This Makes Me Laugh Every Year

Silent "monks" "singing" the Hallelujah Chorus.

Priorities

To my deep and abiding chagrin, I dropped my Garmin (the handheld GPS receiver that I use for geocaching) down a steep hill/cliffside yesterday.  My hands were freezing even in mittens and it just slipped out of my grip; gone forever.  I could see where it landed down the slope, but reluctantly decided that it just wasn't worth taking the risk of trying to go down after it and turned around instead.  Call it a triumph of good sense over hope.  It wasn't a new or fancy GPSr, but it worked well for me and it really makes me mad that it's gone, especially since I just ordered a lanyard for it after a similar recent misadventure that had a happy ending!  The lanyard hasn't arrived yet...classic Murphy's Law.

To Himself's credit, the first words out of his mouth when I told him about the Garmin were, "What the hell were you doing on the edge of a cliff?"  At no point did he give me grief for being careless with a reasonably expensive device, he just wanted to make sure I hadn't lost my fool mind and any good judgment it might still retain.  As it happened, I wasn't particularly close to the cliff edge* at the time and it was just an unfortunate freak confluence of force, gravity and angle, but it's good to know that his first thought was concern for my safety!

*I know it sounds bad, but I wasn't there alone, and I really wasn't standing in a dangerous spot.  I swear.





    

I Cannot Believe...

...that I just ordered my ELEVEN year-old a pair of MEN'S SIZE TEN shoes.  His feet are bigger than mine.  They are bigger than his father's.  And the kid is maybe 5'2" right now!  Hope to hell he does some serious growing soon because he is going to look flat-out ridiculous otherwise.  Time to sign him up for the circus??

If At First You Don't Succeed, Take Two

NOLA, these cookies *are* ours.  :)

My mother came through with her tried and true spritz cookie recipe.  It's truly amazing how much easier it is to operate a cookie press when you are not trying to extrude a cementlike substance through it!  I mixed, pressed, and baked, Petunia decorated, and a good evening was had by all.

Holiday Memories

This time of year, the antique side table in my dining room usually holds a group of Christmas decorations that my kids made when they were in preschool.  Since all of them attended the same school, I have three of one particular decoration from their first Christmas there at age 3; a simple representation of Jesus in the manger.  This is Thing Two's.

 
If you look closely at the top of Jesus's head, you'll see that it looks a bit odd.  Therein lies a story.

Seems that the teachers distributed all of the pieces for the craft to each child before starting.  Thing Two apparently thought that the styrofoam ball was some sort of candy and he picked it up and took a bite out of it before the teachers could stop him!  At least they got him to spit out the piece he bit off.

When I went to pick him up from school they were very apologetic.  I don't think they were expecting me to laugh, but I did!  No harm done, and after all, how many people have decorations in which a bite has been taken out of the baby Jesus's head??

Keeping The Ol' Ego In Check...

I've never in my life felt like a moron as often as I have since I took up geocaching.  No worries that I will be getting a big head anytime soon.  This is not fake modesty: I'm reasonably bright, but some of my fellow cachers must have IQs that are through the roof because the puzzles that they set are positively fiendish.  

I'm currently working on a challenge that requires me to solve a bunch of those evil puzzles.  The one currently causing me grief has about four stages and I still haven't gotten through the first one even though I've already found information hidden in the source code of a web page and converted it all from base-16 to base-10 so I can plug it into the online decoder for a particular obscure kind of cipher.  (I'm doing something wrong with the decoding, I think.)  For any who might be wondering, this is masochism at its finest since it is a completely voluntary activity!  I must be out of my cotton-picking mind.

Straight Talk, Right Here

Every field, rink, gym and arena in which kids play needs this sign, and stat.