Upcoming Anniversary

Business first. My 2 year blogiversary is coming up on February 4th. To celebrate, I would like to give away a few goodies. (No, I CAN'T tell you, it would ruin the surprise! Yes, it will include yarn. Heck - since it is cold out, you might even get chocolate, or some other yummies).

There are 3 ways to enter.

1. Leave a comment on the blog.
2. Mentioning the contest on your blog will get you another entry.
3. Every time someone else mentions that they found out about the contest from you, you get another entry.

All entries need to be in by Monday February 4th.

The fronts are done on Ribby Cardi. I'm not thrilled with how the decreases came out in the last few rows. Either I am stupid or the directions aren't entirely clear...

You there in the back, stop snickering.

I realize that since I am not the first person to knit this lovely pattern, that the issue most likely resides between my ears and not with the designer.

Really, I must put down the Merlot before I knit, it would make life so much easier. The final few rows may get ripped back and redone. You know, so I can live up to my claim of being persnickety.

I've started the sleeves and thought a few stripes might liven things up a bit. I'm not entirely sure yet. To keep the spontaneity going, I will finish off the last row or 2 of the collar in the grey - for balance.

Yes. I am calling it balance, not schizophrenia.

Last week, Caleb and I spent the night at the Dells with my family for a fun-filled 24 hours of swimming at the Kalahari Resort. We had 13 people (including 6 kids) in a 3 bedroom suite with a full kitchen and living area. All the cookware and dishes are included. Caleb had a blast riding all of the slides. He even tried out surfing!

Look Ma, no hands!

We started for home at bedtime and while he wanted to watch a movie on the portable DVD player (it is a 2 hour drive), I was Cruella DeVille and told him that he needed to sleep. He made one protest at the 15 minute mark and that was the last I heard from him!

Vacation from Hell?

Last week, Eric received 3 free passes to a water and theme park about 2 hours from home. The type of place where rooms run $200 a night for a room with 2 queens and they are nothing special. Because the room rates are so high, we decided to make a day trip of it, figuring that Caleb is old enough now to handle that kind of drive with the help of the portable DVD player and Pixar.

We managed to arrive 15 minutes after the park opened and headed into the park in great spirits. It all changed shortly.

The changing rooms we found were NASTY, mildew covered and stinky. The waits for the rides were up to an hour. An HOUR to go on a slide for 30 seconds. The areas for the little kids were designed for toddlers, not the 4 to 7 year old crowd. Caleb wasn't allowed on the larger slides because of the height restrictions (along with the hour wait, yikes).

We tried the go-carts but the lines weren't any better. Again an hour to go on a 5 minute ride.

The miniature golf was worse yet. There were no kid sized putters (seriously people - a place for kids and nothing was their size? - they missed that demographic completely). We could live with that and started along the course. We had to call it quits at the eight hole because half of the green carpet was missing (This was a horrible time for the batteries in the camera to die - the pictures would have been priceless) and the plastic cup in the hole was broken.

Caleb was set on trying the wave pool so we bravely headed that way. We managed to find a single chair for our towels and set off in search of an inner tube for Bubba. Can you guess what happened? Predictably, there were none to be found and we headed into the arctic waters of the wave pool. Within a minute, Mr. NoBodyFat had blue lips and needed to warm up.

The last straw for my husband was when Caleb tried to go down one of the kiddie slides and it was so slooooow that he had to scoot himself down the damn thing.

After trying out a couple more areas in the park we decided to bug out and find the Wonder Spot. Par for the day, it wasn't where we remembered it. A quick google search proves the Wonder Spot was done in by modernity.

Because we tried to make due at a restaurant that had an arcade for kids, but overall, the entire day sucked ass. So much so that even Caleb pronounced it "not fun at all".

The piece de resistance was at MickeyD's where I found a large dead bug in my salad.

Hruumph.