I think I woke up in the wrong house twice in a row! Because the house I woke up in contained two happy boys who were ready early and were NOT fighting and were not complaining about anything and were not demanding lunch money they’d forgotten to ask for the night before or any of that! I think they’ve been taken over by aliens!

And you know what? This morning they each actually woke up late! And they were still ready early! It was amazing! Often, if a child is running late, and it looks like they won’t have time for a relaxed breakfast - they’ll have to grab a granola bar and run type of day - they will holler at me, “MOM! Please, can’t you just take me?!” But when it’s already that far into the morning, it is hard to work things out. The three of them take two different buses - one leaving 30 minutes prior to the other. So the second bus rider, which this year is only Sammie, either has to be ready early so they can come with us, or in a really good mood, so they can finish getting ready and get on the bus without my being here. Their dad sleeps late and is not in any way, shape, or form, a morning person. So he’s just in bed - not watching them get on the bus, like their sweet, protective mama does.

So anyway, this morning, Shawn asked me as soon as I got him up - and that really gave me enough time to say, ‘yes’. Actually, I told him ‘maybe’ - if I can get everyone cooperating for that, we’ll do it. And they did. And I did. And it was really rather quite lovely. It’s funny, that now driving them to school is kind of a treat for all of us. In Texas, it was just an everyday occurence. But it gave us some time to be together, laugh, and enjoy each other. It was nice.

I do hope the aliens who’ve inhabited
my sons’ bodies don’t leave too soon -
I’m enjoying them!______________________

Truly and utterly devastating! I am a complete internet failure!

How do I know? Well, thanks to my friend, Cat, that’s how!

Hey Cat -

I’m so depressed - I got 55%!!

Online Dating from Mingle²

Isn’t it awful? Can someone please pass a tissue?

Ya’ll go take it, too - and come back here and report, so maybe I’ll have some company in my ultimate failure!

Well, thanks to my friend, Cat, from Ami-Chan.net - we’re about to find out! She tagged me for the middle name meme and this is how I have to play it:

The Rules:

1. You have to post the rules before you give the facts.
2. You must list one fact that is relevant to your life for each letter in your middle name. If you don’t have a middle name than use a name that you like.
3. When you are tagged you must write a post containing your own middle name game facts.
4. At the end of your post you must tag one person for each letter in your middle name.. Don’t forget to comment them telling that they are tagged and to read your post to get the rules.

My middle name is MARIE, so here we go:

M - married to Mark

A - anal about hand-washing (ok, this is too funny - I have my lunch on a plate in front of the keyboard, and while trying to type this line, my hands kept hitting my peeled banana and frustrating me! LOL!!!)

R - rigs, I love big Rigs!! hehehehe!

I - I idolize Gayla of MomGadget.com and Wendy, of emomsathome.com - these two ladies really turned me onto the power of blogging!

E - eccentric, I’ve been called this more than once in my life, and I actually rather like it!

Ok, now with five letters in my middle name, I have to tag five people to play along with us! I’ll pick:

1. Gayla, of MomGadget.com

2. Wendy, of emomsathome.com (Of course, you know I’d pick those two!)

3. Loretta, of Thoughts Out of My Head

4. Marissa, of My Dandelion Patch

5. Eve, of Confessions of a Housewife

Now ya’ll get busy - let’s hear about those middle names and what they have to say about you! (If I haven’t double-tagged anyone, that is!)

One more reason I’m only almost a Hippie - I love big, gas-guzzling machines! All kinds! Love them, love them, love them. I completely place the blame on Greg Evigan and a very sweet (furry) friend of his! Yes, these two guys right here:

….are definitely at fault! But aren’t they both just so cute?!

I was in the fourth grade, and I was totally hooked on their show, BJ and the Bear. And ever since then, I just can’t get enough of big machines! Construction trucks, giant construction trucks (Ooh - even better! You know, those kind that can’t drive on our regular roads!), semi trucks, pick-up trucks - all of them!

So in thinking about how to differentiate this blog from my blogspot one, I’ve decided to call it “H2″ - at least for a little while. I do love Hummers (Evil hippie! Bad hippie!) and so I thought it was perfectly fitting!

You may take comfort in the fact that the truck I covet right now is a 2000 Nissan Frontier Crew Cab. Not only is it a mini-truck, but, it is a Japanese vehicle - two things to make it a bit nicer to the environment.

There is another, though, that I love so dearly - and it is absolutely horrible for the environment! It does, however, cost around $150,000 - so I’m pretty sure I won’t be buying one anytime soon!

But is that not just a THING OF BEAUTY, or what?!

It’s the new International CXT.  Some of you Posties may remember the Big Blue Monster - he was a CXT - oh, how I longed to meet him! 

Our last house in Texas, was a few miles up the road from an International location. When they first got these trucks in, hubby and I were going crazy, we were so excited! He kept passing there to go to work, and he wasn’t even sure what he was seeing those first days, because, the one truck he saw was way in the back. But he kept trying to explain to me what he saw and we were both just freaking out! It was kind of like, two kids peeking at Christmas presents together, and discovering that Mom and Dad had bought them the coolest gifts EVER! Ha! Mark finally decided that, yes, it had to have been some kind of giant pick-up truck, and that was it! I had had enough! I was going to see for myself!

I drove my little minivan-mom self over there, and I drove right in past the ‘Employees Only’ signs and drove right to the back of the buildings! I had to know what they had back there! And besides, what is the worst they could tell me? “Uh, ma’m, you’re not supposed to be back here.” And then I leave - no problem.

Only - that never happened. Nobody ever said anything to me. And guess what? They had about twenty of those bad boys back there! I parked my minivan facing the trucks, turned off the engine, and just sat there s-a-l-i-v-a-t-i-n-g! Serious! I needed the Brawny man to clean off my steering wheel!

I returned on multiple occasions to sit and yearn for this fine piece of machinery, like any true truck nut would, and no one ever said anything to me. Well, except for the time I brought Mark with me, and we saw a man out there with the trucks, so we went to talk to him. He told us some more about the trucks, and their cost, and that only ‘Daddy Warbucks’ and his pals would even be test-driving them!

So yes, in bad hippie form, I am a hardcore truck nut! And I’ve been thinking about a few cute ways to set this blog apart from its ancestor, and I think “H2″ is just the perfect way to do that! So Hippie Spelunker - “H2″ it is!

….or, from K8, that is! This really funny and wonderful blogger, K8, is having a contest. In her contest, she is giving away heaps, and I do mean HEAPS, of scrapbooking goodies! I would so love to win this scrapbooking contest!! We all, as bloggers, have a chance, though! All you have to do to enter is put her adorable graphic in your sidebar or post about the contest or put the graphic after every post, if you’re so inclined! I am actually so glad that I stumbled onto this contest (thank you, Laura!) because, I love K8’s blog!! It’s called Three Wild Monkeys and she is so funny! And her sweet little monkeys are completely adorable!

And don’t you just love the graphic?

Look, if I do so well as to survive this oh-so-wonderful period of my parenting years - I want you to promise me that you’ll award me some fantabulous award, mmmmkay?

They are for sure wearing me out. And I think I just realized this morning that the worst issue you had with your child during their ‘bad toddler’ years (be that 2 or 4 years old, or whenever the nightmare was for you and your sweetpea) is pretty much the same issue you will face as God pumps unGodly amounts of hormones through their sweet litte demonic systems!

I’m serious! The exact same issues that I had with Shawn at age four, (ahh, yes, reminds me of a little bugger in Dallas I know) are the ones I am dealing with ON A DAILY BASIS RIGHT NOW!!!!!!

Let me give you a good example. This is not quite what happened this morning, but, it’s close enough. You don’t butter his waffles for him - he’s mad at you for not helping him out. You do butter his waffles for him - he’s mad at you for doing it wrong.

I know that none of you, least of all Tracy, can relate to this! Not even in the slightest!

So it is just this constant, ‘Mom’s making my life miserable’ thing and it is completely exhausting me! It’s this constant back and forth - you’re supposed to go left, you’re supposed to go right, no, no, no - you’re just doing it WRONG!

Let me tell you, by the time he got his books and left this morning, I was so fed up! I actually slammed the door after they (the boys) went out to wait for their bus.

And then, sappy me, always thinking - something is going to happen to one of us, and the last words we shared were in anger - I went back outside after a few minutes to say goodbye to them again.

I’ll be so glad when we get to that responsible, gentlemanly, deep-voiced, would do anything for his mother, older teenager stage.

Yes, it sounds like a pipe dream - I’m well aware - but, both of my brothers got there. So - it could happen. Rare? Yes, but, it could happen.

Of course, then you know I’ll be crying about how I miss my sweet pre-teens!

Sounds like they came by that ‘can never be pleased’ stuff honestly, eh?

I can’t wait to tell my RPG-head son about this!

“Oh, Shawn! Come here, darling, Momma’s got something to show you!”

Outside

See more like this on kontraband.com

Think it will work?

I need coffee - need it. Yes, it’s true. Mark’s aunt told me the other day that the lumps in my armpits were some kind of cyst disease and that I would have to get off all caffeine for it to go away.

I told her she didn’t know what she was talking about.

Seriously, you’d have to send me to drug rehab to get me off caffeine!

Give me coffee or give me death!

And when you give me free coffee - I love you even that much more!

Check it out, ya’ll:

Can you say - gah-roooovy!!

I have been trying to learn all that I can about web site hosting. I have recently acquired a few new sites, and I have a lot to learn. I have actually had my own hosting for several years, but, that is through a host that is what I call - a major hand-holder! I wouldn’t say I’ve really learned a whole lot of back end information from that account. I actually had it for several years before I even knew what an FTP program was!

But as I wander around the internet, trying to absorb as much information as I can, I find that I am getting lost in a sea of advice. I want to find the information that I actually need - not too technical, not too simple - so that I can do my work online, to the best of my ability.

I found a site today that seems to be offering me just that.
It is called Web Hosting Information and there
is a lot of great - and understandable - advice there.

They have a huge section of reviews, in which they review a ton of different hosting companies. And anyone who visits the site can vote on each company based on features, reliability, support, and price. And there is also a comment section under each review, so that if you have anything you want to share about a particular company, you can.

They have a weekly podcast, on which they answer questions that have come in. They’re very short, so they’re easy to listen to. And underneath each podcast, they list related resource articles. This is a great section! They are a month behind right now, though, so I’m hoping they’ll pick this one back up soon.

My favorite section is the News. They offer daily hosting industry news briefings. So you get a little bit of this or that, in relation to hosting. The last one talked about a Hosting Convention in Las Vegas that’s going on right now.

All in all, I think this is going to be a great site to help educate me about the in’s and out’s of web hosting and I’m glad to have found it!

My sweet Patrick got his marching band shirt and he looked so cute and so handsome in it! And they had to wear them on Friday, because, that night was ‘Meet the Eagles’ night at the stadium. My sweet boy is ‘cheating the system’, according to my book, anyway! He is getting to be in a high school marching band two years early - while he is still ‘in’ junior high! I say ‘in’ because our junior high schoolers and our high schoolers all go to the same school. And - being a small town, they start in marching band in the eighth grade! He just looked so handsome Friday morning that I made him pose for a pic! I’m so glad that I have a home based business that allows me time for stuff like this in the morning! And I made sure to back up and get allllllll of him in it - because, Mom, Tracy - he’s grown like a weed!! Since we came home from Texas - he has been doing nothing but growing! I have been ‘checking’ him every now and then - I check him by making him stand face to face with me and see how close he is to ‘eye to eye’ with me. He has grown, but, his eyes have been a couple inches below mine. Then, one morning last week, he woke up and his knee was hurting him and it kept hurting for a few days. Mark said that it was probably growing pains, so, after a few days of it hurting, I checked his height again - and I’ll be gosh-darned if that boy isn’t within an inch of being EYE TO EYE with me!!!!! What?! What the hell happened? (Tracy - you’re the lucky one, being a bit taller - Mom and I are gonna have to be face to face with this monster any day now!!)
Isn’t he the cutest thing, though? And I was just so excited about his t-shirt, so I had to get a close-up…
And darn-it, if he isn’t the handsomest 13 year old!!! (And shhh! He recently held hands with a girl! Shhhh!) I did NOT tell you that!

I don’t know what it was about that darned t-shirt - but, I just thought it was so cool! I should be more excited about the band uniform itself, but, we haven’t been able to actually see that on him yet. I almost caught him in it on Saturday morning, when they had to take pics, but, the speedy monster had already changed back into his shorts by the time I got there to pick him up!

Doesn’t he have a nice, manly throat?

Gosh, I’m a dork.