Category: Life

Home Movies

Hot Rollers Used to Be How I Rolled

Karen

I used to spend two hours, every day, hot rolling my hair. That, of course, was back in the days BEFORE children because we all know that spending two hours on your hair AFTER children is simply not going to happen.

I totally bought into the big hair style. It was fun to roll it, fluff it out and then use a whole can of hair spray (okay, not whole, but half) on my hair to make it stay. It was doubly frustrating for me because my hair would look AWESOME for about thirty minutes, and then it would start to droop, fall and soon I would just look like I crawled out of bed and was too lazy to comb my hair.

But I’ve reformed. I’ve evolved from those big-hair days and now have I virtually no hair.

I’m nothing if not extreme.

Okay fine, I have hair, but it’s the shortest it’s been … ever. Some days I LOVE it. Some days I HATE it. But I’m learning to live with it, I think. It’s certainly a lot easier to take care of and it literally takes me two minutes to blow dry it in the morning.

Now THAT I can live with.

I just bought some hair wax the other day, but I haven’t played around with it yet. I’m not real sure what to do with it. I mean, I KNOW it goes into my hair, duh, but … then what? Do I scrunch it? Do I toss it? Do I spike it? I suppose I can do whatever I want with it, that’s what this wax product claims anyway.

I bought the cheap stuff. A lot of the wax were $15.00 and over. *blink* I was about to toss the whole wax idea when I stumbled across a can for $5 bucks. Knowing that you often get what you pay for, my expectations are suitably low at this point. We’ll see how it performs. But I would sort of like to make my hair look like Annette Bening’s, only with bangs, if possible.

I went and got my hair colored a few days ago. I wanted to wash the remaining red out of my hair. Red is okay, but I really want to go back to my natural color, which is more of a chocolate brown. (Okay, so it’s more of a mousy brown, but saying it’s a chocolate brown sounds way more sexy). When the gal rinsed me out and we sat in front of her mirror, I could tell, right away, I was going to HATE it. I could tell, even when wet, it was that clown-orange color – AGAIN. AARGH! My stylist could see I was not thrilled and suggested we put in an ash blonde color to tone it down. At that point? I was willing to try anything because I really don’t want carrot-colored hair.

It doesn’t go with my eyes, you see.

So, my poor stylist spent another 30 minutes on me putting in an ash color. But when she rinsed it out, I’m happy to say it did indeed take the remaining red out and it’s now that sexy chocolate brown.

I should rename this blog “The Hair Saga.”

Anyway, as I mentioned before, I’ve been busy digitizing our old home movies and capturing snippets to share with you all. Kevin and I were visiting my folks in this snippet and we were getting ready to do some sight seeing in Kansas City. Everyone was ready to go, but everyone was waiting for me to finish my damn hair. I’m not exaggerating when I said it took me two hours to get ready. After shower and makeup, I would hot roll my hair, and then have to sit around for about 30 minutes to wait for it to cool down. Then I would take out the curlers, fluff it, pick it, make it as big as I possibly could because I knew it would lose a lot of it’s body before the end of the day and then spray the ever-loving heck out of it.

Even though Kevin loved the big hair, I think he prefers not having to wait around all day for me to make that happen.

I also used to be pretty anal about not going into public without makeup on. I wanted Kevin to always think I was attractive and to be proud of me. (Which he will tell me, after reading this, that he always thinks I’m attractive, no matter what I look like – but come on, there’s sweet and then there’s REALITY). I was also feeling pressure to always look my best because Kevin’s mom is like that – the woman NEVER looks bad. I think in the 23 years I’ve known her, I’ve seen her without makeup twice and that was because she had eye surgery and wasn’t allowed to wear any. My MIL is also the sort of person who goes out into public wearing sequins, silver shoes and bright pinks and somehow, it looks RIGHT on her. So I was sort of trying to meet Kevin’s expectations, I think. Even though he would tell you that it really didn’t matter to him what I look like (then or now), I know that deep down he sort of compared me to his momma and I didn’t want to disappoint him.

Then the boys came along and *PFFT* – that perfect hair and makeup mentality sort of went out of the window because I didn’t have the energy to care. I routinely dropped the boys off at school in my PJ’s and oily, makeup-free face and didn’t give a hoot. I figured, you no like? You no look.

Now that the boys are teenagers, I’ve learned to compromise. I still make an effort to look nice every day, but I no longer freak out if I have to run to the store on “makeup free” days. (Which, granted, don’t happen that often, but they do happen).

And before any of you go all feminist on me and say, “HEY! Don’t feel like you have to dress up for ANY MAN,” let me just say, I try and look nice FOR ME, too. It makes me feel good about myself and if I feel good about myself, then I’m more confident and if I’m more confident, then I’m mentally equipped to handle whatever life throws at me.

I also want to look nice for Kevin out of respect for him. Just put the shoe on the other foot for a minute. I’d have a real problem with Kevin if he had a huge beer gut (a little pooch is cute, I think), never shaved, rarely showered and never bothered to put on wrinkle-free clothes whenever we got together with family. I can at least return the favor.

Just because you have a marriage license doesn’t mean you have a license to stop caring about your appearance.

But there’s a happy medium in there somewhere – it just takes a while to find it sometimes.

Politics

America is Not Perfect, But She’s Pretty Damn Awesome

Karen

I don’t care what side of the fence you stand on, the concept behind this video, the sheer mindless drones that this betrays, has GOT to scare you, at least a little bit.

Granted, this is pretty dramatic. But maybe things like this will be what it takes to WAKE PEOPLE UP – our government would love to control us like this and I don’t know about you guys? But I have NO desire to become a puppet on a string, thank you very much.

I thought these videos were interesting: What would Reagan do.

It’s pretty refreshing to see a president who isn’t afraid to stand up and take the hits for our country, isn’t it. It’s time to elect someone who will defend our country, reinforce our values and STOP apologizing for our country.

(Just in case I lost you, I’m talking about Obama here).

We need to stop kowtowing to political correctness, and to foreign (and domestic!) dictators.

GOD BLESS AMERICA!

Politics

Caution! I Need More Time to Be Distracted

Karen

They call it the “dilemma zone.” That point in time when you’re driving down the street and the light turns to yellow. You have exactly 1/2 second to decide if you’re going to run the light, or slam on your brakes. Do you have time? What does your internal clock tell you? Because we all know that yellow lights stay on for five seconds.

Give or take a click or two.

What would you do if you didn’t know how long the yellow light would stay on? I’m betting you would stop – better safe than sorry, right?

MoDOT (Missouri Department of Transportation) is changing traffic signal times in response to a new Federal study that found we need more time to stop. It’s not because of what we drive, because newer cars are getting better at stopping.

MoDOT’s Tom Blair said, “Cars do stop, just as well or better than they have in the past. [Chris Hayes interjected] This is our problem. [Blair added] This is our problem. Our motorists, myself included, we need more time to stop. We have too many things that distract us from doing our due diligence which is being an alert driver.”

So MoDOT is adapting to how we react when approaching an intersection. Engineers call it the dilemma zone. We all get that feeling when the light turns yellow, ‘can I make it?’ A lot of it depends on how fast you’re going. So MoDOT is changing yellow lights to make it comfortable for you to stop and they’re basing it on the average speeds people are going.”

Source

MoDOT implemented the longer yellow light experiment at an intersection in Arnold, Missouri to see if fewer people would be caught running a red light.

Last May, Arnold cited 709 people for running a red light on camera.
May 2011? Arnold cited 17 people.

So, will MoDOT implement longer yellow lights throughout Missouri?

MoDOT’s Tom Blair cautioned, “I think the jury’s still out, Chris, on the reduction of red light violations that we’ve seen in 141 in the city of Arnold. We have to see 2-3 months, 6 months, a year from now, does that continue to produce that? Or do all the motorists just re-adapt and now they start running the new red light time?

And that’s precisely what I think will happen. I think the lower number of people caught running red lights in the example above is because the longer duration allowed more people to cross the intersection before it turned red. I also think it temporarily confused people and they slowed down out of caution.

I also firmly think that people WILL adapt and we will soon be back to the exact same situation we’re in now – people will take chances because people inherently think they can get away with it. So overall? I don’t think lengthening the amount of time the yellow light is on will make a huge difference one way or another.

But the part that really gets my blood boiling about this entire piece? MoDOT wants to lengthen the yellow lights because “we have too many things that distract us from doing our due diligence which is being an alert driver.”

Because we’re distracted with something other than driving, we need more time to stop.

What. The. Hell.

So, in answer to the fact that too many people are distracted when they drive is to give people MORE time to finish what they’re doing and bring their attention back to driving.

Because driving is a SECONDARY priority, you see.

Are you kidding me??

Here’s an idea – CUT OUT THE DISTRACTIONS AND FOCUS ON DRIVING, MORONS. WHY must we allow for these dangerous distractions? Why must we excuse people’s responsibility to drive safely? Why don’t we focus on educating and warning people about keeping their eyes on the road instead of pandering to the idiots who would prefer to use their cars as mobile offices?

It drives me bonkers whenever we give people an excuse not to take responsibility for their actions and choices.

Making the yellow light sequence longer is not going to force people to become better drivers. They will just adapt to the longer time period and continue to be piss-poor drivers. Because bottom line? People nowadays don’t think about how their bad habits will affect other people. Because the world nowadays is all about ME, ME, ME.

People need to start caring, and respecting, other people. We need to start training people, because the message got lost somewhere over the years, to be courteous and polite to each other, both on and off the road. Pandering to people’s bad choices will never solve the problem.

Any problem.

Life

Update on Jazz’s Toes

Karen

When I picked Jazz up from summer school today (remember, he has personal finance in the morning and P.E. in the afternoon – NOT the best class to have when you feel like your toes are going to fall off), and he said today was the first day that he didn’t feel the agonizing pressure on his toes that has crippled him these past several days.

Praise God! I’ve been praying really hard for God to heal him – it’s been a ROUGH week for Jazz.

He was actually walking normally to the car today. I can’t help but wonder if the Epsom salt soak helped with the pressure. We haven’t been doing the soaks because the salt has just about killed Jazz this past week, which is probably good, salt is healing, but I just couldn’t bear to see him in so much ADDITIONAL pain, so I didn’t push the issue.

Anyway, we went to the followup visit with the podiatrist this afternoon. His toes look gross, but the doctor said he’s seen much worse at this stage. He was concerned about all of the pain that Jazz has been feeling. Though his toes would still feel sensitive at this stage, he said they shouldn’t be hurting him as much as they have been and that that was a sign they were infected.

He prescribed a different antibiotic and we’ve made another followup appointment in two weeks – WHICH, hopefully, will be the last time we have to see him because HOPEFULLY, the infection will be cleared up by then and he should be feeling much better by then.

I hope.

The doctor did use some tweezers to pluck out some dead skin (string of built-up puss? I didn’t catch what that was, exactly), and Jazz nearly came unglued when he touched the tweezers to his toe. Again, the doctor said he shouldn’t have been so sensitive and that it was the infection that was causing so much pain.

I blame myself. I take total responsibility for Jazz’s pain. Why? Because I should have stuck with the initial antibiotics that the clinic prescribed. I also should have stuck with the soaks. If I had done those two things, Jazz probably wouldn’t have been in so much pain this past week.

I dropped the mom ball. I not only dropped it, it rolled under the couch and got stuck under there.

*SIGH*

The antibiotics knocked him out. They made him so drowsy that he couldn’t keep his eyes open at school, which was terrible timing because it was finals week and he sort of needed to stay awake for those. That’s why we didn’t finish the medicine. But still, I should have worked around his school schedule and given them to him, regardless. It’s my fault that this has gone on for so long.

I feel so bad for the kid. It’s bad enough to see your kid in pain, it’s worse when you realize that you actually contributed to that pain.

At any rate, we finally figured out that ibuprofen works better for him than Tylenol, so I guess that’s a plus.

A small plus.

So here we are. Taking an oral antibiotic and when the infection gets knocked out, then we’ll have to treat his toes to an anti-fungal ointment for … God only knows how long.

Jazz was actually in pretty good spirits today. I think he was just so relieved to have a break from the pressure that he was giddy. I told him on the way home today that he now had a “story” to share with people. “Remember when I was 16-years old and had to have my toenails removed? Yeah. That sucked.”

I also told him that this kind of thing, only makes a person stronger. It builds character. I know he doesn’t want to hear that from me right now, but at some point, he’ll get what I’m saying.

We ALL have stories, unfortunately.

Home Movies, VideoPlay

Four Minutes of Cutesy Love Stuff

Karen

WARNING – WARNING!

Home video ahead!

Proceed at your own risk.

BYOP (Bring your own pillow)

I’ll supply the drool bibs.

Okay. I’m getting this digitizing process down and it’s going a lot faster than I anticipated. So far, so good. *knock on wood* I’m currently on tape four and I’m BORED OUT OF MY MIND. Seriously. I could never make it as a videographer because I literally have HOURS of film of people eating.

What the …??

I didn’t eat back then to stay skinny, so I think I was wishful thinking – fantasy calories are just as good as the real thing? Right?

Now? *pfft* Pass the buffet, friend.

Anyway … there may not be as many snippets as I had hoped because truly, I can barely stomach watching all of this footage; I would never dream of putting you all through that torment. I mean, I like to consider myself a brutal-sort of blogger, but even I have limits.

This first video is our first anniversary. We gifted ourselves our first video camera and we took a video of us taking a bite of the first tier of our wedding cake saved from our wedding. You can watch the results.

Pardon the mushy kissing part but we were young and in love. (Sorry Kevin, not WERE, but ARE – ARE darling). Actually, we still do that, but now it’s even more gross because we’re old and wrinkled. We only do it in public to embarrass our teenage sons. SCORE.

Also? This was the one and only bite I had of my wedding cake. (Er. Wait a minute, maybe not). I was too nervous and worked up to eat any cake on our wedding day so … I’m really hoping it tasted better on THE day because it was like chewing cardboard that had been soaked in dog urine when we took this video.

Yum.

Here’s a picture of us with our entire wedding cake, if you’re interested. We’re munching on that top tier you see.

Did you notice anything weird about the Happy Anniversary sign that Kevin printed out on our state-of-the-art ZENITH computer and Epson dot-matrix printer? (You did indeed read that correctly. We’re old enough to have been around when computers were first becoming available to private citizens. And you only THOUGHT I was old, right?) For you sharp-eyed readers out there, a gold star if you noticed that “Anniversary” is missing an “R”. It say, “Happy AnniverSAY.” Hence the reason we say “Happy AnniverSAY” to each other every anniversary. Inside joke. Well, not so inside now, now that I’ve shared the joke with you all.

I will be honest and tell you that Kevin is quite horrified that I’m posting this for all the Internet to see. But as usual, I sweet talked him into letting me have my way so … don’t ruin it for me by making fun of it or anything or my marriage may not SEE year number 22. HA!

Some observations while watching these old movies:

I had BIG hair. No now, we can be honest. There is some footage where it’s literally standing on end. Why didn’t anyone tell me how stupid I looked?!? I mean, good grief. In fact, the next video I’m posting is me, in my hot rollers just to PROVE to you that I suffered all in the name of having awesome early 90’s hair.

Also? What is up with my high, squeaky, hillbilly voice? I had no idea I sounded like that and when I turned to Kevin, just now, my face a mask of petrified horror, and asked him if I still sounded like that, he said, “No. Thank God.”

Okay so I added the “thank God” part, but wow people. All that is missing are my overalls and missing teeth. (And I stopped wearing overalls shortly after having babies because WOW – that did not help disguise the post-baby fat AT ALL).

I have no idea why I have this weird fascination with the cake in this video. I keep picking at it, like I’m excavating for … treasure? Taste? Who knows. Actually, I remember picking through the cake and I think I thought the crusty icing was sort of fun to dig through. I was just as easily amused back then as I am now, it would appear.

And at the very end of the video, I dare to take one more bite. I think I was unwilling to accept the fact that it tasted so nasty the first time, so I was hoping that by taking a second bite, it might taste better.

It didn’t.

The candle in the video is the same candle that we used in our wedding. And yes, we both lit it during the ceremony to signify “unity.” Cheesy, but touching. I hung on to that candle for YEARS before it finally turned yellow and started to smell funny. Actually, we had stored it in a box in our attic and it was starting to melt from all the heat and getting candle wax everywhere.

Not one to be terribly sentimental, I tossed it.

This was taken in our first home, which we rented, which I found because Kevin was working so much in his new career (accounting), that he didn’t have time to look with me. I was shown this house, liked it so much that I called Kevin (from a land line, because we didn’t have cell phones back then *GASP*), and he said, “if you like it, I trust you, get it.” So I got it. We lived in that house for about two years. We moved into the house we own now when Dude was six months old. It was a great first house. VERY drafty, but very comfortable.

Also. I took a lot of video of Kevin’s youngest sister. I had (still do, actually) a girl crush on her and it’s painfully obvious in these old movies. I also noticed that she hardly ever acknowledged me while I was filming her. I bet she thought I was terribly irritating. Now that we’ve known each other for 20 + years, I’ll have to ask her if that annoyed her back then. lol

I love looking back on these old movies. It just brings up all sorts of tender feelings toward Kevin (not that I don’t STILL have tender feelings for him, but you know … did I just put my foot in my mouth?) and makes me thankful that we’ve had such a great life together. I’m truly blessed to have such a great man.

More videos on the way!

Please, contain your excitement.

Life

Digitizing Old Movies

Karen

I’ve mentioned that the horrific F5 tornado that ripped through Joplin got me thinking about what I would want to save if I knew something like that was barreling down on us – our family home movies and pictures – and how I really want to focus and get everything stored onto DVD for safe keeping.

I would be physically sick if I ever lost these precious old movies of when the boys were little.

So, that’s what I’m doing, digitizing our old movies, burning them onto DVD’s and will soon store them in our safe deposit box.

(The same with our pictures, too. Which is the next project after I finish this).

So, I hounded Kevin into setting up the old camera at work and I’ve been busy capturing the videos for the past several days.

Digitizing Old Movies

It’s slow going, but it’s not that bad since I can start the process, set the timer and then come back and check on it. I’ve been capturing the video in chunks because Kevin started to do this a while back and said that it would crash the computer after a time period. So I’m capturing it in chunks to hopefully avoid that snafu.

I just finished capturing the first tape and I will be burning it onto a DVD very soon. I will also be snipping portions of that tape and uploading them to YouTube, so you should see some of those snippets very soon.

Lucky you. 😉

Our first video camera was an anniversary gift to each other for our first anniversary. (I’ll likely post a snippet of when Kevin and I took a bite out of our first tier wedding cake that we saved – with interesting results, I might add). I took hours, and hours, and HOURS, of video of absolutely nothing. Well, not nothing, per se, but rather nothing really interesting happened, and I have to admit, it’s pretty boring, but it’s fun to watch all of the nieces and nephews when they were so YOUNG. (Geez, it doesn’t even seem possible).

I’m really looking forward to getting to the tapes when the boys were babies. I can’t wait to watch those again. It’s been YEARS since I watched them and I’m really looking forward to sharing some of those precious moments with you all.

This is going to be quite a process, I’m afraid. We have 42 tapes to go through.

Box O' Tapes

I really regret not taking more videos over the years. I was so good about doing that in the early years (thank God), but as the kids got older, and well, resistant, (HA!), I just didn’t drag out the camera as much.

Later, we ended up buying a camera that filmed on DVD’s, which I’ll go through and post snippets of when I get to them. That will be a lot easier, obviously.

I’ve already told Kevin and the boys that we’re taking our video camera on vacation with us this year. We’ve talked about taking our video camera with us on vacation every year, and every year, Kevin and I would look at each other, contemplate the hassle of carrying around a video camera and nearly at the same time, wrinkle our noses and say, “Nah. Forget it.” (Just one of the reasons I adore that man – we think so much alike).

But I’m not going to allow him to talk me out of it this go-around. As we did last year, we will take enough cameras for everyone to use (the boys actually took some of the coolest photos), as well as our video camera and we’ll take turns filming each other. It should be interesting what the boys choose to focus on. HA! Kevin bought a whole spindle worth of 30-minute DVD’s for really cheap, so we won’t run out of DVD’s to use any time soon.

Oops. The timer just went off. Time to capture the next installment of our VERY EXCITING LIVES.

Hey. We may not be the most exciting people out there, but I wouldn’t trade our mundane moments for anything in the world.

P.S. – Here is our set up in case you want to do something similar with your old movies:

We’re using the Pinnacle Dazzle DVC 100 DVD Recorder. Here is the product description:

With the Pinnacle Dazzle DVC 100 DVD Recorder, anyone can transfer video to a DVD using a PC—no experience required. Simply connect a VCR, DVD player, camcorder or other video device to the Pinnacle Dazzle DVC 100 DVD Recorder USB hardware. Then use Pinnacle Dazzle DVC 100 DVD Recorder software to create a DVD recording complete with menus and chapter at the click of a button. You can burn your video directly to a DVD without first copying files to the PC hard drive, saving both valuable time and space. The DVD can be played on any home DVD player. DVD burning has never been so easy thanks to the Pinnacle Dazzle DVC 100 DVD Recorder.

And it really is easy. And it saves as a Windows Media File, so there should be very little conversion required.

Though Dazzle probably has software that comes with it, we’re using Windows Movie Magic to actually capture the video. It recognizes the video camera and it’s as simple as clicking “start capturing video.” Once you click on “stop capture”, then it saves to whatever folder you designate. Once it’s on your hard drive (actually, you don’t have to save the video on your hard drive if you don’t want to, but it’s less likely to crash when you burn it on to a DVD later), you can burn it to a DVD. Once on a DVD, then you can edit the video and upload it.

Anyway, that might give you a starting point if you’re interested in digitizing any of your old movies.

P.S.S. – I was not compensated, in any way, for mentioning this product. It’s what we use and we like it because it’s easy and seems to do the job. Remember? I don’t do product reviews. Ever. I should write a disclaimer or something.