Summer is almost in full swing. Jessie’s heading into her last month — well, really 3 weeks — left of school and she’s SO ready for summer to get here! She and Jim have this deal, if she brings home straight A’s on her report card, he will get her the Nintendo DS and Dogs game she’s been wanting.

She’s worked REALLY hard this nine weeks, and if she’s not spot on, it will be close! She had a shaky start at the beginning of the year and this is the first year that she did not spend the whole time on an Honor Roll at all. (until this year, she’d always had straight A’s) I’m really proud of her, she found her motivation (a game system/video game … what a wonderful little geekling!) and has not let up, going full tilt boogie studying and making sure her homework was always checked for mistakes.

This geeky momma is so proud!

Her class is going to the Zoo next week, and guess who is chaperoning. Yup, yours truly. (Don’t worry, I’ll pack body armor and mace! ;)) She’s excited to have me coming along, and I’m just as equally excited to be going. She’s still in that cute stage where it’s OK for me to be around while she’s sitting and talking to her friends … I’d better enjoy it while it lasts! LOL!!

Shopping!

Jim and I will hopefully be resuming furniture shopping soon. The new bed is almost paid off and we now need a new mattress. We’ve been to several places and found that we both liked one of the Serta models. We tried out the Tempur-pedic from one place, but you know? I was surprised to find that I really don’t care for the memory foam mattresses.

After that, we’ll probably get a new couch, but that may have to wait until we get a new house — the den is pretty cramped as it is! We got a new dining room table from my grandmother, and we both have odds and ends still in storage.

Part of me thinks it’ll be kind of fun re-arranging and replacing everything. The ‘paying for it’ part still sucks though. ;P

Jessie’s class has been learning to write essays over the past couple weeks. That girl loves to write and I’ve read several of her stories that she’s written on her own. She has a great imagination, and I told her that she should keep writing even if it’s just for fun. (after all, I got my poetry and for a short time did write several short stories and published two of them)

So far, for her assignments, she’s written about karate and cartoons — two subjects she knows very well. LOL! Her assignment this week has been to write a description 5 paragraph essay. She was showing it to me last night — she wrote about dogs. She mentioned that her teacher encouraged her to write about something else (as the majority of the class wrote about animals!), and she was stumped and out of ideas.

I named off several things that she knows well: her various video games (UT!!), Harry Potter, Webkinz (too much like animals she said), Neopets, … she rejected them all and I was running out of ideas. Looking over across the den, we have a box of wedding stuff waiting to go into storage. I suggest writing about her part in the wedding. No dice. My next suggestion: How about the honeymoon?

“Huh?” LOL, she gave me a puzzled look that made me laugh, “You know, Disney World?”

Her face lit up like the 4th of July. Eureka! I hit gold.

She scrapped the paper she had previously written and started at once writing a new one. She let me read it just before bedtime last night and she wrote more about the hotel cafeteria and pool than the Disney World park itself. LOL!

Good thing we went there instead of the royal caribbean cruise I had been eying, hehe.

So my little budding writer was all happy and giddy when I left for work this morning. She was still talking about the paper she wrote last night and can’t wait for her teacher to read it.

That’s my girl!

A friend of mine’s mother passed away and her funeral was today. Things have been pretty somber over the last few days, and considering how long her mother was sick, I know she’s glad that her mom is finally at peace. The weird thing is, her mother and my mother-in-law have the same first name and almost the same last name. Listening to the eulogy was a little surreal, but everything was beautiful. One of my co-workers sang (and boy could he sing!). On the way back to work, I marveled at the scenery and thought to myself that I had forgotten how beautiful Jemison Park is, and the winding roads going in and out around English Village.

Several of you have emailed me, wanting to know if I’m feeling better. Thank you for your concern. I’m doing better. I had a slight headache last night, and woke up with it again this morning (nothing near the monster I had last week!) — but I know that’s from the crazy roller coaster temperatures (good grief, what’s with this weather!?) we’ve been having (hooray for full term insurance [sic]) and the lack of sleep from last night. Jessie is sick, so I was up most of the night with her.

This morning I went to check on her before leaving for work. Poor thing was crouping/coughing all night and could barely speak. She had a temperature and was having a hard time keeping the medicine down when I gave it to her. At one point she asked if I was going to stay home with her. I told her that I couldn’t, that I was about to have to go to work. She grabs my arm and says in a weak voice, “But I want YOU to stay with me!”

That broke my heart.

I’ve been uber-busy this morning and luckily don’t have anything pressing to attend to this afternoon, so I’ll most likely head home after lunch. Her favorite thing to eat when she’s sick is egg-drop soup, so I’ll probably stop by our favorite local Chinese place and pick up a couple ‘to go’ containers.

In other matters, I’ve applied for a CTL (Community Team Leader) position at Soldiers’ Angels. Hopefully I’ll hear back from them within the next few days. Everyone at SA has been really great at answering all my questions and has made the whole process seem a lot less overwhelming than I initially thought.

There are tons of other things I want to share, but am a little short on time and have a sick little one who’s been asking for me. Hopefully I can catch up one evening this week, (heh, my desktop is FULL of shortcuts to articles and things of interest that I’ve been dying to comment on!) but for now this will do.

Thank my husband for the snazzy post title, LOL! I was sitting here trying to think of a title that would encapsulate all of the topics that I wanted to cover, and that’s one of the first suggestions he blurted out.

He has his moments of brilliance …

Friday went pretty well. Jessie had both a dental and eye doctor appointment that morning. End result: she’s getting new glasses thanks to my insurance, and she needs braces and all her baby teeth pulled. So now my mission is to find an area orthodontist that can fit her in pretty soon. Oh the joy. Good news is: no new cavities, and her vision hasn’t changed dramatically so all in all everything went well.

My mother-in-law’s move to Montgomery went pretty well. We arrived not too long after the moving truck left, so Jim helped move boxes and furniture around as I helped out in the kitchen. The kids were exiled to the back yard. (It’s a really pretty house, very modern style … got some really funky bathroom lights in one of the guest b/rooms!) We stuck around and helped unpack a good majority of the boxes that night, and rolled back into B’ham just before midnight.

Saturday was pretty fun. We met up with Captain Fantastic and the Lovely Miranda for some fun at Alabama Training Institute & Pistol Range. Jim had his new rifle and I rented one of ATI’s pistols — a Beresa 380. I like to think I did pretty well considering that it was my first time firing a “real” handgun. (results) We hopped around to a few places afterwards before hitting the Galleria, and finally settling on California Pizza Kitchen for dinner.

Side note to ‘flavored’ martini lovers: their Caramel Apple Martini just totally rocks!

Jess is out of school tomorrow, so I’ll be working from home. Well, I don’t know exactly how much work will get done, but I will at least be continuing my fight with our SharePoint server. I worked a little on it today and have just about gotten the CSS cleaned up enough that I can manipulate the MS ‘core’ to look about the way I want.

Woot!

I was showing my progress to Jim a few minutes ago, and he thought it looked great. However, when *I* look at it, I see the margins are still off a bit in IE (grrrrrr), and SharePoint keeps overwriting my font sizes on certain web parts, and the background doesn’t quite line up the way I want, and … you get the idea.

You know me, I’m not happy unless I’m obsessing.