“I triple dog dare you!”

“Schwartz created a slight breach of etiquette by skipping the triple dare and going right for the throat!”

Dares are terrible things. Challenge is another word, it sounds nicer, a bit more intense, in the end it means the same thing. “I bet you can’t…” was the beginning, the beginning of the end. The beginning of the end of my morning love.

A friend of mine said “I bet you can’t go a month without coffee.”. Seriously? I said I could, I just didn’t want to. Really now, who wants to give up their morning cup of joe because someone thinks you can’t do it? <clears throat> I did it. I decided to give it up for a month to avoid being harassed pestered badgered nagged beleaguered bothered with the bet again. I decided to be the adult, be mature, show this person who must be feeling soooooo ashamed right now that I could handle it.

Anyone who knows me knows I love my morning cup of coffee. Good stuff, Maynard! I used to drink a quart of it every morning. A lovely delicious steaming quart of coffee. I cut back to half that a few years ago, I then cut back a leeeeetle bit more to where I enjoy one, rather large, mug of coffee in the morning. So sue me, Toomey! I like my coffee!

Anywho, this “friend” will be shown I can forsake my coffee for four weeks. I miss it, I’ll always miss it, but I ache for black coffee. Half way through day six. No headaches, no shaking, no unusual for me behavior.

10 points for anyone who can point out the three movie line references, as well as what movies they’re from. A bonus 5 points will be awarded if you know what product the one commercial quote that snuck in to my post was advertising. One movie quote has been slightly altered to fit the context.

One more for good measure.

“Now I know that some of you put Flick up to this, but he has refused to say who. But those who did it know their blame, and I’m sure that the guilt you feel is far worse than any punishment you might receive. Now, Don’t you feel terrible? Don’t you feel remorse for what you have done? Well, that’s all I’m going to say about poor Flick.”

Peep Wars 2012

What happens on Easter stays within the family   gets posted all over the internet.

 

Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes! Easter has come and gone once again which means massive quantities of sugar were consumed as well as nuked to crazy hot temperatures! To simplify things this year we used only two colors, pink and yellow. Corin was always pink and I stuck with the classic yellow birds. Without further ado let us dive right in to the Peep Wars 2012 intro. Aaron was gracious enough to step up as announcer for the second year in a row! Let’s watch the 6th annual Peep War extravaganza!

Thank you, Aaron! Let’s move on to the first round. Listen to my brother-in-law in the background. I think he needs to be the announcer next year. He DEFINITELY has the voice for it. Watcha think, Rob?

Wait, what? Did I actually win a round? Can this be? What is the world coming to? On to Round 2!

Favorite quote? “Yellow is dehydrating!” Corin won that round, knew my luck couldn’t hold out! Bring on round 3!

OH YES!!! SECOND VICTORY FOR MEEEEE!!! Beyond belief, I won two rounds in one year. Was there a chance… could I actually win a Peep war? Round 4 is ON!

Yep, totally lost that one, totally. My little, yellow warrior passed out at the mere site of her pink beast. Which brings us to round 5, the tie breaker.

Thanks to the call of the munchkin referees I WON! It was about time! Seriously can’t believe it, I’m in shock. I’d like to thank all the little people who helped make this dream a reality. Okay, yeah, never mind.

Do you all remember Shapime Up from last year? She was gracious enough to make a second appearance and to share her findings after this year’s autopsies.

Thank you, Shapime!

What does one do when one wins a Peep war for the first time? One celebrates of course!

And so concludes another year of ginormous Peeps and people ramped up on sugar.

Tip: This year’s Peeps were left in their packaging until time to do battle, this kept them from splitting like last year’s birds did.

Tags: entertainment, Peep War, Peep Wars, Peeps, Video

For once…

I’m on time with planting something in the garden!  Usually I stick things out after they should be in the ground, or last year when I stuck a ton of things in the ground too early. I actually lucked out last year as the weather was gorgeous and everything had a jump-start. My next door neighbor last year thought I was crazy for putting the tomatoes in when I did. A month later the plants were huge when he was just getting his seedlings in the ground. The potatoes on the other hand were started too late last year.

This year I’m playing it safe. We’ve been subscribing to the paper and I live for the Home and Garden section on Saturdays. I like to set it aside until I get all of my work done in the morning and then slowly peruse it while eating lunch. All time favorite part? The small space where they list what you should do in your garden for the week. I love how they tell you to get a head start on your weeding. Whatever, weeding is an always and forever, ongoing, never-ending job out here. If they saw our backyard right now they just might die. It’s scary. Anyways, potatoes are what the cool kids have been planting the past couple of weeks. I’m a wannabe so I jumped on to the tail end of the potato planting season, but I did it with a bang.

A month ago my mom and I headed up to Peaceful Valley Farm Supply to pick up my garden order. Five bags of beautiful compost (Yes, I unashamedly love dirt), four pounds of seed potatoes and a bunch of seeds that won’t be planted for several more weeks.

Last year I planted two types of potatoes, Chieftain Reds and Colorado Whites. They were the only kinds left at our nursery, since as I said earlier, I started them late. They came in bags with no weights written on them, but they did well, tasted good, didn’t last long around here. This year I ordered the seed potatoes so I would have a better selection to choose from, as well as to insure I would have them before planting season. I settled on 2 pounds of German Butterballs, 1 pound of Colorado Rose and 1 pound of Yukon Gold seed potatoes.

Cut, dipped in wood ash and ready for the ground.

I decided at the last minute to go plant them today. We’re expecting rain next week and I knew today would be my last chance to get them in the ground before then. Aaron went out and tilled me some beautiful rows. If you ask me, his roto-tilling skills have definitely improved from last year.

I armed myself with a hoe and an iPhone (for pictures) and headed out to the garden. Will came out to help spread the gorgeous compost in to the furrowed rows. He also helped plant the cut potato pieces.

No need to tell me my rows aren't straight. I know, I know, I know...

One thing became very obvious as we put the potatoes in to the ground. There were a whole lot more than there were last year! The plan was to plant twice as much so we would have two full rows of potatoes. We ended up with almost three full rows of potatoes! Aaron came back out and tilled up another strip of dirt for the Yukon Golds.

One last look at them before Will and I covered the rows.

And then we won’t see any signs of life for a week or two.

Stay tuned.

Yes, I know it’s February.

I’ve been blogging for over a month now. Sorry if your feed readers haven’t been picking it up, you see, it’s all happening in my head. I write some of the most amazing blog posts in my head. They even amaze me, okay, so that doesn’t take very much. Why don’t they ever make it on to my actual blog? Because I’m too lazy and can find a million other things I’d rather do than actually write it up ( I need to go pull those weeds, ooo, Pinterest!). I’ve never been a writer, all of that talent went to my older sister. The english language and I have never been on good terms. Grammar rules? I prefer to look on them more as guidelines or just helpful suggestions. They don’t really need to be abided by, right???

Looking back over old blog posts I can crack myself up with my own writing. Trying to figure out exactly what I was trying to say can be confusing even for me. I hold the crown in my household for longest run on sentence. Seriously, I’m a professional folks and can think of a million things to insert in to one sentence without a break or a stop that will leave everyone holding their breath waiting for me to take mine. <GASP> So thanks for bearing with me for almost five years.

We’ve had a lot of changes going on around here. Some easy, some not so.

Last November my family decided to leave a church we’ve been part of for almost six years. Having grown close to so many families, having my dad serve as a deacon for several years, being involved in helping them start a new church plant near us and so on, there were a lot of things that made it very hard to say goodbye. God has been working in our hearts for over a year and we knew we no longer fit in to the church we had been a part of. We attended a couple of churches in November but have settled in one close to home that has made us feel very welcome. I loathe being the new person in a church and I’m horrible with names which doesn’t help. So it has been… interesting. We’re all getting active in small groups within the church and Aaron is even looking at going on a trip to Mexico this Spring to help build houses (he’s pretty stoked).

Last year I finally got serious about staying active. I lead a fairly sedate lifestyle and knew I needed to find something I enjoyed doing that I could do even in the stormy Winter months (biking in the wind and rain? No thanks!). Thanks to a friend’s suggestion I started using Turbo Fire  from Beachbody. It was crazy fun and something that I was able to stick with for the full twenty weeks. Last Saturday I started another one of Chalene Johnson’s workouts called ChaLean Extreme. My shoulders are pretty sure they’re dying, but I am loving all the weight lifting involved! “I’m gonna pump <clap> you up!”.

What else? Hmm… I’m planning out my garden for this coming year. More potatoes less tomatoes. Maybe a tomatillo so I can make my own salsa verde. Super yum! Lots of the old classics, zucchini, yellow crookneck, cucumbers, corn and so on. I already have garlic and onions in the ground for a Spring harvest. All of my seed potatoes, some of the seeds and a bunch of compost are coming from Peaceful Valley Farm Supply this year. My mom and I will be headed up to pick everything up once they have the seed potatoes in.

So I just looked at my Books Read in 2011 in the sidebar. Super sad. I think I stopped entering books in to it sometime around July. I think I’ll go take that down and change it for the books I’ve read/am currently reading this year. Do seed catalogs count? Ya, probably not.

 

 

2011 in review. It’s sad, but here’s to a better blogging new year!

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 6,100 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 5 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Tags: annual report