the kids and i ended up stuck in the car with thirty minutes to kill so we came up with a game to take turns describing a monster. i’m not saying who came up with which attributes but here is our creation:

• two hundred feet tall
• weighs four hundred pounds
• five red eyes
• blue, scaly skin
• long ears like shrek, with ears like ours on the end, pink
• four purple wings on his back
• ten legs with ten feet
• twelve toes on each foot with giant claws
• snake like body and a triangle head
• wears a purple scarf
• he’s bad
• tree like arms with each branch having a five inch sword like nail
• a forked tail
• eats pizza
• two fangs on top pointing down, one fang going up and touching his nose, round mouth
• his name is alixandpete

an overcast and rainy day in the northwest still beats a day almost anywhere else.

i don’t mean to sound callous, but seriously, the best place to improve your opinion of your body image has got to be poolside at the ymca.

on a more positive note, watching these folks hit the pool and swim laps for a half an hour or more is quite inspiring and makes me feel not only callous, but lazy and weak too.

“she has tender, serious eyes”

from my emphatic beyond his years five year old.

i crashed my head in to the tail gate of the rental car while we were loading up our luggage at the airport. since i don’t have enough hair on the top of my head to protect or hide the mistake there is a good looking inch long scab running across the middle, top of my bald head.

last night at dinner ethan asked if someone drove a sword in to my head. the truth is so much less glamorous that i went with the sword in the skull.

ethan attended his first tae kwon do lesson and wasn’t the kid crying in class; unc won the men’s ncaa division one basketball championship; and i was sitting here at the end of the day.

a fine welcome to the pacific northwest.

“mom, if you don’t let me out of this chair i am going to kick the mister in front of me.”

one of the many highlights of our four hour and forty-nine minute flight to portland.

yeah, and flying to portland was another highlight. we were supposed to fly in to seattle but delta canceled our original flight and two days later portland was as close as we could get.

more often than not, when i come across something that is popular or trendy i don’t think “wow that’s great”, rather i think “how did they know the lemmings would flock to that?”

when i was a kid i was told its pretty common to find indian arrow heads in farm pastures; near creek beds or just laying around in the woods. i can tell you its not that common because i spent a lot of time looking and never found one.

last week, when my five year old was walking along a near by creek with his cousins, he showed me up and pulled this arrow head off the bank:

i’d pretend he’s as excited about finding it as i was, but that would make it hard to explain why its been sitting on my desk ever since he brought it home…

seriously, microsoft is so lame they are paying for an ad that features the line “i’m just not cool enough to be a mac person”

i’d show you more, but i’m not lame enough to have their technology on my computer. you’ll have to visit their site to see how you get what you pay for.