TEAM EDMOND!!!!

Is there anything better than The Count of Monte Cristo?
There is not. I love the abridged version, the unabridged version, even the truly horrible movie versions. I love it so much.
Thanks, Scribe.

I have a dream.

A dream that haunts me; so real that I can almost wrap my fingers around it, but that is still only a figment of my imagination.
I dream of the perfect mug.
It will be round and bulbous and big enough to hold two cups of coffee; It will have a lid on top so that I can brew tea in it. It will be thick to keep it's contents warm, and not quite so smooth that it feels like plastic. A faintly grainy texture, I think. The handle will be thin and rounded and out of the way, but big enough to slip a couple of fingers through. I can feel it in my hands, and it's absence makes my fingers itch.

...And now you know what I've been obsessing about lately. One day I'll get up the nerve to walk into one of those kitschy pottery shops downtown and ask if they could make it for me.

Not much else happening here. Mina had a fun birthday, we took everybody to eat at the 'Olive Oil Garden', as she calls it. She got a Dora doll in a fancy red dress and a LPS kitty from me & Pete. I also got her a tea rose and a shiny hat that says 'Birthday Girl' on it, which she wore the whole day. Random strangers were telling her happy birthday, which she enjoyed. We stopped by the mall to get the oil changed, and we found out that the book store was having a 70% off sale; Not much was left but we did get a copy of The BoxCar Children, a Tinkerbell novel, and a few picture books that they chose for themselves.
I've started The Black Tulip which I got for Christmas, and I love it. There's several pages of historical context added to the front, which I totally appreciate.

I'm going to go make tea and drink it from a dainty, inferior mug.

Festive Olive Salad

20 green olives, w/ pimentos
1 oz olive brine
3/4c cheap vodka
1 splash of dry vermouth

Shake with ice, enjoy. Mmmmmmmmmmmm.

New blog post.

Dinosaur Pizza.


Buccaneer nuggets.


Aw.


Levi is sooooo glad that he dialed 1-800-...


Ooooh.


And again. I wish I lived in this room.

Good Parenting

Every now and then I get the urge to do something so irresponsible, so terrible, so self abusive, that I wish someone would beat me over the head with a Dobson book screaming "No, you fool! IT'S NOT WORTH THE PAIN!!!"

That's right; I'm baking with the kids.
I have these visions of a Norman Rockwellesque bonding experience, but it almost immediatly degenerates into whing, screaming, open weeping...and then there's the noise the kids make! They fight, and push, and eat the raw dough, and lick the measuring spoons...ERG! They sit and pick little bits out of the formed cookies to test, then cry when their cookies come out of the oven looking like they've had small pox.

I JUST CAN'T STAND IT.

I have nowhere to put anything

Clothes, specifically.
What can I do?

Dining Room

Okay, so here's that window-mirror in the dining room: I started prying the glass panes off and the whole thing just kind of swung off the wall. Guess what was underneath?



Drywall! Nice, undamaged drywall. Mr. Legs remembers when the whole room was that color. The frame was just screwed onto the wall and connected at the top to the real window.


So we primed it and painted it 'Arabian Sands'. I think that wierd blotch in the photographs is the ghost of our electrical system (more about that later).


Here's the hutch, after I put all the school stuff in it.


And here's the whole thing with our pretty new table. I admired it for five minutes, then promptly covered it with a plastic table cloth, chewed crayons and a bit of old tomato sauce.