Meanest Mom in the World

The next time Paige or Marissa give me that look that says "you're the meanest mom in the whole world", I'm going to pull out this article to show them:

'Meanest mom' sells car after finding liquor
Jane Hambleton has dubbed herself the "meanest mom on the planet." After finding alcohol in her son's car, she decided to sell the car and share her 19-year-old's misdeed with everyone - by placing an ad in the local newspaper.

Someone else has already taken that title. Good for you, Jane!!!

Oh, and just to give equal billing, here's the "meanest Dad".

Glad to see there are still responsible parents in the world.

Bill Gates' Last Day

This week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas marks a major milestone for the tech world: Bill Gates delivered his last Key Note address as the President of Microsoft. Most have probably already heard that Bill will be stepping down this summer to spend more time working with the Gates Foundation. It is truly the end of an era.

As Bill (yes, we're all on a first name basis here at MS) delivered his Key Note in Vegas, he thought ahead a bit to what his last day at Microsoft might possibly look like:



You know, when most of us retire, we'll be lucky to get a slide show of old photos set to sappy music. When you're Bill Gates, you get Bono, George Clooney, the NBC Nightly News and the entire Democratic party!

So long, Bill! It won't be the same without you!

Home Improvement (Ar...Ar...Ar!)

As much as I love my husband, home repair has not always been his greatest strength. When we lived in our trailer house in Bismarck, he tried to fix the plumbing when our bathroom shower sprung a leak. That became a disaster of such proportion that his dad ended up coming over to save the day, and the floor in the laundry room still had to be completely replaced. Of course, I haven't really him live that down, and the memory of what has become known as "the plumbing incident" always made the idea of doing home repair and improvement projects a little scary. (There really is something to be said for all of our years of renting apartments when I could pick up the phone and call maintenance when something broke.)

So, a week before Christmas, the girls and I were home one night and suddenly we heard a horrid screeching coming from the basement. Going downstairs to investigate, I found the source of the noise to be our central exhaust fan. Besides being the exhaust for the bathrooms, in the winter, it runs constantly since we turn on the humidifier system attached to our furnace.

Now, we've known for a while that the fan was going to bite the dust real soon. It's been rattling and making some really weird sounds practically since we moved in, but the fact that it chose that particular moment to break down completely was such a thrill for us. To borrow a thought from a fellow blogger who has been fighting with her clothes drier, we really love it when things break down just before Christmas because we are, after all, made of money.

The fact that the central exhaust is necessary to run the humidifier meant that our house has been exceptionally dry for the past couple of weeks. Mike has always been prone to nose bleeds, but has not had many since we moved in. Once the humidifier was out of commission, he started having them again just about every day. This, of itself, was bad enough, but with the fan broken, we also had no exhaust fans in the bathrooms. I won't even go into the details, but lets just say we used A LOT of Febreeze Air Effects spray over the past few weeks.

Wednesday, Mike decided he'd had enough of the nose bleeds and Febreeze, so he took the fan apart and made the ceremonial trip to Lowes to buy a replacement fan. Two hours later he came home completely frustrated. Not only did Lowes have no idea what it was, neither did Home Depot, Fleet Farm, or Menards. What happened to taking care of all my home needs? I know that central exhaust is a little bit unusual, but it's not completely unheard of! So yesterday, Mike continued his quest by trying home heating and cooling companies and had no better luck with them.

I'll skip the details because they involve alot of running from place to place, explaining what he needed, and receiving blank stare replies, but in the end, Mike found out that the only way he could get this part was to go to a company that sells parts like this to contractors. (HUH???? It's a stupid FAN, people! We're not trying to buy explosives or anything!) He goes to this company and they tell him that in order to sell to him, he has to be a contractor...so guess what? Mike now has a general contractor's account with this company. (I guess if we ever have to build, we can buy our own stuff now, right?)

Of course, buying the part was only half the battle. Once he got it home, he realized that the fan he bought was set up exactly opposite of what we needed. (I'm now having flashbacks to the plumbing fiasco.) He proceeds to completely disassemble the casing of this brand new fan and reverse it so that it fits. After a bit of swearing and fumbling, Mike had it reassembled. Amazingly, he took it downstairs, wired it, and it fit right into place and we now have a working exhaust. Our humidity is improved and the bathrooms smell much better!

So, Mike has now successfully completed his first major home repair, and his confidence has be lifted so much that he's been walking around grunting like Tim "The Toolman" Tayler since last night. Unfortunately, if you ever watched Home Improvement, you know how well most of his projects turned out. I have to give him credit, though. This was, by far the most complicated repair we've completed without calling someone to come do it for us, but for now, I still think I'll be keeping him away from the plumbing!

Saying Thank You to Those Who Serve

When we lived in Washington, I was fortunate to fall in with two of the most wonderful, caring women I've ever had the pleasure to know. Val, Barb, and I worked together, but we truly became connected when another co-worker (and a pretty darn cool guy!) was deployed with his Guard unit to Iraq. The three of us sent Rob emails and care packages, and we did everything we could to make sure that those who are defending our freedom knew that they were not forgotten.

Rob has since come home and is happily back to work, but many, many other service men and women are not. At this time of year, it is so important that we let them know how much we appreciate their sacrifice. Next week, while we enjoy family, friends, food, and gift-giving, these dedicated soldiers will still be in Iraq or Afghanistan or some other location around the world, away from their loved ones and the safety of home.

Today, Val forwarded an email to me with a really cool (and extremely quick!!) way that we can let those men and women who will spend the holidays serving our country that we have not forgotten them. Here's what she sent:

If you go to this web site, www.LetsSayThanks.com you can pick out a thank you card and Xerox will print it and it will be sent to a soldier that is currently serving in Iraq . You can't pick out who gets it, but it will go to some member of the armed services.

How AMAZING it would be if we could get everyone we know to send one!!! This is a great site. Please send a card. It is FREE and it only takes a second. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the soldiers received a bunch of these? Our guys and gals over there need to know we are behind them...hope you join in.

Even if you don't have much time, please consider taking just a minute to say thank you to those who are protecting our right to celebrate the holidays.

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

It's that time of year when every night of the week is spent running to this concert and that recital and the other performance of any kinds. Here's a couple of activities that we had last week.

First, Paige's 6th grade orchestra concert. For those who haven't seen her in awhile, she's the second cello in the front row. Here are two selections from their concert:

Jingle Bells

Jolly Old St. Nicholas

On Friday, Marissa had a dance performance. They did two routines, but she's in the back row in the first one and you can only pick her out every now and then. I love this one though. It's their Christmas (or should I say "holiday") routine and they only started learning it about 4 weeks ago, so I thought they did a great job! Marissa is the second from the right in the front row:

Here Comes Santa Claus

So, I hope you enjoy! And Merry Christmas!

So Long, Mr. Fogelberg

OK, so usually when a celebrity dies, I pause for a second to feel bad for his family and then go on with my life. But this time, it seems a bit different. I was never a superfan of Dan Fogelberg, but his music has always found a way to haunt me.

"Run for the Roses" came out when I was in the 6th grade, at the height of my fascination with horses and horse-racing. I knew every single word as my friend and I would sing it on the playground at recess time. I became aware of "Leader of the Band" as my interest in music was hitting its peak. I found the song inspirational and incredibly sad all at the same time.

So, it is with a heavy heart that I say so long, Mr. Fogelberg. You will be missed, but your music will live on for eternity.

The color purple and other tidbits

Just cuz I know ya'll have been dying to see it, I took a picture of my toe for you. (Try real hard not to notice the hairy big toe. It's cold here right now and every little bit helps!) I actually took this yesterday, and if I'm honest, the photo is a bit disappointing because it looked much more dramatic on Sunday. The shadow on my foot just below the toes is not a shadow at all, but part of the bruise which was an incredible shade of purplie-green last night. Even the toes themselves are looking much less mangled today. But anyway, just because I love you all and want to share so much, here's what my toes looked like on Monday morning.



And now, in other news.....
I finally got the pictures from Thanksgiving off of my camera today. (It's amazing all of the little odds and ends I can accomplish while sitting on a conference call.) In case there's anyone left in the world whom I didn't tell, I hosted Thanksgiving this year. Preparation was traumatic, but the event itself was alot of fun!! The entire Zimmerman clan was here along with my dad's brother's wife's mother, Lorraine. Dad's brother Jim and his wife Jill were supposed to join us, but were forced to cancel their travel plans at the last minute.

Anyway, I uploaded this first picture just because it's so doggone cute! Nothing like a little sisterly affection, right? Somewhere, there are pictures of both me and Laura each with a cheek, but no one grabbed my camera for that one, so someone will have to share with the rest of the class! Daddy???

Along with Thanksgiving, we also threw in a little Christmas along the way. Since we're all going separate directions for Christmas this year, we decided we'd just make Thanksgiving weekend do double duty. So, Laura, Mom and I took the kids to the kitchen and made Christmas cookies.

Laura and I learned a very important Weight Watcher tips....don't try to lighten up cookie dough by using apple sauce in place of shortening or butter. The unfortunate result is that your dough takes almost twice the recommended amount of flour in order for it to be firm enough to knead or roll out, but when you add that much flour, your cookies end up more like bread than cookies. Ah, well. They're still really cute, and in the end, we've discovered that they make great coffee-dunking cookies!

So, anyway, here's a few pics of the cookie making that I thought turned out really good.
















And here's one of Jerome Decking the Halls....or wrapping garland around my staircase.





Until next time!

Merry December!

Since it's December 1st, we need a little Christmas Cheer!

And December certainly did come in with a vengence today! We have about 4 inches of snow (our first of the year) and it's not supposed to stop until sometime tomorrow. I'll try to post pictures tomorrow.

In other news, I broke my baby toe. I did it on Thursday morning while I was getting ready for work and today is the first day since that I've actually been able to walk without too much pain. I still can't put a shoe on (at least not one of my own, but Mike's tennis shoes worked pretty well for walking in snow today), but at least I can get down the steps without sliding down on my butt!

Friday Funnies: Blog Style

At work a few years back, one of my former coworkers started the Friday Funnies as a way to keep himself sane when everyone he'd ever said hello to in his life would forward funny emails to him. You know the emails I'm talking about, the ones that give you such a chuckle that you just can't wait to forward them back out to everyone you've ever said hello to.

This coworker, however, was extremely considerate. He didn't want to clutter up everyone's inboxes (even though no one ever seemed to worry about cluttering his) so he would collect them and compile them and send them all out in one email on Friday. Ever Friday, to this day, I can't wait to get my new edition of the Friday Funnies.

I don't think I'll save every funny I get (and by the way, people don't really send me a lot of funny emails) but I will try to find some gem that is, at the very least, giggle worthy to share. So in the tradition started by my former coworker, I give you the first edition of my blog's Friday Funnies:

A little change will do you good....

Change seems to be a theme lately. Changes at work, changes at home, changes with the girls, changes, changes, changes. It only makes sense that I also change my blog. Many of my internet friends will think that I pretty much dropped off the face of the earth over the past two months, and to those whom I've blatently ignored, please accept my humble apologies. You all mean a great deal to me, but trust me when I say that it became very necessary for me to focus on my real life for a period of time. Now, with this, my new and improved blog, my hope is that I'll be able to reconnect with many of you and keep everyone up to date on what's going on at the Carpenter house.

So, what's with all of the changes that I'm talking about? Oh, where to start. I guess, let's start with school. Yes, I've taken the plunge and started grad school to pursue a Master's Degree in Project Management. Each class is only 5 weeks long, and I go to class one night a week. It's through the University of Mary branch here in Fargo. I really think I've probably bit off more than I can chew, but I'm doing the best I can. So far, so good as I have an A average after two classes. We'll see how things progress after this next class.

Another big adjustment for me is that I've changed jobs...well, kind of but not really, but yeah, I've changed jobs. I'm still doing the same work for the same group, but I've changed products. I used to manage the support content for the products that were based here in Fargo (the old Great Plains products), but in August, my manager called me and asked if I would consider changing my product focus to the Office products. I was thrilled! When we lived in Seattle, this is the group I did tech support with so I was so excited to work with so many of my old team mates again! It's been alot of work and I'm finding out just how much work goes into releasing a major service pack for a Microsoft product, but I'm having a blast. It seems like every time I turn around, and old friend's name shows up in my inbox, so it's been such fun to catch back up with all of these people!

Mike changed jobs too, over the summer. He decided in the spring that he would not spend another summer in the kitchen at Woody's, so when the opportunity came for him to go work at a local liquor store, he jumped at the chance. As it turned out, a friend of his had just been named the new manager of the store and he asked Mike to come work for him with the understanding that, as long as things worked out and they both agreed, Mike would become the assistant manager. He started working there and within a month was officially promoted. He really enjoys it, but our kitchen looks like it could be a liquor store of its own with all the bottles that he brings home as samples from the distributors! If you're having a party and need libations, I'm your girl!

Change has not bypassed the girls either. Paige has made her first major jump signaling to me that she won't stay little forever...she started middle school this year. Along with a new school has come a whole new attitude...and I do mean at-ti-TUDE! Why do perfectly sweet 5th graders become hormonal, mouthy 6th graders just with a simple change of school buildings? If this is 11, I hate to see what 16 is going to look like. But it's not all bad. She's doing well in school and even made the B honor roll for the first quarter, so I guess there hope.

In the midst of all this change, the one person I thought I could count on to stay her little self was Marissa, but it seems that even she is not immune. I've noticed over the past several weeks that she is no longer fighting the urge to grow up, either. Each morning, she comes out of her room after getting dressed and I think to myself, why can't she dress in those cute "little girl" outfits anymore???? No, instead, she looks like something off the pages of the Limited Too catalog. (And I only shopped there for her ONCE, I swear!) So it seems that even my baby doesn't want to be my baby anymore. Sigh!

So it seems that change is inevitable after all. We've all gone through adjustments and changes and I guess there will be more to come. Stay tuned. You might get to watch me go slowly insane as I struggle to cope with it all.

Anyway, welcome to my new blog. Now that you're caught up on all the most recent happenings in my life, I'll try to keep you updated more often. Glad you're here!