It's Raining, It's Pouring

(The view out my back door.)

No one told me I needed to bring my ark to Oklahoma.

The House Tour

Welcome to our home!

It is a lovely brown brick color with a vibrant brown lawn.  It's also very unique in the neighborhood.

It stands on a curve rather than a straight section of road!  Ahh, the serenity of a street full of brown.

Come on in the front door and have a seat on our lovely brown couches.

Don't miss the beautiful brown artwork hanging on the wall.  If you look closely you will see a book in the picture named "Is Sex Necessary?"  Perfect for sparking conversation.

Say hello to Anton.  He's modeling our lovely brown kitchen:

Don't be deceived by the colorful placemats on the table.  Those are just to distract you.  In the corner behind the table I've assembled my own little sanctuary:

Of course the only unpacked boxes happen to be enjoying my sanctuary too.

If you turn to the right you get another view of the living room from the other side.

For variety we have a light brown dresser with a bamboo style holding up the Dish TV box.  (Way too many channels for non-TV watchers like us!!)  Now turn around and take a gander down the hallway:

The brown walls and brown tile coordinate with the brown house just perfectly, don't you think?  But before you go farther, we need to look to the left into Alex's bedroom that opens right off the kitchen/living room junction.  Perfect for peaceful, quiet sleep.

Yes, there is some yellow and blue in this room, but we bring all back down to ground level with the brown bed skirt.  We don't let the color go to our heads, we promise.  But please don't tell the authorities about this:  

Pink!  Ella tries to bar Alex from the room because she is convinced it is for her and her alone.  See the problems color injects into our peaceful society?  Next up is the very serviceable laundry nook:

The shelf is far to high to reach.  It's there merely for looks.  But doesn't it look lovely?  Turning to the right we see Ella's room:

Again, those brown bed skirts keep everything in line.  Thank goodness for the efficient brown dresser.  

And finally, at the end of the hall, we come to the master bedroom.

See the door in the wall?  Easy access to the backyard!  (And the only access.)  But the plus of the room?  The closet:

If we had another child, they could sleep here comfortably.  And here's the room from the back door:

The previous occupant was so kind as to leave his own wall art: airport charts!  I love them so much I may build a frame around them.  Before we step outside let's peek in the bathroom which is behind the door on the left:

The lovely color combo of blue and orange is just the jolt I need each morning before going out and facing another brown day.

And finally the backyard:

A lovely combination of brown grass, brown fence, brown cement, and a hill that makes the entire thing somewhat unusable.  Fabulous!

But all funny quirks and joking aside, I really do love being in my own house.  I'm a little concerned about being too noisy for our duplex neighbors, but such is life.  Ella's school is less than half a mile away, and most everything is fairly nearby.  We're outside of the city amongst all the horse fields, so country living for us!  I hope you enjoyed your little tour.  Feel free to come visit sometime!

Catch-up Post

I've been storing a few things in my brain to blog about, so I figured I'd get them all out at once.

Random 1:  On our way to Oklahoma we stopped and visited friends in Kansas.  While there we played at a really cool children's museum.  It was in an old school, and each classroom was a different theme.  There was a room full of ramps of different shapes and sizes that you could roll buckets of golf balls down:

There was a space themed room, a hospital room, a lego room, an art room.

(Sharing love in the space room!)

I think the kids' favorite was the farm/garden/market room:

Alex gardened for a looooong time.  I was super cute with him in those rubber boots that came up to his thighs.

We went to lunch afterwards at a place where a train brings you your food!

We ordered our food in two separate orders so we could have the train come twice.

The food gets lowered down to you on a little elevator.  It was really neat.  Too bad the food was just mediocre.

Random 2:  Can you believe that during our whole 22 hours' drive on three different days that the kids only fell asleep once!?!  It was trying to my patience.

And when they did fall asleep, we were about half an hour out from our hotel in Oklahoma.  Sheesh.

Random 3:  Before we left Utah, Ella had built a really cool tower out of blocks and called me over to look at it.  She wanted me to take a picture of it, but I didn't have a camera, so she knocked it over.  Just then I turned around and there was a camera on the counter, so I told her to rebuild it and I'd take a picture.  So she rebuilt it, then it fell over.  She rebuilt it again, and it fell over.  She had to rebuild it FIVE times before she was able to finish it and keep it up.  I went to take a picture of her and her tower......and the camera battery was dead.  So after a rush to find a camera that works, I finally got a picture of her and her tower!

She looks crazed!  Her hair is actually in a ponytail there, but it's such a mess you can't tell.  

Random 4:  I took the kids to the park the first day we were here in OK while Anton was at work, and guess what I saw?  People painting the grass!!  All the grass here is completely dry brown.  But in some special areas it looks like this:

That green is fake.  Nice, right?  I had a good laugh about silly Oklahomans who paint their grass.  Then of course I asked someone about it and they reassured me it's just fertilizer and weed control.  But then again, they didn't have to tint it green, did they?

So that's all the randomness for now.  Once I get a couple more boxes unpacked I'll take some pictures of our house and environs.  Just prepare yourselves for brown, brown, and more brown!

We've arrived...

...and I'm not impressed.  Well, the town itself seems fine, what we've seen of it, but we went to register Ella for school and I felt like I was in a juvenile detention center.  Everyone has to come in a log onto a computer before they can get through the locked door into the school.  The parents have to have a card with their kid's name on it to pick them up from school.  Ella's classroom has a bare white floor and white cinderblock walls.  It's very institutional.  There are 8 first grade classes in the school, two they've made since the school year began.  Ella's teacher was pulled out of retirement to teach her class and she seemed a bit scatterbrained.  Maybe I'm just tired and cranky from being in the car for days, but I didn't like it at all.  Plus we're stuck in a hotel for a couple days instead of in our house, and that has me cranky too.  And can you believe I'm about to complain about being hot?  It's hot!  It's 77 degrees out and muggy.  Blah.  And yesterday when we were at a children's museum (which I'll blog about once I'm done complaining) I wacked my head super hard and my brain has been throbbing since.

Okay.  I feel a little better now that I've vented.  We'll return to our regularly scheduled happiness and fun in a moment.

The Employment Adventure Begins!

Well, it's official, our "temporary" stay in Utah is over.  We drove out today.  I had a small moment of panic when we were sitting in McDonald's for lunch and Anton's phone rang and the guy on the other end said he was from the FAA.  I knew he was going to say, "Oh, your class has been cancelled.  Sorry.  You'll have to wait another six months."  But all was well.  He just wanted to know how much Anton weighed and what color his eyes were for some reason.

So now I'm chilling in an awesome town in Nebraska.  Yeehaw!  We ate at the nicest, and only, Mexican restaurant in town.  It was a small step up from Taco Bell.  A very romantic way to spend Valentine's Day.  We also played in the pool and melted in the lava pot they call a hot tub.  It was HOT!

You know what I hate about staying in hotels?  Well, one of many things.  I hate that my kids won't sleep while any lights are on and Anton and I are still up.  I don't want to go to bed at 8, which is when I would like them to be asleep.  Now it's after 9 and they're still wiggling around over there.  I'll have to give up soon and go lay in bed in the dark being bored.  If the battery hadn't died in my mp3 player, I could at least entertain myself by listening to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, but alas, the new batteries and the charger are in the suitcase on the bottom of the pile in the back of the car.  :(

And so begins our new adventure, and hopefully some more blogging on my part.  Since we will now be away from all family, it's only fair to try and keep them up to date with what we're doing.

Look out Ohhhhhhh-klahoma, here we come!!

Alex Strikes Again

This morning I woke up and walked out of my room to find a large egg outside my door.  It was about the size of Alex wrapped up in a blanket.  I picked it up and took it into my room and laid it on my bed until it hatched.  I named it Chip.  Alex loves to pretend he's a little chick in an egg.  It's so cute.

Alex also believes he has the power to control automatic doors with his voice.  When we go to the library he walks up to the doors and yells, "OPEN!" and is then so pleased when they obey.  Today when we were leaving the library we were halfway across the parking lot and he was yelling, "STAY OPEN!" and when they didn't, he was really upset.  We had to convince him the door just couldn't hear him.  We wouldn't want him losing his superpowers this early in life.

On the way home from the library we passed a neighborhood watch sign and he asked what the man on the sign was for.  I explained that it mean that if we saw bad people in the neighborhood we would call the police who would come get the bad guys.

After a short pause he asked, "Do policemen have swords?"

I answered, "No."

Another pause.  "Then how do they get the bad guys?"

I explained to him about guns, and he replied, "So the police will come and shoot all the bad guys!!"

Alex couldn't leave well-enough alone today with all the cuteness.  He had to balance it out with some uber-naughtiness.  I needed a red crayon I had been using to cross off lines on a pattern I am crocheting and asked Alex to go get it for me.  He nicely went and did so, and that was that.  Or so I thought.

We were getting ready to go to the park later and Ella said, "Why is there a red line on the stairs?"  Sure enough, he had dragged the red crayon all the way up the carpeted stairs and left a red line all the way up.  ARGH!  I got out the carpet cleaner and made him scrub it all off and then made him sit in his room for two hours until dinner.  He kept complaining about how boring it was in his room.  I had to keep telling him that was the point.  Sheesh.

So three cutes and one naughty isn't too bad for one day, right?

Milk and Cookies

So I know why all kids in the '40s and '50s came home to plates of fresh cookies and tall glasses of milk.  Their mothers were bored out of their minds.  It dawned on me today when I was floundering for something to do and the only think I could think of was bake.   Admit it, you've all hit that point in the afternoon when a large dose of sugar is just what you need and there's nothing in the house to satisfy, so you bake yourself some cookies.  You wouldn't be baking those cookies if you had something better to do with your time.  So just imagine a world without cable TV and the internet and cell phones and malls, and you can see why so many mothers perfected the art of milk and cookies.

It didn't help that our internet was out all morning, so I had to play cave man.  It was pure torture!!!  How was I going to survive not knowing if I got an important email or if someone posted something really good on their blog!  How was I supposed to sufficiently waste my time without my internet!!  It was hard, but I persevered.  And look what it got us, fresh, hot, ginger cookies.  They're my favorites.  I'll will freely admit to having eaten at least eight so far today, and I promise I will eat more before bed.  I will also be paying for it later.  But it's so worth it.

So the next time you're so bored you feel the urge to play Betty Crocker, here's a recipe for you to try.  These are unbelievably good.  I've been trying to figure out how to give them a hint of lemon, but I haven't perfected that yet, so here's the basic recipe:

Soft Ginger Roo's

Ingredients:

1 cup  Pure or Light Olive Oil 
2 cups brown sugar packed 
2 large eggs 
½ cup  molasses 
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract 
2 tablespoons softened butter 
4½ cups  flour 
4 teaspoons baking soda 
¾ teaspoon salt 
1½ teaspoons powdered ginger 
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon 
1 teaspoons ground cloves 

Preheat oven to 375F°.
In mixing bowl combine Olive Oil, brown sugar, eggs, molasses vanilla and butter extracts. Blend until creamy.
Add flour, soda, salt, ginger, cinnamon, and cloves. Blend until smooth.
Roll dough into small tablespoon-sized balls, or use large cookie scoop.
Roll in sugar and place on prepared cookie sheets.
Bake for 7 - 10 minutes. Remove and let cool on cookie sheet for at least 5 minutes. 

Bored

I'm actually far enough ahead in organizing and packing that I find myself with nothing to do.  I've been so bored the last couple of days.  I haven't felt like reading.  (Shock, I know!!)  I manage to finish my to-do lists (albeit, very short ones) before lunch.  I even sat down to do my taxes the other day just to give me something to do, only to discover we don't have all the paperwork yet that we need to do them.  Sigh.  What's a girl to do when she can't even do her taxes for fun?  I'm sure next week when the move is impending I'll feel a little more pressure, but for now I just whine and make life miserable for my family.  :(