Cut Short

I finally did away with the terrible haircut I've been sporting for the last few months. The cut I got on Monday was nice except for the three major things that were wrong with it.

So I took scissors to my own hair for the first time ever. Let me tell you, in case you are unaware: cutting one's own hair requires an entirely different level of skill than cutting one's children and husband's hair. In case you have never tried it I will paint you a picture:

It's like writing a story in a foreign language left-handed while looking at the paper upside down and in a mirror. The one difference being that if you get it wrong you can't just crumple the paper up and try again. Instead you are doomed to feel lame or wear a paper bag over your head whenever you're in public OR cut your hair really, really short.

I now have a renewed respect for people who cut their own hair well. Respect and also a slight hesitancy to believe them. (still, mine isn't bad enough to require a paper bag or shorter cut, but I'm not sure yet about how embarrassed I should feel to be seen in public.)

So anyway,

Actually, never mind. That was all lead-up to what I actually wanted to post about which has virtually nothing to do with poor haircuts, cutting one's own hair or even writing in foreign languages. But I'll post that one another day because going to bed sounds so very much better at the moment than trying to remember my point. And plus, cutting this post off awkwardly seems very fitting.

The Most Exciting List of ALL TIME!!!

Please read no further if you have any issues with your heart or if you are not securely seated or standed. Otherwise, the greatness of this post may possibly have the hypothetical potential to BLOW YOU AWAY.

You have been warned.

A bucket list. I'm making one. I'm not much of a bucket list maker, really. I mostly just want to be a better mother and raise amazing kids. I don't care where we go on the way or how many side skills I develop or anything like that. I have no ambition (I believe I have mentioned this lack-of-quality of mine).

So the bucket list I present to you today is things I ABSOLUTELY MUST do before...............
We leave to go to Warsaw tomorrow afternoon.

(if you are still reading despite a weak heart, I beg you to turn away now!)

1. edit reports written this week and email to client
2. pack four thousand of everything. A few of each item for each person in the family
3. bake something to take to the mission president(s wife) since they've invited us to stay in the mission home (bake extra for friends we will hang out with while we're there)
4. try not to even peek at facebook or Catching Fire
   
5. wash all sheets and hang to dry while we're gone
6. keep Spencer awake, despite the fact that it will be his bedtime so he will sleep for at least part of the 4-5 hour drive
7. do not explode when Spencer refuses to stop hanging on me/whining while I'm rushing around because he is so tired he can't see straight*
8. make sandwiches/pack snacks
9. tidy house after everything (if time allows. HA!)
10. get as frazzled as possible so the drive and the upcoming fun will be as well-earned as possible

There you have it! Did you survive? I won't ask if that was the best list of any sort you have ever read. I think we all know the answer to THAT one.

This list has been brought to you by Melanie, who, I know I have never mentioned on this blog, so sorry to throw her out at you so randomly. Go here to find out how you can post a bucket list on your blog and get serious entry points to win her book, The List, or other awesome stuff she's giving away.

The Fruits (Vegetables) of Procrastination

(Herbs are vegetables, right? Or vegetable-like, anyway? Good.)

Greg's parents are here this week. This is a wonderful thing. I hardly ever have to wash dishes and apart from meeting some very basic needs of the little ones, the only thing I have to do is remind Aaron to let babcia breathe now and again.

The night they drove in I decided to make chicken noodle soup. I'm a bad soup maker. Yes, I tend to point out flaws in everything I create but with soup I am not being overly critical when I say I really am Very Bad at it (i.e. whipping it up without a recipe).

Actually I think that was sort of beside the point, but I had to mention it in case anybody might think I make delicious soups. I can't have people thinking that.

So I only had chicken, broth, carrots and some spices. I really wanted parsley, but we didn't have any.

Then, when I heard the kids playing out back I remembered something. In the middle of November, before it had snowed I went out into our teeny tiny garden (foot-wide strips in the shape of an L maybe 8 feet and 20 feet long) and tried to dig up everything that should have been dug up months before. It was way too hard (I didn't use any tools because I didn't see how they could help. I'm an idiot.) so I left most everything there. Especially the parsley. We had a lot of parsley and it was stubbornly stuck in the ground. I planned to try again later (meaning tell Greg that it was Man's Work and he should really do it).

Before we had the chance to procrastinate for more than three days it snowed and everything was covered in a foot or three of snow for two months. Last week all that snow melted and what was underneath it? Beautiful, green, fresh looking (albeit smashed flat on the ground) parsley.

That parsley was just exactly what the soup needed to make it approximately as unimpressive as every other pot of soup I've ever made. Hooray for procrastination!

'Tis a Gift

Head cold. Not a gift. But here are some things I've been thinking of lately.

One of my favorite things in the world is taking a baby out of his crib. Why are babies so sweet after they sleep? They're so warm and cuddly and happy. There is something about not having held the baby all night, or for the hours during their nap that makes it feel like someone is giving me a gift when finally get to I pick that little guy up. Heaven.

****

I always floss before bed and I'm ALWAYS very tired and I NEVER feel like doing it. Last night I went to floss my teeth and realized I'd already flossed earlier in the day so I didn't really have to floss again. It felt like someone was handing me a little package. I was very happy. I doubt if I would be any happier if someone knocked on the door and handed me $50. (I thought long and hard about an amount. More than 50 and I would have been happier than about not having to floss, but less than that, for sure not.)

Okay, I just read over the parenthesis in that last paragraph and am in love with the sense of it all. Not to mention the relevance. It is just so important (the whole flossing thing!) and I'm pleased to now publish it on my blog.

I have a head cold.

Have You Ever

created something in your mind, say, a personal food blog, and instantly knew what you were going to call it (Culinarily Speaking, for example), then thought about it all night long and then woke up and did a search, only to find out that someone already had a blog by that name, but you didn't care because you thought of it before you ever heard of it from anyone else and plus that blog was on wordpress and there was no such blog on blogger so you went to create your blog, assuming you could use the blog title for the URL only to find that someone already has the URL although they didn't seem to be using it so you tried to cleverly alter the title for your URL and you came up with a silly-but-okay-for-a-URL URL, such as culinarilisaspeaking only to find yourself wondering if maybe you shouldn't rename the blog CulinariLisa Speaking or maybe CulinariLee Speaking or CulinariLis Speaking or any of a number of other, um, clever names only to stop the idiocy just in time to prevent yourself from making that grievious mistake and go back to just plain Culinarily Speaking? Well, I've done that. Just once though, thank heavens.

A Secret Revealed (Not The Secret revealed)

Today I'd like to tell you about the diet I'm on.  But I'm not going to tell you it here.  Instead I'm going to tell you it here.  That link will take you over to Heidi Ashworth's blog where I'm guest posting (how nice is she!).  There you'll find out the amazing secret to losing weight quickly.  Okay, fine, I can't keep it a secret.  It's called the S Diet.  But that's all I'll tell you.  Okay, so I didn't reveal anything at all.  Go read!

Also, please know that you should probably already be reading Heidi's blog, which will be obvious if you start looking through it.  Which you should.  Which I don't know why I keep saying which.  Which I love when people start their sentences with "which" when it doesn't really fit in (seriously).  

How Boring Can You Get?

Annette tagged me for this tag, which should be at least somewhat interesting and insightful, but really mine is NOT.  The reason is because I do not take pictures and I currently have not a single picture saved on my computer (husband recently emptied everything off of here so that I could continue to blog without it shutting down every 3 minutes).  

For this reason I asked Greg to follow the instructions on his computer so that I could:  Post the sixth photo in [my] sixth folder.   He said it was actually the sixth in the sixth in the sixth, which I do not understand except that I know that it probably has something to do with the fact that he takes loads of pictures.  So aren't you dying to see the photo?  Well, here it is!

Wow!  Fascinating!  This is the shot of one of the bodies they're making for a client (it's called a puzzle car, I assume because it is made in pieces and then welded together? And I am unaware of exaclty what part this is.).  I will say that it is quite beautiful, as you can see the aluminum is most excellently well polished with that stripe sanded down the middle.  Plus you can see the awful glass cubed wall (with many of the cubes missing) that lines the side of the shop at Greg's work reflected in it.  (for more pictures, and especially if you're interested in buying a Cobra -- and YOU KNOW YOU ARE -- go here.) 

How exciting!  Well, speaking of exciting things, we found a way to make a little extra money, thanks to a good friend of ours, and I have spent Monday and today frantically typing up articles.  20 of them at 500 words each.  I still have three to go, so I'd better sign off.  But first let me say that typing up ten thousand words about pendants is not my idea of a good time.  Yes, that kind of pendant.  For each article I am given key words such as "opal pendant" and then I write about it, with that much information given as direction.  What a joy.  What a blast.  Let me stop blogging so I can get back to something FUN.

 (and I really hope to catch up today or tomorrow with you all!  I've been missing you, especially since I've had you right under my fingertips this whole time!  But look how disciplined I am!)

Don't Wanna

It's a long weekend. People don't want to read blogs all that much. Some people don't want to write posts all that much, either. So I'll do us both a favor.

Except I have to say that we decorated the house for Christmas yesterday (we always did it the day after Thanksgiving growing up and it's a tradition I'm keeping) and then sat down with some slush* (another Christmas tradition) and watched The General (a silent film from 1927 with Buster Keaton. We all loved it, and even Aaron sat through the whole thing pointing at the screen and saying "Uh oh!" and "Woah! Woah, whoah woah!" at all the right parts. He even laughed when we did,but only because we did). The General isn't a tradition, but maybe it will be from now on. Or maybe just any silent film. We're into Charlie Chaplin, too.

I hope you guys are all being at least a little lazy and not too productive. That's what it's all about. Food and laziness.
*I was going to link to a recipe for slush, but couldn't readily find it online. It's just the orange, pineapple and lemon juice and mashed bananas made into a syrup, frozen, and scraped into glasses with 7-up poured on top thing. This is another of my family traditions and we usually drink this with chips and dip. Mmmm, salty/fatty with refreshing and sweet. YUM.

A Woman of My Word

I totally believe in keeping commitments that I've made.

Like, for example, if I said I would do something every day, I will do it.

But I'm smart, too, and I know my limits. I would never say that I would do something really well every day.

Because for sure, some days I won't do it very well.

Please adore my use of tenses in this post. Actually, just adore everything about this post. How could you not?

Tragedy: A Top Quality Post

Yesterday I read the post I've highlighted in my sidebar and cried. This morning I read a post of Melanie's at Write Stuff and cried. Then I read an email from my cousin in response to my questions about her health, and cried. Then I went downstairs and watched a little Larry King while sitting on my husband's lap and cried. Mostly because I didn't feel very comfortable and kept feeling like I was falling off of his lap (please try to contain your tears of empathy). I moved onto the couch and started thinking about how I might have to wake Aaron up from his nap in order to be able to pick the kids up from school on time, and I felt sad. Larry King got boring so I switch to some cooking show and started crying. Not about the cooking (they weren't cooking seafood or anything, it was a dessert). Or about the previously mentioned email or blog posts or baby thing. I went to the kitchen to make a sandwich, thinking it was maybe my blood sugar level or something. I started buttering the bread and REALLY started crying because there was no way I could eat that sandwich because I wasn't feeling well.

I'm weepy. I think it's just a severe case of PMS. I'm not even going to charge you for that information. I'm generous in my sorrow.

And to make up for the previous bad paragraphs, have you heard my favorite joke that I forgot to tell in my other post?

Why is it called PMS? Because the name "Mad Cow Disease" was already taken.

And one of Greg's favorite jokes that sort of matches: Why do women wear make-up and perfume? Because they're ugly and they stink.

I don't feel like crying so much anymore. I think I'll go take a shower. (but I'm sure I'll come up with something to cry about in there. Does anyone else love crying in the shower as much as I do?)

(Never mind. I have something to cry about. I finished typing this up and went over to read Alison Wonderland's latest post and accidentally clicked on her link to an article which tells a very sad story (got a little weepy) and then mentions organ donorship. I LOVE ORGAN DONORSHIP. So I started all-out crying. Everyone, be a donor.)(Now I feel like crying because donorship isn't a word(sorta suspected that) and I think it should be (maybe you're aware that I usually don't care AT ALL if something is a word or not.)