Blurred

August has been passing by in a blur.

First there is work.  This is my craziest time of year.  To summarize what I do, the government gives my agency money then once a year they come and sift through all of our paper work to find mistakes so that they can say,

     "You know that money we gave you, well you made a mistake here, here and here so we'd like X amount of that money back, thanks." 

 My job is essentially to comb through the paper work and find and hopefully get someone to correct the mistakes first before the big guns come out to find them.  Since the big guns are coming next month, the amount of work that I have to do sky rockets, but by October my little rocket will fall back to a more hospitable atmosphere. (Note: October Sky, which is a movie about rockets, is a pretty good movie. When you saw rocket and October you thought that too, right?)

The other thing that has been going on, is a flurry of household changes.

 First our dryer died.  We knew it was old and so was our washer, whose work ethic had been spotty at best.  We were planning on purchasing a new washer and dryer anyway next year so we just moved up the purchase a little.

I love my new washer and dryer.  When you turn the knobs to adjust the settings it makes the same sounds that the Super Mario game makes when you hit the coin boxes with Mario's head.  I also enjoy that the washer has a clear top so you can watch your clothes swish around.  It's hypnotic and relaxing, like watching the small waves in a bay.  You can also watch the clothes in the dryer spin around, and who doesn't enjoy that?  The last fun thing about my new washer and dryer is that instead of an annoying buzzer, when they have completed their cycles they play a happy little tune that sounds vaguely like something you would hear on a Baby Mozart video.

During the same week that our dryer died, we turned on our air conditioning one hot day and noticed that air was coming out of  the vent, but the air was not cold.  Our air conditioning unit had also decided to die and join our dryer in appliance heaven. 
     When we got the house inspected before we bought it the inspector (who we always remember because he could have been a Christopher Walken impersonator) told us he didn't think that the unit would last us through the first summer.  We have been fortunate that it has lasted us eight more years than we expected, but its time had come to an end and we replaced the old unit with a new one.

Our cat was not happy with the two air conditionless weeks we tolerated (thankfully it never got super hot) before someone could come out to change the unit and she couped by changing up her sleeping places so that she could air out.

And while all of that was going on, our contractor told us that he was finally ready to come and start working on our master bathroom.  Here are a few pictures of what the bathroom once looked like.

The avocado green toilet really makes the room, don't you think? The pictures don't do justice to expose the high amount of 70's green décor.

The new room is mostly done but not absolutely finished and of course there will be some finishing touches that we haven't purchased, but when it is finally completed I'll show pictures of the finished product. 

As you can see August has been a hectic month filled with new things that we are thankful for. It has been exciting and exhausting. I'm hoping that September arrives with its foot on the brake because I'm ready to slow things down for a bit and rest up before the super crazy month of November begins.

Don't be jealous of my Giant Rainbow Unicorn Heart

During my fruitless efforts to locate my old camp picture, I stumbled upon my old sticker books.

 

 

When I was a kid, stickers were all the rage.  Girls were passionate about their stickers (maybe there were some boys who were passionate about stickers, aside from the kind you put on your skateboard, but I never met one). And I’m not talking, hey there’s a sticker and I’ll wear it on my shirt how fun, it was more like, if you even think about stealing my fuzzy lion sticker, don’t lie I see it in your eyes, I will cut you.  I could spend hours organizing my stickers and designing my pages.  It was the perfect way for my parents to get me to accompany them on long boring shopping trips, well either the promise of stickers or the promise of candy worked equally well.

There were various categories of stickers...

There were puffy stickers

 

 

There were fuzzy stickers

 

 

There were stickers with your name on them, though they weren't the best because they were hard to trade unless someone happened to have the same name as you

 

 

There were stickers with your favorite cartoon characters

 

 

There were the always popular glittery stickers

 

 

And my absolute favorite, the scratch-n-sniff

 

 

If you had a giant sticker that took up most of a page no matter what the sticker was of, you were pretty much the coolest. If it was of a giant rainbow unicorn heart, well I'm sorry I'm so awesome, don't be jealous.

 

 

The very best days were the ones when your friends would come over and bring their stickers and you would spend hours bartering and trading.  You would say things like,

   “The iridescent butterfly with the liquid stuff inside that moves when you touch it? Oh, that’s worth at least two sheets of scratch-n- sniff and one sheet of fuzzy unicorns." 

Maybe the kids these days have fun spending time trading virtual stickers, but my heart does feel a little sad that most kids now will never know the pleasures of a newly opened pack of scratch-n- sniffs or know the joys of trading a page of Garfield for a page of glittery butterflies.  They were fun times, fun times indeed.

 

Two notes: 1) This is my 100th Blog post.  Yay me!  2) It always miffed me that the Garbage Pail Kid Sara Slime spelled her name without the h. 

Jacked up ice cream

My friend Stephanie discovered a new homemade ice cream place and last week we took a group trip to Swedesboro NJ to give Latteria a try.

   

Located in a strip mall, Latteria is a cute, quirky (they had a paperclip curtain that showed up in a dream I had later in the week) ice cream and coffee shop that boasts interesting flavors using natural, local ingredients. 

One of the more interesting flavors is the Chocolate Jack Daniels; the perfect flavor to have at the end of a busy week. Though my week was plenty busy, I passed on the Jack and chose one scoop of chocolate peanut butter and one scoop of caramel pretzel.  The chocolate peanut butter was good but the caramel pretzel was fantastic!  The caramel mixed perfectly with the saltiness of the pretzels.

 My husband got the toasted coconut flavor which was also great.  The worst thing about Latteria is that it is quite a hike for us so we won’t be able to visit it as often as we’d like (I’m sure my derrière and waist line are thankful for the distance), but we will certainly be back so that we can try their other delicious creamy flavors.

 

      We met up with three couples from our home church for ice cream night.  When we sat down to enjoy our treats we unconsciously segregated ourselves.  The two couples with glasses sat on one side of the wall and the two couples without glasses sat on the other side of the wall.  Someone made a comment about how it was like a glasses vs. non-glasses version of West Side Story, hence I spent my week making up songs in my head for our musical.