Good Intentions

Well summer break has not started off with a bang as I had hoped it would. Much of that is due to my own lack of ambition, but I've resolved to not spend the rest of our summer like we did that first week. Items that I should have had completed by the end of the first week? 1. Clean the house top to bottom. 2. Get all the laundry caught up. 3. Detail the car myself. 4. Plant a garden and 5. Do something fun with my kids every day. 6. Get caught up on the blog.
The house did get cleaned, but I wouldn't call it top-to-bottom. We are functional and sanitized at this point. The washer broke down after my first load of laundry and flooded the basement. Wet, old carpet=nasty, musky, moldy, smellier old carpet. I spent all day at the laundry mat with the kids and a giant, black hairy spider and all kinds of bacteria. I'm not sure if our clothes were cleaner after that trip. Detail the car? Ha! Well I did throw away a plastic wrapper off a sticky bun and a few old receipts, so I guess that is progress. Who knows what kind of weevil colonies are are multiplying in our car as a result of a school year's worth of food crumbs. I really hate bugs, so that will most definitely get done this week, I hope. Planting a garden did not go as planned either because it rained pretty much every day, all day last week. We had brief moments of sunshine, but it was never long before the clouds came rolling back in. That really put a damper on the exercise thing too. I couldn't take the kids out on a bike ride in the pouring rain and as a result, the small spare bike tire around my waist has grown into a trailer tire. I'm not about to let it get much bigger so I've cut down on the nacho cheese sauce and popcorn and jalapeno bites. Think I'm kidding? I'm not. I'm an emotional eater and just having the washer break down was enough to send me into a week-long binge. So you can imagine that I just ate more and more when I did not manage to get the car detailed or to plant a salsa garden.
Then we come to my blog. I love writing. I love preserving families memories and I definitely consider it worth the time and effort to keep this up. I decided I'd procrastinated enough and downloaded 300 pictures of the last two months of our lives on the computer. With that done, I thought, alright now to the fun part--actually posting on the blog. Little did I know that this whole time my computer was plotting against me as well and got all senile on me. It "forgot" where it put those 300 pictures that included Taj's preschool graduation and many other irreplaceable moments. I was literally devastated when I clicked on the folder and all I saw were those horrific three words: "Folder is Empty." Wha? Whawhawha? WHAT?! My heart was broken into pieces to have lost those pictures and then of course all I could think to do was to go upstairs and throw some poppers in the oven and consume 300 deep-fried calories of jalapenos and cream cheese. I shut down the computer and restarted it, hoping the ol' dinosaur would wake up and remember where it put my pictures. It did not and also notified me that I had "successfully" cleared out 200 mbs of space. Hmmm, must of slipped my mind because there is no way in HELL I did that! Can you guess what happened when I went back into my pictures folder to search for the lost 300? I discovered that ALL albums starting with the letter A had been deleted. They are gone, no where to be found. That's the moment I exercised great restraint and kept myself from hurling the ol' silver dinosaur through the wall of our basement and out into the front yard. I will never trust it again, which is why I don't dare download more photos on it right now because I'm afraid they will be lost in cyberworld forever. Some geeked-out hacker is probably having the time of his life stuffing flaming hot cheetos down his gullet, all the while hysterical laughing and picturing my confusion, shock, and rage at the discovery of the missing files. Well I hope he snorts one up his nose. No slurpee in the world will put that flame out. So rest assured family and friends who actually read this blog, that I have not abandoned my post. You WILL see regular posting from here on out, I hope.