First of all, I will never complain about being thristy again after reading about what the terrorized Russians went through on the 1st of September( in People magazine last night). I knew it was going to be hard to read, and I am sure they edited out stuff that was even grosser than the little children drinking urine because they were dying of thrist. That was a horrific experience on what should have been a glorious first day of school. I didn’t know that the terrorists had wired bombs all around the gym where all the hostages were and it blew up because the one that was hooked up to the basketball net fell down. God help the grieving family and friends left behind.
Personally and very insignificant as compared to above, I was up until 1:30 redoing my blog. I was fa-arting with putting some more bling bling on my sidebar and though the preview was fine, it screwed up after I republished it. I had to republish the template and lost all the goodies that were already on there. It wasn’t hard to fix, but gee, what messed it up so badly? I think my mouse is going and I must have deleted html without knowing it.
I am so tired of trying to do everything around here. Can she paint, wash clothes, sort junk, dust, make beds, make dinner and still have time to work on a cross stitch project that desperately needs to be done in 2 weeks? I need my time on the computer to get my thoughts together before I plunge into the day.
I was reading the blog of a young woman I know who is a freshman at a Penna. university. First she was all sad and missed her family and boyfriend. Then she must have had a revelation and started to look around and appreciate how unique everything and everyone is. I thought that was a cool way to cope with feeling alone and like you are in a new universe. I felt that way more than once at different schools when I was a newbie. You miss the sheltering arms of your family. I kinda felt that way after I had Sean almost 18 yrs ago too. My mom was here for almost a week, but she was cooking and cleaning and not really helping with the baby that much. When she went home and I had a little baby all by myself all those long hours, I had postpartum depression for a day or so and got over it. It’s like I knew it would be my only chance to be a mom and I better be the best mom to my little guy.

You think I just won a prize! I just got a call from the furniture store and the woman said that they can be delivered on Saturday. No more fighting over the lumpy lounger chair. My red microfiber sofa-ahhhhh-I can’t wait.
Not much new, just doing a little bit of listing on eBay-it isn’t adding much to my pocketbook lately. Guess it’s either too popular (seems like everytime they start showing their tv commercials sales can go to either extreme) or with school starting, people are spending money on their kids. I am mainly listing items that I found in the family room over the last few weeks. A few are things I just picked up at flea markets.
Got lots to do and I can’t believe it’s after 1 already.

By now you must have heard about what our girlfriend Oprah gave away to welcome the 19th season of her show. You haven’t heard? She gave away 276 Pontiac G6s!!!! Wowsa-woo-woo! I would have fainted dead on the spot. Thank goodness she had paramedics in the studio, just in case. We looked up how much those cars list for-$28 k. One of the 11 people who first came on the stage lives a few towns over (stone’s throw) in Unionville, PA. Her friend had written a letter requesting a car for her friend Jayne because their present vehicle was breaking down all the time. Jayne’s 14 yr old son Jared is really sick from Lyme Disease and needs to go to A I Dupont hospital twice a week for treatment. We learned about Jayne through the local news, not on Oprah.
It was great that she gave the lovely homeless girl named Alex a new lease on life by helping her get a full scholarship to any university of her choice. Alex originally wanted ‘just a hug’ from our g/f! The last good deed was paying for a home that foster parents to about 8 kids was about to get kicked out of. They also got goodies from Crate & Barrel and Best Buy.
If anyone would like to write to Oprah concerning my 1960s ‘original’ kitchen (yep has the 44, almost 45 yr old oven) and get her decorator pal Nat to come here, that would be fine and dandy. I have been wanting to do something in there for years, but my pocketbook is always emptied by something. Oprah, can you hear me? : )

Do you stitch small projects one at a time that you can finish quickly, have numerous large projects going at once that you rotate,or both? How does your current system work for you and have you thought about changing it?
I usually have 2 larger projects and 2 smaller ones. The larger ones are usually the charity quilt squares that I do. I work on 2 at a time so I don’t get bored with either one as I need to complete them to have them included in their finished quilts. I am having a hard time with the collie dog head I am completing now. I have the rest of his ‘ruff’ (new word alert-the fur around his head) to complete before the 27th of Sept. If I don’t get it finished, I’ll have to stop and make it look half-way decent before I send it. This happens to me sometimes when I am working on an old chart and the symbols are hand drawn. This one had one symbol and a line drawn to indicate to fill in all the blank squares with that color. Lazy!
The two smaller designs are usually Christmas ornaments or something that I know I can finish. I think my current system is working, though I have a few UFOs that I need to get out of the way so I can start something new.

Hey, I can come up with topics too. I was sitting here brainstorming last night….
How about if your name was Charles Manson like the infamous ring leader who killed actress Sharon Tate and the others? Wouldn’t that be freaky? I think I’d have to be known as Chip or Chuck or maybe by my middle name. But if you were still a Manson, they you’d be asked if you were related to Charles. That would be a dilemma.
My name is Dianne Carol, the Carol part meant to be the feminine for Carl, my father. When anyone would hear my first and middle name (when I was younger), they thought it sounded like Diahann Carroll from the tv show ‘Julia’. At the time I didn’t like the comparsion to a lady close to my mom’s age and of a different race. My feelings now are that I think Diahann Carroll is one of the loveliest performers ever! She has a class that so many of the younger singers or actresses will never possess. I am proud to have a similar sounding name.
Sometimes Jay Leno (right?) will have people’s drivers licenses if they share a famous name or have a funny sounding name. You definitely have a picture of the famous person in your head, and he shows you the driver’s license of ‘Neil Armstrong’ and it’s not the first man who walked on the moon.
Once we were looking through a local newspaper and a real estate agent had the same name as Brian (last name too). The guy looked nothing like Brian either. And why would he have to look like him any way? LOL
Sean will do a search for his name and see other Sean Cs on the internet. He has found a few, some in Ireland too. He said ‘Look mom, I’m an English professor in Ireland’. : )

We’re still trying to get this family room in order. I knew it would be a job and a half. On Friday, I continued to stack and sort my books. By this time, it must sound like I have a million books-close to it! Only kidding. I’ve been collecting books since I’ve been a teenager. Most of them aren’t novels but non-fictional. The big hassle now is trying to figure out if the new bookcase is going to cover one of the floor vents. If it does, it does. It probably won’t lay right on it, but there will be air space around it like the other bookcase-only the edges hit the floor-you can see the mark it left where it use to sit.
Brian continued to paint the ceiling on Saturday. He’s almost 3/4s of the way finished. He noticed a few areas that need touch up last night and he tried to fix a crack in the ceiling. We had to move things out of the way so my brother and Brian could move the old sofa out yesterday which wasn’t any easy task. The sofa now sits in my mom’s living room. She complained about it being a bit flat in one area (where my butt sat I guess), but that was one reason we wanted a new sofa in the first place! The carpeting is definitely showing it’s age in some places. I think I’ll have to get an area rug, maybe an Oriental for the sofa area.
Sean and I did go down to mom’s yesterday. I skipped the Mushroom Festival altogether. Sean went up to it on Saturday and said they were charging for parking (he found a grassy spot for free), and everything else. I read that a ‘sip’ of soup in the soup tasting tent was $1 a sip! Are they kidding? Anyway, we hit a killer flea market where I went to community college and then we went up to my hometown for ‘Super Sunday’. I didn’t buy that many things. Of course I eBay shop at events like this and didn’t really see that much. I got some green glass coasters that look like they are from the 1930s, some old snowmen figures (may keep) and a ribbon laced message board for the family room in golds. I got my mom an amber candy dish (she had asked me to look for amber). It wasn’t hot, but warm walking around. My sinuses were bad yesterday too.
One of the highlights of my day was stopping off at my brothers to give him gas money for running his truck out here. His children made a big fuss over Sean and me. Ken sat me down at his computer and showed me a slideshow of their recent trip to Ocean City, MD which I enjoyed. I also got a photo of the kids waiting for the bus on the first day of school. So cute! They are getting so big I hardly recognized them in the shot.
The next cool thing was after we came back from having dinner with mom, her ‘new’ car was waiting in the driveway for her. Ken found a 1992 Mercury Sable (her present car is a 1987 Ford Escort) through a guy at work that was owned my the guy’s mom. It is a pearly blue and in good shape. Perfect for someone my mom’s age. She was overjoyed! She is usually so down in the dumps it was nice to see her smiling and excited about something. She took us for a drive around to my brother’s house (around the corner). She had to figure out where the shift bar was first-yikes! Sean is next on the agenda for a car. Maybe he can get one in the new year.

Thanks to Mindy for this one. Her jobs were more varied for sure!
List all the jobs that you have had in your lifetime.
First job-babysat for the neighbors when I was about 10-11.
Babysat for most of the kids in a nearby neighborhood-the same families for a number of years.
(See where this is leading?)
Worked at the daycare center at the local community college while I attended there majoring in Early Childhood Education (have a AAS degree).
I worked at another daycare center run by co-owners who liked each other (if you get my drift). There was a main teacher and two assistants (I was one of the later). Talk about getting sick all the time! I got close to the kids, but it was a no where job for a 20 year old-a glorified babysitter (and they made you eat liver). Of course I turned around and got almost the same kind of job a year or so later, but this time was left behind with about 15-2yr olds for 2-3 hours, which can’t be legal. The owner hoarded the food she asked the parents to donate. One time the other assistant opened this cupboard and there was a small supermarket in there! I got a weird virus and was so ill I decided to leave and not work in this kind of environment again.
My mom worked in the job placement at Widener College and found me a job at Z & H Uniforms which I had for a year or so and left for a job at Zale’s Jewelers. I stayed about 3 weeks until I was asked to pierce someone’s ears and it went half way through and the other saleslady had to finish the job! I also couldn’t figure out their complicated register with about a zillion buttons.
Right before I got married I found a job in a take-out gourmet shop. I liked this job, but it was a small family run business (the job search lady was the gourment shop lady’s mom). After the woman hired a friend who was desparate for a job, they canned me and made a lame excuse for getting rid of me. I had been on my honeymoon in Mexico and was sick and couldn’t come in. Who wants to handle food when you are making trips to the bathroom 12 times a day? She said I had had enough time off (1 week) and she was letting me go.
I took a job in this area filling in for teacher’s aides when they were out for the day or week in the local school district. Not too cool. They call you about 6 am (short notice most time) and you have to drag yourself out and learn a job in a few hours. Watching kids on a playground wasn’t that great. A little girl broke her nose almost right in front of me because she had done a weird twist off the monkey bars.
If you can call eBay a job-well, it’s basically making pocket money, then that is what I am into now.

You can pretend to be serious; you can’t pretend to be witty.
— Sacha Guitry
I think humor comes from within; you are either funny or you aren’t. Just look at the tv show ‘Last Comic Standing’, esp when they were doing the auditions. So many of the people that came were just plain bad or they thought doing something stupid was funny.
I think most of my family has a good sense of humor. My little brother Ken can get us all laughing. Of course Ken learned this from his 3 older siblings. I have said or done something more than once that tickled Brian’s funny bone that he had tears in his eyes from laughing. He makes me laugh too.
My grandfather use to write little bits that he hoped to get published. I think when he submitted one and it didn’t get in a magazine, he lost hope. It was called ‘How to assembly the little jiffy adironack chair’. Just the title sounds humorous.
Doctors take first place when they have to be serious, esp with delicate matters. Definitely the show ‘Scrubs’ tries to inject humor into a very sober topic as did M*A*S*H one of my all time favorite shows.

It was like it happened yesterday, not 3 yrs ago already. I got up and turned on the tv and there was a tall building and it looked like a helicopter had crashed into it. Katie Couric and Matt Lauer were frantically trying to make sense of what going on. I remember someone had hand glided onto the Statue of Liberty a week earlier. What the heck was going on? And then the earth stood still. It was a plane! And it was one of the Twin Towers! Within minutes the second plane went into the second tower. I sat in disbelief and then I thought-sh#*, Sean’s in school! NYC isn’t that far away. And then the plane hit the Pentagon and the other plane went down here in Penna., but out in the western part. It was not good living in this area-it was frightening. All those blasted planes had probably traveled not far over our heads. Sean will always remember that he was a freshman in high school and wanted to come home. I think everyone was watching the skies that day and praying, esp for all the lost innocent souls.
Two of the pilots were from near us. The one pilot lived near where I went to high school and his kids were in the same school district. The other pilot was from Bucks County. So many people were from Bucks County as it isn’t that far from NYC by train.
A friend from Montana called to see if I was ok, not knowing where the plane went down in Pa. We talked for a long time. I thank her for that as I was a wreck.
I sure suffered post tramatically from that for a long time.
I pray that my child or that his children never have to live through anything like that again.

I was playing with this online thanks to Princess who is linked to the blinkie entry below.
Portrait Illustration Maker – Let’s make an original icon!!
I’m just a glam puss and look about 25? Gee, what a face lift and nose job would do for me! ~LOL~ I think this is what I want to look like.I’ll have to try this again…and again!


Brian was hard, this is a redo…


Now I think this looks like Sean: