the west — towards downtown Apex — so it can get pretty loud…and annoying.

Because it isn’t a constant blaring of the horn…the blasts are sometimes a minute apart, 2 minutes apart, 10 seconds apart…you just don’t know when the next one will be.

This morning, it started at about 5:45am, and continued until after Timmy wandered in at about 7:30am. I would JUST DRIFT BACK TO SLEEP, when another whistle blast would awaken me.
So I’m tired today.

PS: I *know* that switching is better off done at night, when there’s less auto traffic being inconvenienced waiting at the crossing gates. A couple of the crossings sometimes have the gates down for upwards of 1/2 hour, as a train scoots back and forth as they add/subtract freight cars.

An Updated Experiment

13. March 2008 · 3 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , ,

Well, while the enthusiasm is there to have our family live with just the one car, in practice we discovered some “issues”.

First, Dave usually leaves his office around 5:30pm. If I’m doing a labor-intensive dinner, such as a stir fry where I’m chopping veggies and standing over the stove for a few minutes, taking the 40 minutes to go out and pick up Dave every day would be a challenge. With the time change, though, we’ve been having dinner closer to 7pm lately, so we might be able to swing it…at least for our experiment.

If I do simple dinners, such as casseroles and quick homemade pizza, and if I prepare everything ahead of time so I throw it all together as soon as we get home, it can be done. Tonight it was homemade cheesesteaks with raw baby carrots and Ranch dip. 15 minutes.

Also, Thursday is soccer night for Jake, at 5:30pm. So I’d have to pick up Dave at 5pm on the nose to get back to Apex in time for soccer. Dave is willing to work from home on Thursdays, which would be great! I can make a fancy dinner on Thursdays, at that!

So today I drove about 60 miles in just the Prius. That would be ~1 1/2 gallons of gas, compared to 3 gallons it would have been in the van. This morning I dropped off Jake at preschool at 9am and then went straight to campus and was able to drop off Dave around 9:20am. Dave usually is at his office from 9:30am-5:30pm.

I drove Daniel home from the park today, and we had to cram his booster seat into the back of the car along with Jake’s booster and Timmy’s 5-point convertible seat. The seats all fit, but it was barely so and the seat belting was certainly an effort. But we were legal!

Picking up Dave was an adventure. I can’t remember ever being on campus at 5:30pm…what a nightmare, between the auto traffic leaving campus, the students walking everywhere, and the buses stopping every 50 feet. I pulled a “stupid” and tried this roundabout way to get to Dave’s building that wasted about 10 minutes. I ended up behind a bus that was stopping at each bus stop. Argh!

Jake, however, enjoyed his views of the young pretty girls. He asked me to put down his window (it was 65 degrees!) while I was crawling through campus traffic and he was hanging out the window yelling “HI!” to the girls. Of course the girls were swooning over cute-little-Jake. What a ham!

An Experiment

12. March 2008 · 7 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

So…we own two vehicles. Dave drives the Toyota Prius to/from work (20 miles per day), while I take the boys around in a Honda Odyssey (more than 20 miles per day, usually closer to 50).

Don’s blog now has an RSS feeder streaming his favorite news articles related to Electric (EV) and Plug-in Hybrid (PHEV) vehicles. I also noticed our local Citgo station’s unleaded gas (corner of Penny and Ten Ten Rds.) is going for $3.29/gallon (look here and scroll down to the list of most expensive gas…and YES PAUL, that’s Costco with the cheapest gas in the area!).

It got me thinking: how much gas (read: how much money) could we save if we tried to live with one car for a while…just the Prius?

Right now we average 1 tank of gas per week for the Prius (about $28), and 1.5 tanks of gas per week for the van (about $75). I wonder if we could do everything in a week on 2 gallons in the Prius?

Could we save ($28+75) – ($28+$28) = $47 per week? $200 per month? $2400 per year?

The "New" Jaguar

08. March 2008 · Comments Off on The "New" Jaguar · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags:

I’ve been seeing this commercial by Jaguar on FoxNews, I have always liked the song (“Hush” by Deep Purple), so to tie it to this INCREDIBLY SEXY car is really cool.

Author’s Note: I doubt I’ll ever get to own one of these, I like having both of our cars paid off. Starting at ~$50K, this is pipe dream.

While I’m Having a Blast With My Two Weeks’ Tour…

08. March 2008 · Comments Off on While I’m Having a Blast With My Two Weeks’ Tour… · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

…here’s Dave.

I’m almost home, dear! You’re doing great!

Don’t You Hate it When…

29. February 2008 · 4 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,

…you buy ice cream and your freezer freezes is SO hard you can’t enjoy it?

Yesterday I bought a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream at the commissary. It’s VERY rare for me to do this — I last had this over a year ago! So put it in the freezer, and I fell asleep last evening before I remembered that I had it.

So tonight after my microwave lasagna dinner I figured I’d have some.

Hard as a rock.

Pleh.

Above All.

29. February 2008 · 2 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,

Greetings from my Annual Tour at Shaw AFB, SC!!! For two weeks out of the year I’m put on orders to work in my “real” job — the position that I’m trained to do should I get activated full time.

For these two weeks, I put on an “active duty” hat and work on Director-of-Operation tasks with the full-time active duty Director of Operations for the weather squadron my unit supports. I’ve been gainfully employed on various tasks that I could manage in my two week stint…nothing too long-term, which is nice. I got to talk on the phone with someone in Egypt this morning 🙂

This week was also the launch of the US Air Force’s newest ad campaign: “Above All.”

They mean “Above All Adversaries”, by the way, not “Above All Other U.S. Armed Services”.

I’ve already seen the commercials on Foxnews and the USA Network: “Meet SSgt Jones of the Air Force CYBER-COMMAND!” I guess if I wanted to sell the Air Force to a young man who really enjoys, say, playing his Wii, showing someone fighting our cyber-enemies will do it!

Based on what I’ve read about the campaign, we can expect to see ads aimed towards parents and other adults who influence kids’ lives…similar to those Army Strong commercials where the announcer is saying, “Parents, if your child wants to discuss opportunities in the Army, please listen.”

If anyone is reading this who has a kid considering service in the Armed Forces, please do listen. We need good people.

It’s OSCAR NIGHT!

25. February 2008 · 2 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags:

Okay everyone, put on your black ties, full-length gowns and diamonds, it’s Oscar night ladies and gentlemen!

I LOVE watching the Oscars. Sure, you could make several arguments about the political messages infused into the monologues and that perhaps the awards themselves are fixed. I don’t care about all that. I tend to feel that the actors/actresses that are nominated are deserving enough, and that the films nominated are worth watching, too.

My favorite part? The ladies in the BEAUTIFUL DRESSES and the guys dressed to the nines. There’s just something about those dresses that puts a smile on my face, no matter what.

So there.

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