CUBS WIN! CUBS WIN!

Good morning ladies! Just had to throw that out there as they were down 4-3 and I was watching a food network program about a birthday cake decorating competition when Jack came running in saying the loaded the bases with no outs in the bottom of the 8th. The catcher gets up and is down in the count with one strike left, whams it and makes a grand slam home run. We ended up with one more run and they have an excellent closer that nailed the coffin shut on the Cubs biggest rival, St Louis Cards. They actually swept the series 3 games to 0. It is quite cool this morning (Jack even got locked out going to the trash can when the key only storm door slammed behind him and locked) so guess who had to come down out of my warm bed to let him back in???

Gloria: My husband is a big military history buff (think it is that prior experience? ) and just yesterday morning he watched for the bazillionth time on the history channel I think some movie about WWII where Tom Selleck played Eisenhower and it was about the Normandy invasion. Jack was active duty towards the end of the Vietmam War, but being sea going wasn't very involved. His ship was the one where the pilots got shot down over Libya, he was also on board when the Marine barracks at Haifa Israel were bombed, then again when they went to "discourage" Idi Amin. Kids grow up so very fast. My little guy reads, does math, etc and I think it is almost yesterday he was not even walking. Sounds like you have a bundle of dgkids all around the same age.

Jean: Glad you had a nice time at the old home church. Sometimes it is fun just to go back for a little while and visit. We haven't seen our old church friends in Indiana in over a year so we should probably try and get together for dinner when we are up there maybe in Sept.

I should be getting T's easter basket today and I am waiting for some curtains from Penneys for my dining room then some pet products including some stairs for my chicken little dog so he can get up on our new bed. I am hoping the shampoo and stuff I bought will help with his itching. I think he has just a tad of allergies as I know neither of them has fleas. The shampoo is oatmeal, banana, honey and I guess the smell is wonderful. I also got some stuff from the same people to put in his coat to make it shine and remove odor so he smells good between groomings and it is like cinnamon, spice smells so he should just be smellin' real nice! I think I am going to start taking it to the groomers for them to use instead of what they use because I think it dries out his coat. I found out that dog shampoos that suds (most of them do) are what causes their coats to dry out so wanted to try this stuff. It is called Royal Treatment and is made by a family that are actually royalty of some kind (their name sounds Italian) and they make people shampoos and one of the sons decided to start formulating the same stuff for pets. You get it on QVC and the reviews all rave about it so when they had this special deal, thought I would try it.

Well, guess I better get started for the day. Lots to do as always.

Faye

Good morning ladies! It is already in the 60's this morning so I expect a beautiful day. When it is warm, I go out and sit on the deck and read awhile, but this year the sap has been terrible from our tree. It is on everything and makes it all so sticky. I have been washing the patio furniture almost everyday and I noticed even the garbage can is sticky with sap. I know the farmers have something to say about that, but I know little or nothing about horticulture.

Jean: I do get catalogues, but not a huge number of them. I know I get an LL Bean catalogue and I only ordered from them once several years ago. I get regular Penney's sales catalogues, regular ones from Harry and David and one here and there that I just automatically toss in the trash. I like looking through them so it doesn't bother me. I finally got T's basket last night at almost 9 PM! I think it is ridiculous I have to sit and wait for him that late. I have several things coming today so I hope it isn't as late as it was last night because I usually go upstairs early and watch tv while Jack is in his office.

Soccer practice was sure a lot warmer last evening. One of the little girls was in the goal and they were practicing kicking into the goal and another little girl whalloped the ball and hit the goaly smack in the face. I can't believe she didn't get a nosebleed. The little one that kicked the ball was more upset than the one that got hit. With dd being his coach, T gets upset easier than usual I noticed. Last practice momentum carried him and he couldn't stop himself and kicked out when the goaly had leaned down to pick it up so she started to remind him and he broke down. He just sobbed and sobbed like she had screamed at him. I felt so sorry for him.

I guess I better hit the bricks and get started this morning. Everyone have a great day!

Faye

Good morning gals! It is nice and warm here, but it looks like we might get a little rain from the clouds, but we aren't supposed to so who knows? I know it is supposed to be upper 70's and low 80's all week into next week with sun so it will be nice Easter.

I ordered the food yesterday for Easter, but boy was that ham expensive. My dd is going to pay part of it though and it doesn't really matter. I still have to cook the ham (I thought it was precooked) and I have to warm up the other food, but it is better than have to make it all. I can at least enjoy everyone instead of slaving in the kitchen.

Jean: Sounds like that boy doesn't really want to be in school at all, does it? It doesn't seem to bother kids nowadays to not do their work, but it would have driven me nuts even if I didn't understand it.

I am washing dining room curtains and rehanging them this morning and guess I will tackle the upstairs. I am leaving downstairs until Friday. We are going to be so busy on Saturday with soccer, picking up the eggs to hide from Kelly, picking up the Easter food and want to re shampoo the dining room rug that I won't have time to clean down here.

I am getting off caffeine again and I not only have a headache, I am so nauseous this time. I know that stuff is just not good for you, but it sure draws you in. Unless you have water, you usually have to order something with caffeine when you are in a restaurant. Ahh well, this to shall pass as they say. I figure I will be ok around Friday.

Not much going on in my world. I got the dog's new shampoo and stuff last night and am going to try and give him a bath today if I can find the time. The stuff is honey, banana oatmeal and smells pretty darn good. It is supposed to moisturize their coats better than regular dog shampoo.

Well, I need to get going as I have a lot I want to get done today!

Have a good day today and keep !

Faye

Good morning ladies. Must be warm out at the ac has been on this morning already and it is set for like 75 or so. It sure was beautiful yesterday. I didn't get to sit outside though and I kind of missed it. I am trying to get things done for Easter.

I got the blasted curtains done and put up. I haven't decided whether I like the new ones or not, but I am keeping them anyway. At least all my curtains are now clean as I did most of them right before my sister got here.

I finished the upstairs and will tackle some of the downstairs today, but want to leave the bulk of it for Friday so the house is nice and clean for Sunday with just a quick spruce up before the kids come. They will be here early, around 11 AM for the scavenger hunt so I will not have a lot of time since I have to bake the darn ham and I was expecting only to warm it up. Oh well, at least everything is prepared and only has to be warmed.

First soccer game of the season is on Saturday and I hope they can start with a win. Thomas has yet to be on a team that wins a game. They may have won one, but I am not sure about that. Anyway, the current team seems to be in good shape and Kelly is doing a good job. They are the Purple Zebras (by vote of the team.) I suggested Purple PeopleEaters, but that went over everyone's head (I don't think his other grandma heard me) I guess because they were too young to know about the song. I thought it was a great name, but I was ignored! I even thought about getting a recording of the song and bringing my dvd/cassette/radio and everytime they scored playing it as loud as it would go sort of like teams do with their school song. Well, everyone ignores great minds!

Jean: I am glad all your outside cats are now safe from the jerk next door. I know you enjoyed them, but at least he can't hurt them now, they have more of a chance at having a good life. I saw an advertisement on tv about the Jello eggs and they looked like they could be fun for the kids. I actually LIKE Jello, but I bypass, yellow, green and orange! My grandma used to make carrot salad with those flavors, UGH! I only like fruit or marshmallows in my Jello. My favorite was a two layered desert with Jello as one layer and a Jello mixture as another layer and it had both fruit and marshmallows in it.

I forgot to get meat out of the freezer yesterday and so we had takeout Olive Garden last night. I like lots of olives and tomato in my salad and asked for extra and they sent a whole carton full and since Jack likes neither I had them all to myself! Unfortunately, my favorite is Chicken Alfredo and whoo is that high in fat.

I guess I better go girls. I need to check and see about an order for a computer book for Jack I made with Amazon. They are having trouble verifying some info on my credit card and I resubmitted and want to check to see if it went through and if not, I am going to cancel and start all over. I think I may have typed the wrong expiration date, but when you try and put it back in again, that is not one of the things you have to enter so this may be one of those round and round things!

Have a good day ladies

Faye

Good morning gals! It is going to be a busy day here today! Jack has the day off and I am getting him to redo the dining room carpet as it is still dog smelly and I can't stand it. Jack doesn't notice and I would bet most people don't but to me it is awful so we are going to reshampoo it. I also have a couple cleaning chores on tap, we are going to Lowes and pick out paint for Jack's office as he is tired of the awful red and white in his room and he told me he is taking me to lunch as my dd can't make it today. Tomorrow I am going to finish up with the mopping after the soccer game and picking up the food for Sunday and I am going to stick the ham in the oven and get it cooked so all I have to do on Sunday is warm it up.

Jean: We used to have great assemblies when I was a kid and I don't know how much of that they do anymore. Kids are so rowdy and hard to keep in their seats nowadays unless you have someone that will really keep their attention. I bet the kids had fun with the hypnotist.

I got my book mess all figured out, I just went in and put Jack's bank card # instead of mine with the expiration date. Now, here is the funny part. We have a computer program that you can burn cd's and dvd's and make video cd's etc. We started having trouble with our burner that is in the hard drive and Jack was going to uninstall and re-install the program and he couldn't find the disk anywhere. I even helped him look as he is a peruse the room and give up MAN! Anyway, he re-ordered the thing through Ebay, I then ordered the book that goes with it, which is what the Amazon mess was. Yesterday, the program came and it had the SAME book I ordered as part of the order (which when he ordered it on Ebay the first time all he got was the disc) and they had already shipped the book so I couldn't cancel! Now here is the good part. He went upstairs last night and came back down with the other program disc in his hand! UGH! He had been having trouble with his laptop getting too hot so he stuck about 3 cases under the back of it to lift it up to release the heat and one of them was this NERO program! So now we have two programs and two books!

Everyone have a great day today!

Faye

Good morning gals! I am still pretty sleepy, but Jack woke up and tried to tiptoe downstairs and I heard him anyway. He is gearing up to a sinus infection so I am trying to help him feel better. I gave him some OTC meds and he has his prescription nasal spray that he used so I hope he will feel better. He always lets things go until they become serious. I have been asking him for days if he needed to go to the doctor or wanted some meds and he always said no he was ok! MEN!

Jean: Hope you have a nice quiet Easter! Of course we will have the little whirlwind here so it should be fun. When we have a family gathering like Thanksgiving, we cook the turkey, strip it off the bone and pour the juices over it to keep it moist then just reheat it. It works wonderfully that way. We have been doing that for several years now. On top of the two program thing, we found out he didn't need to reorder it in the first place! I tried to tell him I thought it was the cd burner in the hard drive and NOT the program as it worked fine in the burner we have that is external, but they don't listen to women because how could we possibly know more. Well, yesterday he tried to burn something in the internal drive and it wouldn't work! We had the program already in the hard drive so we didn't have to have another one right away, but he went and ordered it (otherwise there would have been a fight about it!) I think he was irritated with me yesterday because the printer/fax/scanner wouldn't work that is attached to my computer. He messed around getting more and more frustrated and mad and said he would have to work on it today and stormed upstairs. I sat down, clicked on my HP director ICON and followed some instructions, unblocked it (why it was blocked I don't know) and it worked FINE! On top of that he said the scanner wasn't working and I ask him why he was using it from the scanner and not through the computer and showed him how to do it and it worked so I probably disgruntled him somewhat! What can I say, I live to serve.....

Well, he just asked me if I was writing a novel, so I guess I better go and turn out the kitchen light so he can rest.

have a wonderful holiday!

Faye

HAPPY EASTER TO MY FAVORITE MAGNOLIAS!


THE PURPLE ZEBRAS WON 4-1!

I am so mad this morning I could spit nails! Every morning I sit at the computer and balance my checkbook and our credit cards. I am a hawk about them. When I ordered the food from the ham place, they said they couldn't give me a price on the ham until the day I picked it up because I am then charged that day's "market price." I have never heard of such a thing, but anyway, I called and talked to a manager (that was this last Tuesday) and he gave me that day's market price in exchange for the ham not being cooked first (I think they are precooked but not heated up) We went yesterday and paid for it all and Jack signed the credit card slip, which was actually our copy that we kept and that they had already run through at 6:44 that morning for $146.23, which was my quoted price. I was doing my banking stuff this morning (actually just that credit card to see if it have been charged) and they had a pending charge of $175.48 from Holiday Ham!!!! Boy, Monday I am going to be doing some reaming to that manager. I did contact the credit card company and gave them all the information and asked them what is going on as I have a machine receipt that says the amount I paid. I noticed that they gave me the restaurant copy though so who knows what those idiots did. They have a bunch of high school kids that work in there and yesterday we stood for 5 minutes waiting to pick up our order with no patrons at the other register where you order single meal type stuff and the kids just jabbering away at each other.

Jean: We spent over $200 for the drawer pulls and handles in my kitchen. I have 22 knobs and 10 drawer pulls. We got them at Lowes and I had looked all over for something that was just right and found these and begged Jack to buy them. They are ceramic so I guess that is why they were so expensive, I don't know. It seems kind of ridiculous to spend that money I guess, but we have painted white cabinets and light blue walls and these were white knobs with blue centers that almost match the paint color and the hadnleds are the blue ceramic and brass. Everything in this house is old and I couldn't afford to replace the countertops and the cabinets so I did the next best thing to try and spruce them up. Jack and I have been going 3 rounds about his office. Here is the deal with that. First off, he has a HUGE L shaped desk in there (which he had to have and we spent like $350 for when we moved in) and a large metal filing cabinet. He was all excited on Friday about going to the store to look at paint, we get there and he is worse than some picky old woman. First off, he has TERRIBLE taste in color and picked out this awful lemon yellow color and wanted to pair it with this lime green color. Jean, it was disgusting, but it is his office. Let me remind you we call his office the "blood" room because he had to have his office painted like Indiana University, which is Crimson and Cream. I finally wiggled him into picking some colors, but not before I blew my stack in the store. It got worse. He wants plantation shutters for his windows instead of ANY kind of blinds or curtains. He also wants just one shutter over each window not a pair. He found what he liked at Lowes, but it was faux wood and he hated it and they didn't carry wood. We had another row about that when we got home because I tried to tell him it would cost at least $800 for the two windows to have wood shutters if the stupid faux wood ones in his size were like $300 apiece. I tried to talk him into getting wood blinds and then when we could afford it, putting the wood blinds in the spare bedroom, which has the same size windows and he would have none of it. Boy we went round and round about it but I relented and said I would buy one shutter at a time to save money as the place I found on line was having a sale until the end of the month and we could at least save on one of them to the tune of about $150! He said ok, but then I talked to him about when he wanted to paint (I got smart and made him sit at American Traditions Virtual Painter website and find a color combination (with my guidance) that he liked as it "paints" a room in the colors you pick out so you can see what the two will look like. We settled on a date to start painting (we were going to break it up into trim one week and walls the next as the trim may have to have primer and coats or several coats because of the red) Anyhow, I asked him about dismantling his desk and using a long folding table for a couple weeks until we could get him the desk he wanted because the desk has to come out to paint as it is so huge. "I am NOT going to use a folding table for a desk..." and on and on until I blew a gasket and told him in not too polite terms to jump off a bridge that I wasn't helping at all he could do the whole darn thing by himself! They I did the unpardonable sin, I wouldn't speak to him. He cannot stand it when I don't speak to him. He follows me around trying to apologize or asking when I am going to talk to him or whatever. I let him stew for a couple hours then we "made" up, but the situation is far from solved and we will probably be at it again when the time comes to paint. One of the things is he wants the exact same desk he bought me for down here. It will look wonderful with new colors, but he isn't understanding we can't put together the new desk until the old one is out of the room as there is no room in there to even put the box, and he won't let me take apart the old one first to give to GoodWill because he won't have a desk to put his laptop on! Sheesh are men idiots or what?

I hope everyone has a great holiday. I need to get cracking as I want to clean up the patio and try and get the BBQ washed off because it is loaded with tree sap and one of T's eggs is inside the bbq and I don't want his clothes messed up trying to get the egg and next clue.

Faye PS: Here is Thomas at his first soccer game!

HAPPY EASTER
Just a short note to say Hi! We had a very nice day. DD#2 had the whole family over for a Lamb dinner and they surprised me with a cake. BD tomorrow but I would just as soon forget it. Getting too old to celebrate but it is good to be here and not the alternative. There were 14 of us and we got to take home most of the leftovers. DD and her family leave early tomorrow for Fr. Lauderdale....school vacation. Can't imagine she had us all over and she is leaving tomorrow. Sometimes she takes on too much. It was good to see all the gks all in one place.

Hope you both had a great day.... I will 'talk' to you all later. The Gangs of New York is just starting and I want to see it. Bye for now.

Gloria