Jenyfer Matthews

Actual wildlife that is – there has been no excessive partying in the woods (as yet!)

I missed getting pictures of the couple of wolves I’ve seen on the gravel roads in the area as well as the large black bear that wandered out onto the highway in front of our vehicle as we drove to Canada last weekend. I haven’t gotten any pictures of the doe and twin fawns who come around every day either.

I haven’t been totally unprepared however. I did get a picture of this cool stone figure near the harbor in town.

There were probably 50 stone statues of various shapes in the same little area. They were amazing to see and examine but it was difficult to get a good picture of them all because they also blend so nicely into the larger rocks upon which they sit. I loved the little man above because he was so nicely proportioned and had a round head!

Ten little ducks went out to play…

The mama duck was herding her ten babies around the shallow edges of the rocks in the harbor. She didn’t seem to mind the picture taking and it was certainly safer than getting up close to take a picture of a wolf or bear!

My step-mother continues to feed the foxes in her yard, but this year’s litter isn’t quite as tame as last year’s. They have started coming close enough to the house to be entertaining though. I practically had to run one over to get out of the drive way yesterday morning!

I interpret the above pose as an “No fair, Mom!” moment.

Last but not least, a big happy birthday to my own daughter who is 11 years old today. Where on earth does time go??? All in all I’m very glad that human children don’t grow up as quickly as babies in the wild, but time is still going a little too fast for my liking…

As much as I enjoy driving and the freedom that owning a car gives you to go where you want to go when you want to go there, I didn’t really miss owning a car for the nearly six years we lived in Egypt.

I am quite proud of myself for (mostly) mastering the art of driving a five-speed manual transmission though I still don’t love coming to a stop at the top of a hill (or even a small incline!) but I still prefer to walk to my destination when possible. Walking not only keeps you in shape, but you can also go a lot of places on foot you can’t get to in a car with the added bonus of never having to worry about finding parking. Walking also burns calories while driving burns fuel – which is getting more expensive by the week.

I particularly didn’t miss the maintenance and repair aspects of car ownership. I bought myself a car in Ohio because we didn’t live in a place that was totally walkable (which is pretty much most of the US) but I bought an older car because I didn’t know how long we’d be staying. I am really quite pleased with my little car, in spite of its advancing years. If you had seen what I was being shown when I was shopping, you would be impressed to!

There will be maintenance issues with any car, but particularly one that is a decade old. The first quirk I noticed was the car’s insatiable appetite for oil. It doesn’t burn oil, it just sort of absorbs it. I checked with the mechanic where I’d had the oil changed and apparently Volkswagon issued a technical bulletin saying that it is normal for the car to use 1/2 quart of oil every 600 miles. Hmmm… that is a definitely a quirk to be aware of! However, in the process of being a responsible car owner and checking my oil level after my long drive to Minnesota, the plastic sleeve of the oil dipstick snapped off. It would happen while I’m far from civilization! I’m now driving around with a wooden dowel plugging the dipstick hole until I get the part sent up to me.

All in all, if it were practical, I think I’d stick to using a kayak for transportation: no fuel costs and only two parts to worry about – the paddle and the body of the boat. Very simple to maintain on the whole. If you are in a kayak, you’re not likely to end up driving over a large hump of gravel left behind by the county grader and rip off a plastic dirt shield from under the engine, which in turn will lead to several days of picking up pieces of plastic from the ditch along the road to find the parts serial number. Nope, not likely to happen in a kayak.

Now all I need to do is buy a house by a large body of water in a town on a harbor…

For anyone who is keeping track, I officially gave up on my diet plan a couple of weeks ago. I liked the concept of the Lose It! site, but also found it a bit demoralizing. Food just has too many calories in it!!!

On the up side, keeping track of my food and liquid (that is the real downfall for me) intake for a week was a great reminder to be more aware of consumption and thinking about how many calories I was consuming was a good incentive to get out and get active. I even started walking 4 miles a day which certainly didn’t hurt a thing. I lost a couple of pounds and I felt better both physically and mentally.

Realistically, I am not going to keep track of every item I put in my mouth when I’m traveling and on a dial-up internet connection. In truth, I guess I just don’t care enough.

I told my sister my tale of woe and she suggested I just buy bigger pants. It’s a good thing that I left some of my larger jeans there last year because I have the feeling they are going to come in handy…

There were some kind comments last week referring to what a good mom I am. I appreciate the sentiment but I think you give me too much credit. I am obviously still learning in this motherhood gig.

I did a couple loads of laundry over the weekend, one dark load of clothes followed by a load of sheets and towels. When the dark load was finished I stuck them in the dryer and took the children to a movie (Judy Moody: The Not Bummer Summer – pretty mediocre if you ask me but the kids seemed to like it) When I got home, the dryer was done so I started to unload the clothes when I noticed something – many items had blue splotches on them.

I could not imagine what had happened until I found an empty blue crayon paper. The dryer is stacked on top of the washer so I had to get a chair to investigate further. The inside of the dryer drum was coated in blue wax, particularly near the lint trap where the other half of the crayon had landed and melted on.

When, oh when, will I learn to check pockets? Previously the pocket litter has been limited to candy wrappers and coins, perhaps the occasional Lego piece or small toy – none of which particularly mattered when I was limited to line drying as I was in Cairo. A melted crayon is messy, messy, messy – and of course a new pink shirt my daughter had just bought herself was in the load.

I promptly got online to seek remedies. Toothpaste, a sponge, and a plastic knife were enough to get the crayon out of the dryer (and also leave it minty fresh). There were several suggestions for the clothes and I decided to try them in ascending order of difficulty.

I started out by dabbing big blue spots with Dawn dish liquid then used a cup of detergent and a cup of Borax and washed in hot water on the heavy duty cycle. Warning: that combination of detergents and booster does create a huge amount of sudsing that not all washers are going to like. Since I was using a front loader, I had to stop the cycle and do a rinse and spin before I could go on. The next cycle I used a cup of detergent and a couple scoops of Oxyclean also washed in hot water. Many of the items seemed to come clean by that point, and frankly I suspect it was the hot water more than anything else.

A few items were reluctant to release the stains so I tried the next suggestion: oil. The internet suggested WD-40 but others said that baby oil would work much the same but with less smell. I would caution anyone not to try the oil unless the clothing item is a lost cause anyway because it is oil afterall. I soaked the spots with the oil, then dabbed them with the Dawn and washed in hot again. Some things worked, some things didn’t – my daughter’s new shirt was among the didn’t works for the blue, a red shirt of mine was among the oil casualties.

By this point, getting the crayon out was more of a personal challenge because I had succeeded with the majority of the load and also clearly spent more than my daughter’s shirt was worth in detergents and hot water. I gave it one more try with hot water and Borax but added a few new items to the wash, just to fill out the load – and ended up turning a couple pairs of socks pink.

I called it a day and bought my daughter a new shirt.

Yesterday the children painted some birdhouses they had made last month. They were wearing giant t-shirts as smocks, but my son managed to get a splotch of blue paint on his shorts – ironically, a pair of shorts that escaped the crayon load unscathed.

I wonder if the baby oil will work to get the paint out?

One of the good things about being back in the US and having a car is listening to the radio. I am *WAY* behind on new music but liked this song a lot the moment I heard it.

Sitting around doing nothing all day is an unlikely scenario for me, but it’s certainly a nice thought!

Hope you have a nice day.

I have been lucky to have been blessed with a pretty good metabolism – upon which I’ve been coasting for most of my life. Chips? Ice cream? Cheese? Wine? Bring it on – I have always been able to count on making up the difference pretty quickly by simply cutting back on another day.

My advancing age has been catching up to me in the last few years of course, but it was also easier to eat what I wanted and to keep up with it in Egypt. Not only was I doing an hour and a half of power yoga twice a week but I was keeping up with our home in one of the dirtiest cities on earth. Add to that the four flights of stairs up to our apartment, the stairs in our apartment, and the fact that my feet were my primary source of getting around and maintaining the status quo was not really a problem.

It’s a different story these days.

I came to the US with a bit of a deficit – I don’t eat in times of stress so I lost a few pounds during the evacuation process. I have since gained it back plus a few more. This wouldn’t worry me overly much except that I’m about to go and stay with my father and step-mother for the summer. My step-mother may look innocent and sweet but she’s the devil in disguise in the kitchen. I haven’t once stayed with her and been able to resist her nearly every night desserts, the ice cream treats she buys because they are my favorite, or anything else to speak of. I’m putty in her hands.

And my butt is turning to putty as well.

Now that the weather is warming up a bit here in Ohio and my books are all but finished being formatted (stay tuned!) I am trying to get back to being more active. My only hope of surviving the summer without blimping out is to go into it a bit light, build myself a margin for error. Five pounds ought to do it – eight would be better.

I know where my major weakness lies – in liquid calories – but I decided that maybe a food journal might be handy as well. Just to keep things really in my face and invoke my competitive streak. There is an online site I’ve been looking at this last week called Lose it! It’s nice because you just plug in your current height and weight and then your goal. It lets you pick a daily caloric intake and then projects how long it will take you to reach your goal. During the course of a day you input your food intake and your activity and it tells you how many calories you have left to consume.

I haven’t counted calories in a very long time. How is it at all fair that a medium sized banana has about 100 calories in it, but vacuuming for 1/2 hour only burns about 60 calories? A tortilla has between 100-200 calories depending on the size but taking a half and hour walk at a moderate pace only burns about 70 calories – and since no one is going to eat an empty tortilla you can guess how long you’d have to walk to burn off a burrito, nevermind the beer you know you want to have along with it!

Go snoop around there for restaurant entrees and you may never eat out again! Sigh…

Just so you know, my step-mother isn’t all bad. She did buy an extra kayak so we can go out together this summer. Maybe if I paddle to Canada and back I can afford to indulge in some fried fish and fresh pie!

And I’m not talking about the Rapture, LOL. After today, there are only 7 days of school left, and three of them are half days (why do schools do that, anyway???)

I might be even more ready for the children to be done with school than they are themselves. I am tired of getting up with an alarm, tired of fumbling through fifth grade fractions, tired of homework in general, and very very very tired of all the candy.

When I enrolled the children in school, they gave me the supply list which included things that you would expect like pencils and notebooks and folders, but it also things you might not expect like two bags of candy per child. I was a little surprised but I assumed that it was for holiday parties (though if every child in a class brought two bags, that would still be an awful lot!). The administrators told me not to worry about the candy since the kids were starting so late in the year. (Just between us, I probably wouldn’t have bothered with it anyway!)

The candy is not however limited to holidays. The school offers candy as incentives to do well in a task, but also as a reward for either having achieved a goal or even merely cooperating with basic school rules. Every time I turn around it seems like the kids have a cheek full of candy.

I might be able to live with that – a little candy never hurt anyone in moderation and I don’t keep it around the house as a rule – but it doesn’t stop there. There has been a candy sale fundraiser every day this week which is is on top of the usual handouts which is all on top of ice cream sales plus “Fizzy Friday” where the children are allowed to bring soft drinks to school.

The friend with whom I am staying is as astonished by this nonstop sugar orgy as I am – so are her teenage children who say they never got so many candy handouts in their elementary schools. It makes me wonder what is in the principal’s mind? Was she deprived as a child? Did she not get the memo regarding soaring childhood obesity rates? Whatever happened to giving out rewards like stickers or pencils?

As many sugary treats as are being offered, I wish they would offer a dental plan as well.

I am sure the children have reached their candy quota for the year. Following the freaky episode with the ice cream man, I think it’s going to be strictly apples and carrots and floss all summer!

I took the children to the park over the weekend and while we were there, the ice cream man drove past trolling for customers. I have very fond memories of getting treats from the ice cream man as a child so of course I let my children stop him.

One thing that has certainly changed since I was a child, lo those many years ago, is the prices.

(Click image to enlarge)

I used to go out to the ice cream truck with $.50 and have a hard time choosing. The least expensive thing on this menu is $1 and if I had a time machine (how cool would that be???) I’m sure I could prove that the treats I bought were both cheaper and larger. What kind of chump pays $2 for a ice cream sandwich you could eat in five bites when you can get a box of them in the store for not so much more?

(Who are you looking at??)

I got the children their treats, then went *way back over* to my chair in the shade of a tree probably 200 feet from where the truck was parked. I zoomed in to get a picture of the menu and in the process got this picture too:

Does he look like a poster boy for America’s Most Wanted or what? I hadn’t given him much thought until I saw this picture later. Makes me wonder what – or who – he has in the back of that truck! Or maybe he’s just shy – he left in what seemed like a hurry

The children in the meantime finished their treats in a flash and went back to whining, fighting, and bickering again – which they had been doing on and off for about two hours. I had had enough of that behavior so I packed up my chair and took them home, where I made them pay me back for their ice cream. No treats for bad behavior! I’ve probably put them off ice cream trucks for life – which is just as well since I’ve since seen that particular truck circling the block around our temporary home!

The children’s school held a carnival at a local, family-owned, old fashioned amusement park called Stricker’s Grove this past Friday. Generally speaking, I am not a huge fan of amusement park rides (or crowds or lines) so I haven’t gone out of my way to take the children to amusement parks. After I looked at this one on the website, I decided to make an exception: the ticket prices were very reasonable and included food and unlimited rides. Also, the park itself was small scale. The children only *think* they like amusement park rides – I figured this would let them try them out in a fairly controlled way.

(Note: there are amusement parks in Cairo but I have avoided them for a number of reasons, one of which is my lack of faith in the maintenance of the rides!)

I admit that there was an element of nostalgia involved in my decision to buy the tickets as well. I can remember my own elementary school having carnival nights at a small amusement park called Pontchartrain Beach in New Orleans and how much I always enjoyed them. I was pleased that my own children could have such an experience as well.

The park was as cute as I imagined it would be with only one main walkway off of which all the rides were located. I remember Pontchartrain Beach as being bigger, but then again I was much smaller myself! The children did not notice or complain about the size of the park at all – they were completely focused on the rides!

The first ride we all went on was the Ferris wheel. The operator did not make a great first impression. First he forgot to clamp the bar down on the first riders, and then when we yelled to alert him, he nearly ripped off his own arm when he threw the wheel in reverse suddenly while simultaneously reaching toward the car. Yikes! Some people actually got out of line when he did that. Not us though- we are thrill seekers I tell you!

(Click any image to enlarge)

The ride went smoothly after the rocky start – everyone exited with all their limbs and I never heard any blood curdling screams from there that evening so I assume the operator got his act together!

There was a nice assortment of rides as well – something for all ages and tolerance levels. My children, of course, were most interested in the fastest, highest, and most thrilling rides of course. There were two wooden roller coasters. We started with the smaller one first, named the Teddy Bear.

The Teddy Bear was a beginner roller coaster, but it was more than enough for me. It did one trip around its track – no loops at all – and it was done. So was I. What can I say – I am a total wimp.

This sort of thing is much more my speed:

My son was not content to restrict himself to the Teddy Bear however, he wanted to go on the Tornado. I was there with my friend and her two teenagers so I could have just skipped the Tornado myself, but n-o-o-o-o-o. My son started trash talking about how his mommy was scared of the roller coaster and I could not let that pass. I also told myself that it was one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences that was crucial for me to experience so I could use it sometime in my writing.

My son and my friend’s son got in the very first car. My friend and her daughter got in a car behind them. All the other seats filled up quickly so I ended up sitting with a little boy in the last car. I told the boy and his two friends ahead of me not to be alarmed if I screamed. They told me it was okay – girls do that sometimes! They then gave me details on what to expect and also admitted they might scream too. Chatting with them was the best part of the ride!

Did I mention I wasn’t a roller coaster person? I regretted getting on the ride almost as soon as we started out. We had seat belts and safety bars and I still came several inches up off the seat when we rushed over the highest curve. I did not get a thrill out of the ride – I was petrified! I am not sure why exactly it bothered me so much. It doesn’t bother me at all to go down a mountain luge track on a plastic sled at high speeds but I hated the roller coaster. If I am going to be going so fast, I guess I want to have more control over the vehicle I’m in!

After the roller coaster, my son ran off with my daughter and her friend and I stuck to more sedate rides for a while, like the swings and the carousel.

Is this not the most tormented looking horse you have ever seen?

After the riding the roller coaster, this is pretty much what I saw of my children for the rest of the night:

My friend and I were remembering carnivals from our youths and the rides we used to like. It was nostalgia that deluded us into thinking that we would enjoy a spin on the Electric Rainbow ourselves.

I think if it had stayed at this angle we would have been fine. However, this is just the beginning.

I took the above picture from the swings and I watched it tilt nearly perpendicular to the ground while we were waiting in line so I really ought to have known better. I am truly surprised that it wasn’t covered in vomit. (There were, however, splats all over the sidewalk outside of the ride). My friend and I got on the ride and my children scampered on right after us. They were thrilled to see us on the ride that they had been enjoying so much all evening.

I had a fond memory of this ride and should have left it at that. I did not hate the ride this time, I endured it. I survived it. I celebrated when it stopped. While my children ran shrieking with joy off to the next ride, my friend and I found a nearby bench and tried to shake off the spins. She never did recover – she ended up being sick and leaving early. It’s hell getting old.

There was less than an hour left to the carnival when my friend departed so I decided to just let the children continue riding while I strolled and took pictures. Then the children found me and tried to get me to ride the big roller coaster with them again. I was *almost* foolish enough to go along with them but then I thought about it: if I didn’t like the roller coaster in broad daylight, I knew I would truly hate it in the dark. I suggested that we try the Tilt-a-Whirl instead.

The children agreed, though they did say they thought it was a boring ride because their car didn’t spin much the one time they had tried it. It certainly spins a lot with Mom in the car. It was kind of fun at first – at least until it wasn’t. I should have known it wasn’t a good idea when a child stopped outside the fence for the ride and vomited just after he’d exited. We spun and we spun and we spun some more. By the time we finally stopped, I was more than ready to get off. My son exited in a hurry as well – and ran straight for the bathroom.

He was never actually sick (probably because he had been too busy with the rides to eat anything) but that was the end of the fun for him. And of course suddenly it was all my fault that he’d been riding the big, fast rides all night. He’d wanted to go on the carousel and the train but he couldn’t find me anywhere. I’m guessing that the lesson he should have taken from this – stop while you are ahead – will be entirely missed.

Both children have already asked to go to King’s Island. They might end up going sometime but it won’t be with me!

I am coming to you live from a new laptop. There are no smilies accompanying this announcement because it was an unplanned, unbudgeted event.

My old laptop survived the trip from Cairo to Istanbul in my checked baggage when we left Egypt, and while getting older and slower, was managing to get along just fine (a bit like myself really). I liked it fine, knew my way around it, and was willing to make allowances for what it could and could not do. So why did I end up replacing it? Because my copy of Windows needed to be replaced and spending $$$ to buy a new copy of Windows for an old computer did not make sense for a computer that might only last another year or so.

And when I say it needed to be replaced, I mean that Windows started trying to hold my stored data hostage. Nice.

Between all the doctor visits, my new glasses, and now this new computer I feel a bit sick at all the money that is so rapidly flowing out of our pockets these days. That doesn’t even take into account all my various thrift store finds recently – or the money a Spanish pick-pocket relieved my husband of on a train in Barcelona last month. Guess what I told my children when they asked me for new video games at the electronics store yesterday?

I still have a lot to be grateful for – at least I *could* afford to pay for all of these various expenses as they came up. It’s a good thing my children like pasta though because I see a lot of that in our immediate future.

I am pleased to say that I finally made my way through the proofing of ONE CRAZY SUMMER and all of the digital editions have been updated. Now all that remains to be done is to format the file for print. So far I am on track to have that completed by the end of the month, fingers crossed…