She Made Me Do It!

David Hasselhoff just cracks me up. In this picture he is being driven away at the Heathrow airport on one of those electric carts. Drunk as a skunk. Rumor has it he wet his pants as well. (See in this picture?) His publicist denies it. He also claims his ex-wife made him drink.

Sure, blame it all on her. Or maybe the "bizarre medication" he's taking? Puhleaze!

If you want a good laugh, read what the girls at Snarkywood have to say about him. It'll crack you up!

Little Tough Guy

Poor Bob. He did this while riding his bike last night.


Today, a friend asked, "Bob, what does the other guy look like?"

The other guy is the tree on the left side:

Bob rode his bike down the hill (like the big kids did) but the tree stopped his progress...


Boys.


I guess he is listening to me because this morning he told someone, "I need to walk my bike down the hill."

Good boy Bob.

Lucky 13!

Today is our 13th wedding anniversary. We are going out to dinner with my 2 sisters, my brother-in-law, and my sister's boyfriend.

Why is Cranky smiling so big? Our 6 yr. old son took this picture. He tried several times but kept saying the camera wasn't working. I was gritting my teeth as I said, "Just take the damn picture!", which of course made everybody laugh. And here's the result.

Ahh, family memories...

The Great Flood of 2006

Yesterday we had an unexpected HEAVY rainstorm that overwhelmed our yard and drainage system. It started before lunchtime and made the backyard look worse than it did after a long rainy spell, and only in a matter of 2 hours! We had a little leaking in the basement, which we quickly mopped up and continued with our day. The rain picked up again around dinnertime and after we ate, we checked the basement for water. As Cranky and Raymond (age 6) were mopping up a bit, Cranky noticed Raymond's puddle growing faster than he could mop it. Then they checked other corners of the basement and found leaks everywhere! I came down to help and quickly realized we were losing the battle. Water was 2 inches up the basement window, sloshing, resembling the porthole on a boat! All 3 kids were pressed into service. Bob, age 3, was released from duty at 8:00 pm to go to bed. The other 2 kids worked with Cranky and me until 9:45, when we finally got it under control. Ice-cold beer and ginger ale was consumed amid the mess as we evaluated the damage.

Our basement is all torn up, since we had to move everything from the corners. The guest room was also soaked. My sister and brother-in-law are coming for a 3-day visit tomorrow so we are working hard to make it habitable. Not exactly how I wanted to spend my weekend!

Funny tidbit from today: I was working on the mudroom (taping and mudding) when Raymond came in to watch. He was whistling the tune from the Enzyte (natural male enhancement, if you haven't seen it yet) commercials. Besides pondering the fact that those commercials are no longer shown only on late night tv, but on channels that my children watch, I asked (okay, told) him to stop. So he started humming it. "PUHLEZE stop with that tune!" So he sang Row, Row, Row Your Boat. I thought that was better but corrected him on the stanza, "Life is BUT a dream". His reply, "hahaha. Life is BUTT a dream! hahaha!" I just couldn't win today!

Go Italia!

I'm on a long stretch of flying -- 12 days in a row. Nothing but back and forth to Rome, which I like, but it's a long time to be gone. I will go home at the halfway point, but only to sleep one night at home, change out clothes and leave again.

Last night was an fantastic night to be in Rome! I watched Italy win the World Cup, beating France. Many restaurants were closed or had closed early. I grabbed a slice of pizza and watched the game, cheering on the Italians.

This Italian woman is a big fan...


I watched the match with Lisa, one of the flight attendants who flew in with me from New York:


Walking back to the hotel afterwards, people were going nuts in the streets.


A flight attendant told me this morning that she saw about 200 people jumping around in Trevi fountain! Other flight attendants told us about watching the game in Circus Maximus with 35,000 other people. They reported that it was awesome!

Tonight the Italian team is scheduled to be back in Italy. We were told the party will be continuing in their honor!

On the homefront: My mother is driving me crazy, even when I am out of town. I can't wait until she goes back to Florida...

Beachin'

The kids and I stayed at the beach yesterday much longer than we planned. It was the first truly nice day we've had in a while and I just couldn't bring myself to make them leave. Mary was swimming and hanging out with her friends, and even ate lunch with them. I had planned to leave by lunchtime, but I bought hot dogs for the boys in the snack bar and stayed until late afternoon. (The snack bar is just like it was when I was a kid. The swinging screen door brought back memories...)

From my chair on the beach, I decided to take a picture of Steve Tyler's (Aerosmith) house. It's not the most amazing house on the lake anymore, but it was pretty cool in the 70's when he built it:

One of the coolest things our town recreation department did this year was putting some great toy trucks out for all the kids to use. Bob loves "diggers":

And the cement mixer:

Raymond likes all of them, but spent a great deal of time filling this dump truck with mud:

Since we missed Bob's nap time, he had a little "quiet time" on the couch before dinner (this picture was taken 5 minutes after he laid down):

We'll be back there tomorrow. And the next day...

Happy 4th!

After burgers cooked on the grill, we all got comfortable in the backyard to watch Cranky's fireworks:





Hope you had a good one too!

The Getaway

Cranky and I managed to get away for a couple of days for some great hiking! My mother is in town, driving me absolutely nuts, but she agreed to take care of the kids so we could go up to the White Mountains. It's only an hour and a half away, and we left Friday morning. When we arrived, we hiked up to Franconia Falls. This was our warmup hike to check out our boots and day-hike gear, as this was an easy trail. Once at the Falls, the sky opened up and we got to try out our ponchos! We sat under some trees that were providing a nice natural canopy and ate our lunch. The rain slowed and we made our way back to the Ranger station, making it 6.8 miles roundtrip. While looking at some maps to decide our next hike, the rain picked up again. We decided to call it a day and went to our hotel.

We stayed at a hotel on Loon Mountain, a ski area. It was a nice place to stay and we made plans for a more challenging hike the next day. Before hiking, I talked Cranky into going up the gondola to check out the view:

This picture was taken on the way back down. Cranky was itching to get on with our hike so of course the gondola stopped and we sat there, roasting for an extra 20 minutes. After finally reaching the bottom, we jumped in the car and headed for Mt. Hancock.

We parked at the Hancock trail head and cranked some tunes while lacing up our boots. We double-checked our gear and headed out. The trail started of rather easy for the first 2.4 miles, then became a little more challenging for the next mile or so, with several river crossings that were a little bit tricky. We headed for the North peak first which was a very steep .7 mile climb. Here's a picture I took of Cranky going up:

In the same spot, Cranky took this of me looking back down the trail:

The North summit was our first official 4000+ ft. peak we've conquered. There are 48 mountains above 4000 feet in NH and we hope to climb all of them. This one was 4400 feet and the South peak is 4274 feet. After a quick lunch with some fellow hikers, we headed to the South peak. It was only 1.5 miles away and not a bad hike, except that is started to rain. Argghh! The weather forecast was for mostly sunny skies! We donned the ponchos and continued. After checking out the South peak, we headed back down the mountain. It was a steep half mile, though not as bad as the trail up the North peak. The whole hike was 9.4 miles, with a total climb of nearly 3000 feet, and we checked off 2 of the 48 peaks on the list. It took us 5 1/2 hours, including lunch and photo stops.

We drove back home to reality, arriving at dinner time.

This morning, Cranky saw this deer walking up our driveway. It's the same color as our silly dog and it caught his eye. I guess we had some delicious leaves on our trees! I took this picture from an upstairs window. At this point the deer was on to us and was looking toward the house.

That's all for now. Time to take the kids to the beach...