Dear Mother Nature:

Dear Mother Nature:

Today is the first day of spring...This is what I SHOULD be seeing:



In anticipation of this, we got out the summer ride on toys the other day and put them in the back yard, all ready to go.


However, on this first day of spring, this is what I am ACTUALLY seeing:



I request a redo and the immediate cessation of this white crap that I hate.

Sincerely yours,
Ready For Summer

Thursday ramblings...

I realized after Brittany over at The Greer Five http://thegreerfive.com/ featured me on her blog (Thanks Brittany), I hadn't gotten a chance to blog in a while so I'm going to ramble for a few minutes and then try to get myself back in a routine again.

Things are crazy busy around here. I'm in the process of spring cleaning (wishful thinking with snow on the ground but I'm ever hopeful) but it's makng my house more of a mess than it was to begin with. :) I'm trying to go room by room and get rid of things and rearrange and reorganize so making a mess to get everything in order is well worth it to me.

Court proceedings are...well they are proceeding...it's a long process but I'm confident of the end result and I'm trying to have faith in the system to do the right thing, and although they have yet to prove it to me, I'm holding strong.

The two and the three-year old are going through a "terribles" phase and good grief, it wears me out! The seven and eight-year old are doing great although a little rambunctious (as boys generally are) with not being able to get outside and play in this freezing weather. The thirteen-year-old still isn't speaking to me but I still love him and have faith we will work it all out.

I've read a few books lately that I enjoyed, but I didn't love them enough to do individual reviews on them, so I'll do a short synopsis of all of them in the next blog. I do, however, totally recommend the new YA series that James Patterson is doing and read the first installment "Witch and Wizard" and now I'm kicking myself. I hate, hate, hate waiting on the next book in the series to come out. I would rather wait on the whole series to be written and then read it straight through. I didn't touch a Harry Potter book until this past year for that very reason.

OK I'm off to work on the cleaning some more and see if the "wonder spray" that the hubby got me will actually take Sharpie off the walls like it claims (thanks to the little guy for the extra work, ughhh).

Anyway, to wrap it up, there's a ton going on around here but I'm hanging in there like a champ and ready for the next challenge to make good things happen. Have a great day!!

Stupid Groundhog, Stupid Winter, Stupid Meteorologists

It's Groundhog Day. Every year on this day, thousands of people gather at Gobblers Knob, Pennsylvania to see if a rodent named Punxsutawney Phil sees his shadow or not to know if we will have six more weeks of winter or if spring is on the way. This is supposed to be based on hibernation and if the groundhog is ready to get out of bed or not for the year. Heck, if I could be a weather predictor in winter, I'd never get out of bed just for the extra sleep, so it's no wonder he sees his shadow. Really, it's more of a tradition than a weather indicator and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (sounds like a pretty important government faction to be commenting on a groundhog, doesn't it??) even says that Punxsutawney Phil has "no predictive skill". Really? Are people not smart enough to figure this out about a groundhog that you felt the need to come out with an official comment??

Of course I don't think that Punxsutawney Phil has much more predictive ability than the meteorologists on the news. I think I had it all wrong as a little kid when I said I either wanted to be a mommy or a teacher - I should have said I wanted to be a meteorologist. They can be wrong at their jobs CONSISTENTLY and still make good money - what other career can boast about that??

I really wanted to write this post so I could repeatedly type "Punxsutawney" (say it a few times, it rolls off the tongue nicely) but here are a few fun facts about Phil:

• Phil made his first appearance in 1887.
• His official website says he is over 100 years old...righttttt.
• The average life of a groundhog is 6-9 years.

Let's think about that for a minute... It's 2010 now.

2010 - 1887 = 123

If we give Punxsutawney Phil a decent groundhog lifespan, considering he's probably better taken care of than the average wild groundhog at 8 years:

123/8 = 15.375

Seems to me, we're on our 16th or so (give or take a few groundhog mishaps) Punxsutawney Phil. It could probably be more than that - maybe the townsfolk of Gobblers Knob start to go crazy after a particular rodent has seen his shadow a certain number of times and send him off to groundhog heaven to try their luck with a new one?

My take on this is F you Punxsutawney Phil, F you winter and F you meteorologists!