Death by Tab...or Diet Coke...or...

So, you all know how much I love my Tab cola. Well, did you know that if I downed 271.53 Tabs in one sitting, it would kill me? It would. Death by Tab. Death by caffeine. So, how many caffeine drinks would it take to kill you? Go and find out: http://www.energyfiend.com/death-by-caffeine

I will say that I hope none of you try to see if it is true. I would hate to lose any of you.

Add Paint with Bowling and Apples and what do you have? A blog post

We are having a couple of rooms painted this week. Our house has that nice latex painty kind of smell. For some reason, the paint job that I did a few years ago was not quite good enough for Brodi. I have no idea why she wanted a professional to repaint those rooms. I think I worked around that wall hook rather nicely.






We took the boys bowling this past week. You all probably didn't know this...but I was a superstar bowler back in my college days. OK, that is going too far, but I did take a bowling class at the UofU. I was in quite a groove back then and could regularly bowl in the high 100s...around 180 on average. Those days are long gone. But I can still do some trick bowling and I have a mean between the legs shot. Carter liked it so much that he tried it. The ball went so slow down the lane that when it hit the pin, the ball slowly ricocheted off of the pin and went to the other side and hit another pin. It was truly impressive.



We also spent time at the video arcade where Carter showed us how to do it with the fighting machine...while Brodi used her sniper like skills to mow down the bad guys with her guns. There was a line behind Brodi of a bunch of little kids wanting to play, but nobody gets in Brodi's way when she can shoot cartoonish characters on an arcade game.





Update on the apples - the tree is now completely bare of apples. No more driveway applesauce. The birds are sad because there is no more fruit dinner for them. I have almost 2 years of rest now before the apples come back with a vengeance.

A working Garage Door...do I need to say anything more?

So, it has been a long time with no working garage. Like, since Summer long. But watch out now, because we have just had our new door installed. Obviously, it is a bittersweet day to say goodbye to our old door. Our doorman told us that it may have been the original door to the house which would place it at 50+ years old. It weighed close to 17,000 pounds. OK, maybe not that much but was insanely heavy. The repair guy told us that it was very difficult to take down. Initially I thought that maybe I would do it and maybe even install it. As I thought about it, I quickly realized that I would probably die trying to do it...get killed by one of the springs. I let the professionals do it.

Back in the Fall, we talked about what to do with our garage: http://samandbrodi.blogspot.com/2010/10/i-want-my-garage-orange-brown-and-red.html After many of those genius ideas were shot down, I looked more into wood doors, copper doors, paper doors, no doors and I finally gave up. We went with just a standard regular door and life is good again. And you know what? It works. It goes up and down (the door repair guy was not amused when I asked him if he could set it up to open from the sides and just move across horizontally).

Yep, we can park our car in the garage instead of in front of the garage. As you can see, we can actually park both of our cars in it. We can open it and use it. Instead of just dumping everything in there. I will be honest, I wept like a little kid when I opened it. I will say that I was a little disappointed that my neighbors did not throw us a party to celebrate...but oh well. Heres to another 50+ years with the same garage.

Slathered up in rotten applesauce

I know how much you all love to hear about this subject, but I can't stop talking about it: Frakkin' Apples. They are back and messier than ever. My apple tree gives off apples every other year. Last summer, the tree was full of them. But, funny thing about my tree - the apples hang on for dear life. They refuse to come down. September, October, November...the apples just chill up in the tree. The apples sit in the tree mocking me because they know and I know what is coming soon.





Then January hits and the apples start falling. The birds who have braved the winter hang out in my tree and enjoy tasty rotten apples and fling the apple carcasses violently to the ground when they are done with them. It is now almost the middle of February and there are still hundreds of apples in the trees. I pick up 30+ apples every day that have fallen onto my lawn and driveway. I tried to convince my boy Carter to pick up the apples for a penny a piece...he looked at me like I was absolutely insane. I have applesauce on my driveway to feed a family of 73 for about a year. I am thinking that sometime in late March, the tree will be bare. And I will cry for joy.

computers everywhere

I don't know if our family can get any more pathetic. Seriously. We just got Brodi a new laptop...I have my work laptop. And we have my old laptop. And we have Brodi's old laptop. We have 4 laptops all lined up on our kitchen table. (only 3 are pictured...Brodi doesn't want to have hers mingling with our ugly old dirty computers). It is a site to see when all of us are sitting around working/playing on them. I will say that the two boys both know their computers better than we know ours. I just hope our old laptops can keep functioning because I aint buying an 8 year old or a 5 year old a new computer.

Guest blog post

I posted a guest post on Brodi's uber popular blog HERE Feel free to check it out.