oh and by the way..

I need some yummy smelling fall/thanksgiving/christmas type candles for my house. Any suggestions on where to buy?

The bathroom bandit

Last night, Ross slept over so that he and Doug could ride to set together (our VW is in the shop for a few days.) And I woke up around 1 am to the sound of someone jiggling a doorknob. i couldn't quite get my head around what i was listening to... was it the kids in the bathroom, was it a burgler at the front door? what was going on? then as i kept listening and sorting it out in my brain, i realized that it was ross and he was stuck in the hallway bathroom. the handle was locked from the inside and he couldn't get out.

I climbed out of bed to try and help and we actually had to get doug up to get him out. what if I hadn't woken up? He could have been in there all night. How sad..and a little bit funny.

While blog surfing this morning I found a link to a really cool website called Fredflare.com. It has the craziest, random, kitchy stuff that people loooove to get for christmas.

I love this little planter pot.




My kids would totally dig this one.



You can't see it but this one is so funny! i'm actually kind of sad that I was so on top of my shopping because I would have bought this Cat-a-pult for Doug's brother scott.

Delish!

I LOVE salsa and i found this recipe this afternoon so i could get rid of the leftover cranberries.

Sophie thought is was gross but Brooke and Sara thought it was pretty good. 2 yeas and 1 nay. Not too bad. Oh, and i like it so i guess that's 3 yeas.

It's great with pita chips. i know this because the bag and the bowl are now gone, baby, gone. Yum!



Here is the recipe.

Oh, this is a good one.

There is no doubt that all our good stories come from managing the ghettoplex. And today is no different.

A new family moved in a few months ago. they are very nice and have two kids and seem really great. The only thing I'll say is that they are both a bit pushy which makes me not want to help as much when problems arise. Although, I have been sort of cranky lately, so it's probably just me.

ANYWAY... they needed to have their toilet replaced and our maint. guy (Matt) wanted to do it this afternoon. When i talked to the guy to coordinate he said they weren't going to be home so we should do it another day unless I could sit with the maint. guy the entire time. ( something i just don't really do.) Apparently, he was worried that Matt was going to steal his jewelry. So, even though i was completely bugged, i conceded and sat down there with Matt while he switched out the toilets.

Now, this is the good part. I start nosing around on his dresser just to kill the time and i spot this little brown envelope with the words LAPD evidence printed on Red Tape. What?? I look closer and it has this guys name as the Arrestee. whoa. He was arrested? And apparently he had 92 cents on him and the LAPD was giving it back. ok. well, people have pasts, i get that. it was probably from years and years ago.

So, of course i have to keep looking to see what else i can find... and next to the envelope there are 2 receipts from the jail saying that he was arrested on 11/23/07 ( a mere 4 days ago!!) for Spousal Battery! what? His bail was set at $20,000.

Wow! Does anyone normal live here??

Maybe it was good I found it, right? From now on I'll be watching out for his poor wife.

Oh, and there was a suspicious looking picture frame with no photo and no glass. smashed against a wall maybe?? The stuff of sopa operas.....

Weekend Round Up - Thanksgiving Edition

1. Thankgiving with the Chamberlains was fabuloso! Cousins, gloriously yummy food and a little pomegranate 7-up. It was everything a thankgiving should be and more.

2. Lunched with my Grandma and my sister Chris and my nephew Robert. Haven't seen the latter two in more than 2 years!! (What kind of family are we?) It was a blast.

3. Got a little Christmas cabin preview up at Brianhead and my kids went nutty with excitement. (As we were headed the steep mountain with Grandpa Charlie, Owen looked out the window at the snow and asked Grandpa if he had seen any penguins!)

4. Got stuck in traffic in Baker, CA and spent the night in the most fleabag motel called 'Arne's Hawaiian Paradise.' or something creepy like that. I felt like I was in some kind of scary movie and didn't sleep much at all. oh, never again...

5. Watched the Spurs beat the Supersonics on TV. GO Spurs!

2 VERY obvious facts just newly realized by me.

Does that sentence even make sense? Anyway, I've discovered 2 things this past week that are monumentally simple.

1. Doing Laundry on the same day every week is actually easier.

I am notoriously bad at laundry and usually put it off until all baskets are piling high and no one has anything to wear. Then when I finally get to it, it takes me ALL day to take up and down the stupid stairs and by the end of the day I'm so sick of it that I inevitably leave one or two loads overnight so other tenants have to take them out and fold them for me or toss them on the table where they wrinkle into shriveled, little unwearable prunes.

Now i just do 4 loads on Friday morning and everyone is ship shape.


2. Christmas shopping early is AWESOME!

I've got 4 of my 10 out of town family gifts purchased and wrapped. This is soooo not me. ha ha.

Weekend Round Up

Soccer: They lost their first game of the whole season. Sophie scored their one and only goal in the last 30 seconds of the game. Afterward their coach said this:

"I'm very disappointed in the way you played and you should be disappointed in yourselves."

Hmmm. Nice. We saw 2 girls crying as they walked away. I should have said,

"Coach, i'm very disappointed in the way you spoke to those girls and you should be disappointed too." What a lame-O.

Both Friday and Saturday we went to the Grove and did a little shopping at the Gap. Ok, a lot of shopping at the Gap. Our friend gave us a friends and family 30% off discount card and we went a little crazy. It was a blast. We don't do a lot of school shopping in Sept. because the weather is just like summer for sooooo long. Now that it's thanksgiving, it's starting to cool down. Thank goodness!! So it was like school shopping just right before the holidays and with a discount card.

The Grove was all decorated for Christmas so it was so much fun!! Just what we needed to get in the spirit of Christmas.

Pic by Sophie!


The round face emerges...


Blurry, but adorable.


And then sunday Sophie had a piano recital. She played "I want to live the gospel" and it was more of a hymn sing a long so she got some experience accompanying. It was great. No photos of the actual playing at the piano, but here's shot of her with her friend and her teacher.





So now this week we're getting ready to go to Utah for Thanksgiving and then on to Christmas!! Anyone have some good holiday music suggestions?

Ew! Tonight i really hate homework.

I really do. Sophie has always had to do homework but it seems like 5th grade is just crazy busy with homework!!

I remember my sister Jami telling me about a family in her neighborhood that had to decide to quit all extraciricular activities, like sports or music lessons, just to keep up with the school workload. At the time I thought that was so stupid and i would never do that. Well, it seems like that's just about where we are these days because when we do anything else on any given day there is not enough time for everything and we end up staying up until 11pm . In fact, sophie is still up reading as i type this at 11:10 pm.

Part of the problem is she's so honest! I know that doesn't sound like much of a problem, and i refuse to do anything to change that but...don't you agree that it's ok if i cut and paste vocab words to index cards while she finishes up her science? I do! I was just busy work that wasn't teaching her anything. But since she didn't want me doing her work for her, I stopped and we eventually finished it up together.

As she would say....Oy Vey!! I know that's a totally jewish saying and i have no idea where she got it, but she says it ALL the time.

Anyway, i guess I should be grateful she's so dedicated to her school work. She's a smart kid and loves her teacher. I just pray it lasts through college and she doesn't burn out somewhere near 10th grade.

UNCLE Rossy!

Since Ross started working with Doug my kids have seen what it's like to have a cool single uncle around. He has a truck and a sweet motorcycle and can bust out the guitar and sing "pretty blue dress" or "Special Ned" at a moment's notice. Oh, how they love that.

The other night we pondered a few mind-bending questions, like... What will we do when Rossy gets married? Is there room for both of them to sleep on our couch? Will she come with him to watch Spurs games and use our internet?

I guess we'll have to cross that bridge when we come to it.

All kidding aside, my kids love him. When he does come over they hang on him and want all of his attention. More than a few times Owen has walked out of his room in the middle of the night to go snuggle up with Ross. And typicallly in the morning, we will find Owen sprawled out and ross smashed into the corner of the couch.

They have a good time, as you can clearly see from the photos below:

Shoes Always Fit

Even when nothing else does, the shoes always fit. Aren't they cute?? They were only 30 bucks so i snatched them up at Target even though i don't have anything to wear with them...YET. ha ha. Just a little something sassy for the ever expanding pregnant mama.

Just when you think your sweet boy...



has turned into Nicholas Bradford (the youngest child on Eight is Enough)...



the kind ladies from the Aveda salon in the mall come to the rescue.

Weekend Round Up

Saturday -- Surprise, surprise...more soccer. the good news is that sophie's team won and is now number one in her division at the park. The bad news for the other team is that the score was 1-0 and they accidentally made the goal for us. oops. so sad. Looks like we'll be going to play-offs, though.

Owen rock n rolled his game and then we spent time together eating lunch and shopping for the game Wii Play while Sophie was at a birthday party. We were in GameStop for probably 45 minutes and he was in heaven.

Sunday -- Christmas lists. This is the gist of what they came up with.



A remote control Robot for Owie, not necessarily this one...





And a telescope or microscope for Soph. Not necessarily these exact ones either.

Let's see if Santa is feeling the same vibe come Dec. 25th. :)

Article from the school newspaper

Can you even read this? It is a crinkled up copy of Sophie's school newspaper, the first edition of the year. They interviewed Sophie as the fastest kid in school. Her answers are cute.

Minor TV celeb sighting!

If i told you that i saw Christopher Gorham at the mall today you'd probably say, "WHO?" But if i told you that i saw the totally adorable and perfectly nerdy accountant Henry from Ugly Betty at the Food Court, you'd understand why i got all excited.

He was there with his family, wifey and 2 ninos, and they followed us from the food court to the play area. I'm such a dork, though, i should have said Hi but instead i just stared out of the corner of my eye while they played with their boys and stood around hugging each other. I probably ended up looking like a stalker. Oh, well.

Did anyone see Ugly Betty last week? It's always so melodramatic which is part of the charm but his story with Betty was very adorable. It was all about New York and Wicked on Broadway and, of course, the two of them finally getting together in the end.

So much fun.

The 5 Month Belly

I don't see my family very often so here's a little updated photo Sophie snapped while I was cooking the other day.

She keeps saying, " You look SOOO pregnant!"

Oh, just wait.

settlement never sounded so good!

The long drawn out saga of B. Rob (me) vs. F. Sam (my horrible, white trash, prescription drug, and likely some choice illegal drug dependant tenant) has finally come to an end. It's hard for me to believe. I still fully expect to be called in for yet ANOTHER stupid deposition any minute. My supervisor assured me that it was final.

Apparently, they asked for $500,000 to start, 148,000 of it just to cover her "medications." We countered with 45,000. They lowered to 300,000, we countered with 55,000. They said they wouldn't go less than $100,000 we said we would go over 100,000. And that's where the 4 hr mediation meeting ended and we were set to go to court on December 6th.

The glorious phone call that I received yesterday told me both sides settled on $87,500. Which is a huge chuck of change for someone who is a total waste of space. She deserved nothing but since i don't have to testify anymore, i'll let her smoke the 20 or 30 grand she'll actually end up with in a big, fat joint, go on with my happy little life and worry about her NO MORE!!

aaaaaaahhhhhhhhh, that feels good.

The wobbly tooth is wobbly no more!

Weekend Round up

I stole the weekend round up idea from Emilystyle, but since she'll likely never visit this blog, it's ok.

As with most weekends in the fall, we start saturday morning with soccer. Sophie and Owen both play so we spend much of the morning at the park. Sophie won her game 1-0. She was playing against one of her best friends at church and scored the only goal of the whole game. Woo hoo! I can't find recent soccer pics for sophie. I'll get some this weekend.

Owen's games are awesome. They play 3 on 3 at this age and it's so funny. At the beginning of the season he would just dance around the ball and let the other two players get in there to scramble after the ball. His favorite job is throwing in at the side lines. He LOVES that. But yesterday he actually kicked the ball a bunch of times and had a little run toward the other goal that ended in the splits when he collided with a kid from the other team. But he's getting so much faster. GO Owen!!



Everything else was very normal. Primary was crazy... and Doug went to an AFI reunion yesterday that was apparently so lame! The highlight was when he texted me and said that Superman was there. I instantly thought he was talking about the hottie, Brandon Routh from Superman Returns, so i text back that he needs to go get an autograph for me. But it was a different Superman, in fact, the one that dresses up and hangs around outside Graumann's Chinese theater begging for money. Not really the same thing. No autograph needed.

p.s. I think Brandon Routh is what Doug is going to look like in his most perfect state. That makes eternity look really good, doesn't it?

Not another appliance!

Someone in my house thought an object called the Magic Bullet couldn't be anything but a gimick. What?? Me? Get suckered into a tool that promises to take away all the work in my life but is really just a useless hunk of plastic? (i.e. swiffer wet jet mop, vibrating shower scrubber, etc.)

Well, I knew this just couldn't be one of those things (mostly because Jessica Seinfeld's book says so. Which is something I bought after she was on Oprah and which also may be a gimick. I say that because i was telling Owen that he had to eat 2 little brownie bites before he could have a rice krispy treat on Halloween. The brownies had spinach and carrot puree in the mix. Giimick? I guess time will tell.)

So, I bought the magic bullet anyway and that same pessimistic somebody now LOVES the Magic Bullet because you can make individual protein shakes and drink it right out of the cup you blended it in...with the comfort lip ring applied, of course. That's one for the late-night informercials and super smart mamas.

Halloween

Wolverine and a yummy, yummy "homemade" Tootsie Roll. That's right, people...homemade at home by Em the mom on a sewing machine from Walmart. It was a stretch for me. ha ha.


He had to leave his trademark Wolverine claws, or "strings" as he calls them, at home because of the anti-weapon rule at school.


Doug with this buddy at the trunk or treat. Or should i say, Fletch and the Six Million Dollar Man.

We're back!

After a much needed blogging hiatus, we are ready to jump back into the blogosphere.