Little Bit of This, Little Bit of That

OK, so I have been severely lax in posting photos lately. I'll try to redeem myself a little bit, here.

I have a few pics from Mikey's birthday party on Saturday. For the life of me, I could not get a single clear photo at the pool, but the ones in the park afterwards are mostly fine.

( There are only eight for now, but I promise to find more later. )

Not too many on my camera, apparently. Matt had more on his, I'll weed through them sometime this week and post the good ones for y'all. ;)

EDIT: OH! Remember the little girl we tease him about, Desiree? She didn't come to the party, but she gave him a teeny little sticky with a note on it last week.


Sorry it's so delated. *snorts out an amused laugh* TOO CUTE. XD.

All right, so I finally got my pics off my camera. I resized some of them and uploaded them to my photobucket, so now I can share them with y'all.

I hated the idea of camping before I went. Now I'm back, and I can say with absolute certainty that I LOATHE camping. Well, I suppose I have mixed feelings. We reserved our campsite online - it was a nice campsite, the pictures were true to what we actually had.

Almost.

The pictures looked like they were two campsites, right next to each other and on flat ground. Oh, no. They were up a steep-ass hill, and ours was at the top. Hello? Fat people can't climb hills!! And I discovered, too, that every time I got up to the damn tent, I had to go right back down to go to the bathroom. EVERY. TIME.

ANYWAY. Got there Thursday, June 19th a little after noon. Finally got everything up that damn hill, set up our tent with no trouble. Got everything inside. Then a thunderstorm rolled in. A four-hour-long thunderstorm, complete with giant, marble-sized hail. The pics I have of the hail make it look sparse, but believe me, it looked worse before I managed to snap some pics.

So anyway, the four of us (hubby, Mikey, Amanda and me) were spooning through most of the storm because it was freezing. When it stopped, we all had a bit of dinner, had a nice fire for a couple hours, then went to bed. I was up an hour later, and let's just leave it at "worst night of my entire life. BAR. NONE." If you really want the gruesome details, I'll tell you - but we'll leave it there for now.

That evening it got down to about 40 degrees, and down to 45 the next night. The air mattress we brought along was out of air before bedtime the first night even came along, so I didn't sleep well at all the whole trip - and I had really strange dreams the last two nights.

But all the storms and the horrible nights aside, Saturday and Sunday were absolutely beautiful days; those kind of made up for the crummy weather the first two afternoons.

( ♪ Great Faces, Great Places - South Dakota ♪ )

My disdain for camping aside, South Dakota was absolutely lovely - it's very easy to see why people would want to live there.





Makes your heart sigh a little, no? XD

Lots of stuff to put in here, now that I have a few minutes...

First things first - my baby sister graduated! YAYAYAYAYAYAY!! ( Click to see her! )

We've had some interesting weather lately - not this weekend, thankfully, but the last two weekends we had some nasty-looking clouds, heavy rain and hail and tornadoes. ( Check out this wicked sky! )

And of course, I've a pic of Mikey and Matt, goofing around in the Dollar Store:
I love the serious look on Mikey's face:


Not too much else going on right now. Getting closer to our camping trip - looking forward to the time off and seeing a state I haven't yet seen, but still rather apprehensive about the "camping" part. I suppose I'll be able to say I've at least tried it, right? *sighs*

Here's a personality test thingy I swiped from...several people, actually:

That one was pretty close, but I also thought several of this one's characteristics applied to me:

And last but not least, a meme I swiped from fredchikk:

Step 1: Put your music player on shuffle.
Step 2: Post the first line from the first 40 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing.
Step 3: Strike through the songs when someone guesses both artist and track correctly.
Step 4: Looking them up on Google or any other search engine is CHEATING!
Step 5: If you like the game post your own.

It was actually 37, but I hate odd numbers for memes (Yes, I'm anal-retentive.), so I upped it to 40. ( Step right up, test your song knowledge! )

OK, I think that's just about everything for now...

Oh, wait...the mall nearest to where I live has been reinventing itself lately, and this weekend they've had a carnival. So we took Mikey and Amanda today, and they had a blast - except for "The Zipper." Mikey's usually pretty good about rides and loves going on them, but he was screaming his head off on the Zipper. And when he and Amanda got off, he looked a little shell-shocked and clung to me (but I must point out he didn't cry), and Amanda was laughing her ass off, trying to tell me in between gasps of laughter, "He was yelling, 'MOMMYYYYYYY!!!'" Highly amusing. XD

A few weeks ago, we went to the Sesame Street exhibit at the Children's Museum - took several pics, these were some of the best: ( Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street? )

This last week, Amanda's Animal Behavior class had their last project. They had to get into groups of two or more (Amanda, being the quintessential people-hater she is, was in a group of two), and each group was given a baby chick. Their task for the week? Teach the chick to perform a trick. At the end of the week, they were able to keep the chicks if they wanted. I work with someone who owns a hobby farm and she may be able to take the chick, so Amanda brought it home.

She and Matt made me hold it - after which I washed my hands in scalding water (farm animals, remember?) - but it IS really cute, and it's noisy.

( Until now. )

Is it wrong that I adore it when tiny things curl up to sleep on my big man? XD

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday!

Thought I'd share some Christmas pics with all of you.

( Click for Pics! )

All in all, a very nice Christmas. I couldn't think of a better way to show off my new camera than to post pictures taken with it. There are more on my Facebook if you'd care to see them. ;)

I've got three for now - the first one is Mikey, when we made him dig his hand inside the pumpkin. He hates the "cleaning out" part. Which is funny, considering Amanda and I can't get enough of those awesome squelching sounds... XD

( Mikey with a small handful of pumpkin guts )

Next is what Amanda's got so far - it's slow going because it's a pretty intricate design on a very thick-walled pumpkin, but it's turning out SO well. Have I mentioned she's an incredible artist? She didn't make this design, she copied it from a book...but she DID draw it freehand onto her pumpkin, and she's sculpting it beautifully. I'll post the completed pumpkin later.

( Amanda So Far )

And last is mine. I'm done, and I'm extremely proud of it. It's the best I've ever done when following a pattern - I didn't accidentally cut off any parts or anything. I took the pic with the candle inside and the lights off for the whole effect.

( *huggles completely AWESOME pumpkin* )

Will post more tomorrow. XD