Subway contest Not for Homeschoolers!!!

This post came up on my homeschooling board today...

No Homeschoolers allowed in Subway Contest????

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN. Contest is open only to legal residents of the Untied States who are currently over the age of 18 and have children who attend elementary, private or parochial schools that serve grades PreK-6. No home schools will be accepted.

Wow! I could not believe it when I read it! I wonder why?

Here is the Url:
http://www.subwayfreshbuzz.com/kids/contest.aspx


I checked the link and they didn't just say it once. They said it twice that no homeschoolers would be accepted!

Now we get that the grand prize would be a bit difficult for them to offer to a homeschooler...but they could have come up with a better grand prize. I know that my homeschool group could come up with some ideas on how to use that much money...or we could have our favorite park upgraded.

no ideas here

I had an idea about what to post, but then I forgot it. LOL! Isn't that the way life goes?

Yesterday Darly had stayed the night at a friend's house so I had a free morning to myself. How did I use it? I went shopping! Nothing really exciting there, though.

Darly likes to go shopping so shopping without her was no big deal. Although shopping with her can be so much more fun. We have tons of fun in the dressing room complaining about how the clothes fit us.

case in point: sometimes when I am trying on pants the waistband gaps in the back. I have called this gapping "a cup of soup" because it seems as if you could carry a cup of soup back there! I must have got the idea from this Seinfeld episode. If the gap in the pants is big enough to carry anything I will proclaim "No Soup For YOU!" and toss those pants aside. Unfortunately I run across a bunch of pants that are "cuppa soup" pants and I will come home with no new pants.

Darly has even had trouble finding pants with no "cuppa soup" for herself. It is so crazy. Why would little girl's pants have problems with the waistbands? Usually the pants that fit her best are the ones that have the elastic "belts" inside the waistband that you can adjust.

So yesterday while I was shopping I was looking for glass replacements for all of my plastic microwavable dishes. See I read that cooking your food in plastic can be harmful for you. I had heard that before, and ignored it. But now DH is having some medical issues (not life threatening...just annoying really) so I'm hoping that by simply replacing my dishes that they might get resolved. I figured it wouldn't harm anything to try it...right?

Now I'm off to search the internet for the one dish that alluded me yesterday... a divided "casserole" dish. See with my picky eaters I always cook two different vegetables for dinner. One for me and one for the picky eaters. Using a divided dish saves me time since I can cook both our veggies at the same time. Wish me luck!

Update: I found one at www.pfaltzgraff.com that was on sale for $10 and since the one I sorta found at BedBath&Beyond yesterday was gonna be $20, I bought two! BB&B was gonna have to order me the dish. Then I searched online and found a coupon code to get me 10% off my order so I saved another $2! woo hoo!

Now I can go clean out all of my plastic dishes!

had to share this again

And in other news...

I came downstairs the other morning to find this waiting for me!


I was okay with it. But apparently it bothered someone...

I was in making my coffee and heard growling and then barking! I went to find Lilly staring at the doll. So since she was so bothered by it, I picked her up so she could sniff it. Once she found that it was just a doll she was fine. but it was sure funny that she was bothered by it. LOL!

OUCH!

This morning I got up on the wrong side of the bed (literally!) and hurt my back.

See this morning DH got up early to go do yard work at our Church. So I snagged his side of the bed...it was nice and warm there. I fell back to sleep and woke up some time later to barking dogs. grrr

So I decided to get up and when I went to pull the sheets taught, I pulled something in my back. It hurt so bad that I made a yelping sound, that bothered our dog.

I don't know what I did to it, but my back is still sore.

Which is a real bummer cuz today is a perfect day for planting my garden. I think that I might go ahead and try to plant it anyway. I asked Darly if she would help and she just looked at me. bummer! Usually that kid loves working the garden.

Oh well. I've got nothing better to do.

I slay me!!!

Tonight I was out with my good friend Jen. Jen was talking about a field trip that she's been trying to set up and it just isn't working out. The folks who run the place that we are trying to see just don't have a clue about how to have a group of people come to see their historical building.

Another friend was saying that it was probably going to be just another old house with a washboard, a wood burning stove and a waggon wheel out front.

Then Jen joked that she should have tours of her house and charge people money to come through. She said that you could dig for treasure in her couch...and the person who found the most Cherios in the couch would win a prize.

And I figured out the perfect prize...

A free breakfast!

I'm Fine

A farmer named Clyde had a car accident. In court, the trucking
company's fancy hot shot lawyer was questioning him.

The lawyer asked, "didn't you say, at the scene of the accident, I'm
fine?"

Clyde responded, "Well, I'll tell you what happened. I had just loaded
my favorite cow, Bessie, into the..."

"I didn't ask for any details", the lawyer interrupted. "Just answer
the
question.
Did you not say, at the scene of the accident, "I'm fine!?"

Clyde said, "Well, I had just put Bessie into the trailer and as I was
driving down the road...."

The lawyer interrupted again and said, "Your Honor, I am trying to
establish the fact that, at the scene of the accident, this man told
the
Highway Patrolman on the scene that he was just fine. Now several weeks
after the accident he is trying to sue my client. I believe he is a
fraud.
Please tell him to simply answer the question."

By this time, the Judge was fairly interested in Clyde's answer and
said
to the lawyer, "I'd like to hear what he has to say about his favorite
cow, Bessie."

Clyde thanked the Judge and proceeded. "Well as I was saying, I had
just
loaded Bessie, my favorite cow, into the trailer and was driving her
down the highway when this huge semi-truck and trailer ran the stop
sign
and smacked my truck right in the side. I was thrown into one ditch and
Bessie was thrown into the other. I was hurting, real bad and didn't
want to move.

However, I could hear old Bessie moaning and groaning. I knew she was
in
terrible shape just by her groans. Shortly after the accident a Highway
Patrolman came on the scene. He could hear Bessie moaning and groaning
so he went over to her. After he looked at her, and saw her fatal
condition, he took out his gun and shot her between the eyes.

Then the Patrolman came across the road, gun still in hand, looked at
me, and said, "How are you feeling?"

"Now tell me, what would you have said?"

Other news...

finally a break! We've been on the go since Sunday...

Monday we learned how to make friendship bracelets and Darly went to her first Level 2 Ice Skating lesson. She wasn't too happy. It seems that the place we go to decided to combine two classes into one and then charge us $10 less for the session. But that means that we have 24 kids instead of just 12...however they did have two coaches and divide the class into girls & boys...but that still meant that there were a lot of girls in Darly's class. But I checked the other classes at this level offered and Darly didn't want to wake up early on Saturdays to switch. So oh well, we'll live with this one.

Tuesday Darly had a book club and gymnastics and I had a meeting to go to. DH had to go to pick her up. Apparently I owe him for this.

Wednesday we went to the park to go see a Police Dog demonstration. Only someone at the police department lost the info that said they would be there. And so we were waiting around the park on the police to show up. One of the other moms suggested we call up and say there's a suspicious package here they need to send dogs to check out. Instead the cops woke up a night shift officer and asked him to come. Poor guy had just gotten to bed at 4am but came to talk to us with his dog. There wasn't really any demo though cuz they didn't bring the bad guy training suit. But we were still thankful that he had come. Darly & her friends played at the park all day and had great fun.

Today we were supposed to go to the federal center, but since I was the only one who could still go...we canceled it and will reschedule. But Darly has gymnastics this evening and I have another meeting to go to...so now I will owe DH even more. I mentioned to him that he hasn't said what kind of payment he wants. He says "wadda got for payment?" I think I'm in trouble!

Meanwhile our attempt to rename our homeschooling group is going terrible. I sure hope we can come to some sort of resolution though cuz well it might have been a bad idea to let the group help with it. sigh

And in other news...

I came downstairs the other morning to find this waiting for me!


I was okay with it. But apparently it bothered someone...

I was in making my coffee and heard growling and then barking! I went to find Lilly staring at the doll. So since she was so bothered by it, I picked her up so she could sniff it. Once she found that it was just a doll she was fine. but it was sure funny that she was bothered by it. LOL!

My Mother's Day

okay, well first I have to confess that I STILL have not mailed my Mother's day gift to my Mom. Sorry Mom! I've just flaked out on it. I'm a bad girl. I didn't even get her a card. I hope I can still find one.

My Mother's day started off by going to Church and giving my Sunday School kids their final test. I think most of them did well on it...it will just be the boys who didn't want to be there in the first place that will do porely. Oh well, we just found out that it doesn't even matter. The Church has now decided to not even start the kids on the Confirmation program until the 6th grade and to no longer require Sunday School attendance for it.

After Church Dh too me out to lunch at Black Eye Pea. They gave us wayyyy too much food! I ordered 1/2 a sandwich with a cup of soup...who knew that it came with two veggies too??? actually I think our server goofed on that. But it was all good.

When we got home and changed out of our Church clothes I got my loot! Darly had bought me a Pixar Shorts DVD. It's awesome! I just love the shorts...they're so funny.

Darly had warned me the day before that DH had gotten me something on the Don't buy list. So I was wondering what in the world he could have possibly gotten me. He knows better than to get me anything with a cord attached, and that took care of two of the categories. I knew he didn't have the Man Cold...so all that was left was the lotion and the ugly nighty. So when I opened it I was expecting the lotion...I even had my "I hate this gift" speach all ready. But I didn't need it.

DH got me a storage box for our pictures that were almost damaged in the basement flood. After the flood I had layed out all the pictures so they could dry, and when they were dry I had just left them where they were. So DH was wanting them put away, so his gift was kinda like "I got you this box you wanted, so put the pictures away now." But I was still happy with it. I filled it up and need another one, which DH said I could have. I think I'll grab the newer pictures and put them in a new box too...I wonder if I should vent the box...hummm

After this DH mowed our yard and then we went to MIL's house for DH to mow her yard too. Darly made us dinner and did an excellent job. Everything turned out yummy! Course, all she had to do was put the pre-cooked chicken in a pan and then in the oven, put the onions on top of the green bean casserole and put it in the oven too. Boil water for the rice, dump the rice & seasonings (that I had already measured) in the pot and let it sit and finally nuke the peas.

I'm gonna start letting Darly do more cooking this year, so this was an easy way of getting her started I think. I was cooking way more at her age. Hopefully by the time we get camping this summer she's playing with fire nicely.

I gyped my MIL out of $230! & other stuff too

You're in shock right?

See our grocery store was doing this promotion where if you bought a gift card for certain amounts of money they would give you 10% more money. Well we read all the fine print and one of the stipulations was that you could only get one offer. DH wanted to get his mom a gift card for Mother's day and for us to get a larger amount for us to use to get our groceries. The offer said one card, so we decided that we would just get MIL a smaller card with no extra 10%.

So DH goes to get the gift cards and as it turns out the larger amount we wanted to get was actually 4 cards at the lowest amount. We were under the assumption that it would all be on one gift card. Had we had known that we would have just got the larger amount and given MIL one of the 4 cards. Oh well it did seem a bit much to give for Mother's Day and we're sure she'll be very happy with the smaller card.

So this morning I get woken from a nice sleep by my credit card company's fraud dept. Seems they wanted to verify our purchases for yesterday since it seemed awefully unusual to spend that much money at the grocery store. I had to giggle about that. The credit card might be a bit more upset when our credit purchases for groceries go way down for the next few months as I'll be using our gift cards.

Then this evening we went to Champberlin Observatory for their Quarter moon Saturday evening Open House. Oh this was a lot of fun. We have been many times for their Public Nights where it is just a presentation and if the weather is clear we get to look through the telescope. But for Open House all the members of the Astrological Society bring out their telescopes and focus on something up in the sky and allow everyone to look through them.

Early on we got to see the moon a lot, because the sun was still up and that's all we could see. But as soon as the first "star" was visible they all turned their scopes toward it...because it was really Saturn!

It is so unusual to look at Saturn...or even up at the Moon because through the scopes it looks just like they do in pictures. But unlike the pictures you get to have the person who focused the scope tell you what else it is you're seeing. We got to see two of Saturn's moons too.

Later on we also got to view the two star middle star of the handle of the Big Dipper. With the naked eye it appears to be just one star, but through a scope you see it's really two stars close together.

There was also a man there who had 3-D pictures of the Aurora Borealis, and a guy had a map of the world showing all the light pollution around the world. The US is really the worst for using too many lights.

Tomorrow we'll be heading over to MIL's house for DH to finish working on her yard and for Darly to make dinner! She really wanted to do it...so I bought a pre-cooked rotisserie chicken for her to heat up. She'll also be making some Minute Rice, cook a green bean casserole that I've mixed up and also make some peas. Hummm when I cooked my first dinner I had to make meatloaf. LOL! I guess it's a good thing that no one here likes meatloaf.

Adventures in Webcamming!

well when I purchased our new monitor for the computer, I also picked up a very cheap webcam. It's a very nice GE model that only set me back about 17 bucks. I got it cuz, well I have a friend who has one and it's been fun to talk to her over the internet...and the kids have fun with it too.

so we got our cam and I installed it when Heather's kid was here for a sleepover weekend. Our first use of the cam was for kid to have a webcam chat with her dad & brothers. The conversation was going really well until both her brothers decided that they would try to be as crazy as they could, climbing all over their dad to try to be goofy and famous...i guess. I think it was nice for Heather's kid to be able to check in with her family while she was here...although I don't think that she was at all homesick.

our next webcam adventure happened yesterday when Darly should have been cleaning her room. Instead of cleaning her room she spent the better part of yesterday on the webcam with Heather's kid having a Webkinz American Idol show!!! They spent the afternoon with their Webkinz singing to each other. :eyeroll!:

While I was very disappointed that Darly's room did not get cleaned, I suppose that the girls having a virtual playdate was not a bad thing. In fact I plan to contact Darly's friends who have moved away to see if they have webcams too for long distance virtual playdates. Yeah, I'm crazy.

I did contact my Mom to see if she might get a cam to keep in touch, but alas money is so tight right now for her (she's been approved for disability, but the government has not yet started sending her payments. :more eyerolling!:) that they had to disconnect their internet service and they also had their long distance phone service cut off too.

So have webcam? Let's chat. LOL!