Tina, eat!

In the spirit of Thanksgiving and all the good eats we look forward to, here's one of my favorite Napoleon Dynamite clips.

changed my comments setting

Nate pointed out that it seemed only google-ers could comment, so I switched the setting.

Vanilla ice cream is gross! Country music is for losers! Idaho sucks! C'mon, I dare ya.

This result is a bit high. I think the likelihood my cat will murder me is more in the 20-30% range, but maybe I'm duped. Relaxing on the couch, I captured Bruiser lost in thought ...it never occurred to me that he could be contemplating homicide.

Halloween '08

Last week before carving pumpkins Michael asked "Can we use latex gloves so we don't get that stuff all over our hands?" Heh. I think he has a thing for rubber gloves - last year he snuck a pair to school and wore them in class. We found out about it in conferences. He wrote all over them with marker and when the teacher asked him to take them off, he said "But I like them." Finally she threw them away, which Michael later described in his social skills journal as a time when he was disappointed in his teacher.

Back to Halloween - we had a genuine scare when we lost Nicky while trick-or-treating. We went with the neighbors and their 5 kids and together they all ran to and fro a bit too quickly for our eyes to track. Luckily we hadn't yet turned any corners and we found Nicky heading straight down the street towards home.

As you can see in the pictures, we have Adrienne as a princess (3rd year in a row), Zach the tiger, Nicky as Anakin Skywalker, and doctor Michael.

Looking for Ghosts and Goblins...

p.s. Stay tuned for Halloween pics!

My heaven foods wish-list

Last year we bought some coupons from a fundraising door-to-door boy scout. Among them was an unlimited 'buy one blizzard, get one for 99 cents' DQ coupon good for a whole year. Genius. Naturally, we used it several times and got the largest possible size so that the $.99 one could also be ludicrously huge. Occasionally we even shared a few spoonfuls with the kids. Whenever I'd sink my teeth into that first bite of cookie dough w/M&M's blizzard, the Hallelujah chorus of Handel's Messiah burst forth from heaven. As I'd make my way through the deliciousness, I'd inevitably start philosophizing about the next life. How are souls in heaven truly happy without blizzards? Perhaps it's sacrilegious of me to even ponder this, but so be it. One of the orthodox Christian doctrines is that we'll be re-unified with our bodies at the end of time. There must be a reason for this - we were made to be both matter and spirit. The consensus seems to be that we'll be perfectly happy in heaven, but until we get our bodies back, will we ever think about the pleasures we enjoyed while in our corporal state? I've decided that if we do repine for our bodies, it must be in the happy way a child waits for Christmas day - the whole 'anticipation is half the fun' idea. This is sort of consoling.
I've been keeping track of a few succulent requirements that God in his goodness will surely supply me with, if heaven is all it's cracked up to be. Here, in no particular order, are a few of the foods I'd like to enjoy with my eternal taste buds.

• Leeann Chin Peking chicken and cheese puffs
• Mountain Dew
• M&M's and many other candies and chocolates, too numerous to count
• Pepperoni Pizza, preferably from B&B, Pizza Man, or Papa Murphy's
• French toast
• cookie dough w/Oreo or M&M's Blizzards or Concrete
• chocolate cake
• cheesecake
• pumpkin pie
• Cinnabons
• Godfather's dessert pizza
• Abdallah dark chocolates

There are others that I can't think of now. Maybe I'll add some in later. You may notice the lack of fruits and vegetables on my list, and that's because I only grudgingly eat anything remotely healthy. And although I'm pretty sure it won't be a concern there, I'd like to make note that for my heavenly dental hygiene I'll require regular Colgate, due to it's superior taste.

Little Piggy Destruct-o Boy

Here we will observe Zach, the savage ravenously hungry beast, house ripper-upper and terror of the cul-de-sac in his natural habitat during the 3rd week of October, 2008.

Our 1st YouTube video!

And possibly the last. 'Little Princess Bride on the Prairie' was directed by yours truly. Once again, Nate did all the behind-the-scenes work.

Hanging on my fridge...

...is this joke I cut out of a Reader's Digest a few years ago. I enjoyed it so much that I even 'laminated' it with packaging tape. I tried to scan it, but it's too small and hard to read. My lack of techno skills betrays me again.

"I promise. That bird is so well behaved, you can

take it anywhere," the pet-store owner assured

the woman. Delighted, she took her

parrot to church. Things were great until, halfway

through the sermon, the bird blurted, "It's damn

cold in here!" Embarrassed, the woman ran out

and went to the pet store. "This 'good bird'

swore in church today," she told the shop owner.

"I'm sorry. It sometimes does that in new

environments," he explained. "Next time,

grab its feet and swing it over your head a few times.

That should stop it." The next week the

woman and her parrot were in church when the

bird yelled, "It's damn cold in here!"

Quickly, the woman grabbed the bird and

swung it above her head six times. Then she put

the bird back on her shoulder and sat down.

"Damn," the bird said. "It's windy too."

Home Video Clips

Here are a couple clips from some recent home movies. A thank you to my hubby for handling the behind-the-scenes technogadgetry work so I could upload these (upload is the right word, no?).

The theme for these clips is the Psalmist's verse, 133:1 - "Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers (and sisters) dwell together in unity!"

You may need to crank up the volume to hear my kids' sophisticated exchanges.

I am Mary and I approved this message.