Shouldn't This Be Happening to A Much Less Intelligent Person??

We have had an eventful week. We almost died and I almost started my grandma's kitchen on fire, all in the same day, oh, and I completely spaced out a t-ball game. Kaydn Rye doesn't exactly know what day it is from one day to the next (luckily) so he didn't know he had a t-ball game that day, and I never told him about it. Ignorance is bliss. Next year at this time, if I miss a t-ball game he'll probably freak out on me, so I thought I'd take advantage of the situation while I still can.

With the airing of my little t-ball secret out of the way, the near death story goes something like this. We were on our way out to my dad's rental property that I manage, Kaydn Rye, Gertie (see The Dog, Our Old Chinese Man) and I all in the Durango, when Gertie proceeded to try and jump on my lap.

Gertie has some separation issues which prevent her from being more than a foot from any one of us, and I tried to give her the boot into the backseat when I proceeded to drive into the ditch. Gertie was clinging to the center console for dear life while I attempted at shoving her onto the floor of the backseat. You'd think she was hanging from a cliff for pete's sake. We were almost fully in the ditch when I looked ahead and realized we were almost fully in the ditch and seriously over-corrected. While we then almost entered the ditch on the other side of the road, we were definitely on two wheels, I'm sure of it. We were all over the road for quite a while before all was well again, and Kaydn Rye was on the edge of his seat when I asked him if he was alright. He said he'd be alright but that he definitely did NOT want to do that again.

So with that behind us, we proceeded to swimming lessons in neighboring Stanley. My grandparents also live in Stanley so I thought during swimming lessons I'd make them a nice puff pancake, egg and bacon dinner. No problems there, right? Well, the puffy pancake tends to poof up a little too much sometimes, and this was one of those times. The melted butter that coats the bottom of the pan must have also started dripping on the bottom of the oven, and I ended up with a seriously serious oven fire. Everyone once in a while, the puff pancake will drip on the bottom of the oven, but I still have absolutely no clue what in the heck happened, I've never had an oven fire before.



I opened the oven and there was a fire, and by the time I got the puff pancake out of the oven, the fire was completely engulfing the inside of the oven. My grandma's idea was just to shut the door and let it burn itself out, but something about sitting down to eat a nice dinner while the oven was on fire just didn't sit well with me.

To make the situation even better, two of my great-aunts were also over there that day. To save my life I could not remember how to put out an oven fire, without a fire extinguisher of course.

"Anyone have any idea how to put out an oven fire?" I asked.

"Put salt on it," said my great-aunt.

"Pour some flour on it," said my grandpa.

The salt was handier, so I threw an entire container of salt on it, which significantly decreased the fire, but didn't put it out. My grandma was getting pretty upset that I was wasting all the salt, apparently not thinking about the fact that her oven was on fire. That's when I grabbed the tupperware container of flour and doused the oven in flour. That did the trick, and with more than a century of combined cooking experience between my grandma and her two sisters, none of them had ever had an oven fire before. My guess, somebody in the bunch is lying. Really, how is that I am the one responsible for their very first oven fire experience?

Sadly, the oven fire was not the end of a day gone seriously wrong; it was perhaps the pinnacle, but not the end. After everyone was stuffed with puff pancakes and we had ruled out making a trip to the hospital for smoke inhalation, I then began the hour and a half cleanup of the oven fire.

There was a pretty big heap of salt and flour in the oven, so I thought, "Hey, let's just vacuum up the heap and I'll wipe out the rest." Well, my grandma failed to tell me that after every use, her little vacuum with all the wonderful attachments needs to be completely cleaned out. So not only did the vacuum not really do much to suck up all the crap in the oven, but I then had to spend a half hour cleaning out the vacuum.

Once I had spent more than an hour with my head in the oven, scrubbing as ferociously as I possibly could, I then had to clean up the mess I had left on the floor by the oven, and once that was done I had to clean out that stupid vacuum.

I proceeded to the porch for said vacuum cleaning task and accidentally emptied out half of the vacuum cleaner dust onto the porch, which then needed to be cleaned up as well.

Once the oven, the floor, the vacuum and the porch were as good as new, I headed home, where before I left for grandma's I had sprayed oven cleaner in my oven. So, you guessed it, I had a dirty oven awaiting me at home.

It made me wonder, why is it that things that would typically happen to stupid people, keep happening to me?

Oh, and for future reference, flour cleans up much better than salt in a scorched oven. Thought you'd like to know.

Oh, and that puff pancake recipe, here it is:

Pancake:
1 1/2 cups all purpose-flour
1 1/2 cups milk
6 large egges
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup butter (1 stick)
To make pancake: In a bowl, whisk together flour, milk, eggs, sugar and salt until no lumps remain. Let stand for 30 minutes. (You can mix batter the night before, cover and refrigerate. Remove from refrigerator when you begin preheating oven.) Preheat oven to 450 degrees. While the oven preheats, place a large slope-sided baking pan or ovenproof skillet into oven with the stick of butter. When the butter is melted, remove from oven. Pour pancake mixture into heated pan and return to oven. Bake pancake for 15 to 20 minutes until edges are puffed high and golden.

Apple filling:
2 large apples, peeled and sliced (I leave the peelings on though)
2 tablespoon butter
1/4 cup brown sugar
To make apple filling, While pancake bakes, in medium skillet, sate apples in butter until tender, 5 to 10 minutes. Add brown sugar and stir until dissolved. Transfer to serving bowl.

To serve pancake, be sure everyone is at the table when you bring it in, as the pancake will slump quickly. Cut pancake into quarters and fill each serving with sauteed apples. Pass the whipped cream on the side if desired. Serves 4.

Here's to a fire free day!



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The Blaisdell Rodeo Has Again Come and Gone....

Last weekend was rodeo time at Blaisdell, ND, population 12 I think, since it's had a population spurt the last year or so. The town is probably the sorriest thing I've ever seen, but the rodeo, high on the hill on the outskirts of Blaisdell, is for some reason a no-miss event.

You'd never know it by my done-up hair, wedge sandals and crop pants, but I can actually ride a horse, being from a ranch and all. I usually ride horse in my cute little blue running shoes, and I usually attend rodeos in wedge sandals or some cute flip flops, I guess because cowboy boots and wranglers just aren't in my DNA makeup, and I'm sure I looked absolutely ridiculous behind the shoots getting Kaydn Rye to hop on a sheep in my wedge sandals, but that's just how I roll.

Kaydn Rye has been in the kid's showdeo for the last two years, and this year he graduated to sheep riding, which turned out to be a terrible experience. My Mr. Safety was pretty psyched about riding a sheep, which I thought was utterly shocking. He didn't last more than a second, but he did it.

I don't really know what the point of sheep riding is, but for some reason it is socially acceptable. Of course, it's not exactly like bull riding where you get your arm in the air and swing it hoping to look cool and stay on the bull. Nope, sheep riding is a sport that is only won by hopping on, grabbing the sheep by the neck and hanging on for dear life as long as you can.



Kaydn Rye was fully prepared to grab the sheep by the neck and hang on for dear life, until he actually got on the sheep and became utterly grossed out by all its fuzziness. I'm sure he thought, "Oh my word, how many germs are lurking under all that fur?" Which is why he got on, put his hands in the air like the sheep was a bomb ready to go off, and he of course fell off before he even really made it out of the shoot.

Here are some more Blaisdell Rodeo pics for all you rodeo fans.



Kaydn Rye's the kid on the end with the brown jacket who looks like he's in some serious pain.

Here he's getting ready for the big stick pony race.



Here's him taking a much needed break from rodeo-ing.



And I can't forget the wonderment that is t-ball. We've been busy with that the last couple weeks, and we've been hard at work practicing in the yard things like, this isn't football so don't tackle your team mates for the ball. Oh, and when you bat, don't run and grab the ball just so the other team can't tag you with it. Things like that are always helpful pieces of information.



Oh, and of course there's the wonderful yard fishing, can't forget that. I don't know how many bushes he caught in the yard, but he was pretty proud of his casts.



That has been my summer vacation so far...now we're off to the lake.....



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Drumroll Please......

The time has finally come for before and after pictures to prove that while I have not had time to force even one creative thought into my brain, I have been a busy, busy girl.

First off, for the last two months I have been trying to tame my overgrowth of a yard, and I must say, for someone who has no more experience with growing things than watering houseplants and constantly stuffing food into a little monkey-boy, I'm pretty proud. I even put in a garden, all by myself. Yeah, my mother used to force us to garden, but she was the brains behind the operation then.

So I proceeded to the garden spot with my straight-line string, a hoe, a tape measure and some seed. I was busy measuring it all out and making sure all my rows were absolutely and perfectly straight when my grandparents decided to show up and thought I looked ridiculous. My grandmother's suggestion?

Just hoe a roe and put the seed in.

Apparently stuff grows better in crooked rows. I couldn't bring myself to plant crooked rows, but the rows in which I didn't count absolutely every single tiny little carrot seed came up much better than the rows in which they were meticulously counted and evenly spaced. Who knew?

Oh, and remember that crappy (literally) little pond I had in the backyard? Well, we did a little sprucing and here's the transformation.



Drumroll.....







Here are some more flower garden shots....I thought I'd better snap them so at least I could prove I can grow stuff like a good little housewife.

















And of course, the pirate house....



With that done, last week I tackled the bathroom. We had finished the tile, after ripping out CARPET out of the bathroom quite a few months ago (see Holes in the Bathroom) but in a week's time we tore off that terrible wallpaper, replaced the countertop, installed new fixtures, spray painted some of the old fixtures and redid the tub area. We had planned on just doing kind of a concrete overlay on the countertop to make it look like concrete, but we found this remnant countertop for $25, a fourth of the cost of the materials to do the concrete look.

Remember that most-hideous wallpaper and the wonderful holes in the floor?



Well that's all gone now.



Some friends came over and helped me de-wallpaper, which took hours upon hours with sponges and surprisingly, a spatula. Nothing like a good ol' spatula for taking off wallpaper.

Here are a few more pics for your viewing pleasure.







See, I have been very busy.




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What Would the World Look Like Without Us....

My anal retentive self has struck this week, which is why I have again been AWOL from my wonderful blogging life. There have been weeks where I've thought, "Man, I only posted once that week, what in the world was I doing?"

And then I've realized, "Oh yeah, I was actually hanging out with my real-life friends that week. Imagine that." Blogging is a great substitute for human interaction when all your real friends are either busy or on vacation.

But I did not have the privilege of hanging out with friends this week, well, unless you count the day a couple of friends came over to help me in my wallpaper removal endeavors in the bathroom the other day. For the most part I have been working on completing my yard beautification mission, which has completely taken over the last month of my life.

When we moved into this house in September we moved into a property that looked like a flower garden had spontaneously combusted. There were flowers and bushes everywhere, and I mean everywhere. You could just be walking along and realize oh, you stepped on a tulip, or a day lily or a whatever. I am into flowers, really I am, but I need to be able to walk in my yard without feeling claustrophobic. And the massive flower garden that wraps around the house? Well, that was being taken over by grass. So, for the last month I have been cleaning out flower beds to ultimate perfection. And I cannot stop.

I have an innate need for flowers to be where flowers should be, for grass to be where grass should be and for dirt to be where dirt should be. It's the same reason that in our closets, all the hangers need to be exactly the same and all the clothes need to be hung according to purpose and color. For instance, in Kaydn Rye's closet, all the hangers are those little white hangers, and all his shirts are hung up with the blues, the reds, the yellows and oranges, the blacks, the browns and the plaids all hung together in their respective groups.

In my closet, I have skinny white hangers and my clothes are hung with the shirts grouped into blues, purples, greens, blacks, browns and reds. Then the pants, the skirts and the dresses all hung in their respective groups.

In hubby's closet, he has big black hangers and his clothes also must be hung according to color. This was a prerequisite for marriage. Believe me, it is that important.

If he couldn't keep his closet color coordinated with everything hanging on the right hangers going the right way, it wasn't going to happen, I wouldn't marry him. I informed him that he could perhaps sleep on it and let me know if he was ready to commit to proper closet etiquette, till death do us part.

He had seen my closet, so he knew what he was getting into, but for some reason he just had not previously thought about how he would be required to follow the same closet etiquette. Needless to say, he traded his freedom for a life of slavery to closet etiquette.

So anyway, same goes for the yard. There can be no weeds and no grass in the flower beds, and there can be no weeds and no flowers in the grass. There's just no working around it. I have actually taken a couple days off of work to de-grass the flower beds in the last few weeks. That's the beauty of telecommuting - I do not need to seek help for my illness and can still hold down a decent job.

Yes, I know I am suffering from some kind of schizo-obsessive disorder, but the truth is, I do not want help. If I was cured, then I would have weedy and grassy flower gardens, and that's not good for anyone. What would the neighbors think?

And really, if there were no obsessive people in the world, the people who have nightmares about weeds in their flower gardens and blue shirts mixed with brown shirts in the closet, what would the world look like?

Scary thought.

This week, after I clean out all the grass from in between my lilac bushes, then I believe I should be about done. I'll post pictures for the big reveal.

Additionally, I am also de-wallpapering the bathroom. After finishing the slate tile floor almost three months ago, I finally decided to get my butt in gear for another round of de-wallpapering. By the end of the week I'll have updated pictures of our de-hydrangea wallpapered bathroom, complete with new counter top. Wallpaper is like the wrath of G-d upon humanity. I'm sure, just like Eve eating the apple in the garden, wallpaper may seem like a good idea at the time, but believe me, it never is. If ever a little voice starts filling your head with fantasies of wallpaper, run. Run away as fast as you can. Run straight to the paint aisle and pick yourself up a nice gallon of paint.

With that thought, I will return to the world of blogging later in the week, once my mind has been eased by the riddance of wallpaper and weeds.




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