Oh Deer!

I've finally had my first run-in with a deer and it was NOT fun. I've had some near, squeaky misses in the 5.5 years we've lived out here but it was all over on Tuesday morning. One thing you learn pretty quickly is that if you see one deer, it's a pretty safe bet there's at least one more not too far behind. They roam around our neighborhood a lot so you start "feeling" that they are there.

Tuesday morning I was driving to school and suddenly a deer passes right in front of my bumper. My internal dialogue went something like this, "I hate this song, I'll just change channels, oh crap, look, a deer" as the deer darted front of my bumper I remember saying out loud, 'Crap, a deer! Quick, Lorie, see if you see ano..." and that's as far as I got before the second deer popped out. I smashed into it with my front right side and it went down. I asked Lorie if she saw what it did and her answer was that it just kind of bounced from view. Since I was on a dark county road and first wanted to make sure I could keep driving safely, I drove a couple hundred feet down to a little county church's parking lot and used the lamppost there to check out my car. I could see a cracked headlight and some fur stuck in my bumper, but that was all. The tire looked good and there wasn't a smooshed anything in any part of the car. I called Kenny and he said to go ahead to the school and he'd come up when the sun came up and check it out. As I drove back I couldn't see a deer, which bothered me a bit because I didn't know how badly he was hurt (I refuse to share the sentiments of some of the good ole boys when I told this story later.).

Kenny came by eventually and there's actually more damage than I thought at first. It looks like the deer banged into my headlight and busted part of the front grill and then when he went down he got caught in the tire and some part of him bang into the front right panel of my car...not fixable by the great Ken-dini!

We JUST got that car paid off, too. Ain't them the roadapples of life!

Oh, I found the camera, hence the picture. Cute update about the truck: Tall Kenny got to drive his truck to church. During youth group one of the boys asked if the red truck in the parking lot was his and when Kenny said yes, he got a "cool" for a response. Kenny took a side look at me and grinned. So funny!

Oh crud, he's a country boy

You must sing the title of this post to John Denver's "Thank God I'm a country boy" tune.

My baby, my sweet little firstborn curly-top adorably chunky little boy is now a 6 foot whatever, deep voiced, 16-year old almost-owner of a TRUCK! (Almost-owner because we bought it and he will be granted driving privileges. If he wants to own it he's got to get a job and pay us for it.)

So anyhow, last night Big Kenny and Tall Kenny (he won't answer to "little Kenny" anymore) drove an hour away to Pendergrast, Ga (I have NO idea where that is. All I know is that if I live in the boondocks, and I think I do, it's halfway between the boondocks and Timbuktu!) and came home with a red Dodge Dakota truck. Big Kenny called me on the way home and said he'd let Tall Kenny drive it when they got to town. So when Big Kenny got home he made me come out and stand in the rain (okay, it was sprinkling...but I was in my jammies and it was cold) to see the truck when Tall Kenny drove in. So we're waiting and waiting and I'm getting wetter and wetter (not to mention crankier and crankier). Finally we see headlights but instead of coming down the driveway, the kid drives around the other side of the house and around the backyard! I watch my child in this brand-new (to us) truck driving over wet grass that belongs to my in-laws in the dead dark and then head around the pool...towards trees. Hubby takes off running around after him (okay, so THAT part was a little bit funny) screaming, "What are you doing?" Turns out he decided he "needed" to try out the 4x4 part of the truck. He's so 16!

I'll post a picture of the kid and the truck (I've GOT to stop calling it a car) as soon as I figure out where Meg put my camera. I've still got to get that dumb General Lee photo posted, too!

Celebrity Watch 2009

How is it that my last blog was in April? How sad that I'm still on the same woe-is-my-weight train since my last blog was whining about how big I'd become, too. It's just a little irritating that at the start of January 2009, I am almost back up to my January 2008 weight. Now, granted, it's not like I've been working out and watching what I eat (as I sit here scarfing down pizza and a Mountain Dew...the dinner of champions). But still, well, anything I say is going to sound stupid so I may as well leave that one right there, finish eating my pizza and move on.

I had a wee "oh my gosh" moment this afternoon and couldn't get the satisfaction of getting a "oh, wow, you're so lucky" kind of response, so all I'm left with is being able to type it here and see it in print.

Are you ready to "squee" a little? I was actually, truly and honestly, driving behind the General Lee today!!! That's right, the actual General Lee from the old Dukes of Hazzard show! And yes, I know there was more than one General Lee, and this is probably an imitation one, but barring those minor details...the General Lee, people!!

So, okay, that's not too terribly exciting. But heck, I live in Loganville, Ga...it don't get much better than that! Anyway, as the story goes, I'm in my car with Meg on my way to my friend who lives in Covington to close her Premier show. I'm at the entrance to the subdivision looking for a break in oncoming traffic when I see coming down the highway an old-timey looking cop car. So I tell Meg, check out that cop car! That's the way they used to look. And she nicely said, oh, wow. (She's my favorite) Then right behind the cop car drove the General Lee! Now big Kenny has this fascination for the dude that played Bo Duke (whose name escapes me at the moment). John Schneider. There we go, caught up. Anyhow, Mr.Schneider was apparently a celebrity honorary coach for his kiddie baseball team and he has pictures of the game that Mr. Schneider showed up at that he likes to show off. It's one of his Major Moments from his childhood. Well, dang it, I'm driving down the highway behind the General Lee! So I call my man and all I get for my troubles is, oh yeah, that's nice. Come ON!!! Seriously??!!

Anyhow, after THAT disappointing response I had Meg dig out my camera from the Black Hole (my pocketbook) and take a couple photos. I obviously need to have the kid get more practice with the camera because when they turned left and I told her to take a picture so we could see the 01 on the side, she got the cop car and not the side of the General Lee. They turned into Wendy's and instead of taking the picture like I told her spent the time chattering at me and by the time she remembered that in order to take a picture, you had to do something with a camera, it was too late. So all I have to show for my 10 minutes of being close to something vaguely famous is the back of the General Lee and my dashboard. Well, and a nifty picture of the stupid cop car. And when I figure out where she put my camera I'm posting it here, baby, for all (well the two who sometimes mosey over here to read this blather) to see!

The weight of it all.

I'm kind of getting tired of my weight. Well, more I'm tired of what my butt and thighs look like. I'm especially irked because the lady I work with has a brother who is a plastic surgeon who says that there is NO way to get the saddlebags gone except to get them sucked out. Come on! That just can't be possible!

Don't get me wrong. I know what to eat and I know I should exercise, but I want to be the first person in history to get a modelesque body without the work. I know, I know, it's a long shot at best. But a girl's gotta have goals!!

What's that smell? Oh, it's me!

Okay, so for the last week I've noticed that body odor has become a problem with me. The first time I thought, maybe I forgot my deodorant this morning. I've managed to do such a thing a time or two in the past, but the second time I noticed "that smell" I knew FOR SURE I'd put my deodorant on. So next I think, hmmm, hormones they are a changin'. Maybe that's why I'm so odiferous these days. Maybe I need to look into a new brand of deodorant! But being the cheapskate that I am, I wanted to finish up the stick I had so I started spending more time in application mode but with no difference in outcome! Well, this morning as I'm doing the deodorant applying thing and thinking to myself how weird it was that just suddenly I stunk, I noticed that the deodorant applicator felt kind of rough. I took a second and actually looked at my deodorant only to find out that I'd hit the rock bottom of the stick! It was actually at the grid pattern at the bottom which is the rough part I felt! Who knows when it ran out (I'm thinking about a week or two ago with the first b.o. whiff I caught)!

Since I didn't have a back-up stick, I dove into my overnight kit and grabbed my sample size deodorant from there and taaa-daaa, now it's 9:41 p.m. and b.o. has been conquered!

Storms ahead

The last few days there have been storms in Atlanta. I have to admit, I slept through the ones on Friday night, but I hear they were pretty intense. Weather people were debating on whether there was a tornado or just intense winds that ravaged downtown. I think the National Weather Service weighed in that it really was a tornado. That was all the news on Saturday. Amazingly no fatalities...but a bunch of idiots were walking around downtown in all that glass and debris to check it out for themselves. Um, the TV crews are down there. You don't need to be adding to the chaos just so you can check it out for yourself. The storms Saturday touched a little closer. We have a friend who has had weird seizures for about a year. The doctors can't figure out what's going on, but they've gotten so intense and caused his body so much trauma that he was put in ICU at our local hospital on Thursday. A church member had her baby on Friday, so now that Kenny got back from Meg's field trip, we needed to go and do our hospital visits. So we leave the kids home with Ken and Sandra and drive off in what was just sprinkles. As we're heading down the road, the rain intensifies. At that point we realize that we'd both heard that he might be leaving ICU and with the rain, we didn't want to have to be roaming the hospital. So Kenny calls one of his friends, who is also a family member of the hospitalized guy. As he's talking to him the rain is really drumming down. He asks this guy where he's driving at because the background noise is the different than the noise the rains making and we are maybe a 1/2 mile from his house. The guys says he's at home but there's hail the size of golfballs coming down! Okay, so that's weird. We make it to the hospital, Kenny pulls up and drops me off at the overhang and goes to park the car. THAT's when the hail hits! Kenny dodges the hail coming down and we head up to ICU. Inside the ICU waiting area are the wife and mom of the hospitalized guy. There is a tornado WARNING that has just been posted. All ICU patients were taken out of their rooms and placed in interior halls of the ICU and all family members were booted to the waiting room! We get told this and then suddenly the door to the waiting room from ICU get thrown open and a nurse bustles in with sheets and blankets and instructions that if she yells, that we are all to go into a nearby ladies room and hunker down! Apparently the tornado is coming right for us!

Such excitement. It ended up going around the hospital and causing a whole bunch of damage in Covington. But all in all, I guess the safest place to be in an emergency is outside the ICU! I was actually glad we ended up there because the wife was fit to be tied. She ended up crying when she saw me (I thought they'd heard really bad news and were in the waiting room because her husband was having tests or something) and I braced for the news. Turned out she was just so stressed about her husband, that the tornado was the final blow. Kenny and I were someone new and she was so grateful she just let go. Awww. That was a good moment. We also were able to reassure her that her kids were in a basement with their cousins and several adults (the friend Kenny had called earlier) so that was icing.

Geez! How'd it get to be March?

It really doesn't seem like it's been 3 months since I've blogged, but I guess it is. Computers don't lie...or do they? The family's in a upheaval right now trying to get the Spring mess cleaned up. Meagan and big Kenny are getting ready to go for a 3 day trip to St. Simons on the 5th grade field trip. He's a bit overwhelmed with school, getting ready for the Spring season of ball and just regular church stuff. But how can he say no to Meagan? I had no less than 10 staff members come to me today to say that she was so excited to be going to St. Simons with her dad. I know if there was a way for him to get out of it, he would just so he could stay afloat with his work. Also funny, while he's there he'll have to call in to our local radio station. They have a contest called "BAttle of the Sexes" where they have a male caller and a female caller answering questions. The one that gets the most right wins. He signed up and what-do-you-know, they called him to play! He has to call in for the recording session. So funny. The kids are so excited that they're dad will be on the radio.

Other than that, we're about to fall headfirst into Spring ball, finish up Lorie's time with the drama dept at the middle school with their performance this next weekend, then move into dealing with Meg and Jo's school production. There are just no lulls in my life. Right now we're just trying to stay afloat and enjoy it while we're able. Soon the four kids will be up to their eyeballs in their own lives. I figured THEN Kenny and I can breathe.