Home sweet Home : A Fishy And Fishum Story

A month ago, Logan convinced me that we needed fish, so we bought an eight dollar plastic aquarium, and two gold fish type fish things. A week later, when changing the water out did not help the overwhelming fishy stench, we purchased two black shelled Mystery snails named Larry and Gary.

Fast forward two more water changes and three weeks and there was still no sign of a stink free tank. Saturday, Fishy , Fishum, Gary and Larry all moved into their brand new 1 gallon WITH PUMP AND FILTER home.

I am very hopeful that the water will be less stinky with the new pump and filtration system.


Anyone know how much water is supposed to go in this tank? Do we need to fill it so that the black thingy at the top that spits out water is covered?

Mini Movie Marathon

Tonight we will be having a mini movie marathon. We are going to finish watching the Rush hour set. We watched RH 1 the night before last. While watching RH2 and RH3, I will be folding this:
Except the pile will be bigger by then becuase the washer and dryer are working over time. I Generally wait until we need clean clothes before doing laundry becuase I HATE DOING LAUNDRY. So today, while cleaning the house, I washed eight billion loads, and have about 15464 million more loads to wash fold, and my personal hell - put away.

Revenge is stinky

Today I cleaned house. The whole house. I even washed the floors. The dishes are done, the counters and end tables are cleaned off, wiped or dusted. I even took out the vacuum and vacuumed the rug and the game systems.

And what did hubs do while all this was going on? he played A Mario game thing on the Wii. While I understand that He works all week and I do not, I was nasty ill, or out of the house this whole past week, so I neither had the time nor inclination to clean house. i feel that when stuff like this happens, he can spend an hour with me helping clean.

My revenge for him sitting on his ass is very simple. I left the master bathroom for him to clean (well, I did the toilets and sink) he has to change out the litter box, which includes wiping it out, and wash the floors AND shake the loose litter off the rug - outside, then vacuum it.

Fair trade, I figure, I hate doing the litter box!

Wii Fit Update 3

There has been no progress.

Well, actually, one bit, The last day I was on, my Wii Fit Age was 28, which is one year less than I actually am.

The Wii Fit Age is calculated by your current BMI and two Balance tested the game gives you. When I first started, my Wii Fit Age was 44. So a 28 is pretty good.

I am not losing weight very fast, but with only a week of days under my belt, I cannot expect much movement in that area. However, Since being struck down by the uterine pains from hell (I should patent that) I have not stepped on the Fit.

See, on the Fit, if you do not have much time, you can do a body test, which takes only seconds. It's just a weigh in and the two balance tests. But holy crap, I've been feeling crappy! Hubs was On the Fit and did an hour. When he got off he said "I did an hour. That's really good considering I did not feel like getting on!"

I kind of felt like he was making a dig at me becuase I have not been on it, and said so : "lets see you get on some weight benches and do fifty reps while a donkey kicks you in the nards, See if you feel like it then!"

He explained that he was proud of himself and was NOT trying to make me feel bad. I think though, It shows that I myself am feeling guilty for not going on the Fit!

And I WILL get back on, but not until I can stand up straight without feeling stabbing pains from both my back and front!

Week From Hell

This wee promises to be a hellish one. it started three days ago when I got my period. After not having it for four months, it is quite the shock to the system! Not only am I dealing with hellish cramping and back pain, but my skin is seriously suffering too.

I find my self reading (and clicking) link ads on face book that say best acne treatment and Clear Skin NOW!

I've been trying the tried and true creams and ointments in my bathroom, but all it is doing is drying out my skin. And really, dry, flaky skin is no better than oily pimple covered skin!

I am hoping that this will be over soon, all of it, not just the craptacular skin I have been dealing with.

Dammit

It's past one in the morning and I am still awake.

I do not want to be awake.

I am, in fact, very tired.

I just cannot seem to get comfortable enough to fall asleep.

I'm going to go play my S&W tickets on facebook.

And hope I will be tired enough to sleep when I am done.

Bad Light

I took a series of shots last night and not one of them turned out. I had to do some MAJOR tweaking in PhotoShop last night to get it too look like this :

The series turned out like this. All of them washed out, faded, absolutely ZERO life to them! And I am not quite sure what went wrong. I had the camera set to fast action/kids shot, optional flash (the flash did not go off) it was about an hour to sunset and the sun, what was left of it was to my back.




I thought fleetingly about going to the other side of the kids to take pictures, but the sun was still above the house to the back of me, and going around them meant a long walk across the deck, down the stairs and over to the sidewalk becuase my dad is pretty anal about his flowers LOLz.

So. Was there a better setting for me to use? I find that at the beach I also get washed out pictures. Should I be going into manual and playing with the wee buttons? Cus those confuse the crap out of me.

Wii Fit Update 2

Ok. Point in it;s favor/ I'm no longer horribly stiff in the morning anymore.

Point against it/ We have our first Wii Injury. I pulled a muscle in my lower abdomen doing the Push-Up-Sideways-Plank "Strength" Exercise.

While the soreness of my tummy will not stop me from Fitting today, It will prevent me from doing a lot of the exercises on the Fit. And that pisses me off. However, i do agree with hubs that by taking it easy for a bit my tum tum will heal better, faster, than if I continue to push.

***hubs thinks that Me taking a before picture and then an after picture would be beneficial, not to blog, but for me. I cannot bring myself to actually photograph me as I am right now lol, what do you think? Take it or no?***

Insert RANT here

I cannot be the only person who assumed that on her 20th birthday, when I finally got out of myu teens, that acne issues would STOP being a part of my life. For crying out loud! I am 29 years old and STILL buying acne cream! In fact, in five years, I will have a teen in the house and be buying double - some for him, some for me.

I have yet to figure out the trick to making my hair behave, and on the rare time I am able to tame it into submission, I have zits I need to cover and I end up ruining the look!

I'm so tired of it.

A Wish List

the other day Hubs and I hopped into the shower together. We needed to be somewhere and did not have a lot of time to get there. As fun as showing together sounds, Hubs and I do not do it that often simply becuase a lack of room! Oh and he hogs the shower faucet too!

The way our home is situated, there is nothing I feel ready to sacrifice to make room for a bigger shower - maybe one with multiple shower faucets, but eventually, most likely when this house is paid off, we will move to a new place.

There are only three things I will look for in a new home,

1. The Master Bath. I love my nightly baths, and absolutely require the bathtub be suitable for my needs. The one in this house is a super deep tub, I love it to death!

2. Patio doors off the kitchen to a deck or patio in the back yard. This is a must. I will not move into a home that does not have this ever again. EVER.

3. A finished laundry room. Walls, roof, flooring, The laundry MUST be finished. There are too many places for spiders to hide in an unfinished room.

I'm pretty sure that It won't be too hard to find a house that meets all of these requirements!

Not A Winner

I told my friend Sheila that the minute I won the lottery I would buy a plane ticket to head out to Missouri and see her.

I just checked Wednesdays numbers and as per usual - Not A Winner.

People talk about getting flight deals all the time, My sister in law went from Winnipeg(Manitoba) to Mexico (Not sure what part) for 99 dollars a ticket.

Hubs and I checked for flight deals to Mexico - his sister and husband are living there right now so we would not have to pay for a hotel, just the plane and food. But the cheapest WE found was seven hundred PLUS - for ONE person!

WTH?

Wii Fit Update

According to my Wii Fit trainer, the left side of my body is weaker than the right and my lower back is not as strong as it should be. I also have horrible posture, and overweight and have little to no arm strength.

This might discourage some people but, damn, its all true. I will NEVER have any sort of strength in my wrists, thats a given, they have been broken and re broken way to often, but it is very encouraging to me that this ..computer chip... knew just from the exercises we have done, where my weak points are. It makes me feel like using the Wii Fit to become a more healthy me is an actual possibility!

As for the bad posture, a huge part of that is how I sit at the computer. My laptop is on the kitchen counter and I sit at a kitchen barstool - a backless one, and am slouched the entire time I am here. I need to got to an office furniture store and find a chair that will give me the support I need.

And? I need to get off the computer every now and then!

Kids are entertaining!

My six year old just watched an infomercial type commercial for a product called ShamWow. He came to me and repeated basically word for word all the wonderful goodness that is The ShamWow. He is determined that we need it!

He does this with a lot of commercials. Not toys, surprisingly, its always an item that he thinks will help ME. I remember once him singing the whole Tide song when they fist came out with the tide spot remover. There was also this .. ball thing. You put your fabric softener in it and it will open at the appropriate time, and man, he bugged me for weeks that i needed that four our laundry!

He is a very sweet kid, I bet he could hear a commenrical for laughlin hotels and he would do his best to convince me and hubs we needed a romantic getaway!

A new me

In the past month I have cut out chips and cookies. I have stopped putting sugar in my coffee (I still use cream) and most importantly, I have added a daily walk. Usually, the walk is no more than ten minutes, but I keep a brisk pace, and it is EVERY day, not just one day a week like I used to do.

Now I plan on adding diet pills to the mix.

Although I have already lost three pounds, I want to lose a whole lot more - like thirty, and I do not want it to take me six years! I have been reading up on diet pills, the different ingredients, the risks and benefits, and maybe most importantly, I took a list of ingredients to my doctor and asked him if the pill was OK - he said yes.

I am fully aware that diet pills are not the answer to my weight problems, and that they work only as long as I take them, but with the added lifestyle changes, watching what I eat and adding exercises (I will be getting my Wii Fit on Tuesday), the diet pills will give me a boost in weight loss to encourage me to add more and more exercises and more carrots instead of granola bars covered in chocolate. Plus, most of my eating is becuase I am board and snacky, the diet pill I am looking at has appetite suppressants - as well as an energy booster, less food - more exercises, its win-win!

And I can only hope that when I get down to the weight I want to be (115-125 - which is still overweight for my height) I will be so ingrained in a healthier, more active lifestyle, that I will be able to continue to keep the weight off.

When my pills come - I had to order them online, I will keep every up to date on how it goes!

Napping in the pool

This afternoon I got into the pool and it was freezing. Perseverance is your friend when it comes to pool water, however, and within ten minutes I was very comfortable in the water. They boys ditched me shortly after that to play with water guns so I tossed one of their inflatable pool toys, a crab, in with me and laid belly down on it. Then? I fell asleep.

I was, and still am very confidant that sleeping on an inflatable crab is a safe way to pass a hot afternoon, but after commenting on a blog about how I had spent the afternoon, I was informed it was not safe at all.

So maybe I should go and get some cheap term life insurance, so that when I fall off the crab and somehow do not wake up from the freezing cold water going over my face and I die, the kids and hubs will be taken care of.

Or, better yet, Next time I nap in the pool I will use the inflatable elephant!

Pocket Money

Each of my three boys has a money jar. They earn money through tooth fairies, grandparents, and odd jobs I force them to do for quarters.

While we were setting up and filling the pool on Friday my eight year old was filling up the inflatable pool toys. He filled the first two fine, but when it came to his, he was distracted and overfilled it, popping it.

Because we had warned him approximately 400 times to watch how much air goes in, and he did not, we explained that he would be responsible for buying him self a new pool toy.

So last night each boy dig into their money jar and we drove to the Dollar Store. But it was closed.

That was last night, this afternoon I told the bopys that when I finish this cup of coffee and get dressed, We would go to the DS and they could spend their money.

Keep in mind, the dollar store is full of toys and gimmicks and candy and ..well everything!

Stuperman - 4 - told me he will buy a new plate. With a spoon! And thats about as odd as my cat ordering Phentermine 37.5 mg

I mean! All those toys, and he wants a plate?? I guess it is no weirder than my 6 year old telling me he is going to be buying a new party hat..

..But I know what looks nice!

I will fully admit that I do not know a lot about cars. (Though there are plenty of places, like this, http://www.corvetteguys.com/corvette-exhaust.html ,to learn more!) [isn't the internet grand?]

I have leaned how to check the oil, and which side of the car the gas tank is on (did you know there is a little arrow on the dash of the car that POINTS to the side the tank is on?) I can even fill up the windshield wiper fluid container thingy. although, on our old car, since I couldn't figure out how to open the hood, that was a problem. With our new car, it has a hood-pop thing, so thats pretty easy!

Anyway, I might not know a lot ABOUT cars, but I sure do know what looks nice! I LOVE older cars, from the late fifty's - early sixties, especially, I love all the chrome they put on the cars back them.

And I like the Corvette, but then, I am pretty sure that everyone likes the look of the corvette. Right? Sleek and shiny with its rocking roar from the exhaust - we have a thingy every summer Downtown where everyone brings their old cars, or supped up new cars for a show. The cars are parked and the street is closed and we pedestrians get to climb all over the different makes and models, drooling over the chrome and gadgets! - anyway, at the car show there are at least ten different corvettes being shown off - so that right there is a pretty good indication, right?

Reading Material

A bunch of bloggers that I read are publishing books. Well, some are still in the middle of writing the book, others still are searching for a publisher, and some I have already seen for sale over at Amazon books.

this is actually kind of neat. Not that they are publishing, or looking to be published, but reading about their struggles with writers block, reading their euphoric words when they finish a chapter or resolve a story conflict.

I guess, in effect, watching the book be written.

Some of the books I will not look for in stores becuase the subject matter does not interest me, and others I am eagerly waiting for them to finish drafts and find a publishing house so I can read it. It does kind of make me sad though, watching them write write write, while I sit here with a thousand words aching to escape my head, but no paper to write them on.

What I did over summer vacation the weekend

The weekend started early for me, Wednesday. Thats when the boys left to their Grandparents for their week long summer vacation. Wednesday and Thursday were lazy days, I did NOTHING, but by Friday I had gotten quite bored! Thank God for ipods, I am so used to the noise the kids make that the house seemed WAY too quiet!

Friday afternoon I removed eight wheelbarrows full of dirt from the back alley, getting it ready for landscaping. This took all afternoon, and I am pretty sure I broke my armpit. Hubs said I might have pulled a muscle, but it hurts so bad that I am damn sure I broke it. If so, I want to be in record books for the first person to break a non breakable part of the body!

(Woo! I rock!!)

Saturday's all day activity was cleaning out the hell hole that is the garage. It was NASTY with all the kids toys, sand and mud, even sticks they had brought in. My father in law is coming over tomorrow to help me put up some shelves so I have a bit more storage room, and I am trying to talk hubs into getting a little 8x8 shed for the back yard.

Now it is Sunday, and I have cleaned the house (except the floors) in preparation for Monday when I will not have MY kids, but will have my friends two children. (I will be baby sitting them for the next two weeks)

I guess I shouldn't have fooled around Wed and Thur, becuase I did not get everything I wanted done, but hey, at least I got a good start on it!