So my kids have been looking forward to a sleepover at their aunt’s house down in Salem, about 50 miles away from where we live. They’ve been bouncing off the walls, because today is the day my sister is coming to pick them up.

But last night, Miriam, my second oldest girl, began puking. I don’t know what it is with my kids and puking lately, but it was pretty gnarly. One of those episodes where I was thankful I have two washers and dryers, if you know what I mean. And ever since then, she’s been puking up nothing, the poor dear.

So, I had to call my sister and tell her that Miriam couldn’t come. Miriam is disappointed, but she’s at that point that she’d rather be in bed than not be in bed. You know the feeling, you’re so sick you don’t want to move.

But I’ve talked with my sis, and she says she’ll still come to get Hannah for the sleepover, and maybe sometime in the future, perhaps August, she’ll have a sleepover just for Miriam. I really hope so, because poor Miriam already has the middle child syndrome. Even though she’s second born out of four, she’s the middle girl, and she has it bad. She sees Hannah get to do things first, and Monie gets by on her cuteness alone. LOL Miriam is a beautiful girl, but she gets melancholy some times. So I want to do something special for her today.

I had planned on taking my two younger kids out to ice cream and a movie to make them feel better that they weren’t going to the sleepover, but I don’t think I can do that now with one of the kids pukey. Therefore, we’re resigned to watch movies all day. And for my kids, I think that will be a pretty great day.

And I hope Miriam won’t feel left out, although, I’m not sure how much Mommy can actually influence her on this. I have a feeling she’s going to be my moody teen, and she’s only 6. **sigh**

~~Becka

Well since I’ve lost about 30 pounds, and my pants (which were once pretty tight on me) were getting loose, I decided to dig deeper into the recesses of my closet. Along with the Epic Cob Webs, Giant Moths, and The Swirling Vortex to Hell, I found a pair of pants I haven’t been able to fit into for about three years. I decided “What the heck?”

So I put them on, and amazingly, they fit! And I didn’t have to lay down on the bed before I zipped them up!!

This has made my day, as I’m sure you well imagine. Losing the weight, I’m pretty sure I went down two pants sizes. Being my fattest, I refused to buy a bigger sized pair of pants, so I was always stuffing myself into the ones I had. LOL But as I lost the weight, the pants started to fit again, until the point they were actually loose.

I haven’t tried any of my other pants in the deep, dark recesses of the closet, mainly because I’m scared I might not fit into those other ones. That, and I’m terrified I’ll find Beelzebub himself holding the pants on a hanger, while eating a luscious, German chocolate cake (the whole cake). LOL

But I’ve noticed that food isn’t that important to me anymore. I used to think about it a lot, about what yummy thing I was going to eat, and now… **shrugs** it just doesn’t matter. If I eat, I eat. If I don’t, I don’t. No big. I actually don’t get ravenously hungry like I used to. Maybe my metabolizm is changing.

Here’s hopin’.

~~Becka

Raise your hand if you’re a reader of Becka’s Babble. Post a comment to let me know. I have no idea if people actually come here and read my ramblings. I’m just curious.

Oh, and I’ve lost 30 lbs. since the end of March on Weight Watchers. Woohoo! My pants fit again! Hallelujah!

~~Becka

Is it me, or are all big trucks driven by good-looking men? What’s the deal? Little trucks don’t count. The small Nissan pick-up doesn’t factor here. I’m talking the GMC, the Ford, the Dodge, the Chevy. And I’m not talking the older rust-buckets. I’m talking newer trucks.

All nice-looking BIG trucks are driven by good-looking men. And I’m not just talking about “OK” men or “yeah, he’s all right”, I mean, hot guys. Even the older men who drive the bigger pick-ups are good-looking.

What’s the deal here?

I want you to look around your hometown at all the men who drive the big trucks and see for yourself. I’ve noticed this phenomenon, but only just now realized it.

Is it Freud? Bigger trucks mean bigger “ahem” you-know-whats-its? Bigger trucks attract the attention of females? Alpha men just do it bigger? LOL

I really don’t know what’s going on here, but I challenge you to find a newer, bigger truck, deisel or otherwise, and find an ugly man at the wheel.

In fact, if there happens to be a woman driving the big, newer truck is usually good-looking herself.

There is truth in this. Mark my words and see for yourself.

It’s really odd.

~~Becka

OK, remember the school-room remodel I told you about? The room with the nasty-ass checkerboard flooring? Well, here are the before and after shots. Hot dang, this room is smokin’ now!!

BEFORE:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimgoings/14972210/in/set-361573/

AFTER:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimgoings/194493387/in/set-72157594206330803/

~*~

BEFORE:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimgoings/14972108/in/set-361573/

AFTER:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimgoings/194493517/in/set-72157594206330803/

~*~

BEFORE:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimgoings/14972227/in/set-361573/

AFTER:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimgoings/194493609/in/set-72157594206330803/

~*~

BEFORE:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimgoings/14972216/in/set-361573/

AFTER:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimgoings/194493753/in/set-72157594206330803/

~*~

BEFORE:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimgoings/16945959/in/set-361573/

AFTER:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimgoings/194493879/in/set-72157594206330803/

~*~

BEFORE:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimgoings/16945961/in/set-361573/

AFTER:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimgoings/194493961/in/set-72157594206330803/

~*~

See how awesome that turned out?? Holy moly, the room is TRANSFORMED. We LOVE spending time in there, and no longer does it look like a dungeon. The last thing we have to do is paint the checkerboard behind the staircase. But that’s easy peasy. Oh, and some touch-up on the white trim around the room.

But don’t we RAWK?? We should totally be on Trading Spaces. LOL

~~Becka

My Dad is coming to my house to spend the weekend with us. He lives 50 miles away in Salem and we see him all the time, but the poor guy lives by himself and doesn’t have decent meals, so I thought it would be great to invite him up to spend some time with us. We’re going to have a lot of fun!

Some random Becka info… My father’s name is Gilbert Keith Goodwin, born in 1935. Yup, he’s a fogey. LOL His father, George Edward Goodwin, wanted his son to have the initials “GKG”, just like HIS father before him. My great-grandfather’s name was George Kitteridge Goodwin. You may recognize the name “Kitteridge”, as I’ve loved it ever since I was a girl, and I gave one of my heroes this last name; Jeremy Kitteridge in UNDERNEATH THE MISTLETOE, a novella in Champagne Books’s MISTLETOE MAGIC.

My grandmother didn’t want to name her baby “George”, so they looked for another “G” name. We even found the list of names they considered in an old photo album. Our favorite was Geoffrey. Perhaps they didn’t pick it because of it’s spelling. But that’s the name of my hero in THE WOLVERINE AND THE ROSE. They decided on “Gilbert”, and no one knows why. No one even liked that name.

My grandparents called him “Keith”. And Keith he remains. He only uses his first name on “official” correspondence.

This is all probably boring you to tears, but once again, I have nothing to blog about. Aside from the fact that I think I have pushed through my muse-apation, what happens to writers when they are stuck for long periods of time without writing. However, the irony of this is; my dad is coming up for the weekend.

So I can’t write.

Somewhere, fate is laughing at me.

~~Becka

This past weekend, the city of Hillsboro, where I live, had an airshow. DH and I went to the airshow a couple of years ago, and had a lot of fun watching the Blue Angels do their arial acrobatics. This year, however, neither the Blue Angels or the Thunderbirds were going to be performing, therefore DH and I decided not to go.

Saturday, we had to console our dog, who is afraid of NOTHING except thunder and jet engines. LOL Anyhow, on Sunday, as we were painting our great room, I had to go back to Home Depot for something and saw a black cloud in the sky. Then I heard the sirens and my heart sank.

This is what happened:

http://www.koin.com/news.asp?ID=5141

I feel so bad that an airplane crashed and the pilot died, but thankfully, no one on the ground was killed. The pilot did NOT eject, and the locals are calling him a hero because of it. The crash was video taped, and it’s believed the man knew he was going down in residential, and so tried to make his crash less impactive on the neighborhood. If he’d ejected, the crash could have been much, much worse.

So if you’re a religious person, please send up a prayer for the pilot’s family, and for the families of the people on the ground, who’s homes were damaged and destroyed. Thank you.

~~Becka

Apparently, my DH has home improvement on the brain. But this is one renovation I didn’t mind making. Unfortunately, I don’t have any after pictures to share, so until I do, I’ll just tell you what we did.

Our house is two stories (storeys? Who cares). The first floor is on the street level, with the living room, dining room, kitchen, etc. Then we have a daylight basement, so the second floor is downstairs rather than upstairs. This is great for the summer time, because the downstairs is about 10-15 degrees cooler than the upstairs. The rooms are floored with concrete, and are partway underground, so it stays very cool. Admittedly, it’s hard to keep warm in winter. Well, not “hard”, just “expensive”. LOL

Anyhow, in our downstairs, we have my office/guest room, my eldest daughter’s room, the Steamboat Willie bathroom I showed you guys a few blogs ago, our home theater (DH has a 57″ TV) and a second kitchen with a second set of washer/dryer hookups. Yes, I have two sets. But that’s a different story. I guess whoever renovated the daylight basement wanted this house to have two living areas. Because if you put a door at the top of the stairs, you could have a renter downstairs with their own kitchen, w/d, bathroom, and a couple of bedrooms.

Well, we’ve renovated the theater/kitchen area a while back, now it was time for our great room to get some TLC.

Here are some before pics of this room we took when we were looking at the house, before we bought it. That piano isn’t ours.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimgoings/14972210/in/set-361573/

If you poke around in that picture set, the room we renovated is the one with the hideous checkerboard floor. No, it’s not tile, it’s paint. And no, it is not “cute”, it is HIDEOUS. These people like, never mopped, and so there’s these permanent stains and scrapes and scuffs, it’s just so horribly ugly. We HATE that floor.

Anyhow, a long time ago, we ripped out that wall with the windows. Inside that wall is our theater, which has pictures here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimgoings/183082474/

All of those DVD’s are on the NEW wall we built. Mind you, that wall is a LOAD BEARING wall for the house, and the previous owners took OUT studs to make the “cute” little window wall complete with screen door and screens on the windows. WTF? But I digress.

So, we added the studs back in and put some insulation in this wall and it looks great; from the theater angle. The wall has been unfinished drywall in the great room for a LOOOONG time.

We went online and found our paint color for the great room; Glidden’s “Celestial”. It is a light sky blue. Why that color? Because we wanted the room to be the kids’ schoolroom/play area. Our ultimate goal was for the room to be a soft blue with primary colors here and there as accents. So away we went with the paint.

Mind you, if you’ve taken a look at all the pics with the checkerboard floor, you’ll notice that the icky icky yellow color goes up the staircase and through the small hallway past the bedroom and behind the stairs. Needless to say, we had a shite-load of painting to do. The yellow did not make the room brighter or more homey. It looked nasty, like a dungeon. There’s a concrete retaining wall that they’d painted black, and it was just dreary in there.

So, first thing we did was paint the concrete quarter-wall back to white, not black. Took a couple of coats of white primer and a coat of white paint. Then we primed the walls with tinted primer, tinted the same color as our paint. After that, we had to do about three coats of paint. Why so many? Because we were idiots, and our second coat of “paint” was actually a coat of primer. We’d gotten the cans mixed up. So we woke up yesterday, and all sorts of colorful words could be heard echoing in that room when we’d learned of the switcheroo. LOL

This set us back about two hours, as we had to repaint the room with the correct color. And the hallway. Thankfully, the stairs hadn’t factored in our paint snafu.

Then we had to sand all the spackle on the unfinished wall and texture it. We had to buy a few cans of “orange peel” texture, and you just spray it on, to make the wall a little rough, not just like “Hello, I’m painting on drywall”. LOL Besides, the wall needed to match the other walls. Finally after that was dry, we painted that wall. Yay! After months of unfinished wall, we finally had paint up!

DH had an awesome idea which I was apprehensive of at first, but now I’m so glad we did.

We carpeted the room. Not professionally, but ourselves. We bought cheap, office-grade carpet in a dark blue that looks FABU with the wall color and glued it to the concrete floor with carpet glue. This was basically so we don’t have to A.) look at the ass-tastic checkerboard any longer, B.) no more mopping, and C.) it gives the kids a nice play-area, and brings the room together very nicely.

We then bought 12 of those interlocking floor-mats, the soft kind that kids play on, in primary colors and set that up in the middle of the room. We found AWESOME lamps that have six “arms” that you can bend wherever you want light. On the end of each arm is a primary colored cover for the lightbulbs. I don’t know what they’re called, but it looks awesome. Then we bought some spray paint, because we’re going to paint all the light switches and plugs in yellow and red. Against the light blue of the walls, it really stands out. Also, we changed out the one lightbulb fixture on the ceiling into a rectangular florescent light fixture, and it gives the room a “schoolroom” feel.

The room has been TRANSFORMED. It looks bigger, and 100,000,000 times better. I’ll try to get some pics of it soon. The only thing that sucks is our ugly folding tables that have to be in there when I do school for the kids. We eventually want to get four individual school desks.

We’re not done, as there’s still some trim to paint, and shelves to put up for the school books and DH still needs to put up my whiteboard and stuff, but all the major things have been taken care of.

But the important thing is, this room no longer looks like a “basement” room. It just looks like a “room”. And getting rid of that damned floor was like the last thing to get rid of the previous owner. Ah… Free at last. LOL

~~Becka

That’s right, folks, I have absolutely nothing to blog about. That’s how boring my life is. Nothing much has been going on with me. Well, there’s a little something. Hehe But nothing too wonderful.

So I went to the store today with my gaggle of kidlets. And my kids are good kids. There’s just a LOT of them. ;P I’ve got one in the seat of the cart, one IN the cart, and two walking beside me. This is the “ughe” (Becka’s slang for the word “usual”. The “ughe”). Anyhow, I’m wandering through the store in the chip and soda aisle, and there’s this *handsome* man coming my way. I’d say he’s probably older than me by about 3 to 5 years.

My kids are literally dancing behind me, like ballroom dancing. They watch entirely too many Disney movies. So, I turn around and casually tell them to move over, and of course, my kids, being the angels that they are, complied.

This man looked at me like he was impressed that I had such a handle on my kids. He gave me an appreciative grin, which I of course, answered in kind. No words were spoken, but I had butterflies regardless. It’s nice to be noticed by a handsome man every now and again. Every blue moon. Oh who the hell am I kidding? Once a millenia.

But hey, he was probably married too, right? It was still nice making eye contact and smiling, knowing by his look alone that he was impressed by my well-behaved children. That made my day. That and he was HOT!!!

LOL

That’s it for today. Carry on. Perhaps something interesting will have happened by tomorrow.

~~Becka

So DH and I were lamenting that all of the umpteen shows we watch are now airing re-runs until September. What are we to do?

Find new shows to watch, of course!

So we look around and find a show that has gotten a lot of high ratings, SCRUBS, a comedy in a hospital. Now, this show has been on for FIVE seasons. I’ve heard of it here and there, but never had any reason to watch it.

DH and I finally watched a few episodes of the first season, and now we’re hooked. We literally spent all this weekend and today watching the entire first season. (DH stayed home sick today from work. No, not to watch TV… He actually hurt himself this weekend, but that’s a different story.)

Anyhow, we’re watching this show, and it’s just so wild, zany, and off the wall, that it’s right up our alley. The humor is spot-on to what we crack up at and I swear, I haven’t watched a show that has made me bust a gut so hard in a loooooong time. I highly recommend the show if you haven’t seen it. DH and I are excited that we have 4 more seasons to watch.

In other news, I mentioned that DH hurt himself this weekend. Here’s the scoop. He helped a buddy move into their new house, and after the move, all the guys came over to our house to cool off in our pool. We have a 24 foot above-ground Dough Boy pool. Well, they swam for awhile and when it was time to get out, DH climbed the plastic ladder on the inside of the pool.

Now to get an idea of this ladder, it hangs on the inside of the water, has a top “landing”, and then goes down the outside of the pool, so you climb up, stand on the top, and climb out.

Well, as my DH was climbing up, the ladder on the inside of the pool decided to detach itself from the top of the ladder just as my hubby has one foot in the pool, and the other foot on the outside rung. I have no idea why he didn’t just step onto the top “landing” in the first place, but he was straddling the “landing” when this incident occured.

Needless to say, once the inside ladder gave way, my hubby went down, and thus, he did his first ever splits. Thank goodness he didn’t smush the “boys” as he calls them if you know what I mean. But he did tear up his thighs pretty good. Oh, there were full-on tears, and anyone who knows my DH knows the man doesn’t cry at anything. He’s very much a “man’s man”. I felt his pain. Hell, I’ve had four babies. I’ve been spread to the four corners more times than I’d care to admit. LOL

So he stayed home from work today because the poor man is still hobbling along. But he’s not whining and complaining much, and, oddly enough, he’s not milking it. Strange. I should check to see if he still has his “MAN” membership card in his wallet . . .

~~Becka