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This is the last post from this blog. It will no longer be updated with new posts or current information but, it will remain "open" to view archives. I hope you will join me and check out the look of my new blog. Please update your bookmarks and links! Thanks for following me!

Moving Soon...

Just wanted you all to know it looks like this blog may soon be moving and I wanted to warn those of you who use a service like Blogarithm (or something similar) that you will be seeing some crazy stuff coming up as I begin the process of transferring archives to the new blog. Old posts will show as being new ones, or a post may pop up two days in a row. My apologies. As soon as the new blog is up and running, I'll post the link here and fill you in on what caused the move in a later post. I'm sorry for the inconvenience it will cause to those of you who have linked to this blog and hope you won't mind changing your link. I appreciate each and every visitor I've had here, and hope you'll all follow me over there. I'll only be one click away! Thank you, guys.

Time to acknowledge what we already know...

I'm weird

...in far too many ways to discuss them all here (and my friends say, "Amen"). For now, we'll highlight only one of my special quirks. If you find yourself just dying to learn about the wonder that is Chelle, we may turn this into a series. Who knows? It may become a regularly requested feature but today, I only have time for one. Please try to understand and accept it.

Blogger is currently having trouble with their spell checker. Apparently this is an issue that Blogger is aware of and they are taking steps to correct the problem. So?

As I've mentioned in the past, I have always been a Reading/Language arts/English nut. These were among my favorite subjects in school. I planned on teaching Lang. Arts and wanted to work in a school for the deaf before God, in all His hilarity, took my life in a vastly different direction and decided my talents are better suited to sorting laundry. These subjects are also the ones I've always placed a great deal of importance upon with my children, both here at home and after they go off to the public HS because as we all know, math and stuff isn't really all that important. You can use Quicken, but you gotta know how to read, am I right?

Unfortunately, in spite of my love for words, my spelling and grammatical skills have taken a nose-dive over the years. My location is partly to blame. I've said in previous posts that I live in an area where hick-speak is widely accepted as the norm. In fact if I walked into a local convenience store and even used a phrase like "widely accepted as the norm," I might be looked at funny. It's not that people in my area are stupid. I'm certainly not trying to insult my town or the people in it! It's more that folks in these parts don't go for all that fancy high-falutin' stuff. Why say somethin' fussy like, "hick-speak is widely accepted as the norm," when it's just as easy to say "the way we talk here is plenty good enough?" Them big college words just turn folks off. We all know the saying, "When in Rome...

...get off yer dang high horse and quit talkin' like ya think yer better'n ever-body." Or something like that. I've become used to speaking a certain way, and that seeps into the way I write. It has infected the way I think. In other words, I don't think too good no more.

I also think the miraculous wonders of motherhood make you stupid. I'm sorry to those of you who are still waiting to bring your children home, or haven't been mothers long enough to notice the slow, painful loss of brain function. But it IS going to happen. You cannot listen to Dora the Explorer repeat the same flippin' words and songs over and over without a little part of you dying. Moms are incredibly tired, ridiculously busy, and unbelievably selfless. Something's gotta give, and it will be your brains. Again, I'm sorry. But isn't it better to find out now?


So, back to my quirk. Due to my decreased intellect, I've become a fanatic about proofreading. Blogger is only making my proofing obsession, and subsequent decline into madness, worse. Spell check is crack to me. I must have it. My last post contained a couple misspellings that went undetected and I was devastated. After I proof something once (OK, that's not true- it's usually twice...), I will sometimes ask Darrell to double-check it (if it's something important). Then, because I don't trust his findings, I will check again. Can you spell n*e*u*r*o*t*i*c, kids? No? How 'bout an easier one: O*C*D?

And, because I'm a busy, half brain-dead mom, I will always miss something. When it comes to these posts, I swear that the tiniest thing; a thing that eluded my attention during 3 separate proofs, will be suddenly glaring at me as soon as I hit the publish button, and it's out there for all the world to see. If I don't make the discovery immediately, but a few days after, it is always accompanied by a great internal debate: Do I give into my perfectionistic craziness and edit it after everyone has already seen it anyway, or do I "just relax" and leave it?

Of course, I do like to assualt the English language intentionally at times, for effect- like starting a sentence with the word "And," or my flagrant disrespect for dashes, commas, semicolons, etc. As I said- I write like I talk, and I want you to "hear" me talking, so I'm not worried about those.

Some of my most embarrassing and flagrant offenses can't be healed by spell check, anyway. For example, some little smart-aleck lodged in the darker recesses of my head thinks it's funny to switch your and you're. I cannot tell you how crazy this makes me. How I manage to do this so often, when I'm so careful to check for it, is a mystery. I know the difference between your and you're. I do.

Does anyone know when spell check will be fixed? I don't know how long I can take it. I'm suffering, here. How can Blogger not care about that? Hey, is anyone interested in a proofing job? The pay's lousy, and I will neither trust your findings nor take your advice. Interested? Darrell just quit...


P.S.
The New and Improved Blog will be revealed soon. Are you sitting on the edge of your seat? I am. I can't wait!

HOLY MONKEY... The scale says whaaat?

Geeyyyaaawwwwsh. I stepped on the scale this morning; something I've been dreading and putting off for weeks. I was not happy with the number staring back at me. I still haven't started that diet I was talking about a while back, and my little indulgences just keep getting worse. You know those Fisher Price toys where you turn the dial thingy in the middle to an animal, then you pull the handle down on the side to hear the noise that animal makes? I was seriously expecting to hear, "The cow says... MooooOOOOO" when my feet touched the scale. I could hear that little toy guy's voice in my head as I stepped on it.

This past week has been so stressful, and I am definitely a "stress eater." The whole miserable, depressing Vietnam mess, sicknesses, 3 college visits for Alex, everybody's overlapping schedules, Dr.'s appointments, homeschool barely getting done all week, kids' basketball out the wazoo, and the laundry is hopelessly BACKED UP again. Both of our dryers are broken at the SAME TIME. One turns but doesn't heat, and the other heats but doesn't turn. What are the odds? No, seriously... What ARE the odds?

Yes, we have two dryers. One washer, but two dryers. That may sound like a luxury to some. I understand... BUT- Two words for you: 1) Six and 2) kids. My laundry room does not currently smell luxurious. You may recall from the power outage before Christmas, I am not a huge fan of the dirty laundry smell. We have roughly 25 loads, give or take, each and every week. Not too big a deal. When it gets backed up, that's 25 loads sitting around, taking up space, all at the same time. School clothes, church clothes, playing outside in the dirt clothes, I-just-put-on-another-clean-t-shirt-and-got-ketchup-all-over-it-even-though-I-wasn't-even-eating-ketchup clothes, towels, sheets, and sports stuff. Oh, Dear Lord- the sports stuff...

Show of hands: How many of you know a teenage boys' gym bag, clothes, and shoes smell a bazillion times worse than a normal person's? OK, good. So we're all on the same page, then. How are they manufacturing that smell? Where does it come from? It's unholy. The only way a normal person can smell as bad as an athletic teenage boy is to:

• Number One- Die and decompose for several days,
• Number Two- Allow the family cat to urinate on you repeatedly, postmortem.

I'm sorry, that's kind of yucky. And possibly uncalled for. I hope you weren't eating. And I mean no disrespect to cats, the deceased, or my boys. I love my boys dearly. They do take showers. Really, they do. It's just a universal part of being a teenager, but in this house it's multiplied by 3 of them, and a week of disgustingly overdue laundry.

Anyway, what was I originally talking about? Oh, the scale. My weight. My gigantic, fat face. The other day, as I was putting another cookie into my gigantic fat face, I had the thought that as soon as the stress dies down a little, I really am going to get serious about losing weight. My son's wedding is in FIVE MONTHS. I gotta do something. As soon as things get back to normal, as soon as I'm not such a stressed-out mess... Then I realized something. I've been waiting for that day for 18 years! I chose to marry a man with 3 children. We had Alex nine months and 2 weeks after our wedding. Mike came along 19 months after that. Then Evan, then Tuck, then Livie. We started Bri's adoption process when Liv was 4 months old and spent the next 23 months not knowing when our daughter would join our family (and you guys who have or are adopting know what I mean. Adoption and Stress always go together, am I right?).

It was a real "light-bulb" moment. I left NORMAL behind a looonnnng time ago. The day when the stress stops is not coming. And I don't mean that in a bad way- honestly. I love my big family and wouldn't change the choices I've made. I'm just saying that it's time to face facts and stop making excuses to eat and stay fat one more day. There will always be a reason to wait one more day. There will always be stress. I'm sick of it. It's time to handle it like a big girl.

So, this is it. Tomorrow, Chelle turns over a new leaf. Again.

UPDATE: The above post was typed late last night. It is now Mon. morning and so far, so good. I kept my word, and the new leaf is turning. This morning I did not eat Oreos, M&M's or any other digusting treat for breakfast, and I did not drink a little coffee with my cream. I had a diet muffin (which was yucky- we won't be doing that again), a BANANA (did you guys know about this stuff called, "fruit?" Am I the only one who never heard of it before? It isn't made of chocolate. Apparently this thing I ate this morning grows on a tree and is not made of chemicals. Go figure...), and fat-free creamer and Splenda in my coffee. Somewhere in this house, we have a treadmill. You would think something of that size would be fairly hard to misplace. I'll dig under the clothes piles and see if it turns up. Life Change 08: Operation Chelle Reduction is off and running!

LWB Update

Good news! Love Without Boundaries won the Facebook Challenge!! That's a whopping $50,000.00 that will provide heart surgeries to babies in China!!! To all who gave, my sincere THANKS!

There she goes again...

I know. I mess with my blog too much. Yes, I know I am nuts. But thank you for pointing out the obvious. That's very kind of you. Darrell has his nose in the phone book again, searching for some sort of 12 step program for people like me, but so far- it's not looking good. Besides, I don't want to spend my Tuesday evenings saying, "Hi. I'm Michelle and I'm a Blogoholic."

And yes... I know it looks very plain right now. And boring. "But, Chelle," you say, "You're such a vibrant, exciting, colorful woman. Why would you settle on plain old white for your blog?"

Well, I'm not. And thank you for the compliment.

The constant tinkering is due to the fact that I've never been satisfied with the appearance of my blog. I don't really like the choices- or lack of them- that Blogger gives, I guess. I considered switching to Wordpress, and set up a test blog over there- but I don't see that happening either. I don't want to take the time to learn a new way of doing things, when I finally have it figured out here, and I don't want to ask everyone to follow me to a new spot. So...

I have become the Britney Spears of Bloggerville, leaving you guys to stand back and say, "Man, this chick is out of control!"

But the craziness is about to end very soon, friends. VERY SOON. If you can all bear with me just a little longer, you will soon see that this most recent episode of manic blog refurbishing had a purpose. Keep checking in. Big changes- Beautiful changes- are coming SOON and I'm so excited. And once it's done the craziness will stop and I will be satisfied. Probably. Maybe.