OK so maybe we don’t need 2 biodiesel campers, one can be a bus. I’d like to convert one of those tourbuses, like a rock star. OMG then I’d be more of a rock star than Fussy! Talk about going to great lengths to outdo someone, although there really is more to it than that, isn’t there. Anyhow, so we’re preparing to travel around in a bus with our 6 kids and a video production crew for 2-3 months. The first thing we need to do (OK one of the million things we need to do) is find a bus and convert it to biodiesel,or veggie oil there’s a conversion kit that runs around $1000 and then of course, we need to find the diesel vehicle we’ll be converting. Attention- if you own a biodiesel bus company and would consider loaning us one we’d treat it very nicely. And you’ll get some press from it, too. Not only will I thank you to high heaven here on this blog, but we’ll edit it into the opening credits of the travel documentary we’re making for PBS and the children’s travel show we’re making for Discovery Kids. Not that discovery kids knows this, but whatever, they don’t need to know just yet. PBS knows about the travel thing, though- and our first episode is seling wonderfully to the libraries and to the wineries. SO- here’s my link to a company that makes converter kits for diesel engines. Hopefully they will notice a ton of traffic flooding in to them through this link and they’ll come here to check it out and say to themselves “By golly, I’d love to send them 2 free biodiesel tour buses. Go ahead, keep them. And God bless you, green travel goddess.” Golden Fuel Systems ansd there’s also Greasecar Systems and Frybrid Diesel/Vegetable Oil
April 30, 2008
April 29, 2008
One baby or 4 chihuahuas?
A friend of mine, in a fit of baby envy brought home 4 chihuahuas just before Xmas last year, it’s a story I retell all the time, just the way she told me.
She says: “I’m in big trouble”
Me: “What’d you do?”
She says; “I got them a puppy”
Me: “Big deal, he can’t be mad about a puppy- what’s wrong with a puppy?”
She says; “I got them EACH a puppy”
Me: (insert the jawdrop on a hardwood floor sound effect) “You are really in trouble”
and then once i heard the story I scrambled to get off the phone so I could share the gossip with… my husband…. my mother… anyone who would listen.
Y’know my friend J with 4 girls? Yeah, she just got them a puppy…………….each.
Hiking with seven 11 yr olds
That’s what I’ll be doing this June. Any advice? The girls have all decided to spend a day in the mountains. Actually to be honest, they wanted to camp overnight but the whole idea just sounds way too dirty for me, and neither of us Girl Scout Troop leaders has or wants to get our outdoor training, so we’re going to use our mom-mind-powers to get the girls to decide they’d rather go up for the day, and buy matching T-shirts with the proceeds from their cookie sale.
So- we can still do the camp fire, roast marshmallows, play in the woods and in the lake, and get just as dirty as we wanna get, but we don’t have to sleep that way and we don’t need to get a special license from the Girl Scouts.
toddler destroys ancient art with sippy cup.
I just wanted to share a delightful article about traveling with children. I was hooked the minute the child threw her sippy cup at the world famous painting. Anyhow, it’s a great read on flexibility while traveling with children. Something I’m going to need a lot of soon. Enjoy the article
Response from Stardoll
OK- this came from the whole stardoll thing. The address I had was of course, not his. It was forwarded from someone who added this little bit of text:
Har vi ett kontrat med denna sajt?
Virginie
I used the unknown language translator tool to learn that it was Swedish and that it means “Have we one versus that sajt?”
Dear Lisa,
So anyways- I am easily pleased, this was fine for me. Certainly that stuff shouldn’t exist and Thankfully I can monitor my kids online experience. I worry really about the ones left home unattended with the internet. I doubt anything else will come of this, they’re probably both in different countries & I think internet rules are hard to enforce, aren’t they? And besides, my kids use stardoll, not the other sites. How would someone go about researching to see if anything has been done here? the whole finding an unknown language thing was near the top of my capabilities.
April 28, 2008
I moved
M bedroom, that is. The bedroom MrH was building in the basement is finally finished and last night we moved our bed and a dresser into it. Hooray, it was so nice to finally sleep in here. Now I have my work cut out for me rearranging the kids’ bedrooms and everything, I am sure I will get no “paid” work done today, which sucks because I didn’t yesterday either. Or the day before. Whatever- they don’t approve them right away anyways, I fear that whatever I’ve done over the past week will sit in limbo for months. Anyway- I took a few pictures of the finished room, I’m working on 3 different computers right now, so once I get into the one that has the before pictures, I’ll post the befores and afters together.
Poll Topic- Kids Tvs
This is an ongoing thing in my house. I don’t want them to have TVs in their rooms. My sweet MrH grew up with a TV in his room and now he “can’t fall asleep” without it. I, however, can’t stand trying to sleep with the flashing lights and the noises.
So we go back & forth because sometimes the thought of reading the Cat in the hat AGAIN after only 6 hours of sleep just makes me ill, so we end up carrying these TV’s from he garage up to the bedroom or moving them all around the house- the kids love it when they have a TV in their room. I just don’t like the idea of them staring at the box all day long. It totally affects their imagination, and I’m sure it isn’t healthy. But in REALITY there are 6 of them and one of me and sometimes I need relief, and TV is so much easier.
What do you think, how does it work in your house? Are you happy with your system? Any ideas?
April 26, 2008
Rain belongs outside
I am joining the ranks today of several other bloggers who have had floods or other plumbing situations in their home because they were busy blogging.
There’s the mom with brownies
and then there’s THAT mom
and Mrs March is just as guilty as I am because she was here.
You remember we are remodeling our basement. so we’re always on the lookout for problems down there. We’ve fixed pipes that had been leaking, undetected for years and replaced beams and built walls and torn down walls and made things pretty and made things fun. I walked past the stairwell and heard water trickling down there. I went downstairs and found the water coming from the ceiling. I ran upstairs and turned off the water and cursed a little, then I began removing the floor planks because my friend had to replace her floor when it got soaked. I mopped up the mess, people brought me towels from the dirty laundry (which were being rained on) and the whole thing was really just “a day in the life” and now the floor is back together and you’d never have known it happened. Except those hard-to-reach places behind my toilet are cleaner.
With ten little girls between us, we really have no idea who left the faucet on. Or why there was half a roll of toilet paper in the drain. But I did teach my yr old how to remove the P-trap from the bathroom sink, and I told her about the time I found a diamond ring in the trap of our apartment in Lynnwood. So I’m hoping she’ll be our resident drain cleaner. Because there aren’t diamond rings in there very often.
Over the past 6 years
Six years ago we moved to Yakima.
My husband’s father passed away. His failing health was the reason we moved away from Lynnwood in 1999. We loved Lynnwood.
Six years ago our friend Steve said “Come to Yakima. You’ll love it. It’s just like Seattle.”
Six years ago we only had three kids. We bought a $100 cargo top for the roof of our Toyota Camry Station wagon and stuffed it with everything we possibly could. The rest went into storage.
Steve said “I’m filming a documentary here and I really need MrH’s help.”
Yakima is nothing like Seattle. If you haven’t seen the episode of iCarly where her grandfather almost forces her to move to Yakima, you might not realize quite what it’s like here.
It’s brown. In fact, I cried big crocodile tears as we came over the hill. The sign that said “Welcome to Yakima” might have actually said “Welcome to the Valley of Death.” I’m not a fan of brown hills. I would never have chosen Yakima. It is, as far as the color scheme goes, the Palm Springs of Washington.
“At least it has a mall” I consoled myself as I drove past. I had no idea how that mall would have affected our lives. “At least it has a library” I am optimistic. We cruised into town at around 7am and the first thing I did was stick the kids in the stroller and go for a walk. It was a cute little downtown area. A couple of cute old buildings. We walked up and down a little shopping center with a boardwalk. If you’d have told me that a year later we’d own a pizzeria there I wouldn’t have believed you. We came to Yakima with $800.
At 8am nothing downtown was open. I’m not a shopper, in fact I hate malls. I found consolation in the fact that the town HAD a mall, though. It symbolized some kind of tangible proof that the residents here were upwardly mobile. I can live amongst shoppers, I don’t need to be one.
Oddly, within a few months of our moving here, Steve moved away (to Tacoma) and left MrHannigan all alone with this documentary project.
Within a month of moving here I was working full time at a Chinese Restaurant and pregnant although it would take another month to figure that out.
Toward the end of my pregnancy I was sick, working 60+ hours per week wasn’t working out well. We knew we didn’t have the funding to finish the video project, and opportunity came in the form of an ice cream shop.
We decorated. We went overboard with the decor. We turned the inside of this little retail space into a street scene from Venice, Italy. Ice cream wasn’t enough, so we made gelato. Gelato wasn’t enough so we added pizza to the menu. We’re pizza-picky. Our pizza rocked. Yakima noticed.
We were swamped. We opened when baby #4 was just a few months old. The kids would hang out in the loft during the lunch rush and MrH and I would make pizza and drinks for our guests. After a while we needed to hire someone. Little Nikkie is still like family, our employees became a second family. Business was good. On weekends we were swamped. People would stand and wait up to an hour for a table sometimes. Have you ever heard of making reservations for pizza? We featured live entertainment on the weekends. We’d let the kids toss dough. Hand tossed, everything was hand tossed.
That was before we had 6 kids.
8 days after our 6th daughter was born we closed down our second location. It was in that (abandoned) mall I mentioned.
In 6 years we built up and lost a million dollar a year restaurant business.
We don’t have $800 today but we have a house, 2 cars, 2 car payments and state funded medical insurance for the kids. We returned the $100 cargo top to Wal mart for groceries about 3 weeks after we moved here.
And today- the video is finished.
I never would have chosen Yakima but since we’ve been here we’ve been blessed a hundred different ways. We’ve made some mistakes. We’ve learned things the hard way. But we’ve learned so much.
In the future we plan to open another restaurant, on the other (greener) side of the mountains. Our food was good, our theme was good. The restaurant business is crazy, I never want to try and run one myself again. I have so many stories to tell about all that. But it’s a lucrative business and when we move over to the Seattle area, I can’t wait to find a great manager!
For now, though, we’ll be marketing the video. We have enough footage to edit into a second one. This is a travel video for the Yakima Wine Country. Our second one is for the Roslyn / Cle Elum area. We’re going to be doing a vacation travel series on lesser known communities in the Pacific Northwest. Our website should be up soon.
Six years ago seems like so long- so much has happened in 6 years. The project that brought us here is going to be the project that takes us “home” to the West side of the state, where the grass is green, the population is diverse and educated, and blackberries grow wild all over the place.
Life is sweet.
I will miss my friends.
“Life’s about changing nothing ever stays the same and he said how can I help you to say goodbye…”
I will award a free copy of the DVD to whoever knows this little piece of me-trivia. Who was the first person (other than Steve) that I met when we moved to Yakima. I know someone knows this because I’ve probably sent you to this person’s business before. Here’s a clue- I met this person at around 9am the day we moved here 6 years ago. I don’t think this person knows they were the first person I met. They might. We’ll see.
April 25, 2008
my letter to stardoll- possible boycott
Just to let you know- I added a bunch of x’s into the offensive words in this letter because I don’t want someone searching for cxlxixt gxaxmxexs (remove the x’s to read that) stumbling upon my site. And I just noticed the word “sex” has its own x in it, so you’ll have to really use your noodle when decoding my letter to Stardoll.
Dear Stardoll,
I was disturbed to see an advertisement for (insert non-offensive girls dressup game website) on the (insert name of previously mentioned bad bad) website. That site is like the festival of pedophilia. There are several “dressup” games on there that mimic child porn, like a “honeymoon” where the husband is three times the size of his little bride, a “date night” where everyone is laying down and a “help the pervert find his lost dog” game. Additionally, on the bottom of the page there were links to “Bxaxrxbxixe Sxexx gxaxmxexs” and “axnxixmxaxl bxoxy sxexx,” “sxexxtxuxbxe,” “sxexxxy gxaxmxexs cxaxrxtxoxoxn,” “sxexxxy bxixtxcxhxexs gxaxmxex,” and “cxlxixt gxaxmxexs”
I have 6 daughters and It makes me sick to think that stardoll would endorse such a vulgar site. I look forward to your response, and hope to hear that you’ve pulled the advertising. most online ad networks allow you to do so. Stardoll should not be capitalizing on porn, nor should stardoll be sharing profits from click-throughs with such blatantly vulgar websites.
Your response, and this letter will be shared with my blog readers, and distributed widely throughout the various online forums I frequent. I will not be divulging the URL of the offensive website.
Thank you for providing a safe forum for girls.
———————–end of note————————
and since I already warned you all away from this site, I was really just showing my friend. I swear. Cross my heart.
