Welcome home Diana

Diana got back from boot camp late Saturday, and since her mom and brother were still in New York, Mae picked her up and Diana stayed at Mae’s house. We belatedly celebrated her birthday Sunday night here. Mae bought an ice cream cake: Strawberry ice cream over chocolate cake (Diana specifically requested it). I thought it was going to be gross, but it wasn’t bad. We thought she would stay at Mae’s the whole time she was here, but then Jimmy was granted leave from his training and he came on Wednesday. On Thursday, we all decided to hang out downtown, so the cousins could have a chance to hang out with Diana before she shipped out again. Diana had mentioned that she wanted to go ice skating, so we figured Yerba Buena was a good place, there was that little playground up there for the kids, and the carousel, and then afterwards we could all go to the mall or wherever to hang out. Goldie and the kids came with Cathy and Carter, Mae and Pristina, Donna, Thomas with kids including Annika. And Jimmy and Diana. Well, we were supposed to meet down there at 3pm, but I had to pick up the Sharepoint Designer software from the Microsoft guy and he was running late, so we didn’t actually get down there until 4pm. But we were the first ones anyway, along with Goldie’s crew. Then Diana and Jimmy got there, and we found out at the rec skate was from 12p-4p, so no luck there. But we were already there, so we ate, then headed over to Yerba Buena. When we got there, the playground was crowded – I mean REALLY CROWDED – and not with the kids that I’m used to seeing at playgrounds, they were mostly over 10, rowdy, obnoxious and – sorry – dirty. The term inner-city comes to mind. There was an area for water play, which was actually pretty cool, except when we got there, there was a girl sitting on the edge with her feet in the water. Then there was a seperate sand box, but you could tell there was water in there and I looked at the kids and said to them – “you touch the sand or the water and we go home right away”. And they know I mean that shit. Anyway, the kids had a good time, Dillon loves to climb, Alex of course follows her brother, there were these huge slides that Dillon liked but Alex wouldn’t try. Dillon had fun coming down on his stomach, feet-first, head-first, then he came down head-first on his back. He’s so crazy and that slide was FAST. Check out this clumsy ass

Babygirl wouldn’t try the regular slide for a long time because when we got there the big obnoxious kids were playing all over it and not letting the smaller kids slide down. I finally made her do it. Then we rode the carousel.
::When Donna saw this picture, she told me I shouldn’t let him just stick a little of his head out behind mine, makes me look like I have a big-ass head. And she’s told me that before, so I told her once I took her advice and tried to stand behind him and only stick my head out a little and I made sure I stayed behind his face, and my head STILL looked hella bigger. I told her I rather people think it’s a trick of the camera, hahaha.

Then these kids decided they wanted to play in the sand. Uggh, I hate the sand at the playgrounds. Yeah yeah, let them be kids but whatever. Nasty.
Finally, when we had had enough of the playground, we walked over to the mall to have cream puffs and coffee, hang out for a while, then they were off to Dennis’s new place (which is a story in itself), HBY had to go to the hospital to bring food to his dad and I took the kids, Mae and Pristina home.

Pretty cool site…

you can enter whatever words you like, or choose the feed from any webpage and it’ll create a “wordle” like so. and you can customize the font, colors, orientation. so for lack of imagination, those were the words i typed in…

and THIS is why they creep me out…

Seriously, they are so gross.

We went back to the park to finally bring the kids to the Butterfly Zone at the conservatory. I packed lunch and we had a little picnic on the grass out front before we went in. Afterwards we went inside. I’ve never been there before, and I don’t know what I was expecting, but it was HOT and HUMID inside. Okay, makes sense, it’s a greenhouse. And when we went into a side room it got even worse! THEN! We get to the Butterfly Zone. A few years ago, the Bellagio had a butterfly display in their atrium that was basically netting from the floor to the ceiling with a bunch of butterflies flying around inside. Kind of like this, but gigantic.So I pretty much expected that sort of thing, but NO. It was a room with a bunch of plants and displays and the butterflies were just flying freely around. Like – LANDING on people. Oh my god. AND it was crazy hot and humid, I was sweating just standing around. Dillon was determined to hold one, I saw some kids with 5 or 6 on their hands. Eww. So Dillon finally caught one, I didn’t get a good picture of it because I was trying to hurry before it flew away. And then I saw it. It was so huge and nasty looking all I could do was stand there and go – eww, oh my god. There were two hidden in this plant, so I felt kind of safe, they weren’t going to just leap out at me, I would have screamed I swear. But then there was this old lady and after I pointed it out, she got the butterfly to sit on an outer leaf of the plant, all spread out like this (I wonder if she touched it, eww).Then, on my way out, I saw another one sitting on a plant by the doorway, so I told Dillon to put his hand next to it so I could show the relative size of it (haha, yeah, I’m a chicken). I swear if those things were flying around landing on me it would be my worst nightmare come true…

First attempt to go to the Conservatory of Flowers…

HBY had a couple of free days, so we decided to spend a day at Golden Gate Park, and I figured it would be a good time to bring the kids to the Conservatory to that Butterfly Zone. I’ve only been trying to bring them since March. So we went Monday right after we had lunch, and OF COURSE the damn place is closed on Mondays, and I should have known that. I had brought paper and pencils/crayons for the kids to draw the sights at the Conservatory, but since it was closed I sat them out front on a bench and had them draw pictures of the gardens. I guess it looked kind of funny, these two small kids with their clipboards and crayons, looking all serious. I saw this asian guy wandering around, taking pictures, talking to his friends, and he kept glancing toward the kids smiling. He came up to us and his first question: “are you guys taiwanese?” uhh, yeah RIGHT. haha. anyway, so then he asks in his backwards broken english if he could take a picture of the kids, and i’m like – uhhh, i guess, why not, right? and then he hands me the camera – i’m all – OHHH, you want me to take a picture of you with them? weird, so they’re drawing with their boards on the bench, backs to me, and he goes and stands next to them while I snap the picture with his camera. HBY was standing next to me, I’m surprised he was cool with that whole thing. Then, since I had my camera ready, I took a picture of him so I could blog about him, haha. Funny tourists…lucky for him I understand the desire to photograph everything I see, otherwise I would have told him HELL no, lol…

What a difference…

a little etiquette makes. Haha, actually A LOT of etiquette. So I got Liz’s wedding invitation in the mail and when I saw the envelope I actually said out loud “damn, this is nice”. And I was only looking at the outer envelope. And I IMMEDIATELY thought of the invitation I got for Selena’s wedding a few weeks earlier, look at the difference:

Liz’s invitation envelope:

Selena’s invitation envelope:

Haha, when Marvin saw Selena’s address label he said “oh hell no”. What a difference…The funniest thing is when Liz was talking about hand-writing the addresses on all of the invitations because that’s proper etiquette, I was like – don’t go through all that trouble, NO ONE actually does that, and people will probably think “damn, can’t even afford address labels?” Shit, I guess I don’t know what I’m talking about…maybe I was thinking of what it would look like if it were ME writing them, I should have known Liz would make them look all nice and perfect like that…

Our Traditional 4th of July

We’ve celebrated 4th of July at Lib and Gil’s since the first year they moved in there. Even though it’s over 100 miles away, it’s worth it for us. My kids can go wild at the house, and there are enough older kids to watch out for them, and there’s plenty of space for them to run and scream and it doesn’t bother the adults who, normally, are all seated around this huge table

You can’t see in the picture, but the table is probably at least 8 feet long.

Another reason that we make the trip down there (besides the fact that Lib and Gil are the ultimate hosts) is that the city does the fireworks right around the corner from where they live, so we just walk out onto the street in front of the house to see the show, which is normally pretty good. This year it seemed a little shorter, but hey, we’re in a recession what do you expect?

They said the fireworks were going to start at 915, so we head out onto the street around 905, and of course we wait out there until probably 930 then the show started. In the meantime, everyone’s running around with their cameras snapping pictures (except for me this year).

Normally the fireworks show will run about 30 minutes, I think this year was about 20 minutes, here’s the finale…

 

July SP desktop

I downloaded the July desktop from Shabby Princess and inserted pictures from Great America this past Sunday…it’s a little more to my liking this month, but still a little blah….