February 2008 archive
38 loaves
I have now made a batch of 8 loaves of bread in the Bosch. That brings my count up to 38 loaves. The big batch of 8 was tricky, I may have to stick with 6 loaves only. So much for the 9 loaf capacity sales point.
When I reach 400 loaves, I think I will celebrate with a party or something.
Posted by Ily on February 26, 2008 | Filed under: Family News | 0 comments
******Picture Update******
I have updated two previous entries (Dresser Drama and Fun Weekend) with pictures. Scroll down to see the Tabblos that have finally been added to our website.
Posted by Ily on February 26, 2008 | Filed under: Family News | 0 comments
the 30 something party
Since Bryan and I both turned 30 this year, I figured it was time for us to have a proper birthday party. We invited tons of people we knew and picked a date in between our birthdays (yet erring very closely to my actual birthday- um, like the day before it).
To get in, people had to bring 30 of something and they had to be 30 something plus or minus a few decades (we wouldn’t ask how much). A lot of people brought 30 cookies, one brought 30 deviled eggs (thank you- I love them!), another brought 30 blueberry pancake pigs in a blanket (so yummy… and Mr. Schwanns makes them, I asked), my favorite were the crab puff things. A few of the 30’s we received included 30 pocket sized tissue packages (very useful indeed), 30 tootsie pops (for each of us- too much sugar to ever consume in one lifetime), 30 cotton balls, 30 pencils, 30 rolo candies, a tape measure with way more than 30 inches on it (and I needed it because the last one we had is hiding somewhere in our house- likely Reece hid it for us), and Melinda made us the coolest candle ever created (note- there was nothing related to 30 in this candle, but it is cool and must be noted as awesome- thank you Melinda!). I was delighted with how creative people got and we had a great time.
Now that I am 30, I realized that adult parties are way easier than kid parties, and that I am not fit to hang out with people past 9:30. I started yawning and getting very pooped out. How rude is that? Yawning at my own party? What nonsense! I should be flogged for planning such a boring party for Bryan and I. Everyone cleared out by 10:30 I think and I helped Ruth clean up (did I mention we had our party at Kirk and Ruth Brown’s home instead of our own… she was so nice to let us invade her home even though she spent her entire week sick in bed and only felt better the day of the party, what a true friend!) and we were home by 11. Man we were tired too! The next day I had a headache from staying up late- woo hoo 11 is so late- and from eating so much sugar – lots of cookies were brought you know. It was like a hangover, only without the booze. I feel old now!
The next day is also when we sold the Altima which added to our headaches… though it was super easy to do in the end. All the fretting before hand is what tweaked my party “hangover.”
Posted by Ily on February 26, 2008 | Filed under: Family News | 4 comments
Happy Birthday to Me
Happy birthday to Me
We’re a one car family
We will miss you dear Altima,
But we prefer the $650. (For a newer caaaarrrrrrr…)
We sold it. We did. Not really as a birthday present to me, but it did happen to be on my birthday. It still looked great, the inside was clean and looked great, but we were having issues with it. The head lights don’t work at night if the heater fan is on. Problematic. The fan only works on high… but not if the lights are on too. Defrosting the windows is impossible unless you have a towel handy. It stalls a lot. The steering is going out. We think the alternator is dying too. The windows roll down on their own when it rains. The trunk leaks… not the best for the Great Northwest weather. We lost part of the jack.
But someone else still wanted it. I love you Craigslist. Once again, you have taken our trash and turned it into someone’s treasure (Ok, so it wasn’t trash, but the alliteration worked… and we don’t have the mechanical skills to fix it all the time, nor the endless money supply to filter into our mechanic’s pocket… hence making it a large paper weight in our driveway). The guy who bought it, probably knows how to work on it. I hope so. If you have the knowledge, then fixing it could be cheap. We have not the slightest clue.
We’ll see how long we last as a one car family. It was nice to have two cars, but worrisome because we didn’t know if the car would return home every day. Now we will likely buy another car some day, but it is sunny right now, Bryan can ride his bike to work for a few days. He likes the idea of a new bike even instead of a car.
Bryan is worried, his old laptop is gone (thanks to a de-cluttering frenzy from me and craigslist), his car is now gone. I admit that I listed his car Thursday while he was at work- I happened to be posting some other stuff and just thought I would see if we had any takers. We had 13 people email on it. Bryan actually said he is going to start bolting some stuff down so I can’t just sell it when he isn’t home.
Posted by Ily on February 23, 2008 | Filed under: Family News | 1 comment
Fun President's Day weekend!
Last weekend was a 4 day weekend for us. That’s right, US Presidents are special enough for our school district to declare a very long weekend. Friday the boys played at a friends home for a bit and I started my dresser painting project. Saturday, Bryan took Isaac skiing and I continued my painting project while the little boys got some hard earned tv time. They haven’t watched tv in so long! We also went for a huge walk around the neighborhood and enjoyed the sun…. Yay! we actually had sun!
After Bryan and Isaac got home, the boys all got to go play with Trixie the dog and the Wii at Maresa and Brian’s. I had some car drama while trying to leave the Jackson’s home, but we made it eventually, though I thought I might have to push the Altima home. It will no longer be driven at night until we do some major work on it. Don’t expect us to ever buy a car to replace it, we just don’t move that fast. We might be shopping for it for forever though. We are good at shopping for cars now.
On Sunday, my cousin from Utah came over. She was in town for a college regional mock trial tournament (this is an “I want to be a lawyer” type competition to participate in… looks great when applying for law school). She got to stay a little longer to see us after the tourney was over. We had fun catching up. When giving her the tour of our home, she started saying, “so this is where Bryan drilled into the pipe in the bathroom” ... and “this is where the screwdriver story played out”... it was like being in our blog. Like visiting Disneyland and being in the Pirates of the Caribbean… only more REAL. And cooler, I think.
We took her sledding on Monday and had such a blast. We went with a few other families and it was great to let our kids out to play in the snow. It wasn’t the best snow. We would be walking along and then suddenly up to our hip in snow because we had fallen through. This got tricky while carrying a toddler around who refused to walk on the snow. Eventually, we just strapped Reece to our backs with the mei tai (oh yeah, we still use it!) and then we didn’t drop him when we fell. Our friend Justin Jackson found the biggest whole to fall into while rescuing one of the little kids from a hole. He fell in up to his neck. At this point we all started using our Bear Grylls knowledge from Man vs. Wild. This was not a glacier (pronounced Glassy-er in Bear speak) in Patagonia, but we still felt cool speaking in British accents while we tried to coordinate the rescue efforts of anyone who fell through the surface of the snow.
All in all it was an exhausting, fabulous, and fun weekend. I was so glad to see my cousin and see how well she is doing. Weekends like this one make me tired and happy all at the same time!
Posted by Ily on February 21, 2008 | Filed under: Family News | 0 comments
The Drama of the Dressers
I have known for a few weeks that my cousin Katie was coming to visit. I did the normal stuff: clean the bathrooms and hope they stay clean, do laundry so it doesn’t look like I am totally lazy, stock the house with some good food, etc. Well, it seems that every time I have some big event coming up, that I just have to do a project to release nervous energy or something. Past project ideas include paint a room, make a quilt, redecorate my entire house, channel energy to buying some perfect piece of furniture… Um, yeah, I for some reason get really driven to complete an impossible task when people come to visit. The task I chose this time? Refinish a dresser so it is presentable enough to put downstairs as a new phone table and preschool supplies chest.
This may sound huge, but my original idea was to paint my bedroom… well Bryan is glad that I ran out of time for that I am sure. Tear my room apart and put it together again in a two week time frame while only working during naps and after the boys go to bed?! And not to mention that I would likely want to buy new furniture to “complete the look.” I was just about crazy enough to do that, but ended up admitting defeat with that idea and going for something smaller, and much less expensive too.
We have had some dresser drama lately because Micah refuses to get dressed in the morning. His dresser is too dang hard to open to get his clothes out. My solution? Get him a new dresser. His reaction? Tears, lots of them. Then Isaac tried to convince him it would be cool, I could get him a STAR WARS dresser. Yeah. Like I would ever find something like that. Gee thanks, Isaac, for your help. And yep, that is all Micah wanted after that. I bet he would HATE it when the Star Wars adoration phase in his life is over.
So I went shopping, it was discouraging, and ended up just deciding to shuffle some dressers around in our house for a quick fix so he can have a better one in which the drawers don’t stick as much. So I emptied out the downstairs dresser that I used for preschool supplies and to keep the phone on. I moved it upstairs. I put Micah’s clothes in it. I witnessed Micah get angry. And throw his clothes out of it all over his room. And he was strong enough to move it most of the way out of his room too. I swear he is so strong because of how heavy his current dresser is!
Well, that plan didn’t work. He wanted to keep his red dresser. He was firm. Since that little brown one is the dresser I originally wanted for Reece anyhow, but was too lazy to empty when he was born, I figured it was a good enough time to give it to him.
The dresser Reece was using was a Goodwill find that I had planned to refinish, but never got around to. It was a hideous tan color. It was not painted very well and you could see three previous colors of paint in the scratches that were on it. If it wasn’t so embarrassing, I would have taken a picture of it so you could see how ugly it was. Rather than just put it downstairs to do the job of holding stuff that was now homeless and letting it hold the phone out of reach from Reece, I let it stay empty for a few days. It was just too ugly to put downstairs! Eventually I couldn’t handle the card table any longer though that was currently by the phone.
So I began sanding. And then painting. And then sanding. And then painting again. It was supposed to be done by the time Katie got here, but alas, projects never quite go as planned. On coat of primer and two of paint weren’t enough. A third coat was needed. So, it got done the day after she left. And oh my, it looks so GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD! Much better than before. New paint, new knobs, now this thing is ready for the 21st century. It was stuck in the 60’s before. I am now proud of this cute piece of furniture!
Funny, but I will still probably go get Micah a new dresser soon. The red beast needs to be retired to my craft room or something. Any ideas on how to make the new one STAR WARS without it being permanent?
Posted by Ily on February 20, 2008 | Filed under: Family News | 3 comments
The LLLLLLLLooooooooooonnnnnnnggggggg drive home
Yesterday Isaac’s school had early release so me and my friend Heather decided to take the afternoon to go to OMSI with all our kids. There is a new Dinosaur exhibit there that the boys were really excited to see. We made it there no problem.
It was so liberating to travel lightly- all I brought with me was my new “fanny pack” or sidekick as the label called it (better sounding than the fanny pack nickname) that I got for Christmas from my in-laws. I love this thing! Now that Reece is getting older, I don’t have to take a huge diaper bag everywhere and I REALLY love that! This little sidekick has room for a few diapers, some wipes, a camera, my keys, some small snacks and a few credit cards and money. It is really cool.
Too bad the sidekick does not have enough room for spare clothes for the 4 year old who wet his pants because he didn’t want to miss anything at the museum and waited too long to tell me he needed to go potty. So adventure #1 is that I had to figure out what to do with the soiled clothes and figure out how to get him more clothes. I had spare clothes for him all the way out in the car, but I couldn’t leave him in the bathroom all by himself while I walked the ten minute walk to the car and back to bring him back some shorts, yes shorts, that is what I have in the car. He hasn’t had an accident since summer so I haven’t thought to update the stash of spare clothes. I will be putting sweatpants in today to be seasonally appropriate you can be sure. The solution: rinse out his clothes so he won’t get itchy from the pee and so they are a uniform color too (no dark wet spot in a conspicuous place) and put the wet stuff back on him. Then send him off to play at the water table so the rest of him gets wet too and he forgets what happened. Did it work? Thankfully, yes!
Adventure #2 begins as we decide it is almost 4:30 and time to drive home so we can get through the Portland traffic in time for dinner. We get in the car and begin the drive home. We take the freeway exit and realize too late that the roads are gridlocked. A long time later we take the next exit to try to get to the I-205 bridge a different way that might not be so clogged. It turns out everything was clogged- in town, on the freeway, random back streets… as long as you were trying to make it to one of the two bridges to Washington, you were not going to get any closer. We ended up in a less than desirable part of town after almost 1 1/2 hours of mostly stand still and we decided that we needed to stop to get dinner for the kids and let them run around to wait out the traffic. The dilemma now was that all we could see were bars and other establishments of ill repute.
We called Bryan to be our traffic consultant with the internet to find us an alternate route home. He got us sorta closer, but not really. Instead we had to settle for being in a better part of town to stop in. So we stopped at a Jack in the Box and camped out. Traffic finally dissipated after an hour and we got back in the car with some very tired kids and started the trek home. It was still clogged at the bridge, but this time it only took half an hour to travel the 2 miles from Jack in the Box and then get over the bridge and home. This drive should be 10 minutes, not 30, but who is counting at this point?
We could have walked home from OMSI and made it home by dinner, but driving was impossible. Thanks be to the creator of the portable DVD player that kept the kids happy for most of the drive. If the LDS church could saint people, I would definitely be voting to make that guy a saint. Call him the patron saint of road trips or something.
Thanks to Bryan, we found out what some the traffic delays of the evening were: The I-205 bridge was down to two lanes because police were investigating something “suspicious” and there were tons of different accidents all over. How any one could wreck their car in stand still traffic, I have no clue. I would think they would run out of gas rather than disable their car in a collision in traffic like this.
Once upon a time I experienced traffic like this trying to come home from Portland and swore never to go there again. I went back on my oath and tonight I paid for it. Portland traffic still remains the yuckiest thing I have ever experienced, childbirth with an epidural that didn’t work was better than this!
Posted by Ily on February 7, 2008 | Filed under: Family News | 0 comments
A Late Birthday Present
I got a late birthday present, but it’s one of the most thoughtful and touching gifts I’ve ever received. Nolan gave me a domain name for this website this week. Yes, you can forget that old whatever.homelinux.blahblah stuff that you used to have to type to get to here. Now it is simply, TheMurdockFamily.org. How cool is that? Thanks Nolan!
I’ll keep the old free name that we’ve been using for a little while longer, but please start using themurdockfamily.org, it’s just so much classier. If you mess up and type murdockfamily.org instead, it looks like you end up at the website of a nice Murdock family with three young boys and lots of pictures on their website, but that’s not us. Close though!
Oh, and while I’m updating you on the website, I also added more highlighted entries on the right-hand side there. It only shows links for 5 at a time, but it randomly picks those 5 from a larger list each time. Cool, eh?
Posted by Bryan on February 6, 2008 | Filed under: About This Site Family News | 2 comments
Ready. Set. GO!
500 yard swim. 12 mile bike. 3.1 mile run. Oh my.
We did it! We really entered a race. A sprint triathlon actually. If we are in the first 320 people to have entered online for the Beaver Freezer on OSU campus (not Oklahoma state university- I wish it was), Bryan and I will be doing a triathlon as a team relay. Are we crazy? You bet! Are we excited? Heck yeah! Team “Murdock Fever” will be crossing the finish line with tears of joy/ pain in our eyes. It should be great. Here’s to training!
Posted by Ily on February 1, 2008 | Filed under: Family News | 1 comment
