I'm On Fire!

Here it is January and I'm just getting around to posting about Christmas. I'm really falling behind in my bloggy duties.

Santa's been here and he's a slob.

Before the rip fest!

Ready, set....

RIP!

Worst. gift. ever.
This piece of crap is supposed to play games. I spent most of Christmas trying to download games onto it. At wit's end, I finally emailed the company. This is their response:

As stated in our manual, features are subject to change without notice,
games is no longer a feature with our players. There are many other
great things you can do with this player. Thank you for your purchase.

Best Regards,

Joey
Visual Land Team
Support Representative

Dear Joey - I hope your crouch is infested by the fleas of a thousand camels. And by the way, the only great thing I can do with your shitty non-game playing game thing is to throw it in the dump!

Santa got a little ghetto with the "stockings"

The family checking out their loot.

Yes, that's my grandmother. How could you tell?

Benji LOVED this gift. Shame it wasn't his.

That's great, Daddy, but can we play with it now?

Our version of a rope tow

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Keeping with tradition, we spent another fabulous New Year's Eve at Casa de LaBev.

After midnight and 8 out of 10 kids were still going strong!

Rockin' the PJs and party hats!

So there you have it, 2010 lazily wrapped up in a picture-laden post. It's what you've come to expect from me, no?

And I have to admit, things will probably not get any better. I have been commissioned to write a book and that will probably be taking up my time and brainpower.

I'm really excited about the project. I originally wrote the proposal for this book in 2006. The publisher loved it and gave me the green light to start researching and writing. Shortly thereafter I began writing a new project, called a dossier.

(I just spent the last 45 minutes looking for the picture of our dossier, but no luck. But trust me, it was HUGE! Hundreds of pages. Don't believe me, ask Bev, who had to notarize almost every page. It devoured most of my 2007. Of course when I finally finished it, Beck came home and our lives didn't slow down a bit.)

So the book was put on the back burner. Hell, let's be honest, it wasn't even on the stove top. It was probably in the back of the fridge, next to something green and moldy and wrapped in plastic wrap.

Flash forward to November 2010 and out of the blue I get a letter from the publisher asking me to get my ass in gear to consider starting the book. This time, the timing is perfect.

So now I've been writing summaries, filing out paperwork and collecting historical documents, which has been very interesting and hopefully I'll share some along the way.

So that's where I've disappeared to. I'm very excited but also have a mountain of work in front of me.

But I will make an effort to keep up my little bloggy.

Elf you!

Because I can't resist wasting time every year!

Spook-Tacular!

Hello my sugar-coated webby pals. I hope you all had a great Halloweeny weekend. I know I did!
On Saturday night, we joined the LaBevs and Team E+M for some adult Halloween festivities at a local restaurant.

I forced convinced Joe to go as Billy The Exterminator, and I think he pulled it off well. OK, maybe a little too well. He made it only 3 feet through the front door before the first group of women insisted on a picture with him. That trend continued all night. Joe is now regretting his life choices and wishes he had decided to be a greasy bug-killer rather than going to grad school. Live and learn.

Drac and his Babelicious Elvira

By Sunday afternoon, we had recovered (ish) enough to take the kidlets out for for some good ol' candy hunting.

Beck the Transformer and Morgan the Midnight Fairy

Yes, those wings really do work

Is there anything better than attaching a plastic mask to your face with a rubber band?

So how was your weekend? Who rocked the costume fun?

How I spent My Summer Vacation

Obviously, not blogging.

Although I still have a week left of putting up with these rugrats constantly under foot before school starts, I figured I'd be ahead of the times and recap the summer of 2010 before it's officially over.

Of course, in pictures.

Caught crabs

Broke child labor laws

Convinced the kids that Christmas is over

Made new online friends

FINALLY made it by Aerosmith's security

Put some OompaLoompa's out of work

Enjoyed the wild ride

Checked out how the kids measured up

Fed some fish

But mostly, enjoyed summer to the fullest.

Packing the last week full of more shenanigans and then I'll be back.
I Promise.

Wine and Wabbits

Cheers to a fabulous weekend!

Friday I had my dog publicly humiliated by dropping him off at the groomers for a full body buzz cut. When I arrived to pick him up, he walked out like a doomed dog.

"Oh Benji (uncontrollably laughing), you look so good."
"Shut up, Mala! Just get me to the car."
"But Benji, it's adora...."
"Car! Now! I don't want to talk about it. Oh, and sleep with one eye open, lady!"

And to add insult to injury, the groomer topped him off with a pink bow.
Before

And while Benji plotted my death sulked, I dumped him and the kids on Joe and hit the town with La Bev.

Bev and I enjoyed a deee-lish Italian dinner at a BYOW (bring your own wine - and we did!) restaurant.

Shortly after we arrived, the french-Canadian version of Betty White walked through the door. Bev and I did a double take and laughed uncontrollably. We lovingly renamed her Betty Blanche, and stealthy tried taking a picture of her, you know, to share with all of you.

Because we love you like that.

See, the queens of the sly! But damn my zoom-less camera phone! But take our word for it, she looked just like BETTY WHITE!... only Canadian.

No? Here, look through this wine glass.... see?

Moving on....

After licking our plates clean finishing our delightful meal, we each paid the bill...

* cue: sound of scratching record*

Yes, we each handed over our credit cards and therefore paying the bill twice! Sadly, we were too busy drinking wine giggling to realize this until the next morning when I woke up to realize our two entrees ( remember, we brought our own wine.) cost us about $90. It was good, but not $90 good!

So why don't we simply call the restaurant and straighten out the little snafu? Welllllllll, we kinda couldn't pass up the opportunity to fill out the comment card... and immediately flee- giggling at our own awesome-ness.

Awesome Fail!

Next we hit the movie theater to enjoy Hot Tub Time Machine. It was good and it didn't require any deep-thinking... so, it was good.
But because we started our evening rather early, the movie was done by 8:30pm. Yeah, way too early to call it a night! So I introduced Bev to an old hobby of mine from back in my broke college days; movie hopping. We decided to take in a double feature of mindless comedy, and followed HTTM with She's Out of my League.
We had some time before our second feature so we grabbed some popcorn and sat in on 10 minutes of The Crazies. Yeah, 10 minutes was about 11 minutes too much.

Fast forward to Easter.

The kids enjoyed our annual egg hunt. Beck's special friend, and former orphanage homegirl, Aidai came over for the festivities as well. It was wonderful seeing these two together again... a half a world away from where they started.
Ready, set, HUNT!




Benji had a little run-in with the Easter Bunny... oh when does the humiliation end!?

After all the Easter festivities, my Mom and I took a relaxing trail ride.

A perfect ending to a perfect weekend.

Hope you had a wonderful weekend too.

See Ya, Suckas!!!

Yeah, I probably won't be hangin' around here much anymore...