Too. Much. Stuff.

(for someone who seemingly has done nothing forever)

I don't know where to start. I've packed a lot into 2 days. On Thursday I:

1. Tested the new DVD player and returned the defective DVD player.
2. Demanded the Target Associate prove the new selection worked and then bought it.
3. Drove to Home County, ate lunch with my brother, went to a garage sale and installed PhotoshopCS on my brother's computer and gave him a quick lesson.
4. Went to my folks, set up the DVD player, watched bits of Fahrenheit 9/11 and listened to bits of Johnny Cash (Mom was grooving to the tunes).
5. Helped my dad put a one-row corn planter together.
6. Went for seed corn with my dad so we could test the calibration of the planter and saw horrific crimes against the environment, nature, God, and anything that is holy.
7. Contemplated the best course of action to report said crimes.
8. Worked on planter calibration.
9. Went to Dam Town and visited with an old friend who was filling in for my Post Master sister-in-law at the Post Office.
10. Went to the dam and took photos for a potential job.
11. Went to my sister-in-laws and helped her clean/sort/throw the remnants of her dead brother's life and drank some beer.
12. Bought a beat-up coffee table from sister-in-law's dead brother and stuffed it into the back seat of my Subaru.
13. Made it home safely.

Friday:
1. Checked emails and blogs, dinked around on computer.
2. Unloaded coffe table from car.
3. Drove to Ames on the fucking interstate.
4. Parked blocks and blocks away from Beyer Hall, as per advice received from H.
5. Walked a long fucking way to Beyer Hall.
6. Got to Beyer Hall too late to see my sister-in-law (hubby's side of the family) compete in her first competition at Special Olympics where she got a silver medal.
7. Went to lunch with the hubby's family (and H, of course)
8. Went back to ISU campus where H and I wandered around.
9. Saw an art exhibition that was open for Alumni Days. The exhibit we wanted to see wasn't open til later.
10. Hiked around the campus some more and went back to Beyer Hall.
11. Sat with hubby's fam who had saved good seats.
12. Waited for sister-in-law's race and tried to fight off vertigo from sitting on a narrow seat on a vertical surface overlooking the pool.
13. Waited for race and tried to avoid the clanging in my head from the reverberating noise and ignore the vertigo and ignore the kid who was climbing over the seats and kicking me constantly.
14. Made friends with the woman sitting next to me and cheered for her teams while waiting for one race.
15. Saw sister-in-law win!
16. Went to the winner's platform with H and took pictures of our gold medalist.
17. H and I bolted from the fam and went hiked to catch the exhibit that was closed earlier.
18. Exihibit not what we expected.
19. Hiked to H's car and went to Reiman Gardens.
20. OMG. Wonderful. Experience. The butterfly garden was incredible. Everything was so beautiful and the good stuff isn't even in bloom!
21. H took me back to my car which had not been stolen or vandalized.
22. Took the scenic route home to shake the city and interstate traffic off me. (E18!)

Today:
Got out of my jammies about noon, filled bird feeders, got the mail, contiued contemplating reporting crimes, worked on a logo and that's enough. I'm pooped.

Happy Mother's Day

This lamb was born in our pasture on Mother's Day. In this picture he is just a few hours old (he's much cuter now especially with the white tip on his soon to be whacked off tail) O.K., he was born the day after Mother's Day. Close enough. O.K., he wasn't born so much as he was pulled from the womb by his observant owner who happened to be driving by and saw the ewe in distress, thrashing wildly in her pain.

I had no idea this had occurred until I went out and saw a new lamb. Cool! No muss, no fuss on my part. I've been arm deep in sheep midwifery before and like goat raising, those days are behind me. Thank God. But there is nothing cuter than a little lamb hopping and bopping in the grass. So I'm glad the sheep and lambs are there and also glad they are not mine.

As for human mothers, I managed to remember Mother's Day and procured appropriate gifts (mother & mother-in-law) well in advance, which was quite remarkable for me. It's hard to find gifts for people who have tons of junk already. Plus the fact I remembered it was Mother's Day. Woot.

I went to visit my mother last Friday and brought her gift. I was excited to give her something that I thought she would use and thought she would like. It was a DVD player. Just a little, inexpensive one.

Oh, you shouldn't have, oh, pj, oh, oh. She seemed happy. I was thrilled that I made her happy. Until I couldn't get the damn thing to work. I had her all primed to watch the Michael Moore Fahrenheit 911 DVD and nothing, but nothing made the player play. I even took the player into my brother's house in town thinking HE WOULD MAKE IT WORK. But it never happened.

So I picked up a Pasquales pizza and went back to my folks and we ate the best pizza in the world. I left my folks with my car full of stuff, including the defective product which went back to WalMart today. WalMart sucks!

WalMart took the thing back without even looking in the box. WTF?? When I purchased it, I got the alarms and the shake-down at the door when I was leaving. But when I return it they don't even look to see if the box is filled with faucet parts from my junk drawer??

I took my money and ran to Target and got a replacement. I will test it first, then if it works I will take it to Mom. Then mother's day will be happy.