While I was out.

Nothing happened. I was a bit disappointed too. I was hoping that some TV decorating crew would stop by and paint my house and decorate things nicely.
It didn't happen.
Now I am forced to do it myself. When we first moved in the house, we so hated the flat, beige wall paint that I quickly painted the living room.
Then I burned out fast.

Two years later, I painted the older boys' room. It's a very dark blue. Very. Dark. Too dark. I'm going to have to paint it again. However, my husband has laid down the law and stated that the all rooms must be painted one before I can re-paint a room.

sigh

So I did the little boys' room to prepare for the new baby.
Burned out again.

I finally got motivated to attack the pink dining room. It was very pink and flowery. We are not pink flowery people. It is now a lovely pea green with a Jungle print valance. I know the jungle print sounds odd but it suits us. It has a black background with jungle trees, peacocks, jaguars, an little brown monkeys with parasols. The boys picked it out.
I love it. It is wild and it gives me an excuse to buy monkey accessories.

The rest of the house is painted with an awful dark beige builders grade paint. (Translated: it takes three coats of anything to coat it.)

I have now started the kitchen. The old blue wallpaper is gone and the lower part of the wall is a lighter pea green. The top on two walls is a pretty light yellow. I now have to paint around the cabinets. (arg!!!!!!) and if I am feeling brave, I will pain my 1980's cabinets because they are ugly and new cabinets are way too expensive for us right now.

So this is a long way of saying that I have added three new colors to my favorite panting pants. (which are maternity pants since that is when I do most of my painting...Not I'm not pregnant.)
My painting pants are a great memory keeper for me. J's nursery walls, the kitchen of our first house, our purple bedroom. A memory of rooms that I won't ever get to see again are preserved on a pair of old navy blue stretched out pants.

Thank you Blogger

You fixed my stuff. Oh thank you, thank you, thank you. My links aren't bright blue. My Blogger bar is now stretched out over my blog instead of little stunted rectangle in the corner.
I am happy.

It's odd that I would find happiness in such a tiny little thing but I have been feeling very put out and unappreciated lately. I feel as though I do for others but receive little in return and I hate even *thinking* that way. (how "what have you done for me lately" of me)

Just having someone do a little something nice for me...It makes me feel really nice. Especially since the Blogger-folks most likely have a lot bigger fish to fry than my tiny issues.

Thanks!

Trying to get settled in

I'm still trying to get used to this format. When I first switched to this blog, I dressed it a bit and then lost interest because I couldn't seem to get rid of the bright BLUE links. (what a trade off...bright blue for spell check capabilities. But if you could see how poorly I type, you would understand the choice made.) Needless to say, I have not yet figured out where to stick the code to make the bright blue links become some other calming, muted tone.
I know you are wondering why it even matters to me...It does. Bright blue is my equivalent or red ink. It upsets my delicate psyche.

Then once I got my pictures all in place...My photo host fell through. At that point I just said, The heck with it! I have enough stuff going on right now." My problem is that I only have a little bit of webpage knowledge. We all know that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. ;)
The sad part is that I am webmistress (I don't really like that word.) to two websites. One is a business site. The other is my homeschool support group site. If anything, I should know how to change to color of some words. But not here. My magic here is seriously limited.

Today's activities include making a giant pine cone wreath. I have some large cones already so the boys are supposed to be outside collecting smaller ones. I say supposed to be because I hear them and they don't seem to be discussing how attractive or how prickly the pine comes are. They had direct orders to fill the bucket with nicely shaped pine cones that had not been stepped on nor eaten. Since we have rather prolific "Pine Cone" trees, they should have any trouble finding enough cones. But I'm afraid that they have lost interest in the cones and become interested in one of the large numbers of Daddy Long Legs spiders that have been around out house lately. (I just heard, "Wow, look at the legs" so I'm making assumptions.)

Once we have enough pine cones, we will all don heavy gloves so I can wire them together into a large wreath that the boys wile decorate with fall leaves, acorns, nuts and whatever else they feel is "fallish." Of course along the way we will talk about why leaves change color, what nuts are, where the seeds are in pine cones, why squirrels each pine cones, nuts, and acorns, why pine trees don't' change color (evergreen versus deciduous) and anything else that might come up.

Science and art day. Plus I end up with some holiday decorations.

So the "email your post" thing doesn't work that well.

I guess there are still some issues to work out. I should just go ahead and manually publish all my old posts but now it's old news. There's no fun in posting old news.

So what's going on at "The Zoo?" Lots, little...It depends on how you look at it. The things that should be going on, aren't and there all kinds of extra things going on.
I am neighborhood captain for our neighborhood food drive. I'm trying to round up volunteers to make this thing work out this year. Scouts are going smoothly though homeschooling is still a little rough. With all of our other stuff, I just haven't gotten into a groove yet. Work is getting done and the boys are learning but it's not the fun kind of learning that I want for them. They aren't complaining. They just enjoy learning and they know that it would be a whole lot less fun if they were in a durational school.
As much as they hate grammar workbooks, they don't hate them enough to miss out on all the other fun stuff.

Soccer is winding down. Yeehaw!!!! Just in time for basketball sign-ups. At least they practice at night and have Saturday games. This is highly preferable to afternoon games and practices.

The lack of sunlight is getting me also. On sunny days, we do 'school" out on the deck so I can relish what little light I can.
Thank goodness we don't' live in Alaska. I would go crazy the first season.