The real fun is just beginning

i have three boys, aged 12-16. I never wished i had girls instead of boys. In fact, i consider myself very fortunate to have three sons. But, ...

Teen-aged boys are not the same as little boys. These kids like that activity called parkour. Basically what it is, is you take a physical stunt, like leaping from one precarious point to another, determine what your farthest successful jump would be, and then find a situation where the distance you need to jump is about 4 inches further. And you have to do it high up enough so that if you didn't quite make it, at least one bone will break when you hit the ground. (Or at least that's what it looks like to me, the mother.)

Or how about this fun activity that one of my boys did the other night: eat a slice of habanero pepper, just to see how hot a famously hot hot pepper is... Perhaps it is just as well that i didn't think to grab my camera and photograph the result. But a few words will fill in that missing picture for you: all fours, saliva streaming from nose and mouth, screaming. It only lasted for fifteen or twenty minutes and then it was mercifully over. And a few days later, when asked if he would ever do it again, i discovered that that sort of agony has a price. And that price is somewhere between $30 and $40. Boys. Gotta love 'em.

Area Man Creates Best Cookie Ever

My husband likes to make cookies. He recently took the recipe for chocolate chip cookies from the back of the package of Hershey's semisweet chocolate chips and added his own inspired touches and came up with The Best Cookie Ever. Try this, and if you have a better recipe, send it, and we'll bake it up and see if we are wrong and you are right. Now that's good research!

So you take the recipe off the chips pkg., and you add about a teaspoon of Mapleine and a couple of heaping Tablespoons of peanut butter. The result is a soft, melt-in-your-mouth cookie, with a complex and delicious flavour.

Stuff Happens

I did it again. I let the kiln heat up to anneal my beads, and i went and did something else, and before i remembered it again i got a little bit of hell going on in my workshop. These are some very melted, slightly charred, BirthBones glommed on to the bottom of my kiln. I've been at a bit of a loss as to how to remove them, plus i was bummed out, so i think it has been at least 3 weeks since i've made a bead. But i've been distracted by many other issues, too. Perhaps some people like to do beads to relax, but i think i look at it as more of a job now. Maybe that's what happens when you try to make something you love into a career. Family-related worries, two part time jobs, visitors, home repairs,... I'm a little relieved to be able to put at least one thing on the back burner for a bit.

And after a very uncharacteristic (for New Mexico) fortnight of dark, cool, gloomy, damp weather, the sun has returned and it has been gorgeous. And the cool dampness has made everything so green and lush! I am a weeder by personality. Picky, picky. It is a great feeling to pull a big weed up by the roots. I do as much of that as i can after a rainy spell. :-)

i lol'ed

You know how sometimes you just have to google "baby guinea pig" images? (I just wanted to see something really sweet.) I laughed a bit when i saw this sparky little mug, but i also checked out a photo of a cooked guinea pig --people eat them in their natural stomping gounds. It didn't shock me, but the person who posted the photo, along side a live, pet guinea pig photo, took some real aggressive heat from his readers. But i think that person's blog is aimed at getting a rise out of folks.

Which made me wonder what other people do with their blogs. There's a handy "next blog" button on blogspot's header, and i'm under the impression that it randomly takes you to another blog. When i tried it before, it took me to several foreign language blogs. This evening the selection of blogs it showed me had an eerie trend of goats and homeschooler subject matter. A christian homeschooled rural teenager photographs herself daily as a model and describes what she's wearing (turquoise peasant blouse from GoodWill, flower print tiered skirt from GoodWill) and how she's styled her hair (ponytail). She looks and sounds happy, but surely she's dreaming about being somewhere else. Then there was a goat farm's blog, with close up photos of the south end of a goat, ostensibly to give the readers a really good look at Tirzah's udder... This blog had dreamy celtic music playing. It didn't really help. Then there was a blog that appeared to be about ocelots, but the entries were all about "the goat" learning song lyrics, or "the goat" teaching somebody about apostrophes... i should have had a closer look at that one, but there were no visuals so it didn't hold me. And the last blog that randomly came forth was by a homeschooling, living-off-the-land family, who apparently are getting into poultry in a big way with tons of pictures and videos of their chicks.

So i'm adding a chick pic and a goat butt since that's what everyone else is blogging. Oh, and for good measure: plaid shirt and track pants (thrift shop), police academy t-shirt (BIL), loose hair. Hey, i think i'm really getting the hang of this blogging thing! ;-)