catching up

Lots to cover today since I was a slacker yesterday and missed the picture prompt. 

I'll start there, where I have three entries. 

Historical:

Eagle Scout is looking a bit historical in this dandy hat.

Historical:

This historical action figure is a toy at Angel's Toy Barn where Camden and Benjy went wild yesterday choosing Play Mobil accessories to go with their playsets.

Historical:

In a shocking, historical event, I played volleyball, bringing back memories of being the last student chosen to be on a gym team in high school. Clearly they didn't know about my janhg bong skills.

Last night's gathering of the special forces at Princess' home was so fun. Eaglescout and I are homebodies at heart, so we don't get out much, save Taekwondo or church or McDonald's or Taekwondo. So this was special. Camden disappeared the moment he arrived, climbing up on the shed roof and playing some kind of game that involved making people "dead". Benjy cried a bit because he "didn't want to be dead", but he did relish chasing people with swords and light sabers. He ate Smarties while all the grown men stuck them to their sweaty foreheads. Yes, it's gross. But it was a contest and the competitive spirit couldn't be squelched. Not sure how grown these men really truly are....

I'm awaiting my second order of freebies from vistaprint.com. Most of this stuff is for my first graders and me. For only shipping charges, I ordered a pen, sticky notes, two sets of note cards, a note pad, a car door magnet to stick on our classroom door at school, business cards that say "reading is thinking" to use as bookmarks, postcards to teach about partnerships in reading, a self-inking stamp that says "completed with help", and this tee shirt: It's kinda hard to read, so I'll tell you what it says. 

I heart martial arts & crafts.



Get it? arts & crafts???
Clever, I thought. And free.
That's the best part.

Oh yeah, there's a prompt for today - Juicy.

Check out these pix from Eaglescout and Cubscout's gardens. 

(Yes, they each have their own. The OCD in ES prevents him from sharing gardening space with his son.)

One day those tomatoes will be juicy.

And one day those blossoms will be juicy pumpkins or watermelons. We'll just have to be surprised because we have no idea what kind of seeds Cubscout was sowing into the dirt last spring.

We barely made it to church today, sneaking into the pew just as Pastor Larry was reading the gospel. Drat, my tardiness caused us to miss the back pew. Nevertheless, I'm just glad we made it. The collect really spoke to me.  

Almighty God, the fountain of all wisdom, you know our necessities before we ask and our ignorance in asking: Have compassion on our weakness, and mercifully give us those things which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask; through the worthiness of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Southern Bell don't like

when ES use blog against

his most precious wife.

A Haiku For LL

What is the question?

To spear or not to spear you?

I think I'll just sleep.

Half and Half

I don't know about you, but I like my coffee black. No sugar. No fancy flavored creamers. Just lots of black coffee. So I confess being completely puzzled when I saw the prompt this morning. 

And then, holy words of wonder, Batman! I was totally caught up in my crime novel when Milena told Jack Reacher, "I guess half of you were involved and half of you weren't." Do you see it? half ... and ... half. Well now, if that's not the coolest thing to happen to me today, I don't know what is.

Lookie here. This is proof that I have a janhg bong and I'm not afraid to use it. My partner here is Steph. She's concentrating really hard because I'm so scary and she is very, very afraid of my skills. Girls need skills, you know. See Eagle Scout in the background? He's wielding a weapon here, too. But he's not so scary. See him grinning? He's really just fake laughing because he's afraid I'm gonna do a crazy jump-fly-kick across the room and speak to him with my janhg bong. I wouldn't do that though. Not with Mr. D. in the room. That would most def not be respectful. 

Camden, however, is not afraid of anything. Anybody who knows him knows this is so true. Here he is in a rare moment of rest. I nearly fell off my chair when I saw him chillaxing in the pool. I even put my book down to grab the camera! 

"Not now, Jack Reacher," I said. "I must take this boy's picture while he's not moving." 

"But Crime Fighter Wendi, you must stay. I'm about to solve the entire scam and spear the bad guys with my janhg bong. I cannot possibly do it without you!" Jack Reacher pleaded. 

"I'm sorry, Jack Reacher," I said, letting him down easy. "But I've just gotta do this. One day you'll look back upon this moment and you'll be glad I got the shot."

I go to one,uno, 1, TKD class this morning and I feel like I've been kicked in the butt. Guess who I was partnered with?

Princess.

Uh-huh. Need I say more?

So here's my Game On photo. This was so perfect. I was gonna take a picture of a cup of coffee, a bottle of Aleeve, a tube of Ben Gay, and my heating pad - the results of my Game On. But this little Nerf Gun war turned out to be the perfect photo-op. Glad I wasn't asleep. :)

Fun in the Sun wasn't today. I visited my school to help move all my classroom stuff from the hallways and principal's office back to my room since the NEW carpet has been laid. Lady Leslie was kind enough to take my brood of boys, so I delivered them with doughnuts, root beer, and chips, thinking, somehow, that we'd be even. I know, deep down in my heart, though, that doughnuts in no way = two wild boys. All of us bloggy friends know that. But, hehehe, it worked! (And don't panic, Princess, I didn't do any fun schooly stuff in my room. Just hard stuff. You would have hated it, you know, since you only do your hard stuff at your 57 TKD classes on Thursdays.)

So, without further ado, here is the extent of fun in the sun I had today. And man, was it good.

Eaglescout had no fun in the sun today either. He was in the Pitt all day and had a dinner meeting to boot. He didn't take pictures, but from the doggie bag he brought home, I conclude that he was really truly eating. :) :) :) The scallops were delicious. The veggies look good enough to eat, but I'll hold them till tomorrow. 

The Princess came over today with her younger son for a swim in our ginormous pool. We planned the white-orange-yellow KforK class. The kiddos played submarine and splashed a bit and Benjy got mad when he got splashed even though he started it. I told him he's in a pool; he'll get wet. He said, "OK." 

As Princess and I were sewing up a nice seam in her Janhg Bong accessory so that her two pieces of Janhg Bong didn't clang together in transport, she spotted this frame.

Can you guess who this is? 

I'll give you 3 chances.

Yes, you got it on the first guess! It's none other than Eagle Scout himeself! I dare not ask him the date of this picture for fear that he'll not enjoy knowing that it's being submitted to blogs around the world. But the back of the photo says 81-7, so I'm assuming this is 1981 and he's in the 7th grade. You think he's a stud muffin, no? 

Eagle Scout and young Cub Scout made it home safe and sound tonight. Camden was asleep within minutes of hitting the pillow. I think he thinks he's in heaven because his bed is soft and clean and there are no bugs in it. 

Dork Alert:

I've begun writing down the books I read in a little journal. In June, I read two novels. Not an impressive amount of reading for a first grade teacher who loves to teach reading more than anything else. So far this month, I have finished one novel and one professional book. Here is my current reading pile.

Don't you love how flat books are? You can stack them up. You can put your coffee cup on them. You can carry one under your arm while holding your coffee cup in one hand and the phone in another. Books are flat, but, when you open them up, they are so FULL OF STUFF! 

When I lived in Virginia, my teacher friends and I started this really informal version of a book club. We met at each others' homes once a month or so and simply talked about what we had been reading. Mostly we just talked. But we made sure to share our current faves at sometime during the night. 

One month, when I was prego with Benjy, I was about to pop and couldn't concentrate on reading for more than a minute at a time. I brought an issue of Cosmo to that book club. Obviously I'm not a high-brow reader. But I do love to read, and now that summer vacation is well underway, I'm catching up on all the reading I don't manage to squeeze in during the school year. 

EFFORT

It takes a good dose of effort to look this cute.

Eaglescout and Cubscout are off to Scout Camp, leaving Benjyman and me to our own devices. We've spent the better part of the day playing pirates, making pirate flags, sailing the high seas in search of treasure. Stuff like that. Basically, it was an effortLESS day. Those are my favorites.

Napoleon Dynamite

This is for you, Lady L. If you don't wanna catch the whole movie, at least grant the Princess and me 9 minutes and 32 seconds of your time tonight watching this. These are the highlights of Napoleon Dynamite. Hey, I think my next appliance might have to be named Napoleon. Oh, and btw, the girl, Deb? I used to have an assymetrical hair cut. Not a one-sided ponytail, though I did have ponytails. But I really truly had a do that was short on one side and neck-length on the other. I guess I was a bit like Deb. But I didn't have any boyfriends like Napoleon. Girls want boyfriends with skills, after all.

Did you see that?

Well, if you were in Virginia in the '70s and '80s, you couldn't miss it. 

Here we have a tour of my many and varied hairstyles growing up. The little girl with me in a few of the photos is Michelle. She was the cute one. I was the goofy one who picked my nose. 

To Mom's credit, she kept my hair cut short and simple and little girl adorable without being fussy and overly girly, which is just plain annoying. But I recall telling her one day that I didn't want to be cute anymore, and if she wasn't gonna let me shave my legs, well, I could fix my hair. Hmmmph. And so I grew out my locks and bought a pick and a can of White Rain Extra Hold, the kind with all kinds of flourocarbons in it to eat away at the ozone layer, and now you know where global warming is coming from. 

I hope you've enjoyed yourselves today, girls. I think it's easy to see why I have the history with boyfriends that I have. Clearly I couldn't have made that up. These samples from my Big Hair Portfolio are brought to you by the makers of Dippity Doo. The cute ones with me and short hair were thrown in just to show you that Mom did have a lick of sense before I cut loose with the curling iron. And the current shot taken today was snapped by Benjy who told me to "look pretty, not crazy". I'm not sure what he meant by that.

This is me. 

This is me shooting a gun. 

This is me shooting a gun at a can. 

This is me shooting a gun at a can and blowing the kablooey out of it! 

This is me shooting a gun at a can and blowing the kablooey out of it at the beach party at the Kuhns who are from my school. 

Can you hear the kids screaming, "MRS. RICHERT! MRS. RICHERT!" That's me. hehehe. The first grade teacher. I'm a scary teacher, let me tell you. Kids always do their homework in my class.

Just a bit of my night with the special forces. 

Last night's special forces had no pictures. We can't photograph all of our actions. Some are covert, you know. (I've been reading  a lot of crime fiction of late. I know you can't tell.) 

But I can tell you that I had chocolate ice cream with coconut. 

The Ps had to resort to drastic measures to escape the cold stone. 

Guy Smiley changed his name to Captain Tightpants. 

And Lady Leslie had her ice cream licked by BS.

This is beginning to sound a bit adult rated, but I swear, it wasn't. You see, most of us had our younglings with us. Benjy won't let me say "youngin"; he makes me say, "youngling", which is something out of Star Wars. I'm sure the Princess' kids get it. I say "whatever." So we had the sound of zombies and running feet and yelling and whatnot around us as we had our special forces meeting. It was fun, and oh so dangerous. Yes, it was. You had to be there. 

Color Your World

I have several shots today. I have several colors, you see, that colored my world on this Friday. I'll take you on a tour. Come on. We better hurry. It's almost tomorrow. 

Aren't you jealous of these lovely colors? Don't you particularly enjoy the red sauce that nestled my meatballs in the blue crockpot? What about those green houseplants on the white windowsill? They've been alive for as long as tan Camden. Really. And check out the yellowish hue outside the window. That's sunshine yellow. My favorite color is yellow. Did you know that?

Bet you may have these colors in your house. This is a pirate/knight explosion. Play Mobil makes rich plastic colors. Better than Fisher Price, I think.

Now this is possibly my favorite picture of color today. Check out the contrast between the orange shirt (that, yes, I did wear to ice cream last night; it wasn't dirty; I'm only a yellow belt; I don't get sweaty gross at sparring club) and the black air-soft automatic rifle. That's a gun, for those of you who aren't familiar with weapons of mass destruction. I am a decent shot with this rifle. Which is handy to know cause I plan to join the CIA or the FBI or the SPAR one day to help save the world. I shot two aluminum cans off a stump with this machine, which I feel compelled to name Rolf, thanks to Princess. So, anyhow, we went to the Kuhns tonight to their little beach party. The beach, you see, is really a beach. But it's at a creek. Or a crick. Depending on where you are from. Or how your neck's feeling. So we went down to the beach, a walk through muddy ATV tracks and around wooded spaces and through green grasses, wildflowers, and tall weeds, arriving at a cleared-out space dotted with an actual cabin, camp fire, bathroom, shower, garden, and shooting range of sorts. This beach paradise was built by friends and 13-year-olds Austin and Brandon. They go to my school, and they are really the coolest middle schoolers on the planet. They make me so not afraid of real middle schoolers.  It's amazing. Really, their beach place. And, plus, I drove an ATV tonight. It had mudflaps, thankfully. I don't like the idea of getting mud between my toes. Eeeuuuuuuuuuuuwwwwww.

And this leads me to the final picture of color for today. The campfire. I'm a bit nervous that Benjy is a firebug. He loves fire. He loves to capture it on sticks, watch it burn, put it out, and do it again. He would rather burn sticks than swim in the creek. (Which he calls a crick now that we live up here with all these yankee people.) But the fire was glowing a pretty orange tonight, smelling of camping and smores and lazy nights. Funny how you can smell some colors, huh?

Believe.

Today's picture is of a picture that I took of a picture I made for my sister's 37th birthday last February. She died two months and five days later. Michelle left behind her dear husband Brian and a menagerie of pets and a motley crew of friends and family who miss her generous heart and spirit. Because she was a believer in Jesus, she's in heaven now with him. That's what I believe. 

The word for the day is

accessory.

Check out my accessory that goes with my taekwondo bag.

This is style, I tell ya. I whipped this enviable piece up the other day to hold my jahng bong. That's the ultra cool weapon I got for Mother's Day that I love to twirl in the backyard when nobody's looking. I really debated on the fabric I would use for this accessory. I knew it couldn't be black. 'Cause that's the color they make 'em in over in China. Plus also, black is so yesterday. So, I dug through the fabric pieces I had stored in the basement and settled on this furry green scrap. We made ugly dolls with this once. My ugly doll is in Benjy's room. He's rather fond of it. I stitched my jahng bong holder together on my Singer that I use primarily for scrapbooking, added a handy carrying strap and a Velcro closure, and voila!

By the way, in case you still aren't clear on what this holder is, here is a taekwondo man posing with his jahng bong. The whole stick screws together, so when it's in two pieces, it fits perfectly in my accessory.

Aaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh

Today's word for the picture was "aaaahhhhhhh". Or something like that.

Now, my entry for today isn't simply a visual thing. It's also somewhat aural. You like it when I use sophisticated words, no? 

I do have a real-life still picture to go with this auditory feast, just so's I don't appear to be dissin' the rules. I wouldn't do dat. Even in my gangsta speak. True dat.

So, here's my picture for to-day.

Now what, pray tell, does this have to do with the word of the day? Well, get your dirty minds out of the gutter. I know's dat's where they are. Leslie. Well, this picture accompanies the sound that goes "aaaahhhhh". If you are into this sort of sound. 

Now me? I think it borders on Frenchy or Germanesque. And I personally find these languages U-G-L-Y. Not the least bit romantic. (Now the hottie on House Hunters International who spoketh Italian? His language totally worked for him. Yes, indeed it did.) But here in America on my back porch? Not so much. 

But, for some people I know, this sound is da bomb.  (And, for the record, I totally dig this man who is making this hideous sound. I love him. I adore him. I think he is da bomb. When he is silent.)

Here, for auditory pleasure....

aaaahhhhhhhhhhh

Now that I have real live bloggy friends, I wanna play a game. Starting tomorrow, if that's OK with my bloggy friends, let's take a picture every day for the next 26 days of something that goes with the word on this list.

1. Aahh!! 

2. Accessory 

3. Believe 

4. Color my world 

5. Did you see THAT? 

6. Effort 

7. Flat 

8. Framed 

9. Fun in the sun 

10. Game on 

11. Half and half 

12. Historic 

13. Juicy 

14. Metallic 

15. Moody 

16. Movement 

17. On the road 

18. Priorities 

19. Relief 

20. Sparkle 

21. Spiral 

22. Splish splash 

23. This magic moment 

24. Tiny 

25. Way to go 

26. Yummy 

It'll be so fun to compare our shots. And the built-in bonus is that for the next 26 days we'll have a sure topic to blog about. Whadaya say? Huh? Wanna play?

In our top story today...

The Eaglescout has landed. Camden and Benjy rushed home from church, skipping coffee hour (ie cookies, punch, cakes, juice, hide & seek in the vesting robe closet) to wait for Dad. When he arrived around 2:00, they nearly rolled head-over-heels downstairs to greet him. They missed their daddy. I missed him, too. Yes, I took a 90-minute nap this evening just because I could.

In other news...

I have two new readers here. Welcome T and L!!! Now I should be up to, what's the count...4 and a half? These are my BFFs up here in Yankeeland. You know, it's really Yankeeish up here. Except for these chicks. They're cool. Not cold. Just cool. They don't have any slaves except their hubbies. They're just about downright southern.

When we first moved up here, I didn't think much of this Mason-Dixon line thing. But now I believe it's real. Very real. Of course, on the south side of this invisible line, it's all Confederate flags and Robert E. Lee and risin' again and scary such stuff. Up here, nobody thinks about that. That's refreshing. But, on the flip side, that warm southern hospitality that oozes off the pages of Southern Living oozes not up here. Now, at L's house? There's a real honest-to-goodness front porch and apple pie! Yes, you read right! Apple pie! T is hosting our next gathering soon. Eaglescout should be able to make this one since he's currently padlocked to the chair in the living room. I don't think he'll be going anywhere soon. 

Check out the resemblance.

And in our feature story this evening...

Our neighbors moved this weekend and we inherited their trampoline. I'd give my eyeteeth if I had a picture of the four men carrying this AS-IS up the road, over the fence, and into the yard. It needs a new net, as you can see. It also needed a bit of sprucing up, which Camden and Benjy got right onto. (And yes, I can and will end my sentences with a preposition. It's my blog and I can do whatever I please.)

Note the vacuum cleaner sitting beside the tramp. T names hers. Consuela is her new green sweeper. Mine's just a red dirt devil. No name. Maybe it'd work better if it had a name. Do any of my other 3 and a half readers name your appliances? 

This is so crackin' me up. I can't believe I just discovered TeacherTube.com. This is utube for teachers. Some of it's serious and inspiring, which roughly translates as "it's summer break and I'm not ready to feel that way right now because I'm rather enjoying staying up late blogging and sleeping late and then drinking about a pot of coffee before beginning my day at, oh, around noon".

Some of teachertube is educational, like this. And who wouldn't like to learn improper fractions from a rapping math teacher?


But, my favorite parts of teachertube right now are the funny ones. The clips that make me giggle and guffaw and snort when nobody's lookin'. And since it's summertime, no one's lookin' at me till the end of August. :)

"It's PINK!" shouted Benjy, pointing out the window. After the cloudiest of days with a couple of bouts of driving rain showers, this is the picture God handed us tonight. Wow.

I skipped out on the annual beach trip with the Virginia girls. I missed them greatly. Especially the lazy mornings sipping coffee, afternoons eating salsa, and evenings eating hushpuppies. Do you get the picture here? I love to eat. I missed all that eating. And I missed my girlfriends, too. But they thought of me! They really like me! :) They mailed me this terrific goodie box filled with two boxes of fudge from Callahans, a green martini glass, and a card signed by all. Wow.

And this is the result of Friday's creating. My pact with myself was to use only stuff around the house. I used an old birdhouse that had begun to fall apart, scrap papers, leftover spanish moss from a school project, and a few choice rocks from Maine. Oh yeah, and Hodge Podge. I could glue a room together with that stuff. This little birdie house makes me happy, even if I did make it.