Lori's Blog

A Meme

I was tagged by my new friend Monica at strawberrymountian, she lives in Montana.  New to the blogging game, I stumbled upon her blog (I am not sure how I actually got there, but I am glad I did..Hi Monica.  Thanks for picking me.)  Her blog is pretty and so complete.  It is what my blog wants to be when it grows up.  The Meme is "7 Random Things About Me".  I think I am extremely random so this will be easy.

1.  I despise mushrooms and mayonnaise.  I will not touch a mushroom and if mayonnaise touches my skin, it is as if I have been submerged in a vat of acid. 

2.  I do not like air blowing in my face or really anywhere on me.  I can not handle air conditioning or fans or even the breath of my dear sweet children in my face.  I get high anxiety and body ache and complete claustrophobia from any source of air.  (sidebar:  my husband loves air, has the A/C blowing 24/7 with the oscillating floor fan (ceiling fan also, if I would let him have one) and the windows open at the same time....we struggle in this area)

3.  I can juggle.

4.  I obsess on certain types of food.  I went 9 months eating only lentil soup..breakfast, lunch and dinner. Campbell's Savory Lentil.  I only stopped because the stores in CA stopped selling it until I found out that I could order it from Campbell's in Camden, NJ.  I did and they sent me 2 cases and all the cans were dented and thrashed and it broke my heart but I can't eat food from a dented can.  (I know, dented is fine..it is bulging cans that are bad but still...)  I will find a food I like and eat it everyday for months until I stumble on the next favorite.  Right now it is Nutrisystem Tacos.  I love them.  I scrape the pan that I cook the meat in and I lick every speck of the stuff off of my plate.

5.  I can say the alphabet backwards.

6.  I love to sleep in the car.  If we have to drive anywhere longer than 15 minutes or so, I want to sleep and I will...if Dan is driving, of course.   I Love it.  Drives him crazy.

7.  I hate crickets more than any bug or rodent.  I would rather have rats than crickets.  When I was in the 5th grade we moved back to Riverside from Santa Maria and we lived in a rented house for 6 months.  I call it "The Cricket House".  They were everywhere.  The most horrible thing was at night we would hear them chirping and moving in the light fixtures on the ceiling.  The image burned into my memory is looking up in the kitchen where there was florescent lights with the long rectangular shape cover that was cloudy but you could still see through it enough to see the bodies of all the crickets that were up there dead or soon to be dead or feasting on the dead... Ick.  I have chills up my spine thinking about it. 

I am going to tag Brandi M at http://loveisaverb.wordpress.com.  She is an AWESOME Mom and a great baker and all around great gal.  I pick you Brandi!

Gracie 1 Mom & Bath 0

I am quickly dreading , completely loathing and down right despising bath time.  It has become the hardest part of my day.  Gracie goes dirty some nights because I just can't take another screaming fit at bath time.  I will take a wipey and clean the places that are seen so it does not look like she is dirty but I tell you, the kid reeks and I just pretend it is the dog that smells, not my child.  So, no bath last night since we were at my Mom's bday party and I did not want Gracie's true colors to ruin the happy scene.  I sucked it up and gave her a bath this morning.  It is really the hair washing that is a problem.  She does not like water on her head and in her eyes, etc.  Even when I promise that it will not get anywhere near her face, she does not trust me and freaks out.  In trying to decide how to minimize my agony, I had an idea and thought I would try something new.  I will put swim goggles on her (or gobbles as Gracie likes to call them) and she will love the change, think she is swimming, avoid water in her eyes, love me forever and not cause another days worry.....yeah, not what happened.  She just hated it the same, threw her fit and now looked goofy doing it.

I <3 The Biggest Loser!

The Biggest Loser is by far my favorite show of all time.  Dancing with The Stars...Lame.  American Idol...Whatever.  Flavor of Love...Pass.  The Biggest Loser is amazing.  If Larissa Diaz gets on it next season, she will be fulfilling a dream of mine and I will be living every moment with her from a distance and months after it actually happened but no matter.  The Couples Finale was last night.  I don't usually get to watch it on Tuesdays since I am in a Relational Development group at church.  It has become my Wednesday morning treat.  But last night the dog was sick so I did not go to RD.  It was not planned, obviously, and I enjoy RD but it was a special treat to get to watch it last night while picking up sick doggie poop, analyzing it for possible parasites and then putting it in the fridge for the Vet.  The best part of it all is that a woman finally won.  This dinky little girl beat out all of the big cocky guys...it was AWESOME!  If my computer made little hearts or if I knew how to download them they would be strewn about my page. 

Democrat For A Day

Dan and I officially became Democrats on Sunday.  It was easy, painless and for a great cause.  Check it out.  I thought I would feel different, less...conservative and uptight.  But nothing.  No more or less hope for this country's future.  No desire to meet and mingle with celebrities or play the sax.  Nothing.  Well, maybe a little more rebellious.  The change seemed so easy...maybe I'll get a tattoo. 

You Stop By Stopping

Gracie is tough.  She is 2 years and 9 ½ months old so what do I expect..right?  PerryAnn was tough, I am sure of it but it has been 12 years since she was 2 so like the horrific pains of labor...you forget.  Gracie hates her baths now and screams to have her hair washed. She has soo much curly hair and it gets really ratty so I do the shampoo and then conditioner routine so by the time we are rinsing for the second time, she is insane.  Then we have to comb it.  This is generally where I yell for Dan to talk me down off of the ledge. Yesterday I caught myself pleading with her to stop.  I told her that “You stop by stopping!  That is all you do..you just stop!”  The funny thing here is that I am realizing that as much as I deny it, I am becoming like the adult influences that were in my life as a child. 

Mrs. Hostetler was my 10^th grade Lit teacher.  She was a very thin woman and always seemed to be in a constant state of fear.  My best friend Felicia called her “Exoskeleton” because she was so thin and pale and it looked like her bones were on the outside of her body.  Terrible, I know, but we were 15.  (Sidebar: I went to Notre Dame and though we were supposed to be the good “Catholic” kids, my class in general was pretty tough.   Notre Dame become the school that all the kids that got kicked out of other schools went to because their parents thought it would staighten them out. Our Religion teacher Mr. Summerfield told us that we all had the devil in us and I think it may have given everyone a license to act accordingly.)  Mrs. Hostetler was a great teacher, actually, one of my favorites.  I discovered Wuthering Heights and The Heart of Darkness in her class.  She allowed us to memorize Shakespeare by putting the words to a heavy metal Queensryche song.  She was great but had no control over us.  The class destroyed any spirit the poor woman had left in her and one day she yelled at us to “Stop” and then continued with “You stop by stopping!  That is all you do..you just stop!”   It made no sense to me at the time and appeared to be her last grasp at an attempt for control.  She had nothing left.  And we never stopped when she said it.  We used her comment as a joke when one of our friends needed to stop doing ..whatever.  "You stop by stopping" ...blahhahahah.  Why or how that came back to me yesterday and why or how I thought that would work any better on a 2 year old than it did on a bunch of teenagers..I am not sure.  I suppose at that moment it was my last grasp at control.  Geez, I have a long road ahead of me if that is what I pulled out of my parenting arsenal. 

For Everything Else, There's Dad.

Spending the morning at the park with Dad...Fun.

Going to Carl's Junior for lunch with Dad...Great.

Flying kites in the front yard with Dad...The Best.

Not worrying about what all that fun did to the cute hairdo Mom gave you ...Priceless.

That's My Girl

This may be one of my favorite pictures of PerryAnn because it is so her.  A nonconformist, marches to her own drummer, creative, bohemian and not afraid of what anyone is going to say because it doesn't matter.  They made her wear a dress but it was cold.  So what do you do?  You put on leggings and striped socks and Vans and continue to tour Washington DC.  That's what you do. 

The Dog Poop House

Not mine…though our new member of the family is defecating for the world record and it made me think about an appraisal I did in 2003.  I even fired up my old Dell laptop with the A drive so I could get these pictures off of the 3 ¼ floppy disk that we used when digital cameras were the new thing.

As an Appraiser, I have seen it all.  Well, not all.  I have not seen a dead body but I have seen dead animals, people doing “things” in vacant homes, rats, bugs, and incredible filth. I have stepped through a rotting deck into a muddy cesspool underneath in my good shoes. I’ve have muddy animals jump on me and ruin my just dry cleaned pants. I've been bit by a dog and had a snake crawl over my open toes shoes. I had a locust jump onto my overly hair sprayed hair and get stuck. I measured a bedroom with a sleeping guy in it because he did not want to get up.  I was greeted at one appraisal by a sweat dripping guy who was out of breath and when I got inside he had a porno blaring.  I even had a homeowner who insisted that I “bond” with his German Shepherd, Louie, by allowing the dog to slobber all over me and leave bits of his lunch or whatever funk he had going on in his mouth on my hand. I have stepped in dog poop that was so horrible that I threw my shoes away and went home barefoot. But nothing will ever compare to The Dog Poop House. 

The homeowner was a nice old lady that worked for IEHP children’s health care. She had a nice home in Orangecrest and nothing to point to the horror that was behind that front door. It was a smell that I had never smelled before and have not smelled since. The smell of death.  I can conjure up the smell in my mind if I think about it and make myself sort of gag, it was so horrid. Usually I would carry a fabric softener sheet with me and tuck it into my sleeve if I thought there was going to be a smell problem but who would have even thought that I would have needed a safety net in that neighborhood. As I headed upstairs this is what I saw:

My first thought was that it was blood and that she was psycho and going to kill me.  I figured that the stench was most likely the rotting corpses of the Plumber and the Fed Ex guy and I was next.  I said a prayer, asked God for forgiveness and if there was anyway my life could be spared, that would be just great.  Then as I looked closer I saw petrified poop decomposing on some of the spots.  (if you look at the first picture in the upper left you can see the poop) I went into her bedroom and there was more of the same.  Right up against her bed, she had to walk on it to get to her bathroom.  I turned around and left.  I did not even finish measuring the upstairs or checking the other rooms.  The funny thing about it is that she never said anything about it to me.  Most homeowners make excuses for the way they live or try and play it off like the filth is new and that the housekeeper did not make it that week..riiiiight. She said nothing.  Do we get so used to our “crap” that we really don’t recognize how bad it is? My house gets bad, but I still know that I am cleaner than 98% of the population because I have seen how people live.   I need to find the pictures of The Cobb Web House. Stay tuned.

The Dan Cam

I thought that I had deleted this but just found it this morning.  We had just bought a movie software so I played with it and made Dan this video.  Now that I have a platform to exploit, I mean share my husband's many talents and gifts, how could I deprive you all of this tid bit of good times.   Dan Zimbardi starring in "The Worm".  Enjoy.

Puppy For Sale...CHEAP!

Just kidding. .. We won't charge you anything.   No, just kidding...We'll pay you!   Is it possible that an 8 week old puppy can pee and poop 3 times their own weight, 20-30 times a day and night and only when they are inside not out?  I am preparing to make my "Never Again" proclamation!  Pray for us!