Happy Birthday Mom!!!

I was reading everyone's wonderful tributes to my mom on her birthday and all I could think was, "how am I ever going to be able to express how much I love my mom in the same way?" I have very limited internet capabilities and no access to any of my pictures or videos because my computer is out of commission. I do have a few random pictures on my photobucket but like Adam, I wasn't able to find very many with my mom in them. I started to think......that actually made a lot of sense. In our photos, like in life, my mom is usually behind the scenes, away from the attention, loving and supporting everyone through the best and worst moments of their lives. So really I thought the best tribute I could give my mom, would not be posting pics of us together, but posting pics of wonderful moments in our lives that all happened because of her. These moments are all possible because of her love and sacrifices, but she's not even in the pictures. She's doing what she always does - loving us, supporting us, and making sure all the rest of us are having a great time.

Here is my brother, the day he married the love of his life:



Here's me, the day I achieved the biggest goal I had ever set for myself.



Here's the new floor she helped me install in my newly purchased home.



Here's her granddaughter, discovering a rolly polly on one of her first camping trips.



Here are all her children, playing cards and waiting patiently for their first niece.



Here's everyone enjoying a camping trip together.



Here are her children, again playing cards, this time waiting for Christmas morning.



Here's her son, on Prom night with his date.



Here's her daughter, the first day she drove a car by herself.



Here's her son and granddaughter, anxiously watching their newest family member at the hospital.



Here's her daughter about to lose a chicken fight to her other (more awesome) daughter.



And here are four kids.....who sure are lucky she's their mom.



I love you mom! Happy Birthday!

Turner Falls

I had a busy week this past week. Fiddler on the Roof Wednesday night, Austin Thursday night, and camping in Oklahoma Friday to Monday night. Fiddler was amazing! After Topol sang "If I were a rich man," I leaned over to Linda and said, "this is one of the greatest moments of my life!" She said, "this is the best thing I've ever done with my life." lol. So true!!

Camping was nice. Turner Falls was beautiful!!! Unfortnately, the people were not so much fun. I got there in the early afternoon Friday, and it was wonderful. Saturday the place started getting packed. It looked like a refugee camp. All day Saturday, I listened to about 7 or 8 different people's radios playing full blast at the same time. Tejano music, country music, southern rock, non-stop. We couldn't even hear each other in our own campsite. We tried to take a nap, but I just couldn't. Finally at 10, (no noise hour), I called the police at the front desk. 10:30 and still no cops. Adam went over to the loudest and closest people and shined a flash light in their faces and told them to keep the music down. 10:45 and still no cops, but lots of other people with music. I screamed "TURN THE MUSIC OFF!!!!" Some people did. For the first time all day, my head stopped hurting. Unfortunately, Sunday morning at 7:30am, we were awakened to the same cacaphony as the day before. But this time we were no longer putting up with it. I don't even remember how many times we called the police total (they never did do anything about it) but we ended up screaming at a lot of people. Fortunately, people started going home Sunday and it gradually got a little better. The falls were beautiful, the swimming was fun, the food was great. All in all, it was a great trip.

Hold me Accountable!

I've been doing Atkins for almost 2 months now. I feel incredible. I'm losing weight, finally! More importantly, I actually have hope that I just might actually be thin again one day. I don't know exactly how much weight I've lost because I didn't want to know how much I weighed back then, but in the last 2 weeks, I've lost 10 pounds. People aren't noticing my weight loss yet, but they are noticing a change. I've always been a tired, depressed person and I always thought that was just who I was. But since I've cut out my carb intake, I have so much energy, my mood is about 1000% better and I feel like my eyes have a youthful shine again. I write all this not to brag, but to ask all of you to help me make sure I stay on track. I have a tendency to sabotage things that could potentially make me happy. I'll come back and post my progress as often as possible (I don't have the internet at home right now). So here's my stats:

1. carb intake - 20 grams per day
2. weight - 210.8
3. excercise last week - 3 - 45 min high intensity workouts, 3 - 45 min moderate intensity workouts

Arlen Specter - what the hell?

Don't get me wrong..... I think the very idea of 2 political parties is detrimental to our democratic process. It wasn't designed that way and didn't even really come about until John Adam's presidency when Jefferson cut away politically from Adams and Hamilton. And I certainly would never chastise anyone for ever realizing their political views were wrong and changing to try to be better, or realizing that the party they are involved in has moved away from their values and making a change. But all the explanations I've seen Arlen Specter give for joining the Democratic party just make me hang my head in disappointment. Apparently, he has changed parties because he doesn't believe he could win a Republican primary in 2010 and to save his own butt and his 30 year career, he's changed parties. How can I possibly respect that? We all know that politics is all a big game and politicians are only in it for their own careers and don't really care about issues, or their constituents, or the United States as a whole....but can't we just pretend that's not true. Don't come out and hold a press conference and admit it!! Let's just try and remain delusional as long as possible and think that our lawmakers are actually motivated by making the world a better place.....just for a little longer.

My car has cancer :(

Well, I'm hoping that a long horrible journey with my car will finally come to an end today. My car has been on the verge of death for almost 3 months. Back in February, it started losing power when I accelerated. Of course, I don't know anything about cars so I took the logical action....ignore it and hope it goes away. That didn't work out so well. It ended up totally locking up and cost me $2000 to even get it running again, not to mention I almost lost my job for having to call in. (They weren't very forgiving of emergencies there). Turns out, it was my catalytic converter. Also turns out, the catalytic converters on 2002 Monte Carlos go bad a lot and Chevy extended the warranty on them so everything would have been completely covered for free if I had just taken it in. But I don't like thinking about that. I've put 3 converters on the car since then and they keep going bad. Earlier this month, I totally gave up on the car and tried to trade it in for a new one. I had bought a brand new Kia and had it for about a week when they called to have me come in to discuss my financing. So I show up at the dealership and they say they want thousands more for a down payment or I can take my old car back. Can you believe that?!?! So once again, I was stuck with my car. I took it to a Chevy dealer yesterday and had them make a few repairs and finally (after taking it to 7 different places) they gave me an actual list of what is actually wrong with the car. Most of it was stuff Sterling can do!!!! So I'm here at the parent's house waiting for Sterling to come and save my car's life. I'm trying not to get too excited but the fact that I might be able to wake up tomorrow with all of this just a distant memory is just too exciting. Wish us luck! Get well soon Monte Carlo!