Echo

While at my parents in May, Marceline got a bump on her head from running into a door. I used it as an opportunity to tell her about the myth of Athena jumping full grown from Zeus’s head.

She loves it and her nighttime stories since that night are different Greek myths. One that really caught her imagination was ‘Echo and Narcissus.”

In the version of the story we read Echo is always running fast away from you while repeating your last words back to you.

Marceline now will swing back and forth on her swing with head back screening “Echooooo” into the air. It’s been two weeks of her doing this and it’s just as adorable now as it was the first day she did it.

Only minimal cursing…

Sam has wanted an outdoor storage shed for our tools and gardening supplies. Just to move it out of it garage and free up some space.

We do have a larger shed in the backyard, way on the edge of our property. We aren’t using that very well, the stuff in it is basically storage, some bikes we haven’t used in a while, gardening supplies that we don’t have a place for (think larger hanging pots and larger gardening supplies), and some fun stuff (frisbee golf basket, outdoor toys).

Basically it’s full of stuff we would like to use more but haven’t figured out the time or storage.

But we needed a place for shovels, rakes, hoes, buckets, and more that just leaned up into a corner in our garage. So why not buy a $300 storage shed to put along our house?

Shockingly, with some help and supervision from Sam we got it together in well under an hour. The only stupid part was securing the roof to the structure. It was 8 screws but it pinched my fingers every time because the screws were recessed under the roof and back wall.

But… It’s now successfully up and ready for use.

Toothbrush Tale

I’ve spent the last two weeks visiting my parents. Not quite the visit we expected. Three days into the trip we were all sick with COVID. Girls got over it pretty well, but it lingered in the adults for a week or so.

However, that second day we ran into a little toothbrush incident.

Sam and I went to Target to get a few things we needed / forgot. We brought a reusable bag that we had used to pack clothes on the way there. So, we kneeled down looking at some clothes for Marceline, and when we picked the bag back up off the ground, we saw Marceline’s toothbrush on the ground.

We knew it was hers because Marceline’s toothbrush is a red toothbrush, that lights up, and has a 1-minute timer.

We picked it up from the ground, brought it home, rinsed it off under some hot hot water and blammo, Marceline was brushing her teeth that night.

Except, a day later we found a red toothbrush, that lights up, and has a 1-minute timer among our bags waiting to be unpacked.

Soooooo…. we just had our daughter brush her teeth with a random toothbrush.

But in our defense, what was the odds that the exact toothbrush that Marceline had would be on the floor of a Target, right where we had dropped our bag on the ground to do some shopping?

Anyways, we had her brush her teeth with a backup toothbrush we had brought for the rest of the trip.

Notebooks

I have started to pear (pare?) down my notebooks. Or at least use them up. So I finished a Bullet Journal I started a while ago. Now I I am moving to a half finished notebook from several years ago. The address in it says Lake Ave, where Sam and I lived last in 2016. So not quite a decade, but for some reason I stopped using it and moved on.

While most of the notes in it reflect work and aren’t anything important, but I have some great old drawings in there. So why not have some great drawings here.

Vacuuming

I have a love hate relationship with vacuuming. I actually like vacuuming. I find it relaxing and sometimes ridiculous how much our vacuum picks up.

We have four cats. Now anyone who knows me knows that I am not a fan of four cats. But when Sam’s mother passed we inherited two cats, that do not get along with our two cats. Its been 3 years and they still don’t get along. But they can all agree on how much they like to shed.

I vacuum almost daily. We are mostly hardwood flooring (or tile, or snap flooring) with lots of area rugs. And those rugs get trampled, laid one and beaten up daily. We spend most of the day playing on those rugs. And when I vacuum it pulls an obscene amount of hair off of them every time.

I didn’t used to think that, our vacuum works well just in normal mode, but I started using the power mode recently. Kills the battery, but like I said, we’re just doing area rugs not the whole floor. And that sucks up a full container of hair every time.

I don’t look forward to vacuuming now. I always think, this is the third, fourth, fifth day in a row, I should stop getting as much dirt and hair. But nope. Still coming.