Pop Stars

Last month, there was a Pop Star event put on by one of the older girl scouts. Amanda & Diana went to help.

In the first photo, they are leading songs before the event got going. The other girl is Amanda's sister, Whitney.

There were different stations to do things like get make up done, play with costumes, watch movies and sing Karaoke. Diana manned the Karaoke station with me.


A while back, our council bought a Karaoke machine for about $50.00, I think. Leaders can rent it out to their troops for a $10 fee, or donation of a new Karaoke disc. Most choose to add to the Karaoke library that accompanies the machine. When it gets back to me, Connor helps me check it out and make sure it's all working again.


We were using a list so everyone could have a chance to sing that wanted to, but by the end of the evening, we had to stop taking names, and we just let anyone who wanted to join in with the people whose songs we were still able to play.

I think it was a popular station for the Pop Star event!

The Final Booth Sale!

That's it for me! Whether Diana decides to do a troop as an adult is up to her, but I have fulfilled my Leader duties as of this morning from 10:00 to noon!

Sitting there with Amanda, her mom, Molly, and Diana, you wouldn't believe how many people came up and said, "Where are the girls?" We made Diana & Amanda turn around to show their vests, but I wonder how many people that didn't ask went by thinking there were no Girl Scouts at our booth! Oh well!

At the end, we only had the Samoas and Sugar Free Chocolate Chip cookies left. Amanda was getting ticked though. We finally had Sugar Free cookies, and the people who use their Diabetes as the reason they can't get cookies STILL wouldn't buy them! We had the same 3 boxes for two booths, and only sold one today. They weren't low-calorie, just sugar free.

Someone gave us a donation of $4.00 (cost of a box) and so the girls had to open a box of Tagalongs. It's always the same kind with these guys. Good think I get my own Samoas! We have only 7 boxes left, but 5 of those I need to trade for Trefoils & Lemon Cremes which were preordered. Between the preorder & when cookies came, Diana got more orders so we wound up short on those. I probably could have managed another case of both, but I really hate to push it. I really, really didn't want to have to do another booth. Typically, I can find another troop willing to trade a few boxes here & there anyway. In the beginning of March I'm able to get boxes instead of cases, and I can always fill up the rest of the orders that way.

I'm just really glad I don't have to sit in front of stores with cookies anymore! Wheee! (8 years is enough!) On the other hand, hearing Diana & Amanda talking in unison from so many years of doing this together was pretty funny. They got more reaction from that than anything else! It went like this:

D&A: "Would you like to buy some Girl Scout cookies?"

Answer: "No thanks (or other No answer)"

D&A: "Thanks anyway!"

Or...

Answer: "I already bought some."
D&A: "Thanks for supporting Girl Scouts!"

Or...

Answer: "How much are they?"

D&A: "Four dollars a box!"

They had a unison answer no matter what the question was. Then the people would say, "Wow, you must have been doing this for a long time!" or "In unison!" Then the girls might break from the unison to say Amanda was a 13-year scout, and Diana was an 11-year scout. People were impressed with that too. :)

Booth vs. "Made"

Apparently there's a show on MTV called "Made" which takes teens and *makes* them in to their dream thing...

This afternoon at 4:30, they will be at OUR high school taking applications and doing interviews for an episode. I guess it takes about a month to make people over.

I've never seen the show, but according to their website, they turn the geek into a rapper, the clutzy girl into a figure skater, etc.

Both Diana and Mary want to try out for this (why not?), but our first booth sale for GS cookies will be at Wal-Mart today from 4:00 to 6:00. Typically, we can sell up to 100 boxes per booth on the first weekend of sales (altho the forecast is for rain, and it's so stinkin' early in the year, I'm not all that hopeful). However, we do sign up for our booth slots on a lottery basis, and I can't just dump the first weekend sales. This is the best booth time I got - We'd be left with tons of unsold cookies!

So my compromise is that Mary should go to the tryouts for Made and try to be there early. Once she's done, she can trade places with Diana at the booth sale. That way both girls get to try out, and both will do their sales.

We'll lure Mary into the plan with Taco Bell...

Canadian Flag

Last week, the fifth graders from my school visited the local VA hospital to sing patriotic songs to the veterans. It was pretty cool. I was there to assist the student from my classroom, and got a little extra tour finding all the wheelchair ramps :)

While we were going through the rehab center, there was a bunch of information posted on a white board, including, "On this day in 1965, Canada adopted the Maple Leaf flag."

I'm thinking - hang on, I was still living there in 1965. What did the flag before this one look like?

Well, there was a period of time where they flew the British Union Jack, and/or the Canadian Ensign flag.

The Canadian Ensign flag actually looks a bit familiar to me.

This all happened because of the The Great Flag Debate in 1964 when a new Prime Minister was elected.

Out of all that came our Maple Leaf flag. I'm glad they picked it - I've always really liked it!

Cookie Time

It's actually a pretty small haul this year. Most of these were pre-ordered, and I have enough for a couple of booth sales, or maybe just the first one since we're going to be at Wal-Mart the first weekend of sales.



Connor helped me separate out the orders last night. I had written little slips for each order, and he read them off to me while I collected the boxes. Then we taped the slip to one of the boxes in the group. Diana has some to bring to school tomorrow, and then in the afternoon, we'll need to go to Lee's old job because he had gotten orders for her there :/ Lee is not going to be joining us, but we did phone the floor manager so she could let the rest of the people there know their cookies would be in on Friday. I didn't want those folks to go buy booth cookies, thinking since Lee isn't there anymore, they wouldn't get their pre-order!

Looks like Connie

Diana's friend took these shots. I don't like them well enough to have them be her senior photo, but they both remind me a lot of my older sister, Connie.



I guess it's the angle or something...

Usually Diana looks more similar to Carolyn than Connie to me :)

Friends

I don't have a Costco card anymore. The closest one to us right now is an hour away in Eugene, and we just didn't get there often enough to warrant the membership.

However there are people I work with that do get up to Eugene more frequently. Costco has a great price on Nutella. It's like $8.00 for two large jars. If I try to get it in the grocery store, it's almost $4.00 for one small jar - probably a third of the side of as the large one.

Connor decided recently that he likes Nutella sandwiches. He didn't want PB&J (probably got sick of it), but now we don't have a sandwich for him if we run out of Nutella. So I asked the ladies at work to get me some the next time they go to Costco.

This last weekend, two of my co-workers went there. They both decided to get me two packages of two, so I wouldn't run out so fast again. So now I have EIGHT. LOL

Won't Make the Final Cut

We finally had some decent weather today (actual sun!!) so I forced Diana to grab some outfits & call her friend who does photography to come and take some shots around town for Senior pictures.




Here's Diana calling on her friend's cell phone to tell Lee I locked my keys in the car (I had my camera - that was the important thing!)








Here's Diana's ghost emerging from the trees.

















She just wanted to hang upside down, but it would look weird on the wall & in the yearbook, I think.

















And here she's distracted by a mouse. It's in the left corner of the photo. We decided it was mentally slow, since it was letting Diana hand-feed it, as well as letting Diana's friend get her camera within 3 inches of its face.

Both girls jumped when it stopped eating and started hopping around. Hee.

Diana Wins!

Wheee!

Today was the assembly at the high school where they announced the winners of the video contest & Diana got First Place! She will get a check for $100.00!


She didn't get surprised, because Mary was at the first assembly, and Diana was attending the second one. As soon as Mary heard Diana had won, she texted her "you won!" Then an older lady Diana doesn't know heard Diana talking about the video before they went into the assembly, and she asked if Diana had done the anime one. Diana said "yes" and the lady congratulated her on her win - heh.


Lee was able to go to the assembly too, and he said Diana's video got a lot of great reactions. Later, there were lots of kids with their hands up at their heads doing the Carmelldansen :P

Diana got a lot of good kudos ;) Yay!

Here's the link again if you want to see it (or if you missed it before). Diana's Pretty Girls Video

Get Smarter & Feed People

This site has been around a while. It's just kind of cool.

If you have a few minutes, check how good your vocabulary is.

I try to play until I get to 1,000 grains of rice donated. Don't worry - it's legit. The rice is paid for by advertising on the website.

Fun!

Free Rice

Time for a Haircut

Connor's not a huge fan of haircuts, but he's gotten SO much better than when he was younger.

He still doesn't like the shears, so I do a scissor cut for him. As long as he can watch what I'm doing, he'll let me go for quite a while.

So in these shots, he's sitting on the bathroom counter with his feet in the sink right after having had a bath.



In the second shot, he's pretty much ready to call it quits, so I said we'd be done after 20 more cuts.

Then he dutifully counted each snip from 1 to 20, and then we were done. I probably could have finished in 10, but I gave myself some extra room to fix mistakes.

Cats

I like cats. Lee doesn't. Probably has something to do with the fact that their dander makes him not be able to breathe.

In any case, I had a great cat growing up. Her name was Mietze (German for kitty) and I remember her often. I chose her name for my Warcraft hunter character's pet - and I continue to play my hunter with Mietze, even though there are better pets to use when you play the game.

Diana just sent me an email with funny cat photos.

I hadn't seen a cat from the bottom up before in a laying position.

And to me, it looks like the cat is surprised it was caught doing this to the dog. Almost as if there's some secret cat organization that we're not supposed to know about - and this photo proves cats are capable of so much more than we give them credit for... hmmm.

Then again, I really love our dog, Liberty. She does what no cat would do - warn of danger. #1 way to protect against burglars! While she is typically pretty shy, I get the feeling she would go ahead & attack an intruder to protect us if she had to. But she would have been barking long before they ever entered the house!

Life Change Again

If you checked Lee's blog in the last few days, you'll know that he was let go from his job on Thursday. It came as a shock - all he'd heard was how great things were going and how they were going to continue to expand. There had been a little something a couple of weeks ago when there was a big meeting about how the company was doing, but the owners had come out of that very happy - "giddy" was the term Lee used.

That's what makes me think this was their plan from the start. They only needed him about 6 months to set up the new building - after that, it was done. I'm thinking now, it's better he's out of there if this is how these people run a business. The guy that was working with Lee on IT stuff was already overwhelmed, and now he'll have to do both jobs. This might just blow up in their faces.

Lee has had a rough few days. It's pretty damn depressing. He's not one to want to talk about it once it's done though. He wants to move on.

I've always been kind of a long-term planner. I like to think ahead and consider best & worst case scenarios. I figure in my mind, that'll help me be prepared one way or the other. And I do tend to be pretty prepared - ask my Girl Scouts :)

We're okay for a while - they did give him a little severance pay, and I'm the one carrying health insurance. My income isn't as much as Lee's was, but with unemployment benefits, it will keep us going.

I don't mind telling people he's looking for a job - maybe someone knows about a position opening where he can apply. Maybe it will be better than where he was. If not, it will work until he does find something better.

Oh - if you had Lee's cell phone number - delete it. That was from the company.

In the worst case scenario: We come camping for an extended time in your backyard... At least I have all the gear.

Best case: Not sure yet - send prayer & positive thoughts and I'll let you know when it happens!