District Science Fair...

Maxine advanced to the district science fair and competed today. She had to stay there from 9:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. and then I picked her up for lunch. Afterwards, the fair was open to the public for a half hour and then the awards ceremony. Maxine didn't win 3rd, or 2nd, or 1st place in her age division. So I gave her a hug and told her she did great! She seemed a little bummed. So I started to sneak back to her exhibit to clean it up. So after I got it cleaned up, I started to walk back to where Merril and the kids were standing around waiting for the rest of the awards to finish up. Then they announced the award for Best of Fair and Maxine won it!

Here she is climbing the stairs to get her award.

Here she is standing in front of her project holding the plaque and certificate.

She won a $100 dollar savings bond too! Seriously, that's why she looks so happy. She wanted to go cash it in right away but we had to head back to the school. Wahoo!

Merril's birthday and some other stuff...

Merril's birthday was last week. He turned 32. Merril and I, and Jared and Amy went out for all-you-can-eat sushi! Yum!

On Sunday, we had some friends from the ward over for pumpkin cheesecake. (Don't ask me, Merril wanted it for his birthday. I feel like pumpkin cheesecake is more of a fall dessert. Whatever.) Unfortunately, I realized on Sunday morning that I only had 1 candle. So I made these candles with kite string and leftover Halloween candles.

They were cute but didn't really work out. The flame would accelerate too fast. We were only able to light 3 or 4 before we had an inferno going. So he blew out 4 candles and we just ate cake.

I purchased the rest of my garden dirt today. I used to have on garden box that was 6 feet wide by 11 feet deep. It was too wide so this year I decided to enlarge it and split it in half to end with 2 boxes of 4'x11', adding 22 square feet of growing space.

I'm going to make a path down the middle. The path isn't quite finished yet. Hopefully I can plant tomorrow or Thursday. I can't believe it's almost May and I don't even have my garden veggies in yet. Urg.

Some people have a raised bed with boards or railroad ties holding them together. Not me. I use all the rocks I dug out of the garden. :) Half the trench needs to be covered back up too.

And on a happy note: Our boat cover ripped pretty bad over the winter. We spent close to $300 on it and I remembered that it had a warranty but figured it had expired by now. So I called the place and they said that it had a 5-year warranty!! They said if I ship the old one back, they'll send me a new one. And then the warranty period will start over again! I don't know if they realize how windy and sunny it is here. I could be getting a new boat cover every couple of years for the rest of my life!!

Feeling like a bonehead...

Our computers are aged. We've been limping them along for a while. A couple of weeks ago, the time/date battery started to die so the computer clock would reset when I'd cut power to it. Then it started freezing up so I uninstalled our web browser, ran registry cleaner and installed the browser again. Since then, everything seemed to be running smoothly.

Then I walked downstairs a couple of days ago and saw a weired box floating on the screen. It said something like, "Dell monitor check, digital input 2." and then had 4 colors green, red, blue and white. The computer seemed to be on and running but it wouldn't respond or wake up when I touched the mouse. So I started thinking, "Has the video card gone out? or worse, the motherboard?"

So I did what I usually do and just turned it off and left it alone for a day. When I turned it back on, same deal. So I left it alone for a few more days, hoping it would feel guilty and cure itself. I came downstairs today and started poking around, looking for some obvious glitch, i.e. kids pulled the cord out of the back or something. No dice. Then I started thinking, "The input to the monitor shouldn't be digital input 2. It's analog input 1." So then I just started pushing all the buttons on the front of the monitor (the ones so tempting to little children's fingers.) I found one that resets the input to the monitor and voila! I should've poked around sooner instead of ignoring the problem for days. :) It's my way.

Update on water line to the backyard:

Completed digging 120 feet of trench!

Glued 120 feet of pipe!

Only had to run to Home Depot and Ace 4 times to get all the stuff I needed!

Only soaked Merril and the kids once with 1 faulty junction!

System is now holding water pressure with no leaks!!

As soon as the weather gets a little nicer, I'll go cover up all the pipe. The inclement weather has given me an excuse to stay inside and clean my house, which has been neglected for weeks from the said project.

Have a great day!

It worked! I made cheese!!

Okay. Last girl's night, a friend of mine wanted to try making mozzarella cheese from scratch. Using a not so accurate thermometer, 3 different friends tried to make the cheese. All 3 failed and made more of a ricotta/cottage cheese. I mentioned that I had a digital thermometer at home that might be more accurate so I was sent with the ingredients to try again!

Six days later...

Okay, so I got busy and didn't run right home and make cheese. In the meantime, Shelly found some better instructions that made more sense. Armed with my digital thermometer and new instructions, I set to work. The results, a little ball of cheese!

And boy is it squeaky!

Remember This Pile? By merril

Enter the handiest woman alive(Shown here torquing the rod bolts of the jeep engine.(Google it if you need to))

Ta Da!

Science Fair...

The Science Fair was today. I thought Science Fairs were fun when I was a kid. I guess I didn't realize how much work they are as a parent. Maxine did the experiment but the board was kind of a pain to put together. (It didn't help that we procrastinated the board until the last possible second and then the printer ran out of ink half way through.)

Maxine loves rocks and crystals. Her experiment was to determine which rock from our backyard was the hardest. We collected 5 samples. Here's Maxine performing a scratch test with a rock and a piece of glass.

Here's Maxine in front of her board after we set up this morning.

We must have done a bang up job because she won 1st place in her grade level! Now she gets to advance to district level. I'm glad the board is already done! :)

Today...

Picked up basket of fruits and veggies from local co-op at 7 a.m.

Made waffles for breakfast.

Dug a 25-foot long by 1-foot deep trench for backyard water line with a pick ax.

Sold 1 Sega Genesis game system on Ebay.

Pulled out 2 dead bushes in the front yard.

Planted 2 bushes in the front yard.

Did 1 round of dishes.

Made dinner.

Made 3 batches of strawberry freezer jam.

Got 3 kids in bed on time.

Watched 1 movie on YouTube.

THE END

Bunnies and finished projects...

Around Easter, I was reading the baking blog that I follow and saw the cutest idea for a cupcake! Make cupcakes, frost with green frosting, dye coconut green for grass, make chocolate bunny shapes and add jelly beans! They were so much fun.


Maxine and I are were thinking about it later and the cupcake could easily be made to look like baskets, using licorice or something for a handle.

And today I dropped off some stuff to the D.I. and walked in to look at books and picture frames. I found one to fit Jack's Mini Cooper poster and laid down 4 bucks. We came home, painted it, and mounted it on the wall. Ta-da! Yeah, that's done!

It looks awesome hanging on the wall! But I boneheaded Maxine's soccer game this afternoon and totally forgot. We just sat at home when she should've been playing. So lame.

Renting woes...

I tried to rent Sherlock Holmes from Redbox tonight. It's totally unavailable. Not because they're sold out but because Redbox won't be carrying the title for another month. Apparently, Blockbuster video stores are close to bankruptcy and some suit in the corporate office is buddies with the head of Warner Brothers. So Warner Brothers signed a deal with Blockbuster to limit their DVD rental releases exclusively to Blockbuster for the first 28 days after it comes out. So places like Netflix and Redbox will not be able to carry Warner Bros. titles for a month so the guys at Blockbuster can catch a break. Warner Bros. is also hoping to boost DVD sales because if I can't rent it, I should just go out and buy it, right?

Personally, I think it stinks. Mostly because the closest Blockbuster video store is 2 hours away. There have to be at least 15 Redbox kiosks in my general vicinity but I won't be able to rent the movie I wanted to see for another month.

I noticed that Sherlock Holmes is still at the cheap movie theater in town and I'm seriously considering dropping the 2 bucks to go see it. Lousy, Hollywood producers. Out.

Who knew I was raising such a food snob?

For school, Maxine needed plastic eggs filled with candy for the class egg hunt. At Wal-Mart, I cheaped out and bought knock-off brand of foil-wrapped chocolate eggs. I had a few and thought, "These taste like shortening flavored with sugar and cocoa. But the kids won't notice." So I got all the eggs with candy in them and had a few left over for the kids to eat. Maxine had a bite and said,

"Mom, Hersey chocolate is way better than this stuff."

*sigh* I know, I know. I cheaped out!! So I downloaded a coupon so I could spring for Nestle NestEggs in ButterFinger and Crunch varieties. What I really want to get are those Kinder Eggs from Europe but I thought about it too late. They can't guarantee delivery by Easter.

And then today she came home from the Easter hunt at school and said, "I ate some candy on the way home. Not the jelly beans though because they aren't Jelly Belly's. The jelly beans I got were gross." So it seems I must purchase Jelly Belly brand jelly beans as well. When did she get to be such a food snob?

I guess it's hard to go back to single-ply toilet paper when you've been living the double-ply lifestyle. Happy Easter!