Children of the Corn

This is the field right next to our house. Alex doesn't seem to appreciate it whenever we pull into the driveway and I say, "Heh-heh-heh, Children of the Corn" and laugh maniacally. I don't think I've ever actually even seen that movie.

On a sad note, we knew when we moved in that the plan was to develop this field into more houses. Friday an engineering firm spent the whole day surveying. Ugh.

What do you think?

YAY!! My sister is teaching a blogging class and, while she was really good at doing stuff to her blog before, she's now a PROFESSIONAL (no Olympics participation = ( for Jana). So she fixed my blog/Fall problem. I love it -- THANK YOU. Although I'm assuming due to my summer spent working the concerts at the White River Amphitheater, I sort of think the leaves in the first picture look like marijuana... But hey, marijuana leaves turn colors, too, right? Pretty, pretty. Now one day I'm either going to have to get her to show me how to do stuff or she's going to have to just do the changes all the time. It will be like I have my own personal (FREE) web designer!

Random

I'm not thrilled with the look of my blog. I want it to feel FALL, but I'm just not sure...

I went shopping for school clothes for Eric today. I decided, since I found him two pairs of pants at Penney's, that I didn't have to get him some more pants at Costco, so I could spent the $30 on what I wanted. I hadn't planned to spend more than $100. I spent $171. Watch Robyn stand there smiling, trying not to hyperventilate, and acting like she routinely spends $171 on stuff at Costco.

Eric and I have had several conversations on how we think Alex should behave towards people when school starts up, mainly the two girls that basically shunned her last year, her "friends". I told her that if they spoke to her, she could be polite and speak back, but if they tried to be friends again and act like nothing happened, I wanted her to say something. Eric thinks she should move on and not say anything, but he's also thinking they won't try and be friends again. I agree she doesn't want any friction, but I don't want these girls to think they can walk on her one year and she'll forget about it and let them be her friend again later. Anyway, it's highly doubtful anything will happen. I know she's already seen the one who decided not to speak to her anymore first, and they didn't speak. But she was better friends with the other one, so I wonder.

After about 45 minutes and TWO sales clerks at Famous Footwear finally figured out how to order Alex's Converse shoes and have them shipped to our house, they came today, IN THE WRONG SIZE. Luckily, we had a brand new store open up in Bonney Lake, so I won't have to go far to get them exchanged. Now my question is do I wait for Samantha's shoes to come first? Or do I go ahead and switch Alex's tomorrow? We'll see. I've got a ton of proofreading to do for Shari before she leaves on vacation. I may not even have a chance to leave the house tomorrow.

End of the Summer Update

Man, my posts have been few and far between here lately! It should get better once everyone is back in school and all is right with the world again...

Alex's soccer team did okay, for a team that plays at the P-4 level being put in a bracket of all P-1 teams. We actually beat the first team and held the other two to I think five goals between them. The two teams we lost to came in #1 and #2, so we had nothing to feel bad about! Her team from last year even lost to the eventual #2 team. But both Alex and Samantha had a blast.

I think this year, for Alex, may end up being even harder than last year. She had a really bad experience with her two "friends" turning against her the last few months of the last school year. She started hanging out with some new friends this summer and even told me that she was having more fun in the couple of weeks she hung out with them than she had in the year and a half with her other friends. But she's really emotional and always kind of on egg shells, thinking if she has one misstep, they may not like her, either. It's really hard to watch. When she's with her new friends, she's like a different person, and I know she has a lot of fun. But like tonight, she was supposed to spend the night with a few of the girls, kind of a slumber party, but she had soccer. The girls went to a movie, thinking they'd be home by 8:30. They ended up getting home around 9:45. She didn't feel great after soccer and truly just wanted to go to bed early, but felt like she needed to go so they'd still like her. I just hate seeing her feel that way. I finally made the executive decision that she should stay home. We were sitting in the car in the driveway talking about it and she started crying. It's like she can't even put her finger on why she thinks she feels miserable. I asked her if she wished we hadn't moved, and she said yes, which makes me feel bad all over again. Anyway, it's going to be some kind of journey, I'm afraid. All I can do is be there. At least she talks to me.

I worked two more concerts this past week, Radiohead and the Pain in the Grass, which was mainly Queensryche. I liked the fans from both concerts and got two more bags of bottle caps. Very different crowds, though. Radiohead fans were more hippie-ish, kind of stoner-ish, but equally as nice as the metal fans I've run into. But the marijuana smell from that concert I was afraid would still be there when I woke up the next day, even after showering with my smelliest Bath and Body Works shower gel.

We went to Olympia to celebrate my father-in-law's birthday yesterday. My mother-in-law bought him an iPod nano, which I'm sorry to say , is WAY too much iPod for him to handle. But I think I got him on the right track. I told him he should buy one song a day until his gift card is used up, so he would have to practice with it once a day. I also told him to call me any time he had questions. He actually called today after he bought a song, and I walked him through the next steps, so I think he's going to take my advice!

We are getting the grandkids together this Saturday for a portrait for my mother-in-law's birthday in November. What started out as a nice idea seemingly has evolved into this nightmare. First it was scheduled the Saturday of the Bigfoot tournament. My sister-in-law emailed me to see if we could just "swing by" for a half an hour for the photo shoot. Well, if by "swing by" you mean drive the two and a half hours down from Snohomish to take the pictures and then back two and a half hours for Alex's next game. So then it was rescheduled to this Saturday. All systems were go until my sister-in-law asked if Eric was coming. Um, no, this is a grandkids picture, why does he need to come? Plus, he had prior plans to go to a football game with a former coaching friend. Fine. Then tonight his brother calls and I don't know if he didn't know what he was supposed to guilt Eric into or what, but Eric told him he'd talk to me and call him back. Five minutes later, his brother had called back, so I grabbed the phone. I had just reread the email from my sister-in-law which said, "Dorothy would be beyond thrilled with a picture of her g-kids, so I really hope we can make this happen." Not a single word about us being in the picture anywhere. Turns out they decided it would be cool to get a picture of the three brothers as well, which it would, BUT he can't "swing by" for a 10:00 photo shoot when he is supposed to be leaving Enumclaw at 10:15 with his buddies. At one point my sister-in-law had suggested Thanksgiving weekend for the pictures, which I thought was a great idea. Then Eric's brother decided that weekend was too busy. It really seems like things can never just go smoothly. I finally just told her that we would have to concentrate this weekend on just getting the grandkids, as per the original plan, and if they wanted family photos to go along with it, our family would have to make it in another time.

So this weekend I was hoping Alex would get to hang out with her friend from Federal Way, but even if that happens, I'll have to steal her for a Saturday morning photo shoot!

More August News

Well, we made it back from Montana in one piece. That was NOT a relaxing vacation. It was a ton of fun, don't get me wrong, but relaxing - NOT. So we've had a couple of semi-boring days and now we're off again.

We leave tomorrow for Alex's soccer tournament in Snohomish. Snohomish is like two hours away, short enough that we could just drive it every day. But we're staying in the hotel with the rest of the team. Spending money on another hotel room makes me sick thinking about it, but then with gas prices, it's probably kind of a wash.

Then I find out the other night that when we registered for the tourney, they asked us some random questions, and when the brackets came out, we got stuck in a bracket with all P-1 teams. That means Premier 1 league teams, one of them being the team Alex was on last year. We are a P-4 team. So the coaches pulled the parents together to let us know that they were working on trying to get to another bracket, but if not, it's up to us to keep the girls up and ready to play. I just want to, you guessed it, VOMIT. Everyone else is all, Oh, it would be great to play them; we can kick their butts. When I was growing up, I played tennis for years and years. My whole summer was organized around tennis tournaments all over the state (which was a BLAST, by the way). But I remember people always saying, You can beat anyone if you just believe you can. Well, I did then and I do now call bull*$#@. I remember thinking, So you people honestly believe that if I put my mind to it, I could beat Rainey Lamey (the #1 girl in the state from Billings, who had an indoor court and played year-round) or Berrit Burton (the girl who came up every summer from Nicaragua and kicked all our asses) or, for that matter, Chris Evert. So I've always been skeptical of that, Believe it and you can mentality. I don't think we'll actually end up playing them, but we will be playing at least one team that beat us last year 10-0.

Tonight is my Girls U7 soccer team's first practice. For the love of god, I'm not sure what I was thinking when I volunteered to coach. It's not that I don't think I can do it. I'm just not sure I want to or have the patience. Yesterday Eric kept asking me if I had a plan and what I was going to do. Well, yeah, at that point my plan was just to show up, hand out soccer balls and have the girls kick up and down the grass for a while. Finally, his constant bugging me got to me and I got out the drills my friend gave me to work on. Then I called Alex down and we actually planned out practice. She's even sort of excited. I think she'll be great. We already know four of the five girls. It might even be fun.

My sister gets to house a 21-year-old Scottish soccer coach for a week. I mean, unless he's a total dog, the accent alone is worth it. I told her that I'm sure any sort of sexual activity with any of the people housing them is probably seriously frowned upon. I don't know, some of those soccer bodies (i.e., David Beckham - how can you argue that), boom chicka wah wah.

Also, my sister, after seeing Samantha pass songs on Easy on Guitar Hero, finally got into it. I told her that if she ever gets up to Hard songs, she has to let me know so I can come out of retirement because I can't have my little sister beating me at GH. She posted this morning on her blog that she hit Raining Blood, which I'm not even sure should count as a song. I know a lot of the good people that make up heavy metal fans would argue with me, but I don't get it. And I think I'm fairly open-minded. But if there's no discernible beat anywhere, how is that a song? I've passed it, but I'm not a fan of Raining Blood!

Montana in August

Well, it's been awhile since I've posted, I know... We are actually in Montana again, second time this summer, which is pretty normal for us. It really is our vacation destination. We stopped in Spokane last Friday for my cousin Drew's wedding, which was an awesome time, and then headed here on Saturday. This trip has been a little different because we are staying down the road at my sister's because my sister-in-law and her two kids are here, also, and they are staying at mom's. So far it's working out fine, except for the usual sibling squabbles and Samantha "I'm SOOO FRAKKING SENSITIVE" Fiedler getting her feelings hurt. But she is the littlest cousin and takes everything VERY literally. I'm working with her...

Everyone went rafting on Sunday, with the exception of my parents who were picking up their new puppy, Tinker (Tink). Scott and Jana's friend Doug and his girlfriend Lynette came as well and brought their raft. I ended up on the "kid" raft with Scott. Except for the lack of sunshine, it was a great day of rafting -- oh, and also the falling out of the raft on the biggest rapids part, which I did exceptionally well, I'm told. I was also told by several people that the "lady" got a TON of pictures of my spectacular trip, which I can't wait to see. I'm sure it's going to remind me of the time in the Bridget Jones movie where she slides down the fire pole with her thong underwear and her big ass showing on national television when her skirt flies up. At least almost immediately after me, a whole raft flipped over. Possibly some people might find that more interesting than the girl who flipped out over the back of the raft in a back somersault. I was pretty proud that I managed to hold onto the rope, which was about the only thing I was thinking, that and how the river had just absolutely hydro-douched my nose. I think I still feel river water sloshing around up there.

My Alex was amazing during the trip. When we stopped at some little cliffs and Scott and Doug and Lynette all jumped off, Alex went ahead and joined them, which I thought was pretty cool. I think Carter and Zac also went off the cliff, which was also pretty cool. Then Alex did this:




She not only looked adorable, she was a STUD.