Just. Breathe.

Things have been a little crazy around my mom's house the past month. She has a single-story, ranch-style house, and a pipe burst at one end of the house. It apparently spewed water all night while she was asleep, and it had soaked the carpet through three bedrooms and the hall, and into the front room before she knew it and turned off the water. Everything had to come out of those rooms and closets...42 years of living there, and it's gotta all be moved.  Of course, that means we go through everything. It was like moving, but without the big truck and burly moving men. I live a couple of hours away from her, so the bulk of this work fell to my brother/sister-in-law who live there and have a more flexible schedule. The rest of us chipped in when we could.  A couple of weeks ago, I went on a Saturday to help with closet clean-out. It happened to be the closet in what had been my dad's office; we'd cleaned in there several years after he had died, but apparently we di...

If you know us personally, you might know that Bug, our daughter, is graduating this year and planning to study Chemistry with a forensic science certification. University of North Texas, here she comes!  Today, at the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, the location of the Kennedy assassination, UNT hosted a CSI day for families, and we went to solve the crime. The minimum age of participants was supposed to be eight years old, but I'm pretty sure they weren't checking IDs. Anyway, other than having a slew of girl scouts to work around, it was pretty fun.  We viewed a crime scene, where a bomb had gone off in a casino. We read witness and suspect statements, viewed results of the explosive testings, and compared fingerprints. We got to take our own fingerprints and compare them to the "types" of fingerprint patterns - I'm a "loop" on at least a couple of fingers. Then we checked evidence to see if it was blood (it was). We saw how they analyze pape...

It has been crazy busy around here, and I realized that with all the fun stuff, I took NOT A SINGLE picture! We had family visiting, lots of food, kid party, choir performance, just to name a few ... and it might as well have happened in my head since I have basically no documentation of it. Fail. When I realized this, it ticked me off so much I just decided not to write anything at all. But that's not the least bit helpful, so here's a recap. Bug's Choir performance at the Bass Hall: On the Wednesday after Thanksgiving, most of our family converged on the house in order to attend the school district's choir and theater program at the Bass Hall. For those of you not from Fort Worth, this is the Bass Hall:  Obviously I had to steal borrow this off Google - thank you, IgoUgo! I worked downtown when the Hall was being built. We've been there for concerts and plays, and it's just incredible. That my daughter got to perform on that stage is mind-blow...