NOW What am I going to do?

I admit it....I am addicted to television. I have shows that I watch almost every weeknight. Oddly, I don't watch it much on the weekends. But I leave home at 7am, spend 9 hours at work, then workout 3 days a week and get home at 6 or 6:30pm every night. I don't feel like doing much but zoning out in front of the tv. I do other things sometimes, but don't have to if I don't want to. (I am very fortunate to have a hubby that cooks dinner every weeknight so I don't have to.)

But this week, stuff ended.

The series is over.

This season is over.

This season is over.

So, now what will I watch???

Oh wait!

So You Think You Can Dance starts tonight!

Yes, I will be watching.

I TOLD you that I love tv.

DISCLAIMER: This is my blog and I can write what I want. If you think addiction to tv is a terrible thing, you are entitled to your opinion. But I am not going for treatment. HA!

I received an award!

Christy at Christy's Coupon Corner gave me an award! Thank you Christy!

There are rules that go with receiving this award. They are:

1. Thank the person that gave it to you.

2. Share seven things about yourself.

3. Pass this to 15 bloggers you recently met and think they are fantastic.

4. Contact those bloggers and let them know you gave it to them.

My seven things:

1. I spent 38 years of my life convinced that I did not want to be a mom. Then I met a man with 3 kids and almost immediately fell in love with all 4 of them. When we married, I discovered that I had waited all of my life to be a mom to these 3 kids.

2. I graduated from college with a degree in Fashion Merchandising, with minors in Business and English and have never worked in the Fashion field.

3. I love being a grandma and didn't insist on a cutsey name. I am "Grandma".

4. Some weekends, I love to have one lazy day where I do nothing but watch movies or read a book all day.

5. I will read anything and don't really have a favorite genre.

6. My favorite job of all time was working on computers. I love to take them apart and put them back together again.

7. I am a total city girl, but a few years ago, while on vacation, my sister's goat died giving birth to 2 babies. Since Sissy had to go to work every day, I taught those babies to drink from a bottle and fed them multiple times a day.

I think these bloggers are awesome. (Some are not new to me, but I just love them!)

1. Sonya Ann at A Mom, Money, and More

2. Slugmamma at DON'T READ THIS BLOG; IT IS BORING

3. Amiyhra at 4 Hats and Frugal

4. Erin at Jane4Girls

5. Jeannie at Jeannie's Happy World

6. Stephanie at Katy Couponers

7. Marilyn at Marilyn's Money

8. Pam at Mom's Mutterings

9. Annie Jones at Real Life Living

10. Val at Sew Not My Day

11. Debbie at Suburb Sanity

12. Shopping Golightly at The Thrifty Chicks

13. Pam at The Thrifty Things

14. Denise at Together We Save

15. Yonca at Yonca is Cooking

There you go...some of my favorite blogs. If you don't know them, go check them out!

I am so handy to have around.

While on vacation, I went to visit my baby sister in her new house in a tiny, tiny town in Tennessee. Her house is really pretty! One room that they were working on was her fiance's "man room." LOL! He is a hunter, so had some hunting pics, some guns and some other stuff in there, but the curtains were a little "girly."

Sissy mentioned that she and Mom had found fabric to make curtains, but they had not been made yet. Sissy doesn't sew and Mom hadn't gotten to them yet. So, I said, "I'll make them!"

I tried to sew them on Mom's sewing machine, but it would not sew the fabric. It is hard to describe the fabric, but it is sort of like a thin ultra suede with a slick back. We thought Mom's machine was messed up, but it worked on other fabrics.

So we started brainstorming. I thought I would just take them home with me and see if they would work on my machine. I also thought I could make no-sew curtains using fusible hem tape or some such thing. But when I mentioned that Sissy was hoping to have them by Fiancee's birthday, Mom said we should "go to town" and find something to that would work.

So, we went to town. We planned to go to WalMart, since there are no longer any fabric stores there, since WalMart ran them out of business. Oh, and WalMart has since gotten rid of their fabric departments! So, if Mom wants fabric, she has to go to Memphis. But some WalMarts still have sewing notions. We went to eat first...Chinese, yummy....and when we came out, I noticed a little quilting store. Mom said it was new as it has not been there the last time they were there. So I went in. It was a cute little store that had just opened a week before. And she had just what I needed. I won't go into detail about it, unless anyone asked. But we got it home and it worked great!! I made 4 panels for 2 windows.

Here are the products of my labors:

They were done in time for Fiancee's birthday and Sissy surprised him by hanging them when he wasn't home. He called me when he saw them...I had just gotten of the plane in Houston. He just loved them. In the lower left hand corner of the second pic, you can see his new deer head. LOL! He got it from the taxidermist on Monday. He is enjoying decorating his man room.

Back home and glowing with pride!

We have 3 new graduates in the family! My sister, Joan, and my niece, Shawna, graduated with their Associates Degrees in General Studies, from Black Hills University, on May 8. They graduated in South Dakota, but since they lived in Hawaii for many years, they gave each other leis as is Hawaiian tradition for graduates. After graduation, they met a young man from Hawaii, who was also graduating. My sister gave her his lei. The next day, on Mother's Day, my niece gave her lay to Joan.

My brother, Bob, graduated with his Associates Degree in Industrial Maintenance, from Northwest Mississippi Community College, on May 15. He started his new job with Kimberly Clark today!

(That's him with Mom and Dad before he headed off to graduation.)

Our entire family is so proud of all 3 of our new graduates!! They worked long and hard.

Checking in from vacation.

Hi, all! I am just checking in to make you all jealous of my relaxing vacation. LOL! Here are a few pics. My sister, Jackie, and her granddaughter, Navi, fertilizing tomato plants.

Dad filing a hoe as Navi supervises.

Dad mowing the yard.

Notice that I am NOT the one doing the work? LOL!

♫ I'm leaving on a jet plane...♪ ♪

...but i know when I'll be back again.

I am boarding a plane tomorrow morning to go to west Tennessee and visit my family!! I am so excited! I only go once a year, so I really miss them. My mom, dad, brother, 2 sisters and their families are all there, so it will be a riotous adventure every day. I will get to spend a totally relaxing week just hanging out with the fam. Take a look at where most of my time will be spent. These are 3 views from my parents' deck.

Then if you head straight across the yard here, you come to this. The path through the forest to the barn.Yes, this city girl will be spending a wonderful week in the country. I cannot wait!! I will post picks of the family next week, when I am visiting. (They live in the country, but they do have internet. LOL!)

My new toy....finally.

I finally got around to taking a couple of pics of my newest toy. Yes, I have had it for a week and a half, but I have been busy, okay.

Here it is (yes, that is my actual hand)

And open:

It is SO cute and I just love it! And besides being cute, it does exactly what I wanted it for. I have downloaded some ebooks...free ones of course...from the Amazon Kindle store. I changed the screen to portrait and it is the perfect e-reader. Of course, only one side is the reader and you have the keyboard on the other side. But when I want a break from reading, I can do other things like play games, write, or surf the net when at home or in a wifi hotspot.

The speaker on it is not so hot, BUT I plugged in the earbuds from my mp3 player and the sound was terrific!

It has a SD card reader, so when I am on vacation, taking pics, I can just pop the card out of my camera and pop it into my netbook and check them out and show them off.

It only weighs 2.86 lbs, so I can take it with me to read on the bus on my commute to work and it doesn't add much weight to my bag.

It is just perfect for me and I love it!

Who writes these blogs...

and why am I following them?

I realized a few days ago that I am missing out on posts on blogs that I really like because my dashboard is full of posts from so many blogs. I don't like finding out days later that my friends had a shelf almost kill them, or that there is a boring contest that I really want to win, or that I know someone that lives in Nashville and has been through terrible storms.

So I went to "manage" the blogs I am following. I was following 126!! OMG! 126 people are not following ME. So I started reviewing who I was following. Some are eay, since I see them everyday, SonyaAnn, McVal and Marilyn. But I found a couple that don't even exist anymore. Of course they were not filling up my dashboard.

What was filling it up was the blogs that have a couple thousand followers. They don't know me! I probably started following for good reasons, but now some of those blogs are just coupon links or total contest blogs. Now, I enjoy a good coupon or a good contest as much as the next guy. But I want to be able to find out what by really bloggy friends are up to. So I started weeding some out. I got rid of 15 today. I am hoping that stopping following those with huge numbers of followers will keep my dashboard down to a readable level.

I AM supposed to be working after all. LOL!

Thank you, God, for watching over Jessie.

This is my niece, Jessica, and her little girl, Navi. (This pic is from my vacation last year.)

Here is a recent pic of Navi:

I just found out last night that early Sunday morning, Jessica's home was hit by a tornado! While Jessie and Navi were there! How scary for the both of them!

Jessie said that she was asleep and rain woke her up. Then she realized that it was hail. Then part of the roof was ripped off and the windows imploded. She was terrified, but neither she or Navi got a single scratch on them.

My sister, Jessica's mom, said that the mobile home is probably to damaged to even consider repairing. But who knows, we have some pretty handy people in our family, so it might get repaired. I was already scheduled to go to Tennessee, to see the fam, next week. I think my sisters and I will be hitting some thrift stores to help Jessica get whatever she needs to replace.

Thank you, God, for watching over my family, every single day.

We will miss you, Oreo

On September 1, 1996, a little black and white kitten was born. A few weeks later a friend of the kitten's owner was looking for a new baby to give to her boyfriend. When the kitten was weaned, he came to live with that boyfriend. And when the boy and girl got married, the cat was part of their family. (along with other cats)

That kitten was Oreo. This is Oreo all grown up.

I got Oreo for Bob after we had dated for about 10 months. He wanted a kitten...maybe because I had 2 cats and they were so loveable. I put out the word I was looking for one and a friend at work told me her daughter's cat had had kittens a couple 0f weeks before, so I volunteered to take one.

When the kittens were ready, I didn't even go look at them. I just told Granny...the friend at work...to bring me a cute one. She brought the cutest, sweetest little black and white baby I had ever seen. (I don't have digital pics of Oreo as a baby, since that was before everyone and their 4 year old had a digital camera. LOL!)

The kitty spent the day at my office getting quite a lot of attention. And when he was tired, my assistant put him on a pillow in her drawer for a nap. (She had a little pillow in her car and went to get it.) Bob came to my office that afternoon to pick up his new kitty then went to pick up Chance for some reason. Maybe he was out of school early or something. I don't remember. Anyway, Chance said that the kitten looked like an Oreo cookie and that his name should be Oreo and that is how he got his name.

He has been a wonderful, loving cat and Bob's best buddy for 13 1/2 years. In December, his face looked a little swollen, so we thought he had an abscessed tooth. Took him to the vet, had the abscessed tooth pulled, but the vet felt there might be more wrong, so ran some tests.

In early January, Oreo was diagnosed with cancer...the bump on his upper jaw was a tumor on his cheekbone. We were so sad. The vet told us all our options, including radiation and chemo and our choice was to take care of Oreo as long as he was active and healthy. We did not want to subject him to misery just to try to keep him alive a little longer. Over the last few weeks, he started being less active, but he was still sweet, loving and on occasion proved to the other two cats that he was still the alpha male. He never cried, or acted like he was in pain, but we could tell the end was near.

We told our kids we thought it was time to put him to sleep soon and Meredith and Samantha came over to see him last Thursday. On Friday he didn't eat anything all day. He still didn't act like he was in pain, but he had gotten terribly thin over the last months and we knew that if he was not going to eat then he was ready to go. So, we took him Saturday to have him put to sleep.

It was really difficult and I cried like a baby the entire time. Hubby was more stoic and said it was a little easier since we had been preparing for 4 months. I thought it would be easier, but it wasn't. But at least we know that our wonderful Oreo is not in pain now.

Oreo was a beloved member of our family and we all loved him. We will miss him terribly.