New neighbors.

Look who I found when I went out to water the plants on the deck . . .

Doesn't he look comfy? I went ahead and watered the plant until it was running out the bottom around him. When the water filled up the saucer, he started twitching and making funny little noises. I believe he was in froggy heaven.

There's also a bird building a nest in the plant itself. I love where I live.

Be thankful ~

Karen

There's a formula for this kind of math.

I know I promised camping/rafting photos, but I just have to get this off my chest.

Back in the middle of April, Abbie got her first speeding ticket. She sobbed like the world was ending. Ben and I both welcomed her to the club. Our family has gotten more than its share of speeding tickets, and I won't mention any names but one of us has significantly more than the other (he will, no doubt, defend himself in the comments section of this post).

Ab was driving home from college for a long weekend and was coming through a part of town that has a 25 mph section they put there just to raise revenue. It had been a long drive, she had to go potty, and she got caught. But because she is young and beautiful and an LU student, the cop (an LU alum) only ticketed her for failure to obey a highway sign. Her court date was June 24.

For those of you who've never gotten a ticket, that means you either have to pay the ticket or show up in court and beg forgiveness only to be shot down and still have to pay the ticket, but at least you can say you've gotten some of the judge's time for your money. If that really matters to you. I chose this option once, but that's another story for another day. (Remind me sometime.)

Being the banker of the family, I told Abbie I would pay the ticket online and she wouldn't have to go to court. Guilty is guilty, right? Virginia makes it so easy now. You go to the website, look up your offense, and pay with a credit card. I know this because I've done it so many times. I have the site bookmarked.

When I looked her up, she wasn't listed there. So I waited a week. Still not there. Third week, and still nothing. So I decided to go over to the general district court and see what was up with the easy-pay-online system.

I handed Abbie's ticket to the clerk who also couldn't find her listed in there. She told me sometimes it just takes the officer a while to turn it in, and don't worry about it. If it never shows up, you just don't have to pay it.

Lies. All lies. I should have gotten that in writing.

I kept checking and kept not finding her ticket listed there. Finally, the day before her court date, I checked one last time. Nada. We thought, "How cool! The officer never turned it in!"

Exactly three days later, we received a "NOTICE TO PAY AND OF SUSPENSION FOR FAILURE TO PAY".

My blood pressure shot up 50 points in half a nanosecond. Before I could blow a gasket, Ben snatched the papers from my hands, took the ticket, and said he would handle it Monday.

He made a few phone calls and got a clerk of the court on the line. She looked up Abbie's ticket online and said, "It's right here. I'm looking at it."

Ben couldn't see it from his computer at work.

I couldn't see it from my computer at home, and even took a screenshot of the page so I could prove it wasn't there. (Screenshot is a feature of Macs wherein you get an image of what's on the screen at a specific time. I felt like such a sleuth.)

After another phone call to the trusty clerk, it was determined that Abbie's last name was misspelled, and that's why we couldn't find it. The clerk insisted we were still responsible to pay the ticket though.

At this point, Ben had already paid the ticket, but when he called to tell me the outcome, I started yelling.

"Are you kidding me? I'm just supposed to imagine how they might have misspelled our last name? I have to figure out the 86 trillion different ways there are to write my name wrong? Great! I'll just search the ENTIRE WORLD WIDE WEB for every possible combination of letters, and maybe throw in a few that aren't in there to begin with!"

Hormones may have played a part in this.

I can still feel my blood starting to boil when I think about it. Really . . . figure out how many different ways your name can be misspelled by substituting each letter with one of the other 25, and then what if there are two letters wrong? Or three? It's exponentially mind-boggling. I'm sure I learned how to do this in college Probability and Statistics. I should have paid attention.

Camping photos up tomorrow.

Be thankful ~

Karen

Our record stands.

We're home from our camping trip, exhausted, and drying out the gear. Yes, it rained.

I'll be back with the full story and photos tomorrow.

Be thankful ~

Karen

Once upon a time I had a phone.

Like everyone else I know, I'm sick of paying a high price for mediocre service.

Take my telephone, for instance. We still live in the dark ages with a landline phone. Mostly because I don't hear so great (heh?) on my cell phone and don't want to have to use it all the time. So I recently found out that if I have my phone service with the same people who provide my high-speed Internet, it will save me about $40 a month, which gets me $40 a month closer to the totally unnecessary camera I've been coveting.

So I decided to make the switch.

Oh, would that it were that easy.

First, Ben had to call and put my name on the phone account, so the names on both accounts match. Then we scheduled the new phone install for today, and the old phone cut-off for tomorrow, thinking we'd be safe. Knowing I had a ton to do and wanted to make Pilates at 4, I agreed to the 11 am to 2 pm slot.

It's 9:30 pm. The service guy just rang my doorbell and I'm not even kidding. 9:30 pm. Half my family is in bed for the night and he wants to install a new phone?


I don't think so. Tomorrow I'll call phone company #1 and ask them not to cancel my service yet. Phone company #2 will give me a free install and all kinds of perks that I haven't dreamed up yet. And they'll all live happily ever after.

The end.

Be thankful ~

Karen

This is your garden. This is your garden on drugs.

Remember way back when we were just getting started?

Here's what it looks like now.

It's kind of hard to tell from way up on the deck, but the tomato plants are way taller than I am. The ones at the far end are about 7 feet high.

We have a LOT of stuff. There are six rows of beans in there. Really.

There's this

and

which will taste really good with

when they get ripe. There are also bunches of

and a handful of

and so many

I'm having nightmares about them.

See? We picked these in two days. I'm going to buy more laundry baskets today so we have something to carry them to church in.

So what's the magic formula?

Our neighbors may hate us in the fall, but they love us in the summer.

Be thankful ~

Karen

This just in from Mike's facebook status:

"You know you're at DLI (Defense Language Institute) when somebody writes 'wash me' on the back of his buddy's car.

In Urdu.

And you recognize the letters."


He also posted photos of his new DLI-issued T-shirts.

Now don't you feel better?

Be thankful ~

Karen

I Heart Faces: Teens

Yes, it's a photo of a photo, taken with a very old 35mm Minolta using black and white film. Abbie took this of her brother, the man-boy.

Be thankful ~

Karen

PhotoHunt: Six

Scraping the bottom of the iPhoto barrel here, but it's all I've got.

Six: the number of ingredients in the most awesome bread on the planet. Made by Great Aunt Ethel since I was a little girl. Read the tutorial here.

News of the day: Mike has left San Antonio and is on his way to lovely Monterey, California, to the Defense Language Institute where he will be learning Chinese. From 110 degrees to 55 all in one day. He says flying in uniform has its advantages: a complete stranger bought him a coffee at Starbucks. It's also amusing: a little boy asked him if he was the pilot. Sounds like a good day.

Be thankful ~

Karen

Edited to add: I realized just moments ago (an hour after posting this) that my photo doesn't include the buttermilk, water, and melted butter, so there are really 9 ingredients. Sorry. It's the only "six" photo I could find, so I'm not taking it down.

For once, I'm serious.

Here it is, Friday night already. My body feels like it should be Saturday morning, I've been up so long. Last night we stayed up way too late, and this morning we left the house at 4:15 to take Leah to the airport. She's on her way to The Lord's Bootcamp at Teen Missions International in Merritt Island, Florida. She'll be spending her summer as an assistant leader, taking a group of 13 teenagers to do gospel presentations in schools and factories, and go street witnessing in Hong Kong.

Four of our kids have gone on missions trips with TMI, and every one of them has wanted to go back. Deb went to Cuba, Leah to Poland, Abbie and Deb went to New Zealand and Australia, and last year Elijah went to Switzerland to paint a small castle owned by Youth With a Mission.

So Leah worked as a middle school music teacher last year, lived at home and saved a ton of money, and decided she would do one more trip before she starts grad school in the fall. If I ever won the lottery, I'd send my kids every year.

If you have teens or pre-teens, I highly recommend TMI as a great way to spend the summer. They come back changed.



Be thankful ~

Karen

Hello up there!

Remember Mike?

The one who recently graduated from Air Force Basic Training?

The guy who is taller than his buddy even when the buddy stands on the curb?

And stands at attention to talk to his 6' 2" grandfather?

Mike decided he wanted to be a linguist when he signed up for his six years. He passed the tests with flying (get it? flying? ha!) colors, and off he went to boot camp. Excuse me, basic training. The Air Force has its own way of doing things. Anyway, they wouldn't tell him what language(s) he'd be learning until after basic, and he just found out today.

Chinese.

The average man in China is 5' 5 1/2" tall. Mike is almost a FOOT taller at 6' 5". I'm thinking all he has to do is stand up and he'll intimidate the daylights out of them. Who knows what God has in store.

Be thankful ~

Karen

I got nothin' for this space.

My day involved lots of editing, vacuuming up two weeks' worth of dog hair, cooking Pancit, getting a battery for Leah's car, and dragging Pete for a walk through pea-soup humidity. That was especially fun because of the thunder in the distance. My 70-pound dog tries to hide between my legs every time he hears it, which makes any kind of exercise difficult.

And remember the six squash plants? Every evening Ben brings a sink full of squash in.

Every evening.

A sink full.

Would you like some?

Yesterday we took a laundry basket full to church and managed to get rid of them all. I can see now that I'm going to be the person everybody avoids by the end of the summer.

Run! The crazy woman with all the squash is coming!

On the bright side, we'll be getting our five-a-day no problem.

Last night I walked in the living room and saw that Ben and Abbie had just started watching The Pelican Brief on TV. I said, "Oh, great movie!" and sat down to watch with them. After ten minutes of movie there was a commercial break. Then another ten minutes of movie and a commercial break.

I gave up. I just cannot, no matter how great the movie, make myself sit there and wait through all those commercials to watch another ten minutes of television. So I went in the bedroom, got the book off the shelf, and started reading it even though I've read it before.

Call me weird, but I just can't do TV. What about you? Would you rather read the book, knowing it will take longer, or watch the movie on TV in spite of the commercials?

Be thankful ~

Karen

Birdies.

Lovely Sunday afternoon nap, which I always say I NEVER take, but today it sucked me in. I've been feeling exhausted since I got up, and now I finally feel better.

Better enough to balance myself precariously on a bar stool on the edge of the deck to take a picture of the baby wrens being raised in an L of the gutter. Here's where they are:

And this is the best shot I could get of the one in front:

I want you to know I risked falling over the side of the 10-foot-high deck to take this sub-mediocre shot. I hope you enjoy it.

Now back to church.

Be thankful ~

Karen

A graduation and a wedding.

Yesterday was my niece Anna's high school graduation. We drove up to their house (1.5 hours away) for the festivities. Actually, Man-boy drove

while I sat in the back and bugged everybody with the camera. He said I'd been demoted. But I got him back by waiting until we were 200 yards from our exit when he was in the left lane, and yelling, "Hey! Exit here!" As you can see, we're all still living.

My brother, Jim, is Anna's daddy

His mother-in-law took this picture, while Jim kept saying, "Don't cut our heads off! Don't cut our heads off!" Apparently she has a reputation. This one was close.

Here he is bugging Abbie and Man-boy, before the band started playing.

This would be a good time to stop and tell you that Jim is married to my college roommate, so when we visit, not only do I get to see family, we have a mini reunion too.

Anyway, the party included my brother's bluegrass band. They come from Michigan and Wisconsin. He met these guys when they were all in the Navy many moons ago, Casey taught Jim how to play the guitar, and the band was born. Now they're just a bunch of old geezers (and one lovely young lady) who get together and play for fun. They've made a couple of CDs, but haven't quit their day jobs.

(l-r) Karen (bass), Jim (guitar), Mike (banjo), and Casey (mandolin). Karen and Mike are married. We took a video of one song. If you're easily entertained by sub-par film-making with 1940s-style audio, go ahead and listen. (And if you know how to get this dumb thing in the center, feel free to give me instructions.)


Shoutin' on the Hills from Karen Sargent on Vimeo.

And here I am with my wonderful mommy. I hope I look just like her when I grow up. What do you think my chances are?

One of the nifty things they had was this dish of M&Ms with Anna's face on them. You send in a photo and they put it on the M&Ms. How cool is that?

And this is Bess, their dog.

Bess is about 200 years old, and totally arthritic. She takes medicine for it and hobbles around, just enjoying being in the middle of things. She's a great old dog who refuses to look at the camera.

Today we went to Andrew and Janna's wedding, which I have zero pictures of. Ben looked at me like a three-headed goat and I said, "I'll get them on facebook." But it may be weeks before they're on facebook. So you'll just have to trust me when I say it was a lovely wedding. The violinist was especially lovely.

Note to self: Take more than a cell phone camera to weddings.

Be thankful ~

Karen

The boys' fishing trip and a knife saleswoman.

I don't remember if I mentioned that the boys went to Washington (state) to fish last week.

It looks like Washington, doesn't it? Man-boy is reeling one in

and it was delicious! We ate the first half of it last night. Unfortunately, there are no pictures of the Man reeling one in because he was the photographer and he hasn't yet mastered the art of reeling in a 10-pound steelhead with one hand while photographing the event with the other. But my proof that he actually caught it is in the freezer. (The other guy in this picture is the guide, whom my boys paid $175 EACH to take them to the fish. I need his job.)

Today a lovely Cutco representative magically appeared in my dining room and tried valiantly to sell me $2000 worth of knives, and I'm not even kidding. If I had access to Warren Buffett's bank account, I would totally have bought them all, but I'm not even a distant relative.

Here she is demonstrating the awesome kitchen shears on a penny:

and here's the redesigned penny:

I was most impressed and bought just a couple of knives which I will be making payments on for three months, and again, I'm not even kidding. Call me a sucker for a young lady trying to work her way through college, but these really are amazing knives and I know that because her mother has had them for eight years and I've seen them in action. So I hope that makes me less of a sucker and more of a connoisseur of good knives. At least that's how I'm telling it.

Be thankful ~

Karen

The Bean and how he got here.

Deb says he hasn't figured out how to propel himself around the house. He just sits on this thing and bounces. I say watch out, because when he figures out how to make it go, he'll be crashing into everything.

And speaking of Deb, she's blogging here now. If you like birth stories, you'll enjoy this one.

Happy Wednesday!

Be thankful ~

Karen

I Heart Faces: Play

He's not mine, but his mother lets me claim him sometimes.

Be thankful~

Karen

Why are vacations such hard work?

8:53 pm. Can I go to bed now?

My word, going to the beach is exhausting! But we dug our feet in

we caught up on our reading

and spent a lot of time in the water. It was beautiful!

We watched a wedding from our hotel room

which would have been very romantic had the sand not been 2000 degrees.

See them running back to boardwalk? The ceremony lasted less than two minutes. Do you? Yes. Do you? Yes. Okay, you're married.

Then we ate some dinner (Caesar salad, shrimp, scallops, crab cakes, and more shrimp. And bread.), after which Abbie laid down on the bench and went to sleep.

We revived our little sleeping machine (she's like a big toddler) and went to do something we never did in the seven years we lived there: we went to Mount Trashmore. (I'll save you a click: Mount Trashmore used to be a giant landfill. The greenies in Virginia Beach buried the whole thing and named it Mount Trashmore. It's the premier place in southeast Virginia to fly a kite.)

Mount Trashmore has lots to do: walking trails and an awesome playground that is specifically built for handicapped kids. When we first got there, we stopped at the rest room near the playground. Abbie is wondering how this is going to work.

My kids are wonderful. They always think about taking pictures for the blog. Abbie calls these "Fun-size potties."

Then we climbed the stairs to the top.

Great view of everything going on down below, like this giant dog walking his family

and I finally got my picture taken with the famous Mt. Trashmore totem pole

When we were sufficiently worn out and ready for bed (about 6:30), we headed back to the hotel. We fell into our beds and found a good, schmaltzy Hallmark movie to watch and commenced with the sniffling and awww-ing. At the crucial moment, the screen went blue and fuzzy and we all screamed. Not knowing whether it was the television or the satellite signal, Abbie started pressing buttons on the remote, because what else would we do in such dire circumstances? She decided we needed to reset the TV settings, and here's what came up

Sony needs my help. I laughed about "resetted" half the night.

The movie finally came back on, we finished our awww-ing, and shut it all down. That's when the bass started warming up.

Remember the wedding? This one?

It may have looked all happy and peaceful, but let me tell you, these people rocked it out in the bar directly under our room until midnight.

So after another day of hard work riding the waves, we're officially done in. Good night, Gracie.

Be thankful ~

Karen

This is what they don't tell you on Travelocity.

Oh, the fun of a girls' weekend at the beach.

Until you find out your room on the ocean is directly above the bar with a live band that plays until midnight.  I have memorized the bass line to every overplayed '70s rock song ever written. And to the hundred drunks singing a very bad rendition of "Happy Birthday," thanks for the nightmares.

Pictures will be downloaded this evening. Until then, we're going to eat a bagel and hit the beach again for some much-needed sleep.

Be thankful ~

Karen

PhotoHunt: Sparkle.

Taken on a dolphin-watching cruise in Destin, Florida last April. Sparkling morning sun . . . not too hot . . . Malachi trying to throw himself off the boat . . . it was a lovely day.

I'm heading for the beach now. More later.

Be thankful ~

Karen

More pieces and bits.

My brain is more abuzz than usual today and I can't seem to get all the thoughts flowing in the same direction.

First, I got an email from my mother this morning that included a picture of our family's headstone at the cemetery where generations of my forebears are buried in New Jersey. That may not mean much to you (that's ok), but I come from an exceptionally close family where that means a lot. My great grandparents, grandparents, and many great aunts and uncles are buried there. From the time I was a little girl I remember going there occasionally—sometimes to bury a family member, sometimes with my grandfather to clean up the area and plant new flowers. My cousin Mark is now the caretaker of that part of the cemetery. I'm posting the picture here for the sake of family members who read the blog.

Second, lest we get too sentimental on this lovely Friday in June, Abbie came in my room this morning carrying her computer to show me the newest TOMS:

Oh my word, is that not the cutest thing you've ever seen? And just so you know, "With every pair you purchase, TOMS will give a new pair of shoes to a child in need." (quoted from their website) Just because I don't wear heels doesn't mean I can't admire them. And the flats are pretty cute too. I'm partial to the orange ones for summer:

But in addition to our shoe drooling, Abbie showed me this awesome duvet cover from Urban Outfitters (it wouldn't let me copy the photo). She needs to marry a doctor so she can buy all the cool stuff she finds on the Internet.

Thirdly, do you have any idea how hard it is to find websites about the physics of roller coasters for young children? How am I supposed to explain inertia and centripetal force to a second-grader? I can't very well start talking about angular velocity and tensile stress, can I? (Don't worry, I had to go look that up.)

Fourthly, I'm just about to stop caring about anything else because the girls and I are going to the beach tomorrow, and when my feet hit the hot sand, my brain waves slow to almost non-existent. I'll try not to start drooling until I'm in my beach chair.

Be thankful ~

Karen