A Redneck Saturday Night

This past Saturday, we up and decided to go to the Rodeo.  We probably wouldn't have went, but me and Jamie had never seen our nephew John ride a bull (and he's been doing it for a while now), so we thought it would be a fun thing to do.  So off we went.

The first thing we came upon was a hilarious display of our other nephew, Jared, riding a mechanical bull.  The faces he was making (and just the way he was doing it in general) was totally priceless.  It was hysterical!:

The battery in my stupid camera died not too long after we got there, so then I had to resort to using my phone to take video with (which is lousy).

But anyway, here's more video of some other rodeo stuff we saw:

Halfway through the rodeo, they brought in a couple of motorcycle riders that did some awesome stunts!:

After the motorcycle 'halftime show', the rodeo resumed, and we finally got to see our nephew John ride a bull:

And here are the two best bull rides of the evening:

I also learned NEVER to turn the camera off during a bull ride, because (immediately after I stupidly turned my camera off) I completely missed the part where a bull went berserk and busted the entire gate off its hinges, and knocked down several people inside the ring, plus a horse! (Don't worry; they didn't get hurt).  Then another bull escaped along with the first bull (since the gate was broken, which allowed it to escape), and all heck broke loose!  It was pretty tense there for a while, but they got everything back under control.  Stupid camera.  Stupid me.  Oh, well, hopefully I learned my lesson, so maybe I won't miss recording anything else of interest in the future!  :/

But anyway...

The Return of Unwelcome Bugs

Welp, it's that time of year again when a wide assortment of various weird bugs begin mysteriously appearing in wacky places inside of the house.

A couple of nights ago, I went into my bathroom to pee before going to bed, and spotted something in my bathtub.

It was a freakin' cricket.

(I put my razor next to it to show its size):

(I bet that thing can pick up radio stations from all over the world with antennae like that)!  :|

But the wacko-est thing (so far) was what Jamie discovered this morning.

One of the two light bulbs in the overhead ceiling light fixture in my bedroom had burnt out earlier this week.  So Jamie unscrewed the fixture to change the bulb.  I don't know how bugs manage to make their way inside fixtures that have no openings, but somehow, every time you ever take down a light fixture, it's got several old dead bug carcasses rattling around inside.  Well, the dead bugs inside our bedroom light fixture took the cake.

Freakin' scorpions.

Not one,  not two,  but THREE of them:

WHAT THE...?!?!?

HOLY CRAP!!!

But how?!?

(And even more alarmingly, this fixture is on the ceiling directly over my bed)!!!

O__o

And speaking of bug surprises, the other day, Jamie was out on the porch.  We have one of those plastic storage benches sitting out there that you can lift the seat up on to access the storage space underneath.  Jamie lifted the seat/lid of the bench to get out some fresh litter for the bunny's litterbox, when all of a sudden, one of those fat-@$$ 3-inch bees buzzed straight up out of the bench.  Jamie told me if it had happened to me, I would have $&^% in my pants.  (And he's right).  The dang ol' bee was so huge (and it's buzz was so deep and loud), Jamie's first thought was that it was a hummingbird.  I would have definitely died of a heart attack right then and there if that had happened to me.

But what would a 3-inch bee be doing inside the storage bench?  And how in the world did it get in there in the first place?

Uhh.  I hope we don't have any more yucky/startling bug surprises now that the weather is warm, but I have a feeling it's only the beginning...

Awesome Lilly! :D

Today, Lilly brought home a fantastic surprise from school.

I was so proud, I cried!  :'D

Lilly was the only kid in her class that got a plaque!  :)  She was really proud of that fact -- and she said that when she got the award, she screamed because she was so excited, and all of her classmates applauded for her!  :)

Lilly also got a certificate congratulating her for bringing up 3 grades:

Amusingly, the word 'school' on the certificate was misspelled as 'shool'!  LOL!!!:

Hee hee hee hee hee!!!  XD

And since tomorrow is the last day of "shool" ;) Lilly brought her report card home.  Of course it said that she's promoted to 5th grade, but it also said that she got Honorable Mention this term!  If it wasn't mostly for her trouble with Math, she would have had almost all straight-A's her entire 4th grade year!  The last term of school, Lilly got a 98 in Reading, a 99 in English, an 85 in Math, a 93 in Science, and a 100 in Social Studies!  Yay!!!!!  :D

So later, after we ate supper, me and Lilly went on a paddleboat ride, and Lilly decided that she wanted to go swimming (even though of course it's nowhere near warm enough to go swimming yet).  Lilly does this to me every year in May.  So I thought 'what the heck; why not' and I went ahead and let her swim:

Showbiz

Me and Lilly were watching a game show for kids on TV a few minutes ago.

Lilly kept guessing all the answers correctly, and she said, "Man!  I'm good at this!  Take me to showbiz"!!!

LOL!!!

Lilly's Parent Day at Gymnastics

Yesterday was Lilly's Parent Day at Gymnastics.  They have it once a year, every Spring.  They open up the side doors of the gym, and allow all the gymnasts' families to come see them show off their skills.

Here's some pictures and video of Lilly doing her thing:

 

Busy Mommy's Day Weekend!

Well, we've been extra-busy lately.

Thursday evening last week was Lilly's Dance Recital Rehearsal.  It was at a place we'd never been before, but the GPS led us to it all right.  It totally seemed like we were lost at first, but we secretly weren't.

Backstage of the theater was really weird.  The 'little' girls were supposed to use a dressing room 'downstairs', but there were like, a million 'downstairs'!  It was so weird and confusing back there!  There were numerous sets of stairs going up and down all over the place!  It made me feel like I was in one of those weird M. C. Escher pictures:

"WHERE THE HELL ARE WE?!?"

Me and Lilly ended up so hopelessly confused (plus, I couldn't get Lilly to hurry fast enough for her costume change), that we ended up completely missing one of Lilly's dances.  Good thing it was just a rehearsal!  Lilly's teacher said that during the actual show, they would allow the 'little' girls to change in the area backstage (which is actually just off the side of the stage) that the 'big' girls use, so they could make sure they could all hurry and make sure to be ready in time.  Whew.

A couple days later, Saturday, was the day of the Recital!  Everything went pretty well.  I got Lilly's hair and makeup done at home, and I was driving us up the road, when after we had driven a couple of miles, I realized that I had forgotten our tickets back home!  I whirled the car around and sped back home to retrieve them.  Crisis narrowly averted.  My mind was just so busy trying to remember everything and make sure everything was covered, but I can't always remember everything!  At least I remembered the tickets before it was too late!

Here's a montage of some video and pictures of the rehearsal and recital combined.  My silly little camera is a pile of garbage, so some of the video starts out blurry before it eventually comes into focus.  Stupid camera.

For Mother's Day yesterday, Lilly surprised me with breakfast in bed!  (Which consisted of 2 pop-tarts on a plate).  Hey, I'm not complaining!  Lilly told me "Sorry; I don't know how to make coffee!"  I laughed and told her that was fine.  Then I laughed again when she generously offered to take one of the pop-tarts off my hands!  You know, 'cause two might be too much!  I laughed and told Lilly to go ahead; I would be glad to share one of my pop-tarts with her!

I had told Lilly the night before NOT to wake me up the next morning.  I relish getting to sleep as long as I need to on the weekend mornings, and allow my body to wake up naturally when it's ready to on its own, for once.  But Lilly almost always wakes me up, begging for breakfast.  (Or if she doesn't wake me up directly, she wakes up her daddy, and all the racket they make clunking around the house ends up waking me up in the end).  So I asked Lilly to PLEASE NOT wake me (or her daddy) up on Mother's Day morning...as a Happy Mother's Day treat for me!  I told Lilly that if she woke up and was hungry, to just grab herself a pop-tart.  So thankfully, she actually granted me my Mother's Day wish, and let me sleep for once.  So that was nice.

At school, Lilly had made me a really cute Mother's Day card, and a little glass vase kind-of-thing that she had decoupaged with different colored/patterned scraps of cloth.  It was super-cute!  

Yesterday afternoon, Jamie and Lilly went out galavanting like they always do every weekend, and on their way back home later, Jamie picked us all up sandwiches from Subway for supper as a Mother's Day treat, so I wouldn't have to worry about fixing anything!  They also stopped by Walmart so Lilly could pick me out another Mother's Day present -- a nice plastic drinking bottle in my favorite color -- green!  So that was really sweet.

While Jamie and Lilly were out, I decided to mow the grass.  Let me say that it turned out NOT to be a 'good grass-mowing day' for me.  First of all, I made the mistake of not putting the dogs back in their pen before I started.  If our dogs are not in their pen, then we have them tied outside on long leads so they can get some exercise and have some freedom for a while.  Well, they immediately got all in the way of my attempt to mow the grass.  Maddie in particular likes to get in front of the lawnmower and stay there like a dumb@$$.  So there I was, just taking off with the lawnmower and starting to mow, when Maddie got in front of the lawnmower a couple yards ahead of me and sat down.  I realized that she was not going to move.  So I stopped the mower as fast as I could, to keep from mowing her lead line in two.  Well, I didn't cut her lead in two with the lawnmower, but the lead line was mashed under the front wheel of the mower.  So Maddie was trapped.  If I could have gotten her to move to the left, I could've easily kept on going.  But of course stupid Maddie only wanted to keep on going around the right side of the mower, but she couldn't, because her lead line was hung under the front wheel, holding her in place.  Well, I got pissed, turned off the lawnmower, and put both of the stupid dogs back in their pen so they wouldn't be in my way.  Stupid dogs.  >:{  I knew I should've put them back in the pen before I started mowing, but I assumed they'd stay away from the noisy ol' scary-sounding lawnmower.  Guess again.  Dummies!  Uhh!!!  >:{

Anyway, I hopped back on the lawnmower, cranked it up, and took off again.  I mowed a couple of laps, but the lawnmower sounded and acted funny.  I knew the lawnmower was full of gas, so that couldn't have been the problem.  Then I wondered if maybe I had forgotten to actually turn on the gas.  But I knew I had, and the lawnmower surely would've stopped before I had mowed a couple of laps if that was the case.  Finally, I stopped the lawnmower again to try to see what the problem was, and it only took me a few seconds to realize that I still had the stupid lawnmower set on CHOKE!  Duh!!!  So I put the lawnmower on the proper mowing setting, and started mowing some more.  Then I noticed that the grass wasn't being cut as low as I usually cut it.  I remembered that Jamie had used the lawnmower a few days before to mow the area down below the house next to the lake.  Realizing that Jamie must've tampered with the height of the mowing deck (and of course didn't return it back to the position I originally had it in), I stopped the lawnmower again to lower the mowing deck.  I couldn't remember what setting I had it on, so I just set it lower and went on mowing.  After another lap (and subsequently hitting every clump, bump, and basically plowing up the ground instead of mowing the grass), I realized that I had obviously set the mowing deck way too low.  That fact became even more evident when I discovered the 'crop circle' I had accidentally made during my feeble attempt to adjust the height of the mowing deck:

DAMMIT!!!  >:{

So I raised the mowing deck up some, and it turned out to finally be just right.  After all those mishaps, I mowed pretty good --for a while.  I was mowing alongside the road a little bit, when some stupid truck pulling a boat started to go by, so I abandoned my roadside mowing mission.  Then I decided to mow the actual front yard (which hasn't been mowed at all yet this year).  Our front yard won't grow grass, but what weeds will grow in it were starting to get really tall and scraggly.  I've never tried to mow the front yard before.  But I felt like I could manage it.

Guess again.  It was HORRIBLE.  Our little front yard should actually be mowed with a push-mower, but Jamie broke the handle on our push-mower last year, and of course has never bothered to get it fixed.  >:{  So there I was, trying to maneuver the clunker-tron riding mower around all the stupid obstacles in the yard (Lilly's playset, the flowerbeds, and the stupid sticking-up septic tank pipe).  That wasn't so bad.  But the part that was bad was when I rode the mower to the top of the driveway (which is on a little bit of a steep-ish hill).  I kept the mower in 1st gear the whole time so it would go really slow, but somehow, as I was riding the mower downhill, down the side of the driveway, it got away from me.  I apparently wasn't mashing the brake good enough or something (I guess)?  Because the mower went ZOOM full-blast down the yard, with me on it!  I stayed calm, and in the few seconds that felt like an eternity that I was zooming down the lawn with the speed of an F1 racer, all I could think of was FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DON'T TEAR UP THE MOWER.  And I didn't tear up the mower.  Or myself.  I ended up finally stopping about halfway down the side of the driveway in the field.  O__o  (Actually, come to think of it, I don't have a very good lifetime track record when it comes to Stopping.   The Go-Kart, Bicycle, Sleds, Motorcycle...and now Lawnmower.  I don't know why.  It's like sometimes the area of my brain that controls the 'Knowing How To Stop' just gets a fart stuck cross-ways inside of it and blanks out, so I don't do anything but keep ZOOMING until I hit something, which makes me stop.)  So anyway, after all those awful Mower Mishaps, I decided that I'd had enough, and parked the mower immediately.  I backed it into our little metal storage building and decided to sit down on the porch and rest for a while.  On my walk back up to the house, I discovered what had happened as the mower was ZOOMING away with me.  I had somehow managed to turn over and crush an old metal bucket that I had some flowers planted in:

(Luckily, I was able to bend the bucket back into shape, as you can see in the picture above).  And because this mishap occurred, I discovered that the dirt in the bucket that had flowers in it was COMPLETELY FILLED with a gross ant nest, so I'm not too upset about losing one measly plant.  Yuck!  :P

During my lawnmower ZOOMING mishap, I also ripped out several of the large rocks that we have outlining the flowerbed on the side of our house.  I hadn't even realized any of that had happened as the lawnmower was ZOOMING away with me.  (I made Jamie put the rocks back into place later after he came home).

Stupid yard.  I vowed that I will NEVER EVER do that again.

Anyway, after eating my lovely Subway sandwich, it started looking like it might rain (even though the weather forecast said it was only a 10% chance), but I really wanted to take my first paddleboat ride of the year for Mother's Day, even if it was only for a few minutes.  The lake has finally come up just enough for the paddleboat to be back in the water again, and I'm really happy about it!

Lilly refused to come with us (as usual), so me and Jamie abandoned her up at the house, and we went for a short little paddleboat jaunt for a few minutes.  I documented it, and here's the video:

So that was my Mother's Day Weekend.  Sheesh!  Oh, well...at least I survived to tell the tale!  :P

The Snake that Somebody Ran Over

On our way home from dance class this evening, I spotted a run-over snake in the road very close to our house.  I stopped the car and backed it up so I could get a closer look.  I just wanted to see if it was venomous or not; you know, so I would be aware to be on the lookout for more of them around, if it was venomous.

I couldn't tell very much about it at first glance, and I'm not all that very well-versed in snake identification.  All I know for sure is that venomous snakes' eye pupils are slit-shaped (like cat's eyes), and that non-venomous snakes have round pupils.  So I first tried looking at the snake's pupils, but I couldn't really tell very much about them.

So me and Lilly drove on up to the house and told Jamie about it, and we all walked back down the driveway together to investigate the snake carcass closer.

At first we assumed that it was a venomous copperhead.  But I researched it on the internet a little while later and discovered that it turned out to be just a harmless corn snake.

Here's a picture of the entire mangled snake:

(I had moved it around with my foot a little to try to tell more about it).

Here's a picture of its head:

Here's a picture that I tried to take of its eye:

Here's a picture of the tip of its tail:

I had Jamie flip the snake over so we could see its belly, and much to my surprise, it was in a neat-looking checkerboard-type pattern:

We just so happened to have a crusty old yardstick on our porch, so I had taken it along with us so that we could use it to measure just how long the snake was.  The snake turned out to be just a few inches longer than the yardstick when we stretched it out straight!:

(How do you like my stylish lunch-lady shoes & pants)?  LOL  (I included them for scale)

But most interesting (and kind of sad) to me was when I was taking one last very close look at the snake before Jamie pitched it off the side of the road, I noticed that its last meal was protruding from a hole in its side.  A mouse:

It makes me so mad to hear people say "the only good snake is a dead snake".  There are about 42 different types of snakes in our state, and only 6 of those are venomous.

I learned through my very brief internet research to try to figure out if the run-over snake was a venomous copperhead or not, that copperhead bites are actually fairly rare, and if someone does get bitten by one, they don't even treat it with anti-venom.  Sure, the bite would hurt like *&^%$#@$$#%#$&$**, but it more than likely wouldn't kill anyone.

I was also surprised to learn that killing non-venomous snakes in our state is actually illegal.

I can't believe that people would actually prefer to have harmless snakes around as opposed to vermin.  Snakes have their important place in the ecology of the environment just like everything else does.  Just because they give people the creeps or freak them out is no reason to eradicate them.  That's like choosing disease-carrying rodents over a harmless, beneficial mouse-eater that just happens to be in an odd, slinky shape.  People think it's great when a cat kills a mouse; so isn't it even more great that snakes probably kill more mice and rats than cats do?  A snake is just a long, legless, hairless cat that doesn't meow!  LOL!  Like, if you stripped most of the features off a cat's head and attached it to its own tail (and shaved it all)...then you've pretty much got yourself a snake!  LOL!!!

Step 1 of Transformation:

Step 2 of Transformation:

Final Step of Transformation:

*MEOW-HISSS*!

NOW WHERE'S THE MICE?

LOL!!!

Taking The Dogs to the Rabies Clinic

Well, today was our town's annual Rabies Clinic.  We take our dogs there every year to get their shots.  And even though I think we're really supposed to by law, we don't bother taking our cat to get a rabies shot anymore.  She doesn't really like to go outside, and whenever she does actually ask to go outside, she usually only takes just a few steps out on the porch, and then hurriedly waddles her fat @$$ back inside the house as quickly as possible a few seconds later (with her droopy saddlebags a-floppin').  Domino is a housecat by choice.  So what's the use?

Anyway, last year, Jamie took the dogs to the Rabies Clinic all by himself for the first time, and it was a complete disaster.  Maddie is always fine with everything.  But Lucky is a different story.  Lucky is extremely protective.  So last year, Lucky ended up freaking out and peeing all over the car.  My car.  (Jamie wouldn't take them in his truck).  It took numerous people to hold Lucky down (and subsequently muzzling her) in order to give her her rabies shot, and somewhere in the mix, Lucky also ended up taking a nervous dump in my car, which was the terd equivalent of the cherry-on-top of a disaster sundae.  Lovely.  >:{

So this year, I decided that we would all pile up in the car together and go.  At least that way, Jamie could drive, and between me and Lilly, surely to goodness we could handle soothing and entertaining the dogs.

The picture I took below is actually Lucky yawning, but I like to pretend that she's yelling because Jamie's driving is so awful.  Jamie turns curves too hard, so my coffee travel mug ended up dumping over and spilling about half of my coffee out all over my foot.  Twice in a row.  Even though it was in the cupholder.  Boy, was I pissed.

  Lucky:  *AAAH!!!  YOU'RE GONNA GET US ALL KILLED!!!*

Plus, as we were flying down the road, I could hear the unmistakable sound that a door was not completely shut somewhere in the car.  It turned out that doofus Jamie hadn't even properly closed the back hatch of my car after he loaded up the dogs in the back.  I don't think that it would've come open as we were speeding down the road, but it's too unnerving to think that there's even a slim chance that it might, and if it did, we'd probably be having a couple of dog funerals on our hands, and severe emotional trauma about it for the rest of our lives.  So I fussed really hard at Jamie and made him pull the car over to shut the back hatch of the car all the way.  But he wouldn't pull over right away; he had to continue driving up the road for another minute to find a *good spot* to pull over, even though he could've pulled over as soon as I told him to.  Dopey dork.  He makes me so mad.  >:{

Anyway, all in all, it went well, aside from one huge snafu that lasted for what seemed like an eternity, but in reality, it was probably only 30 seconds.  As we inched closer to the area where they administer the shots, Lucky decided that she wanted to lay in my lap.  So I wrapped my arms around her, talked soothing to her, and petted her, and we were having a wonderful time.  Until Maddie eventually stepped over too closely in our direction.  I guess Lucky just suddenly went into psycho jealous mode, and as a result, Maddie instantly went into super-defensive mode, and we almost had an ultra-mega-severe dogfight on our hands.  In the tight quarters of the car.  For a while there, I wouldn't have been surprised if there had been bloodshed.  The growling, barking, and snarling was really awful, and the wild eyes and flared teeth were very scary.  It could have actually been a fairly dangerous situation.  But thankfully, since Lucky stayed in my lap, I was able to grab her leash, and Jamie grabbed Maddie's leash, and we were able to keep their heads far enough apart so that they didn't tear into each other.  I scolded and scolded and scolded loudly to try to make them stop, and I made Jamie help Maddie get up in the front seat next to him.  After we got the dogs separated, everything was fine.  Lucky still kept trying to look at Maddie so she could snarl at her, so I put a quilt up between the front and back seats so they couldn't see each other.  Crisis averted.  I think Lucky went ballistic because she just didn't want for Maddie to come over to me and *steal* the petting and attention that I was giving to her.  Lucky is an extremely jealous and way overly-protective dog.  And even though Maddie and Lucky are super-best-friends 99.9% of the time, they have gotten into some pretty scary fights a few times in the past.

The only other minor mishap that happened was that when we were only a minute away from making it back home, Lucky started whining and growling again.  It was a little scary.  I don't know if maybe she was having a little pain from her shot, or if she needed to go to the bathroom, or needed water, or she was carsick, or what.  But I was able to calm her back down, and luckily we made it home just a few moments later.

So in all, I'd say that taking the dogs to this year's rabies clinic was a success.  And when we go again next year, we'll know just what to do...Keep the dogs separated the whole time.  Maddie in the front, and Lucky in the back.  With the *privacy quilt* firmly installed between them.  Whew!

And now I've got enough dog hair and dander all in my car to scrape together and make a whole new pet!  :/  Gee, I know what I'll be doing tomorrow...vacuuming it all out.  *sigh*

Here's a montage of the whole ordeal:

Lilly's Easter Portrait With The *Strange* Bunny

They finally emailed me Lilly's Easter portrait that she had taken with the bunny the other day.  Here it is:

Meh; it's not a very good picture, but we only gave them a $5 donation.  You can tell that Lilly had to wake up earlier that morning than she wanted to (from the dark bags under her eyes), and as usual, she wouldn't allow for her hair to even be brushed; much less styled.  Ehh.  Oh, well; it was just fun to hold and pet a *strange* bunny besides our own for once!

This bunny is named Oreo (tee hee; how cute!), and it's a boy.  He was a very good, calm bunny during the photo shoots.  His little 'sniffer' was quite a bit more audible than any of the other bunnies that I've been around.  He was really sweet.  I got to hold him too.  Squee!  :D