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