Darkness

* This post was written last night*

It has been laundry day here and my word, my family has been having some sort of contest to see who could wear the most underwear.  I really don’t know what to make of it.  For some reason or another, I always wash the underwear all together.  It just feels right to wash like things.  You have the whites pile, the towels, the Lila pink pile, the darks, the Mattie brights and the underwear pile.  Usually its a rather small load of only about 28 items, one pair per day per person who wears underwear and lives in our house.  But this week, I have no idea what’s going on.  It’s like everyone hid their dirty ditties from the week before and are just now bringing them out.  If I didn’t know better, I’d wonder if maybe we weren’t doing someone else’s laundry, too.

And in other news here, our power is out.  I should probably be saving the battery here on the laptop, but I really don’t think we are in any sort of danger here that is going to make having a charged computer a life or death issue.  I figure, it’s really all I have to do, so I may as well blog away until the battery runs out.  The power went out right as I was in the middle of dinner.  They dishwasher was right in the middle of a cycle and the washer and dryer were doing their thing, as well.  I had just got my rice going on the stove and out went the power.  It didn’t really bother any of us for the first hour, except the kids were fully expecting dinner to be served and that plan went out with the power.  Thankfully, our favorite pizza guy Daddy, showed up before we had to resort to eating the dog or cereal. Our power was out, but it looked like it was still working across the street and even down the road a bit, so we decided that we would just eat and then head out for a late night at the pool.  The kids had napped late, were fed and there really wasn’t much else to do.  We gathered up bathing suits (and pajamas and shampoo because I figured I may as well shower them and get them ready for bed while we were somewhere with hot water) and pool toys and found our towels, all in the dark and were all set to spend the evening at the JCC.  And then the rain started up again.

So instead, we just sat outside on the porch and watched the lightning bugs until the rain started to get rather heavy and Mattie was convinced that we were completely unsafe and we better go back inside right away before we surely died. It was fun while it lasted though.

We did our best to get jammied and brush teeth, clear pathways from the door to the kid’s beds so that in the event of an emergency no one would be harmed while trying to escape from the room and then I read our worship stories by the light of a headlamp.  There really is something about a very congested mom reading by the light of a headlamp that will stay with you forever.  I imagine this being one of those nights that the two older ones talk about and laugh about, mostly at my expense 20 or even 10 years from now.  Slowly the memory will come back to them and they more it comes, the more ridiculous it will become.

“Do you remember that summer night when our power went out for now real reason?”

“Yeah, and we were having worship on the couch and mom was wearing that ridiculous head lamp, like she was a miner or something.”

“And do you also remember that she was really congested and her words sounded all funny? She looked and sounded ridiculous.”

Then they will recreate the whole thing.  I hope they remember the tiny tidbits like how Mattie was also feeling all around in my ears because I kept telling her how my congestion made it hard for me to hear very well so she was determined to help me out.

They are all asleep up in their beds nows, and I’m really not sure what to do with myself in a quiet house that refuses to let me do laundry, or any other sort of cleaning task. So, I will type….

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Last week I noticed a few garage sales while driving around during the kids VBS.  I love a good garage sale, if for no other reason just to get out and look.  I am a very nosey person, a very curious person I should say, so just looking can be entertainment enough for me.  It’s always fun to see what people are getting rid of and how much they are asking for it.  You never really know what you might find at a garage sale.  If you have even a minute of free time, it really can be worth it to stop and check one out.  Especially if it’s in a nice part of town.

But to these garage sales, I would like to air a complaint.  Not that it will ever be heard here on my little blog, but it makes me feel like I am saying it publicly and that’s good enough.  So here goes, my complaint to everyone in the East Memphis area who was having a garage sale that I stopped at this past Friday:

I do not appreciate it when you don’t put ANY sort of pricing on your items.  None what so ever.  I understand that tagging and pricing every little item can be tedious and sometimes useless because the stickers can come off and so often people haggle over the price anyway.  But nevertheless, having some sort of a starting point to understanding your pricing is good.  Even if I don’t agree with you, I like to at least know from the get go what your thinking.  If you don’t want to tag every little thing, maybe a sign on a table grouping items together would be an idea.  Like a $5 table or all the pants $1.00.  Just an idea, something to let me know what your price points are.  But I am not a fan of these sales where nothing is tagged and every little thing, you have to go up and interrupt the conversation that is going on between the garage sale bosses, just to ask about something that you really aren’t very interested in anyways.

I think you all know me well enough to know that I like a good deal, and I already understand that if something is being sold at a garage sale it’s probably significantly cheaper than it would be if I were purchasing it at say, Target.  However, even though it may be significantly cheaper, there are some things that I still wouldn’t want to buy unless they were ridiculously cheaper.  Like practically free.  Especially considering that I am buying it out of your garage.  I feel like anything purchased out of someone else’s garage immediately goes down in value.  There was one sale that I stopped at that had several pairs of little boys jeans for sale.  Reese doesn’t necessarily need any jeans and these weren’t really the style that I typically buy for him, however, I know of a family that could use these jeans and if they were regular garage sales prices of say 50 cents, I would have taken all of them.  But the thought of having to go over and interrupt the very important conversation going on about the new choice of buns that they neighborhood pool was serving with their hot dogs this summer just to (possibly) be told that they were $5 and me then feel so incredibly cheap and put them back and walk away, well I just couldn’t handle that.  So instead I just walked away completely.  I do not need to be made to feel even more cheap than I already do for stopping to look at your cast-offs.

So to those of you looking to have a garage sale this weekend, please remember to at least put some sort of pricing up somewhere so that people don’t have to ask about every little thing.  I know some people enjoy a good haggle, but they at least need a starting point.  And some of us are just down right embarrassed to ask. Thank you.

And while I am on the subject about the people living around me, I have noticed something else that just seems down right ridiculous.  The fitness craze has hit again and I understand that.  It is summer time after all and people want to look good in their sleeveless and shorts.  That and it’s not freezing outside so they don’t have to use the elliptical machines and treadmills.  I completely understand and on the rare occasion that I feel like getting my fitness on, I prefer it to be outside.  Totally makes sense. But what doesn’t make any sort of sense is the folks doing their workouts in the middle of the day.  The heat has hit Memphis already.  The other day it was 98 degrees outside before 10:00 in the morning and with the humidity it felt like somewhere around 125.  I don’t even want to be outside for the walk from my car into my house (and that’s in the garage) yet, here is my next door neighbor girl coming out to go for her daily jog at 1:30 in the afternoon.  It’s the hottest possible time in the day, even the grass is trying to figure out a way to crawl back into the ground to escape the heat and she is coming out for a jog.  I don’t understand why someone would do that to themselves.  The man across the street was out mowing while I was putting the kids to bed because it’s just too darn hot to be out in the middle of the day.  But here she is, as though on a death march, to run around the neighborhood.  I don’t know if there’s a cute boy who lives a few houses down that she is hoping to catch the eye of or what.  But instead of thinking she too is a cutie, he’s going to think she’s an idiot to go running when it’s hot like fire outside.  And just imagine what he’s going to think when she passes out from heat stroke in his front yard.  I’m not sure that’s the impression she really wants to leave him with…just a thought.

And on a completely random note, Lila has a new word.  I am about 97% sure that she said “Batman” the other day.  She was pointing to something and I asked her what she wanted it.  “At ma” she said and I followed her little finger to the batman figure sitting on the counter.  I guess we have all the important bases covered now, “Lila, mama, eat, yes, and Batman”.  I don’t know why you would need to say anything else.

 

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