Blogging Blues

I am hoping that someone, anyone will read this and have the time to help this poor, tired, and frustrated blogger. I am trying to provide links on the sidebar to previous Post Pages and I cannot, for the life of me, figure it out! I even checked out a couple of books at the library on HTML and XHTML in the hopes that it might help open my mind (except it was printed in 2000 - like that does me any good! Books printed about this sort of stuff seem to become obsolete in a matter of weeks). Does anyone know what I am asking and how to help? I am becoming a little obsessed about it and pretty determined to figure it out. Of course, this is one of my last straws and if I can't work it out soon, I am going to commit myself. I think I've nearly fried my brain.

Trying Something New...

I have started playing around with Photoshop and just discovered how to colorize after making a photo black and white. I know this is elementary to most of you out there, but I was just so darn pleased with myself, I had to share! This Photoshop has been a huge learning curve for me. I keep thinking I should really get a book or something to make it a little less time consuming, but hey, what else is there to do...housework? No thanks.

Pyro

My son decided to burn the house down yesterday. My response: "Gavin don't ever do that again!"

I had no idea there was anything out of the ordinary going on upstairs until Gavin came to ask if he could play with his neighbor friend. As soon as the smell hit me and I asked him what was going on, I could tell from the look in his eyes that it wasn't going to be good!

His first attempt at the truth failed miserably. He tried to tell me that he happened upon a lighter in his bedroom, checked it to see if it worked and the corner of the paper just happened to be in way of the flame. He was baffled at how it all had come about and after that, being the good scout that he is, he set to extinguishing it as quickly as he could. Immediately, I went up to check his room.

He had worked pretty fast to put those flames out. When I reached his room, the window was open, the garbage that held the evidence was next to the open window, the ceiling fan was on and he had drug a floor fan into his room and directed it to blow away from his door and out his open window. I thought how dissappointed he must have been to find, that despite all his effort, he had been foiled by Mom's Mega-Senses.

I went directly to the garbage and found only a small portion of what used to be a wad of papers and a half-melted little box. I don't think our boy scout knew what hit him. His evidence clearly revealed the real "truth". Situation assessed, Mom-Detective on the case, he had to change his story. Shamefully, he admitted that the flames were too much fun to watch and it wasn't long before it was more than he could handle and into the garbage the blaze was stashed.

Overall, his parents did a good job of making him feel as miserable as possible. Maybe if he felt bad enough he wouldn't ever, EVER do it again. Success in that department, I'm sure. Unfortunately, our house stunk to high heaven all night, but in the end Dad made enough jokes about it that the culprit was his normal, happy, lighter-free, pre-teen. In fact, his first act of reform was to hand me the lighter and make me promise to never let him have it again.

Service

As we were getting ready to start Family Night tonight, we received a couple of phone calls, both within thirty minutes of each other. One call was asking us if we could please be of assistance in helping someone move and the other was from good friends inviting us to go to a movie with them. After much thought, Richard and I decided we better go help move. After all, it would be a good experience for the kids to do some service, right? While I was preparing a quick dinner, I thought I would call my kids in and ask them what they would do if they were the parents and could have made the decision on what we would do for Family Night.

Gavin was first and after a long pause, he said, "Mom, I would have chosen to help move. They really need our help and maybe we could get a treat afterward." I smiled with parental pride. Good choice Gavin.

Next Allison was summoned into the room to be asked the same question. Without much hesitation at all, she said, "Well, if I were the Mom, I would say 'Let the kids go to the movie with their friends and have the parents do the moving'". I reminded Alli that it was a night where the family is supposed to do things together. In a non-chalent tone of voice, she said, "Well, that sounds like a real problem."

As it turned out, she went without complaint and very happily danced around and posed for us all while we hauled things up and down two flights of stairs.

Kids...

We were watching tv, the kids and I, when a commercial came on about Lysol Cleaner. Let me paint the picture: There is a young child seated on the sidewalk with her lunch lying directly on the pavement. The narrator says, "you wouldn't let your child eat on the street..." The next scene shows the same child with the same lunch, but now they are seated at a table. The narrator continues, "But would you let your child eat on your kitchen surfaces where over 60,000 germs roam free? Did you know not all cleaners get rid of germs?" To this statement, Allison speaks up and in that "duh" tone of voice says, "Well yeah-uh, that's why you use plates."