This ad by Justin Timberlake for Pepsi/Amazon is hilarious.
Author Archives: Sherry
Apropos of nothing, really
I am so tired lately. A stupid combination of going to bed far too late and getting up too early. I almost always have work left to finish up in the evening because it can’t all get done during the day, and by the time I finish I should go to bed to get a good night’s sleep, but I need that time to unwind – time to watch TV, drink some tea, check out Flickr, catch up on blogs, just time for me. Then I lose track of time and next thing I know I have six hours – if I’m lucky – to sleep before my alarm wakes me up at 6:30 the next morning.
Even now, I should be in bed but I just really wanted to update so I’m sitting here feeling like I might pass out into a dead sleep for two straight days. Eventually I will be unable to stay up and there will come a night where I’ll be exhausted and fall asleep at 10 pm and I’ll feel better, and ready to start the cycle again. Being a night owl is great sometimes but it gets complicated when you have kids and early mornings.
*******
I’ve been reading Wicked and really enjoying it but I’ve now gone three days without even picking it up. I need to carve out some time to read. I still have two more books sitting and waiting for my attention, and then I have several Amazon.com gift certificates waiting for me to order some more books.
I wish I still read like I used to as a teenager.
*******
The weather was nuts here today. Ice and slush and water all over the roads and sidewalks, followed by a weather warning for high winds (we sure got those) and a warning for flash freezing, which would be a joy with all the liquid on the ground ready to turn to solid ice. When I took Hayley to school this morning, I refused to let her walk through the school yard to go in her usual door because it was a sheet of ice covered in a river of water. Instead, I took her in the front door (where we both nearly fell in the slippery driveway) and took her to the office. The receptionist was more than willing to let us sit on the bench in the hall until the bell rang, and then Hayley wandered off to class.
The wind is still blasting. Between the rattling windows and the shaking exhaust fan over the stove, it’s really noisy in here.
*******
Two young children were found frozen to death out West. The Prairies have been dealing with bitter cold – lately it’s been about -30C (-22F) with the wind chill making it feel like -50C (-58F) out that way. The girls, ages 3 and 1, were found in just t-shirts and diapers out in the snow, somewhere between their own house and a neighbor’s house. Their father was picked up for severe hypothermia in the wee hours and was unable to talk for about eight hours, at which point he asked where his daughters were. By then, at those temperatures, it was far too late. There was alcohol involved on the father’s part and charges may be laid against him pending investigations.
The story is here. When it was on the 11 pm news before, I sat and bawled through the segment, then resisted the urge to wake my girls up just so I could hold them.
*******
Flickr is calling me. Photography web sites are calling me. But I think my bed is calling loudest. I’d better get some sleep so I have a little energy to deal with dragging Hayley out of bed to get ready for school tomorrow – it never ceases to amaze me that the same girl who can get up at 7 am on a weekend and be full of life can be so damn stubborn about getting up a half hour earlier during the week, even though she loves school. Maybe I should start putting her to bed a half hour earlier, even if it’s a bit rushed in the evening that way.
And maybe then *I* could get my ass to bed a half hour earlier too!
Chocolate contest
I want to win a free chocolate t-shirt. Do you? Go enter!
Eww – yet hilarious!
Just a quick video for you to enjoy. If, you know, you find gross stuff happening to other people to be incredibly funny. Stuff like a bird crapping in a reporter’s mouth.
http://view.break.com/439964 – Watch more free videos
(Yes, I find it funny. I am still 12 after all.)
My poor homeless daughter
You know how kids often mimic their parents when they’re playing? It’s part of how they learn. They cook pretend meals in their toy kitchens, they use dry rags to pretend they’re dusting or cleaning floors, they push a play vacuum around the floor. One very common pretend game they do is to play Mommy or Daddy (or in the case of my girls you get Hayley playing the mother while Breanna gets stuck being the father). Kids will take a little plastic stroller, find their favorite doll (or stuffed animal), maybe even dress it up, stick it in the stroller and push it all around the place.
Hayley used to do that. She used to even enjoy taking the stroller with her dolls to the park, slowly pushing her way along the sidewalk like a real little Mommy.
Breanna?
Apparently Breanna is a homeless person, with all that’s left of her worldly belongings stuffed into her stroller like a shopping cart, wheeling it wherever she goes.
Parenting
Useful parenting tips – I can’t stop laughing!
Too damn busy
I have so many things I want to blog about, and like so many of us, I am so bloody busy right now that I can’t find the time to write them out. Then when I do have the time, it’s usually getting late at night and I’m too brain dead to do anything other than roam around Flickr. Have I mentioned that I’m more hooked on Flickr than ever before? It’s true. And I’m doing the 365Days self-portrait challenge again, so it looks like Narcissus is living in my photostream.
Anyway, hopefully I’ll have a moment to write SOMETHING down. In the meantime, I was lucky enough to review two great Cranium games designed for preschoolers, and I wrote about it right over here. If you have younger children, and especially if you have younger children who are jealous of their older siblings who get to play big kid games, you might be interested in checking it out.
What to Expect Healthy Home Guide
Recently, I was lucky enough to get a sneak peek at a special (free!) guide from Clorox. It’s the What to Expect Healthy Home Guide, written in collaboration with the author of the What to Expect baby/pregnancy series of books. In the spirit of full disclosure, I never read the books. However, we’ve been plagued with serial colds here lately, so I was eager to read something on a healthy home and the avoidance of germs.
It should be noted, too, that I don’t generally obsess about germs. I wash my hands when I use the bathroom, when I change a diaper, when I clean the litter box, and before and after preparing food. Actually, the dryness of my hands would tell you that I am possibly a little fanatical about hand washing. But that’s basically it. I don’t lie awake in bed fearing invisible germs lurking on every surface, wondering what might be out to get me. But like I said, we’ve all been sick with something for several months now, so I figured a little home audit was a good idea.
If you see my stomach running away, you'll know why
I still hate Winter but sometimes I forget how fun it can be to take a kid to the park in the dead of Winter. Something about snow piled up on the slide is hilarious. Hayley went to see her grandparents on Saturday, so I took Breanna for a walk; she had taken a long nap and I wanted to tire her out so she’d go to bed easily. When I saw the park, I took her in and she was amazed.
Good thing we went, since the temperature then dropped drastically over the last couple of days and there was no way I was going out unless I had to.
*******
I’ve mentioned before that I love to cook. I still do. However, there’s something to be said sometimes for getting yourself one of those sodium-laden convenience meals with little redeeming value. Some of them taste like the crap they are, but some are quite tasty and they’re great to have in your freezer on those days when you’re tired, or lazy, or just running around too much to start making a decent supper from scratch.
And it’s fine if that’s something you do in between regular cooking.
Yesterday I felt kind of icky. I wasn’t quite sick, and I had had a decent if not wonderful sleep the night before. I couldn’t figure out why I felt so blah. Then I went to take the garbage out. Instead of large garbage bags, we often use the plastic bags from the grocery store. Do you know what was in one of the bags?
An empty box of Jamaican patties that I had been eating for lunch the past few days. An empty box of fish sticks. A bag from french fries. A box of meat pie. Four boxes of those little individual turkey pot pies. A couple of boxes of microwave pasta meals.
O_o
No wonder I felt so crappy. Hello processed food hell! Other than breakfast, everything I had been eating for my meals came out of a box! Granted, we were also having salads and/or vegetables with them, but still!
I was horrified. To be someone who enjoys cooking and loves food, that was way too much convenience. That wasn’t even about convenience any longer, that was just laziness.
Tonight I made up a nice big batch of chili, and let me tell you, my whole body is much happier to have eaten something I actually made, rather than something I dumped into a pan and shoved in the oven for 20 minutes. Tomorrow I’m making up a list of groceries and it will include a whole bunch of non-convenience stuff, let me tell you. I think something vegetarian in the mix would be a good idea too. Maybe some Koshary. A nice Moussaka. Anything as long as it doesn’t come out of a box.
Sheesh.
Do you ever get carried away with the convenience of convenience food?
Food trickery
An interesting post explaining all the trickery that goes into some professional food photography.