"to make the house a more pleasant place..."

Studying the Constitution, baby.  This kid could have been a founding Father.

Something shiny, something new...

Our new dishwasher is in!  Wade, hero that he is, ordered it unbeknownst to me.  It hobbled along on its last leg for quite awhile before it started gimping along on its last toe.  Wade had mercy on it and me, put us both out of our misery, and ordered a new one.  And it's shiny.  And it gets my dishes CLEAN!  And it doesn't leak.  And it's shiny.  And it doesn't sound like a generator running in my kitchen.  And it doesn't cause weird odors to waft from my kitchen drains every time it runs.  And it's shiny.  And it uses much less detergent than the old one.  Ahhhhh.  I would have made a terrible pioneer.  I don't think they had much shiny in their lives.  Or clean.  Or pleasantly scented. 

Did I mention it's shiny?  It is.  Very!  When it first arrived, it made my other appliances look bad.  Dirty.  Smudgy.  Like they live in a house with a bunch of grimy boys.  Oh wait, they do.  Now I'm not a fabulous interior designer, but I recognized that there was a terrible mis-match going on in the kitchen.  I know I could have just smeared the new appliance with peanut butter, potato chip residue, chocolate milk splatters, cooking oil and sticky fingers -- and that would have been simpler and quicker -- but I opted to make all my appliances match the hard way.  I cleaned them all!  And for ten minutes all was spotless and shiny in my kitchen!  It was a wonder to behold!  I had to shield my eyes!  And then the troops stormed in, hungry and dirty, and I fed them, and everything is back to normal.  Except I have a dishwasher that works!  And I love it even if it is already losing its shiny.

Thanks, Wade!

Wednesday Contribution in a Timely Manner

Here's my ten-minute blog contribution for this Wednesday.

I'm trying a new "convince myself to be more tidy" strategy.  When I see something that should be done but am tempted to walk right by it, I tell myself, "You'll love yourself for it later."

There are paper odds and ends sitting on the counter.  "Put them in the trash now.  You'll love yourself for it later."

The compost bucket is so full it barely closes.  "Quickly run it out to the garden.  You'll love yourself for it later."

There's a sticky spot on the floor.  "Wipe it up now.  You'll love yourself for it later."

I find I'm telling myself a lot of lies lately.  Because seriously, it's not like I'm going to notice later on that there's not a sticky spot on the floor -- because it's not there!  I should be telling myself, "You'll not be miffed at yourself later" instead.

Re-reading through this I hope I'm not coming across as lazy or a slob.  I'm really not.  I'm fastidious about washing, drying, folding and delivering laundry to the appropriate bedroom every Tuesday (although it usually sits clean and folded in the basket until... sometime before the next Tuesday when I need the basket to carry the dirty stuff to the laundry room again).  Dinner is chronically on the table by 6 p.m. (except tonight, of course, as I sit here and try to list my timely attributes).  Four afternoons out of five, the school work counter gets cleared of all papers, books, pencils and tooth-marked erasers.

So there, I'm not lazy.  Or a slob.  I just need a little motivation to make sure I don't become that way.  And thus I'm writing this now at 7:54 p.m. rather than at 10:54 p.m. -- I'll love myself for it later!

Stimulating Conversations with Boys

We had some fabulously interesting dinner table conversation today.  Perhaps I'm easily impressed since so much of our mealtime conversation revolves around Harry Potter and Legos and me trying to squelch conversations that have anything to do with bodily noises.  So today's topics were a real treat!

At lunch the boys and I debated what would happen if a person were able to be in a bubble in the center of the earth.  Would he hover in mid-bubble, since the gravity-creating mass would be distributed evenly all around him?  Would he explode as the gravity-creating mass all around him pulled him in every direction at once?  Would he implode because of the intense air pressure at the center of the earth (you know, if there were a bubble of air there, theoretically speaking)?  The only solid answer I came away with was that something would definitely happen to him -- not her -- since only a boy would be found in some place as dangerous and exciting as the center of the earth.

And then at dinner we dreamed of having an enormous, interactive time-lapse globe that would let us watch the entire history of the earth condensed down to ten minutes.  Or one hour.  Or an entire day.  The shifting of mountains, dividing of continents, carving of canyons, spread of civilization and slide of glaciers all in fast-forward.  How cool would that be?  And what if you could zoom in on smaller sections of the earth and tell it to play just the years within a certain timeframe -- we could watch the flood, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, the growth of Wizard Island, the crumbling of Pangea, the building of the pyramids or the Great Wall of China or the tower of Babel or the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings.  We could see the chorus of angels that sang at Jesus' birth.

"Do you think we'll be able to see all that when we get to heaven?" one of the boys asked.

It sure would be cool, wouldn't it?

Ten Minutes

Mrs. Testosterhome is embarking on a weekly (optimistically) ten-minute writing assignment -- no rules other than "write for ten minutes one day a week."

So, since I've been slacking severely in the blogging department, I'm giving it a try.  I endeavor to write ten minutes every Wednesday!  That said, I'm not committing to putting what I write each week up here for all to read.  But, I'm hoping that just the process of writing will cause the inspiration to flow and hopefully generate something blog-worthy.  Because I'm cocky and like other people to read what I've written, you know?  

So, with just a few minutes to fill... the boys and I have been observing the coolest moth feeding from the petunias on our deck around dinner time.  At first we thought it was a hummingbird because it's body is that big and it's wings are an uninterrupted blur of speed and it hovers like it's swimming in mid-air.  But it has antennae!  And a proboscis!  It's really cool!  I finally looked it up on-line tonight (what would we do without the Internet?) and it's called -- guess it -- a hummingbird moth!  It's beautiful with a zebra-striped body and flecks of orange on its wings.  It's also impossible to catch on film because it comes out at dusk and moves like a... hummingbird, only more sporadically.  Well, it's impossible for me to catch on film, but if you google it you'll see lots of pictures other people have taken of it.

And there you go, my ten minutes for this week.  If I stopped re-reading my writing so much I'd get a lot more written.  Oh well.  Y'all have a great week!

In Short

After working on summarizing skills in school today, Luke offered, "Maybe they call it summarizing because it's like summer -- too short."