Amen.

No need to add anything to this post (click it to go read it), it says it all.

Help Haiti Live!!

Help Haiti Live is a concert sponsored by Compassion International. INCREDIBLE musicians for an INCREDIBLE reason!! If you cannot get to the concert in Nashville, you can WATCH ONLINE February 27th (like TODAY people!!)!! For real! Awesome? I think so!!

Winter. Blech.

So, I hate winter. Like LOATHE. I do not make any attempts even to cover up that fact. I DO NOT LIKE to be cold. At all. Ever. So this winter with our 44 inches or whatever the final total of snow is has been particularly nightmarish for me. Well, it just got even more enjoyable last week. Seems when the water all freezes in your gutters and keeps re-freezing and accumulating more water until it is a gigantic solid mass of ice completely encasing your very high-up and impossible to reach gutters, it creates what is called an ice dam. This makes it impossible for any water that is coming off the roof from the 837 inches of snow melting to go into the gutter. But alas, gravity says that water has to go somewhere. Also, water that blows up under your shingles when you have winds in excess of 55 mph and freezes seems to lift them up and damage seals around roof vents as well. (Are you seeing where this is going??) And what started out as "um, honey, this window is dripping" has now become a new half of a roof put on our home, industrial drying equipment blowing in our house for the last week straight (mmm, extra industrial drafty, so nice in the winter), holes cut in walls to get out wet insulation and allow the blowers to get air in there to dry out the walls, baseboards and window trim removed, a shower being torn out, counter tops set to be torn out, and possibly some cabinets and more insulation/walls torn out too in the kitchen and the kids' bedroom. In February. When it is cold. And, as noted, I am not a fan of cold. I am also not a fan of having my house torn up and cut into pieces, while chasing around 4 kids, a cat, a dog, and an ever changing number of rodents. (btw, Snowy was found yesterday, flattened and stuck, yes, actually stuck, to a wall behind a book shelf-my life is so special right now. Disgusting.) I am however a fan of our homeowners insurance and their awesome helpfulness and also a fan of getting to replace my hideous brown 1979 shower and equally hideous fake butcher block laminate counter tops with shiny new ones. A silver lining after all!! (I have wanted to replace those suckers for years so thanks, Ice! But now please go away. Forever. Thank you. And we could have done without all the drama too, Water. Jeez.)

But I STILL hate winter. Blech.

PS-and our local high school had the whole gym end of it collapse b/c of snow and ice, very very scary-winter is not any good at all. NONE.

Do A Dollop

Introducing the newest member of our family and resident of the Hamster Bermuda Triangle:

Daisy.

Good luck to you, fair rodent-hope you stick around longer than your predecessors.

(why yes, that IS a disco ball back there next to the hamster cage-hamsters love to do the Hustle, it is a little known fact...)

(and no, we have not found the previous hamster so having this new one virtually guarantees that one will show up--but a sweet friend offered us one of their baby rodents and Thing 2 was just dying for one sooooo....the things we do as parents, I swear, ridiculous.)

Missing!

Oh, we have terrible hamster problems here at Chez Things. You can read about the beginning of our hamster curse here. So, the latest involves Thing 2's Christmas hamster, Snowy. She desperately wanted one ever since her previous hammie died tragically a year or so ago. So, we got her a super cute winter white hamster for Christmas and she was THRILLED!

However, this past Saturday night, we went to dinner at our neighbors' house and when we came home, one of the tubes had been knocked off the side of the cage. And well, Snowy is M.I.A. No sign of her anywhere. It is very frustrating-I don't even know how to possibly find a very tiny hamster in our comparatively gigantic house (I mean in comparison to the hamster, b/c well, anything bigger than a shoe box is gigantic to a hamster...) I am sure she is sneaking around behind me every time I bend down to look under another piece of furniture-and laughing at me!! We feel pretty certain the dog did not eat it (although he has tried in the past with our other hamster, no not the one referenced above that we killed within hours, the one that replaced that one-he ate it and threw it up, and it lived, for 6 more months-NO, I am NOT making that up, can you even make stuff like that up?? I told you, hamster CURSED!!) b/c well, let's just say we are pretty sure, and leave it at that. But the cat seems a little shifty so I don't know...I'm actually quite certain, given that we got ANOTHER foot of snow this weekend (that makes 2 giganto snow storm this winter already-we live in the south for a reason-why the snow, Winter?? why??), that that little rodent hopped a plane for Bermuda. And I just may have to go look for her there....