year of the mushroom

thanks to all the rain this summer, when i look at the backyard i see this:

all those white spots? mushrooms. all different kinds. some of them look like everyday boring mushrooms, maybe with some color in there.

this one was kind of reddish

then there's the wrinkly ones, some yellow ones, and some puffballs.

they make a nice poof sound when you step on them and make a cloud of shroom dust.

and we've got these funky cuplike ones (they like to hide behind the hose), some green warty pads,

and a whole village of these, whatever they are.

nice huh? just thought i'd share

good-bye sulfur sprites

when we looked at our house before buying it, the owners dwayne and daphne assured us the water was very good and tasty. maybe with a little iron but not so you’d notice. they said. well, we noticed pretty quick that drinking that water made us thirsty, and it smelled like the hot springs. not that i mind it at the hot springs, but who wants to take a sulfur shower? and the toilet has a permanent brown stain from the rust. honest. we do clean it, you just can't tell. so we put in a charcoal sediment filter, that we change every month, and it’s done a good job getting rid of the smell. until now. at the fair we ran into the water purifier people – we signed up for a free water test in the winter sometime and never heard from them. so we made an appointment for a test, and i swear the sulfur sprites heard about it because chuck changed out the filter and somehow they snuck through it. we had sulfur smell worse than the hot springs.

so we got 3 water tests within 3 days, and got a water purification system set up by the end of the week. the water actually felt lighter somehow. and my skin’s not so dry. and the sulfur sprites are gone. yay!

the only bummer was that somehow the pressure in the kitchen faucet went from awesome to a trickle. the plumber had no clue why, and chuck cleaned out the faucet and the pipes to no avail. alas. so the domino effect of fixing house is still alive and well. so on top of the filter we had to buy a new faucet. we knew that was coming, but i know the checkbook wasn’t planning on it for a long while.

and while we’re talking about unplanned home improvement, let’s talk about the refrigerator. 30 year old original Kenmore that came with the house. daphne warned us that it had to be manually defrosted. she didn’t warn us that it didn’t freeze anything. took a month to realize that one. luckily we didn't lose any ice cream to it. then i would have been mad. so we don’t use the freezer. then last week we found our milk turning to cheese. so now we have a new fridge. and it’s a nice one. we’d already looked at them ages ago, and picked the one we wanted, so it was fairly simple to go get it. the checkbook complained, but who listens to him anyway? it’s kind of weird having cold drinks again, that mist up on the outside. and ice cubes frozen within hours. we don’t have to walk to the garage anymore to get ice cream (from the chest freezer). i kind of like it. plus we can make ice cubes now, which means we can do homemade ice cream again.........yum!

stepbrats

the last 2 weekends we've been babysitting grandkids. cuz their mom's a pothead and doesn't get a sitter. but that's beside the point. the first weekend we went down to delta (on business to meet a possible renter who didn't show up. we didn't appreciate it), and went hiking around the bottom of donnelly dome looking for blueberries. didn't find any but there's loads of lingon (lowbush cranberry) that we'll go back for after a frost.


pretty, isn't it?
then last weekend we bored the kids to death running errands with them. couldn't help it since it was last minute. in the store, we were talking about their dad and issac said something about me being a stepmom to his dad. so chuck said, do you know that makes you? her stepbrats :D it was the best joke i ever heard him make i think. isaac of course did a good jeremiah kind of angry face, trying not to laugh but even he knew it was funny. so stepbrats it is. even if they are kind of cute.


can you tell he's been eating chocolate?

there is light at the end of the sunbeam tunnel

last sunday the counselor guy said they were releasing me as sunbeam teacher. bummer :D it feels like i’ve been in there forever, though it’s only been maybe 6 months. not too long after we moved into the ward. now i’m free! sort of. my new calling is sunday school teacher for 16-17 year olds. not bad. i don’t know any of them so well have to see. chuck’s being released as gospel doctrine teacher after about a month, and being called as the employment specialist. sounds like loads of fun. he already got to go to some ultra boring classes for it. but this whole calling thing has given me something else to like about military wards: when they say they’re going to do something, by golly they do it. this sunday they took care of everything and i’ll be teaching the teenagers next sunday. whew.

warning for dangerous side effects

POSSIBLE STARVATION, SLEEP DEPRIVATION, DIRTY/DUSTY/DISORGANIZED HOUSE, OFFENDED SPOUSE/FAMILY

caused by: overdose of and/or addiction to The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud (The Magic Circle and The Circle Opens by Tamora Pierce are close behind with similar side effects)

the library should definitely warn you about these dangerous items out on the market, but since they're not, i, as a responsible citizen, am taking it upon myself to do so.

back to normal heather mode: those bartimaeus books are awful (addicting). the main character is a dumb kid (nathaniel) totally brainwashed by government propoganda and social expectations for wizards. he shows glimmers of a normal person with feelings every once in a while, but always falls back to wizard standards. so we don't read the book for him, except for hoping he'll come to his senses one day. the djinni he summons to do his dirty work is entertaining, with more morals than nathaniel. and a smart chick heading some resistence against the 1984-ish magician government, is equally interesting. but i'm really not sure what the addicting substance is in the whole story line. i finished The Golem's Eye (book 2) yesterday. stroud uses the usual tv-style writing, flashing back and forth between 2 seperate scenes/chains of events to keep the suspense up. plenty of books do that nowadays, and i can walk away from them. something about these books just grabs me though. and my house is dusty. i've stayed up late. read instead of gardening, knitting, emailing, blogging, watching a movie with chuck. it's bad.

now that i've finished book 2, you might wonder, what about book 3? i have it. it's sitting on the fireplace. and i ignored it - and picked up Magic Steps, the next Circle Opens book. at least they're only 300 pages or so. i only read 100 of them last night.

oh and PS i got a pet. Chris'll like it. another dangerous side effect for the list today, the dangers of looking at cool stuff on other people's blogs