Happy Monday, friends!  There is a huge thunderstorm happening right now.  Strong winds and heavy rain.  It reminds me of a setting in a scary story.  One of the cats snuck out the door when I was letting the dogs out earlier and he stopped at the end of the porch and said nope and had me carry him back him.  Occasionally, the dogs will bark at the thunder.  I mean, they are gonna get that sucker that dares make all that noise.

It wasn't a super exciting weekend around here.  The kiddos went to their dads on Friday night.  Both of them were home on Saturday night though.  I had to pick Alli up from work.  I don't mind picking her up, it just feels really late some nights.  I had some outdoor things planned for Saturday morning and those were derailed due to thunderstorms.  I ended up working on decorations and cleaning up the front room.  I cleaned up Peyton's room, dusted and sweeped and mopped his floor.  I feel people saying "Why isn't he doing it?"  He does a pretty good job keeping his room clean.  It's just easier for me to do those things.  

Peyton and I did go school shopping at Target before his dad picked him up on Friday.  High School school shopping is the easiest.  Notebooks, pens and pencils.  We will get anything the teachers request after school starts.

Peyton's schedule is M/W with a rotating Friday.  Next weekend, I am going to set up a desk in his room and move his dresser to the other side.  That way he has a place to study on his Remote days.

Alli picked her electives for full remote learning.  I don't know if I've talked about it before.  She is going to do Lifetime Fitness, Sociology and Medical Terminology (I figured that would help with the whole wanting to go into the dental field thing).

The kids did have their yearly wellness visit on Friday.  Peyton got his sports form filled out and we are hopeful he can do baseball in the Spring.  They both got the flu shot.  They had just arrived in the office.  I don't think the flu will be as horrible this year due to all the cleaning procedures and precautions put in place due to the pandemic.  

I watched the second season of "Trinkets" on Netflix and watched the movie "The Nightcrawler".  They were both pretty good.  I enjoyed the end of Trinkets just because the truth came out.  I watched "Chemical Hearts" on Prime and I also enjoyed that.  I finished watching "High Score" on Netflix, which is a mini series on the history of video games.  It was pretty awesome learning about it.  I am still going to be the Street Fighter champ in my family.  Rainy mornings are meant for movies/tv shows.

I am so far behind in watching Big Brother.  Like a week behind.  I need to catch up!  I'll try to do that this week.  I fast forward through a lot of the drama parts because they always recap them during evictions, so it's not missing much.

On Sunday, the kids and I went shopping at a few places and tried to get a late lunch somewhere.  We tried going to a few places, but one was closed and the others were doing delivery only.  We settled on Subway.  Kinda a bummer, I really wanted Pine and Bamboo!  

I took Alli to work, went grocery shopping and wrote a few more Pen Pal letter.  I planted some seeds and we will see if they will grow.  

Happy Friday!

 Hi everyone!  Happy Friday!  Long time, no blog.  I've been lingering around, reading blogs, commenting on a few, but the post writing energy was lacking.  I would start to write and then get distracted and not finish.  Today is a half-day for work!  The kids have their well visits this afternoon.  I enjoy half day Fridays.  

We've done a few fun things recently.

My mom, Alli and my two nieces went with me to Whiskers Cat Cafe.  I was so much fun.  It's $10 per person for around 50 minutes in the cafe and you get a drink.  The kittens are the ones up for adoption.  They have resident kitties.  I think one of them was as big as my Freddie boy.  One of my nieces is under the age of ten, so I just emailed to make sure it was okay if she went.  The owner thought she was perfectly polite and handled the kittens so well.  I noticed on their website that they are having a Paint and Drink night at the cafe a few times next month, I might want to check it out.  We went to Margarita's for Mexican food afterwards.  I think this is the second time I've eaten in a restaurant since all of this started.  It was odd, but I enjoyed the food so much!

I decided to try the whole pen pal thing again.  I flopped last time and I'm the worse.  So far, I've received two letters.  One I've written back already, the other one, I'm not sure how to respond.  But I will.  I've also sent a few off into postal mail land.  I have some literary postcards that I am going to send to a few people.  I'm having fun writing!

Peyton got his braces off!!  He wouldn't let me get a before and after pic though, because that's who he is as a person. :)

Alli's leg had started hurting her a weekend or two ago.  She though because she did a backflip and hadn't done one in a while.  Then, she felt a lump that hurt on Sunday. I made an appt with her drs office.  Her doctor was out, so we saw a Nurse Practitioner.  She felt Alli's leg and suspected a hernia.  They had us go over to a pediatric ER and see a certain doctor.  I didn't even know there was a Peds ER there.  We drove over there and walked right in.  From start to finish we were only there about 1.5 hours.  They didn't even check out temp there, probably because we already had a temp check sticker from the doctors office hospital.  They got her into a room and saw a doctor within 5 minutes.  The doctor suspected that it was actually a swollen lymph node.  The Peds Surgeon came in and looked at it and came to the same conclusion.  They did do an ultrasound to make sure it hadn't ruptured or if it was filled with pus.  Negative on both of those.  Thank goodness, it wasn't something serious.  We followed up with the Peds Surgeon earlier this week and it's mostly gone and he isn't concerned about it.  I have to tell you on the follow up, once we got in the room, the doctor was in there within 1 minute.  No jokes.    I have to give this hospital a 10/10 on their service and the doctors for their follow ups.  

I was re-elected to the Executive Leadership Team for the Kansas City Roller Warriors.  I am still in the same position.  I am over the Bout Productions (all the games we put on), Practice Committee and Facilities.  I enjoy it most of the time.  We had a meeting earlier this month to get a game plan going.  It was super productive and it was nice to see people in person!  I've been regularly attending Zoom meetings with league members on how to make roller derby more accessible to humans who want to play and humans who want to watch, as well as, community outreach.  My first plan of action is hosting a blood drive.  I have everything set up and it will be on October 13th.  The Red Cross rep told me they are short 4000 units of blood that week.  He said this is mainly because high school and colleges aren't hosting blood drives right now and that is where 25% of their donations come from.  I am waiting for the fliers from the Red Cross, then we are able to advertise and get people signed up.  This will be my first time donating blood.  I'm a little nervous, but I know it will be fine.  Once I have a practice committee in place, we will have the task of planning return to skills practices.  

Alli and I tried out a brand new coffee shop in our area.  I don't drink coffee, so I got a strawberry smoothie.  Alli got a vanilla latte and chorizo burrito.   It was all v good.   

Voter turn out was so poor in my county.  Only 40% of registered Democrats voted.  (41% of Republicans)  I did the mail in voting and checked on the website to make sure mine was counted.  It was received only two days after I mailed it.  

Tanner has been sending me pics from way over yonder.  He sent me some camels and a video of him playing golf in the desert.  I was like how do you find your golf balls and he said there are literally thousands out there.  I'm getting ready to send him another package and he requested Cheez-its and M&Ms.  I don't know if the M&Ms will survive the trip, but we will try.

NASA has a website, where it shows what the Hubble Telescope saw on your birthday.  Check out mine below.

My Facebook memories are showing fun times I had and I am missing those.  Ugh.  I want to travel.  I am going to have to cancel our California trip and I am super upset about it.

And here are just some pictures. 

Johnsons Shut Ins State Park

 Johnson's Shut Ins is another Missouri State Park located in the Southeast region of the state.

Y'all, this place is so beautiful, amazing and fun!  It's a 10/10 recommend.

When you drive into the park, you have to follow the signs to the Shut Ins Entrance.  They do monitor the number of cars going through and once they reach the limit, the Shut Ins are closed for a while to allow people to clear out.  We were car 61 the day we went and got a parking spot right up front.  

We visited only the Shut Ins while we were there and is the most popular place in the park. Shut Ins is a term for a gorge in a stream.  This stream happens to be the Black River.  The Shut Ins are hard, volcanic bedrock.  The river flows through the steep slopes of the ancient mountains in the area.  The rhyolite rock does not erode easily and makes the shut ins what it is.

There are small water falls, both big and small pools, smaller streams, deeper sections, natural water slides and fish that hang out with you.  This place was so much fun!  We enjoyed the smaller stream where the water got deeper.  There were also places where people could jump off the rocks into a v deep section.

We did a little bit of the hike and one part was straight up the mountain!  There are also a lot of stairs on one part of the boardwalk.

Enjoy some pictures!

Can you see the kids?

One of the deeper sections in the center of this.

Also, lots of fish!

Not Just a Mom: Back to School

HI all!  I am linking up with Dara from Not in Jersey.  The August subject is Back to School.  Whew! Who knew at the beginning of 2020, this is what August would look like.  There is so much debate and people shaming over the choices they are making for their children.  We are all doing our best and what we think is the best for our children.  Put yourself in the other persons shoes for a moment or if someone can't do that, maybe they should just mind their own business.  It hurts my heart that people can be so mean and cruel when most humans are just trying to do their best.

So, here are our Back To School Plans:

My oldest son, Tanner, doesn't have to mess with the Back To School plans!  He graduated in 2018 and is in the military and loving it.  When he gets back from his deployment, he does plan on taking some classes at the community college and see where that takes him, so maybe next year, I'll be doing a back to school for him!

My daughter, Alli, has opted for Distanced Learning the first semester.  My children are in high school and I allowed them to make the choice on how they want to learn.  We haven't gotten a plan from the school yet, they stated they would be emailing it today.  She asked yesterday if she would get school pictures and I said she would regardless of if it's at the school or we need to get someone to take them.  I am lucky that Alli is older and I will be working from home a majority of the time.  I am also looking into her taking some college courses and her ACTs in the spring.  Her English class already counts towards college credit  this year! yay!  What ACT Study prep books do you recommend?  She is still wanting to go to college in the dental field (Dentist!)  We are getting info from colleges that have amazing dental schools and we didn't even request it.  We manifested it..somehow. :)

My youngest son, Peyton, will be going back to school in person.  I will most likely take him to school in the morning and he will ride the bus home.  They will be having in person school 2-3 days per week and online learning for two days.  Peyton admitted to himself that HE needs to be in school or he will not do well this year.  Who would have thunk his first year of high school would be like this?  Ugh.  It's stressing me a bit.  He does want to play baseball in the spring and I think that will be v good for him.

I haven't done school shopping yet.  I am going to stock up on spiral notebooks, pens and pencils.  I have plenty of water bottles and we already have a ton of backpacks.  I will get some index cards and highlighters.  Other than that, we don't need much this year.  The school supply lists always get shorter as the years go on.  I am not sad about that.

School does not start until after Labor Day.  I know the kids are happy with extra vacation days.  (you know, since MARCH!)

Happy Fri-yay!

Happy Friday everyone!  I hope everyone had a good week and is looking forward to a wonderful weekend!

I'm not sure of my plans yet, but I definitely want to do some things around the house and go on a hike somewhere.  I have  few parks in the area on my list.

Some things that happened this past week:

• Alli caught a guy trying to pay with a fake $20 and got praised at work.  This guy had done it to a few of the carhops, but now they have his picture from the security cameras.
• We tried the new Chocolate Chip Biscuits and they were delicious.
• I was refused change somewhere.  I wasn't even given the chance to give them exact change and/or pay with my card.  I was a bit shocked, but after ranting to myself for a moment, I let it go.
• I got the doggos ice cream cones!  They were so happy!
• I am down 3 lbs from my drs appt earlier this month.  I did weigh myself on my scale before going into the drs and they both had the same read out.  I am pretty confident.
• My mom came over for lunch on Sunday.
• I watched the Hoarders episode of Carol and it reminds me so much of a family situation, not the hoarding, but the actions of Carol.  I had to tell my mom to watch it.
• I submitted my student loan recert,  I am on the PSLF and have to recert every year to make sure I am still eligible.  I am.  They have already processed it.
• I went to Marshalls and found some new shirts, a skirt and candles.
• I ran to the grocery store and passed one of my friends about five times before recognizing her because of the face masks.
• I received a Federal Jury Duty summons.  My original summons was for April, but it was dismissed because of Covid.  Now, I'm on call all through September.  Honestly, I would love to serve on it.  
• I updated my AT&T Uverse and Internet and got a better deal.  
• I met up with a group of people and we cleaned out the storage closet at Memorial Hall.  It took us less than 2 hours and it looks 100% better.  We got rid of all the garage sale stuff that people just left there (none of us cleaning had anything to do with the event) and trash.  There was so much trash and broken items.  Next step is to get in there in and organize our stuff.  
• I got a Sonic S'mores shake.  OMGoodness!  You must try it!
• I had a Zoom call with three other derby folx on how to make derby more accessible for our community and what we can do in the community to improve it and ourselves.  
• Last thing, I started rewatching the Twilight movies.  I've made it though the first one and halfway through the second one.  I have a Twilight story. :)

Twilight story:

Way back when I attended UMKC for undergrad, I had a group of people I would each lunch with each day.  They were also in my education classes.  We would sit at Einstein Bagels and chat.  One day, the youngest of our group was like "OMG!  I just read the best book ever, it's called Twilight!  It's going to blow up and be huge! Read it before it does!"  And yes, all the exclamation points are accurate.  We asked what it was about and she told us a brief summary.  I went out and got the book.  I read it and enjoyed it.  I picked up New Moon and read that and enjoyed it.  Eclipse had just been released, I read that one too.  THEN it blew up huge!  She was right.  When Breaking Dawn was released, I got that one and read it too.   

This is the same girl that got me to sign up for Facebook too, back when you had to have a college email to sign up.  

Car Rides are our favorite!