The second half of our stuff arrived on Sun, as I mentioned, and I unpacked the LAST BOX last night, believe it or not. I have roughly 30 eBay auctions going now, too, and I filled up two more trash bags with throw pillows, old clothes, a Walkman, and the like for donating to a Lupus drive in Sept. (I donated three bags of stuff to the veterans just a month ago! Ack!)

I will probably only do two garage sales ever: one for baby stuff, and another for non-baby kid stuff. I just plain don’t keep stuff around long enough to collect enough for a garage sale under normal circumstances! Once all this is gone, I’ll go back to my usual practice of keeping a paper box in the closet and tossing anything in there that I want to donate. When it gets full, I donate. I tend to be quite careful about what I buy, so usually three to four paper boxes a year covers everything, including worn out clothes that need to be sold as bulk rag to a paper manufacturer. This time was an exception mainly because I got rid of all the stained and worn out baby clothes and and donated an entire bagful of stuffed animals all at one go–we’d inherited a ridiculous number from four different sources. I’ve also gone through EVERYTHING and finally gotten rid of a lot of my middle school and high school clothes. (Hey, if they still fit and are in good shape… *g*)

Our family is so thrifty that the Bear is coloring with Crayons that are up to 50 years old and has markers that I had as a kid. You know you’re thrifty when you carefully pack away MARKERS for the next generation!

It wasn’t food. It was the laundry soap. I usually do the laundry–he did it and used perfumed stuff. No more!

Anyhow, for a hilarious moment in ballroom competition, take a look at this, starting 1:15 in. I have a feeling that once the man in the other couple realized he was blocking, he decided to stop and do a wiggle just to harass Franco Formica. I’ve seen top competitors grab judges and each other just to be silly on the dance floor, all while keeping a perfectly straight face.

He was solid hives from ankle to chest before I got some Benadryl down him. It was quite amazing how red and welted the poor man turned! Given that it’s hives, I’ve told him to keep a food diary, and then we get to play Find the Culprit with food ingredients. DH swears that it’s the ramen noodles he took to work for his lunches this week, but I’m having a hard time finding an ingredient in them that would trigger it. MSG reactions aren’t supposed to be allergic, and everything else is in tons of stuff we eat. But he’s been saying that his throat has been tightening when he eats the ramen (YES, he ate it ANYWAY–YES, I already fussed at him!), so it makes sense that it’s something in there. The egg drop soup made with bullion cubes that he had this afternoon could not have been a help.

I’m having miscarriage #4, DH is swelling up and turning funny colors–why can life just not be BORING for a while?

Oh, well. I guess we’ll see!

Well, so is the rest of my furniture…but mainly my BOOKS! YAY FOR BOOKS!

Ahem.

The moving van’s arriving on Sun. Cool!

He wanted to listen to some non-distracting music while he did some debugging and asked me to find him a streaming classical music station. I found a random one for him. Later, he said to me, “Well, the music was nice, but the woman DJ’s voice was, um, really distracting.”

I put on a sultry, breathy Classical Music Host Voice, and I said, “Did she talk like this?”

“How did you know?” he asked, startled.

“ALL female classical music DJs sound like very expensive hookers,” I said, still in the voice. “It’s part of the job requirements.”

This, of course, launched a discussion of various DJ voice types, including the peppy, young pop voice, the sultry-but-not breathy easy listening voice, and of course, the classical voice, which always sounds like its offering something illegal or, at the least, very, very naughty.

If your heroine’s name would sound good on a racehorse, please reconsider it.

I think, having lived in NM, it will take me a while to get used to not being excited by rain.

It has been DELICIOUSLY cool here for two days. It’s almost unreal, since I’ve sort of mentally equated MD with my part of TX in weather. No AC…temp never getting higher than 76. In AUGUST. For some reason, I was expecting blistering heat. I guess part of it is how incredibly hot it was in Annapolis two summers ago. But here? Lovely!

on plagiarism. Still worth reading.

“This is NOT the naked house!”

Diet pills have always disturbed me more than a little since they’re usually sold as “supplements” and so are very little regulated by the FDA, meaning that not only may they not work but that the chemicals from the “natural herbs” might end up in such concentrations that they do actual *damage.* This is a particular risk since effective diet pills try to pack as many “uppers” as possible into their formula since that accelerates metabolism.

I’m really hoping that the new transdermal diet patches are simply ineffective because the idea of sticking some largely untested chemical directly into your bloodstream just gives me goosebumps. *shudders*