Besties

This is my 100th post.

(Insert balloons and noisemakers and streamers here.)

Yay!

I've been saving this post for a little while now, letting an idea form. I was going to write a list (you know how I love lists) of one hundred random thoughts or things about me.

But today I feel inspired to write about a different topic: my very best friend in the whole entire world. (After my husband, of course.) Fear not. This, too, shall take the form of a list.

• She encourages my Coca Cola addiction.
• She understands when there are days when the lives of my children hang in the balance of good behavior and anti-depressants.
• She doesn't murder her children in a fit of motherly rage because she knows that that would set a precedent too hard not to follow.
• I once brought home a book for my kids entitled "The Day My Parents Ruined My Life" and she dryly commented "I'm pretty sure it would be hard for me to pick just one day."
• When life kicks her in the face and then rubs mud into it, she puts on her big girl panties and deals with it.
• She knows God and loves him.
• She babysits for me. A lot.
• She loves my children.
• She has fridge rights.
• She hangs out with me when I sew.
• She has seen me in my undies and didn't laugh.
• Her pet name for me is Biz-natch.
• She inappropriately invades my personal space because even though I have a huge personal bubble, she know that she's the only one who can do that and make me laugh.
• We could spend hours waxing eloquent about Gerard Butler's various attributes.
• She makes fun of me when I mispronounce words.
• She makes fun of me when I do pretty much anything.
• I can share my deepest, darkest secrets with her and she will still love me.
• We will later laugh about my deepest, darkest secrets.
• She helps me understand who I am and what I'm doing.
• She believes in me.
• She encourages my chocolate addiction.
• She doesn't wait for me to answer her knock. She knocks and then waltzes right in. That waltz always makes me happy inside.
• She knows that I'm a sucker for all kinds of animals and knows the right time to be supportive and the right time to call me an animal retard.
• She is writing a book and I think that is awesome.
  

I love her. I really do.

A Little Help, Please

I have a dilemma. I've been thinking about his for quite some time now, and I'll admit, I'm at my wits' end.

My daughter refuses to clean her room, and, if ever it does get clean, it is messy again within hours. What's a mom to do?

A friend and I talked about this the other day and discussed how it seems like such a ridiculous thing to waste hours and hours arguing about. I remember many occasions as a child that my mother and I argued about the state of my room. I remember purposely dragging my feet because I didn't want to clean my room.

Now I'm the mom and I'm not ashamed to say that these room-cleaning arguments are kicking my trash!

If I encourage Noel to clean her room and keep it this way, there are some positive side effects.

• A clean room = less broken and lost toys.
• A sense of pride and accomplishment.
• She learns good stewardship.
• The seeds of good housekeeping (handy for when she's a grown-up with her own house) are planted.
• Less funky odor emanating from her room. (Seriously.)
• She learns that it's important to obey your parents, even when you don't agree with them.
• She learns that some things in life are no fun and that 's it's best to dive in and be done with them.
• Things are easier to find, there are less already-running-late instances of "Where is my other shoe?"
• She learns responsibility.

I can't think of many negative aspects of the argument of her keeping her room clean, but here are the few I can think of.

• It's her room, if she wants to live like a slob so be it.
• All of the arguing is killing me.

What would you do? Really. I need some feedback here, because I don't know how much longer I can keep this up.

Thanks in advance, bloggy friends.

Berry Pickers

On the way home from church Sunday, Mike said something that reminded what a boy's boy he is.

There is an elk ranch on the way to our house, and some of the bulls are getting some really impressive antlers.

As we drove by, I commented on the huge rack of the bull closest to the road.

Mike asked me what I meant when I said rack. I answered by putting my fingers above my head and wiggling them and saying "His antlers. They're huge!" Then I laughed at myself for wiggling my fingers. I said "Wouldn't it be funny if they could really wiggle their antlers like that?"

Mike was immediately intrigued. "Yeah, and then they could reach out with their antlers and strangle their enemies!"

I laughed and said "That is so like you, to find the weapons-related angle to any subject we talk about."

He was silent for a minute then responded with this zinger:

"Well, I guess they could use them to pick berries."

Isn't that a great mental image?

I Miss You

Once again, I find myself without a home computer. Morgan has a laptop that I'm able to use but it feels weird to me and I haven't yet learned how to upload pictures onto it.

I miss blogging. Blogging makes me happy.

I have got to get a new desktop.

My Kids Are Awesome

When we moved into this house last summer, there was an overabundance of cats running around the place so we had to, um, take care of some of them. At first, I didn't want Mike and Noel to watch Morgan shoot, I mean, take care of the cats because they're pretty tender-hearted when it comes to animals. It turned out that they had kind of a morbid fascination with watching the animals get shot and then subsequently die. There was one in particular that didn't die quickly. It flopped around for a bit before Morgan had to finish it off.

Noel once complained that Morgan took Mike cat hunting but she didn't get to go, so he said that he thought that she liked cats and wouldn't like to watch them get shot.

She replied that she liked tame cats, not wild cats. When he asked how she could tell the difference between tame cats and wild cats, she replied, "When you shoot wild cats, they flop all over, like this" and demonstrated full-body flopping.

Now we like to joke that if you need to figure out if an animal is wild or tame, you just shoot it.

We left a few cats alive for mouse control. One of the cats was a cute little Siamese. Her leg had been shot and eventually fell off, so we call her Lucky or Stumpy. The irony of the whole situation is that now, a year later, Stumpy is the only surviving cat. The rest have been picked off by various predators.

~

Mike has been shooting random objects around our yard lately with the BB gun. A couple of days ago he told me about a wasp nest that he shot. As an afterthought, he added that it was next to a window in the garage and that he had accidentally shot the window and broken some of the glass. When he saw the look on my face he asked, "Is shooting glass bad?"

In his defense, the window was already broken and I think that he assumed that since it was already broken there was no harm in breaking it more. This prompted me to review with him what is okay to shoot and what he should avoid shooting. Since we rent a house on a cattle feed lot, there are a lot of things that are no-nos. Don't shoot windows, buildings or tractors. Don't shoot near windows, buildings or tractors. Don't shoot the cows. Don't shoot any piece of farm equipment.

This led to questions of "What can I shoot?"

I finally ended the talk with a cautionary "Just don't shoot anything that belongs to Joe or Kerry."

After a moment of silence, Mike said "Well, who does Stumpy belong to?"

What a goober. He wasn't planning on shooting the cat, he assured me. He just wondered who she belonged to.

~

In the vein of shooting things, I was inside the other day when I heard a shriek of "dragonflies!" from outside. Mike came in and asked me to come outside with him. Sure enough, there were dragonflies everywhere, and they were huge.

Mike's reaction?

"You could shoot those with a BB gun!"

He is such a boy's boy.

~

I generally do not buy snack cakes because I think that they are garbage. My mom bought some Ding Dongs and sent them home with me because, and I quote, if she kept them she would be "as big as a cow."

I brought them home and put them on the counter. Some time later, Noel came out of her room to ask her dad if she could have a doofus.

"A what?"

"You know, a doofus."

It took him a few minutes to understand that she meant a Ding Dong. She knew it was one of those term-of-endearment words that I am always calling my kids.

A Riddle

What are yellow...


...and pink...


...and pink and yellow...


...and blue and yellow...


...and apparently taste appalling to goats?


Four o' clocks and bush morning glories.

Next year I will buy seeds in bulk.

Guess What!

Either someone stole my social security number or someone at a golf course in Boise transposed some numbers.

I vote for number two.

Today I have spent literally hours on the phone with the nice people at the Social Security office, the nice people at the Department of Health and Welfare and Troy, the friendly second or third in command (depending on who is working that day) at the above-mentioned golf course.

I miss my life.

So far, everyone seems to think that it is just a typographical error but I won't know for sure until I speak with the owner of the golf course and who knows when that will happen because, well, he owns a golf course. He comes and goes as he pleases.

*please call soon, please call soon, please call soon*

Actually, a very small part of me hopes that someone stole my identity and then tried to get credit using that number.

HA! The joke is on you!

In addition, several thousand dollars of wages have gone into my social security retirement account thanks to this situation. Right now, I'm printing out six twenty-plus credit reports. We haven't checked them since we filed our bankruptcy two years ago because we figured (with just cause) that if anyone wanted to steal our identities, they could have them.

*sigh* Now I need my social security number back so I can get a loan to pay for all the ink and paper that printing these credit reports is requiring.