According to my Dad’s side of the family… ok, all of my family, white & nerdy pretty much describes me to the T. I am pretty pasty and I did teach myself how to code websites. In fact, I married Mr. White & Nerdy and adopted Jr. White & Nerdy. If it weren’t for my love of super cute shoes I would be up there in the down right geek range.
In order for Sweet Hope to become a 501(c)3 we have to keep very accurate financial records of sales. Theoretically, this could be done with any number of programs that are accessible to us. For instance, I have access to a copy of Quickbooks Pro. I really should be using that. However, I like to make things difficult on myself. Moreover, I’m a big fan of spreadsheets. It just so happens that Mr. White & Nerdy is the king of all White & Nerdy (except that he’s super hot so we just ignore the nerdy part) and is pro at making spreadsheets.
When he dies, if he isn’t sainted I will come down from the heavens and smote all of those who didn’t think he qualifies for sainthood. I mean honestly, he married ME. This poor man spent the week out of town working his ass off and then drove 2 1/2 hours home in the pouring rain only to have me beg him to make me a spreadsheet as soon as he walked in the door. I didn’t even offer to pour him a drink. And he did it. If that doesn’t qualify for sainthood I don’t know what does. Saving peoples lives and helping the poor are nothing compared to acquiescing to your crazy wife’s whims.
So the trusty husband created this 5 page spreadsheet that can track what customers have purchased, how much they paid for shipping, how much we paid for shipping, how much paypal took from us, how much we spent to make truffles, how many truffles and caramels I have to make, how many I get to eat extra are left over and how much money we get to send to the Baby Home. There is some other stuff in there too. When he was all finished he started to mention what would be cool is if we set it up so that I could enter how many boxes of each thing people ordered and it would automatically calculate a bunch of other stuff. Secretly, this is what I really wanted, but I didn’t want to push him into too much. My response was, “yes, I would like the super deluxe nerdy version please.”
This kind of stuff is what I really dig about owning a business. Of course, Sweet Hope makes a profit every year so that helps. If we were operating at a loss it would be a whole different story.
Don’t forget you get to start voting for your favorite flavors on Monday.
This weekend I shall be pimping my child out for candy around my mother’s neighborhood. Watch for the small person in the safety orange kitty costume. He’s overly cute and you will be compelled to give him sugary treats that his parents will later steal while he’s sleeping. Because that’s what we need in this house… more candy.
Here have a video so you forget about the fact that I just mentioned that I steal from my child.
Three years ago yesterday we received this email:
Hello Lisa and Derek,
Your case scheduled on September 4!!!
Three years ago yesterday we learned that we had 10 days to prepare to become parents. Sure, we’d been preparing for 2 years, but after waiting 14 months with false hope we were skeptical that parenthood was ever in the cards for us. I remember waking up three years ago and saying, “wow, in two weeks our lives are going to change forever.” And they did.
Thirteen years ago today I married my the trusty husband. We were just babies. I was 20 and he was 21. I don’t suggest anyone ever get married that young. Somehow we made it work.
In the past 13 years we have moved 11 times, lived in 3 different states, graduated from college, held countless jobs, travelled around the West Coast and adopted a beautiful son from Russia. We’ve laughed and cried. We’ve never given up.
Derek is my best friend. I know that sounds rather cliche, but when I think about who I would like to spend most of my time with it is him. I miss him every day when he goes to work. I smile every night when he comes home. I can’t sleep when he’s on business trips. I love him so.
Had I known what life was going to have in store for us when I married him I would do it a thousand times over. It has been the best 13 years of my life.
We had the worst photos in the history of wedding photos. They were taken by the church janitor. Hey, he was inexpensive what can I say.
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This is my anniversary gift. It’s one of the best gifts he’s ever given me.
I have a whole crapload of work that I have to do between now and the 31st. So instead of sitting behind my computer and actually doing it, I took 4 days off and enjoyed myself. I’m certain I’ll regret that decision later this week, but looking back on it, I’m glad I did.
I have a few photos, but am really too lazy to resize and edit them so you just get the verbal rundown.
Friday was one of the trusty husband’s flex Fridays (he has every other Friday off during the summer). It was handy that it coincided with our monthly wine club night so he helped me clean the house and get ready for company. We spend Friday evening sipping Viognier with our friends and the weather was nice enough to start a fire in the back yard and have dessert. I love wine club nights
Saturday was Salsa Day. I have been looking forward to this event for about 2 weeks. Windmill Gardens in Sumner hosts a salsa festival in the spring. One would think that it would be in the summer and you get to taste all kinds of delicious salsa. Nope. It is their big tomato and pepper sale. Complete with Mariachi band and Ciscoe Morris. Oh, and they had gallon heirloom and rare tomatoes and peppers for $3.99. We rounded out the remainder of out tomato and pepper collection with 7 new tomatoes and 6 peppers. We also picked up a few Thai Basil plants and 2 Mexican Orange shrubs. The remainder of the day was spent preparing the area the Mexican Orange shrubs (and a whole host of other plants) would live. Derek built me the first of 2 retaining walls and shoveled more dirt and rock than he did in his days as an Archaeologist. By the end of the night we washed about 20 tons of dirt off of us.
Sunday we hosted a BBQ for our friends. Since we were tired from the day before we slept in causing us last minute issues with food and preparations. In the end we pulled it together and had a fantastic time in the sun. The children were none to happy with me because I kept shooing them outside. It was a nice day. Children should play outside when it’s sunny. We ended the evening in front of the fire with guitars and good music.
Monday was back to the garden. We had one more retaining wall to build, but not bricks to build it with. Off to the mega home improvement store… they were out. Next mega home improvement store… doesn’t cary the kind we need. Mega grocery/everything store… bricks are $1.99 each as opposed to the $1.69 that we paid at the mega home improvement store. Third mega home improvement store… has the bricks. Only trouble is that I crack my head on a shelf loading the bricks onto a card and Derek smashes his finger. Now I’m down to one brain cell and he can’t flip people off. There could be worse things, although that last brain cell might get awfully lonely. In the end we finished the wall, shoveled and raked more dirt and installed an irrigation system for the area. We were on the go from 10:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m. We tried to watch a movie after the boy went to bed, but I kept falling asleep.
We are all officially worn out, but can’t take a moment to rest. Not only do I have tons of work to do, I promised the child that we would plant flowers and go to the pool this week. Oy. Next weekend doesn’t look much better. Hockey, Point Defiance plant sale, 2 birthday parties and the dedication of the new addition to our church. I guess I could rest in September.
I’ve always been of the mindset that if I didn’t have something to write about it was better to not force it. I’m pretty sure I’m right about that. I always hate it when people apologize for not blogging in such a long time and then they stop again. Man alive that’s annoying.
My lack of inspiration comes from my brain being totally fried because of excessive yard work. Somehow shoveling dirt makes those last two brain cells work extra hard rendering them useless in any other capacity. Or maybe it is because they are running around saying, “what do we do?!” while watching my child romp and play on a pile of bark dust (in shorts and no shoes). Doesn’t that make you cringe just a little bit? It does me because I picked about 400 splinters out of my feet yesterday.
So since you always get an update on me I’ll do a little on on the remaining members of our household.
The trusty husband:
He too contracted the not-swine-flu-although-we-now-think-it-might-have-been. He was a saint and took care of the child while I lay on my death bed. When I got a little better I took care of the child so he could die in peace. Luckily neither of us died, but the child still gets chips for snack. In the test of wills I won as Derek caved and went to the doctor. He was diagnosed with a sinus infection and prescribed antibiotics. I, however, continue to incubate the super virus. In addition to being sick I roped him into a gardening project where this weekend he will have to build 2 small retaining walls. He will do it because he loves me, but will secretly plot to smother me in my sleep.
The boy:
For sale: 1 small child. Only whines, argues, cries and sasses 90% of the time. The remaining 10% he is an adorable little angel. This time I’m actually joking.
He has gotten to the age where you can almost reason with him. Although we have our moments. Like how he refuses to believe that there are not chunks in his strawberry yogurt despite us telling him every day that the chunks are in Daddy’s yogurt, not his. He still plays mostly alone, but is figuring out that friends are pretty cool. He is no longer afraid of pine cones. The exact opposite really. He now collects them. That was pretty annoying at first, but is becoming more fun. He is discovering that there are different types and pretty soon we’ll pull out the book learn the real names of the trees (insert plant geek language here).
Naps are becoming fewer and fewer, but that will be ok in the summer. We have plenty to keep us busy.
He has become quite the little hockey player. He now works with his coaches instead of clinging to his father. It took the right wording to make that happen. He also skates the whole hour with his stick and is finally trying to go after the puck. We figure by the end of next year the NHL should be calling.
Fat & Dumb:
still fat and still dumb only with 20% more throwing up.
Remember how a while ago I was complianing about how the trusty husband broke my computer and then I strangled him with a ribbon cable*? After that he fixed the computer and actually made Windows 7 work. Of course that meant that I had to install the new Creative Suite 4, which meant I had to transfer all of my brushes, actions, swatches, presets and everything from the old hard drive to the new hard drive. It also meant that I had to transfer other such things as my internet bookmarks, email accounts (all 4 of them), rss feeds, contacts and anything else that made internet living more comfortable. He also got all fancy and hooked me up with Safari. It looks really cool on the surface, but underneath there is a huge learning curve for this girl who has been hooked on Mozilla for years. Safari doesn’t have all of the swanky plugins that Mozilla offers. So I had to learn new apps like Tweetdeck. Sigh. Then I had to set all of my feeds back up. I’ve been working on that for close to 2 days now. I keep up on upwards of 70+ blogs. Design blogs, garden blogs, friends, entertainment crap, you name it. I had to manually go to each page and bookmark it again. Then I had to visit each one a second time to tell the news reader that I’ve read it. Just a big fat pain in the ass.
To make all of this better the trusty husband abandoned me for Minnesota this week. He won’t be home until Thursday and there’s no one here to tell me how to find Facebook in this mess of stuff… ok, I did find Facebook and my own blog, but other than that I’m pretty much lost.
Then the background on my screen keeps changing. It’s a “cool” feature of Windows 7. Pretty pretty pictures that randomly change as you are working. It wouldn’t be that bad if I only had 1 monitor, but since I have 2 and frequently only use one every so often I’ll be seeing a fern in my peripheral vision and then BLAM! Dahlia. Talk about distracting. Write code, write code… oh! pretty flower.
To top off this mess of a computer (which I think is the bees knees) the UPS dude shows up today with a box from Antec. I didn’t order more computer parts. I’m trying to get rid of computer parts. The trusty husband sent them the power supply that we think started this whole mess and the motherboard that said power supply fried. We wanted our money back and for them to pay for the new motherboard we had to buy. What did they do? Sent us a replacement powersupply. What the hell am I supposed to do with that?
Now if you’ll pardon me, it is sunny outside and I have a date with a playground and a juice box.
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*I would link that post, but Safari doesn’t like the Wordpress dashboard and won’t open the insert link box and I’m too lazy to manually write the link in
