Competing with the Webbers

The Bishop's kids win the pinewood derby every year. They always take first and second place. In fact, their family wins every competition they enter I think. One boy just graduated out of cubs so we are down to only one Webber to compete against. This is our boys' last race before turning 11 years old. Mario went and bought a book and all the tools necessary to get the axles perfect. "Too bad those darn Webbers use the same book" and all the techniques in it.

They want to win this year and they aren't stopping until they build the perfect car. It makes me laugh. My dining room table is completely covered between tools for the cars and my quilting stuff. Not sure when we will use our table again. We had our Valentine's dinner last night on the living room floor.

Valentine's Day and Eric's New Mom

Today, Mario and I celebrated 21 Valentine's Days together. We planned to go out to lunch or dinner but I had picked up some filet mignon on clearance a couple weeks ago, so I thought that would make a great dinner for Valentine's Day. Eric found me a great recipe for a topping for the steak. It was yummy. I don't know if I have ever bought real filet mignon before. Erin came home after shopping with a friend and I heated up the leftovers for her. She asked why we don't always have that kind of steak. I told her that when she's old enough to date, she should ask her date to take her out for filet mignon and see what he says as a 16 year-old boy working a minimum wage job.

Mario took the three younger kids to play basketball at the church this morning. Eric said he wanted to go shopping with me instead. Our first stop was the fabric store. He used my iphone to distract him from being in such a miserable place. He spent several minutes following me around the aisles with his head planted downward on the phone. But then he disappeared and I kept shopping. A few minutes later, I heard him talking to someone. I figured it must be someone from school and he must be embarrassed to be in a fabric store. I went to find him. Turns out, he was following a lady through aisles, thinking it was me he was following. She finally told him, I think you have mistaken me for your mom. Talk about embarrassing. I had a good laugh the rest of the day about it.

That wasn't Eric's only embarrassing moment and I don't think I blogged this before. Erin had a summer job mowing the neighbor's lawn but she didn't know how to use the edger. So I sent Eric out to help her. He went and weed whacked the wrong neighbors yard while they sat on the front porch and watched. He wasn't happy with me when he found out it was the wrong house. He said I pointed to the wrong neighbors house when I was up in his room asking him. My problem is unless I'm looking out a window, I don't know my directions. I went over and explained to the neighbors why Eric had just maintained their yard.

Back to today, after shopping for fabric, Eric and I headed for the commissary. He was super excited to pick out food since he thinks I never buy anything good. Problem is that I do buy good stuff but it gets eaten within a couple days. So it was funny today when we brought home all the groceries and the other three kids and Mario started digging into all the groceries. Eric was panicking because they were doing exactly what I always complain about each time. It's funny (and sad) to see your kids turn into you.

Zach's Resume for Elf Job

Zach Conserving Paper in 2nd Grade Math

I thought for sure this made my blog a couple years back, but when the boys asked me to pull it up on my blog last night, I couldn't find it.  So Zach dug through the filing cabinet and found it. So now I had to post it. 

In second grade, the students were assigned 5 math problems off the board every school day.  They were required to write the date and then answer the math problems on a sheet of paper.  Zach decided he would do an entire year's worth of bell work on one side of one piece of paper.  I feel sorry for his teacher that had to grade it.  But he had the most awesome teacher (Miss deGennero) in second grade so I'm sure she was cool with it.  In fact, I'm pretty sure she is the one that told me about it one day while I was in class volunteering.  

January 29, 1994

Twenty years ago, I met Mario at a singles conference in West Palm Beach. I had hoped we could spend the day together to celebrate but instead, I tutored, a kid came home from school sick, the dog needed to go to vet, another child wanted us to take him to lunch and then Mario had to be at work by 12:45.

So hopefully we will be able to celebrate our wedding anniversary a little better.

It's been a great 20 years and if I can dig out Mario's journal, I'll post what he wrote about meeting me that night.




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Happy Birthday Mom

Here's my first attempt at free motion quilting. I made this small lap quilt for my mom for her birthday. I definitely need a lot more practice with it but it was a lot of fun to do. It's much more fun to quilt that way than to make a bunch of straight (not really straight but supposed to be straight) lines.

Taxes and Erin's Basketball

I should have gone to school for accounting.  Then I could take over Michael's (Mario's dad) business when he retires.  I love numbers and I love doing my own taxes.  But I don't have any real training except for google searches and asking some accountant friends or family for some advice occasionally. Once, when I lived in Guam, I went to the base legal office to get some help with my taxes.  They couldn't have been simpler since we only had Mario's military income.  But I felt like I knew more than the volunteers in the office, so I have never gone back to ask for help.

But Mario really should fire me as the tax preparer.  I realized today that I have made errors the last couple years that cost us $750.  Fortunately, the government lets us amend our returns for the last 3 years.  I went back and checked all my returns for the past 10 years, and I guess I only made the mistake for the past 2 years.  Must be my Alzheimer's kicking in.  So I am lucky that I can amend them. Mario is patient and hasn't even suggested I seek a real accountant (I am sure he would prefer it though.)  He knows how much I love doing them myself.  But they have become quite a bit more complicated now that I have my tutoring business and we have the rental house.  I may need to seek more help than google has to offer in the near future.  Darn it.

In other news, Erin has a sprained ankle, but with two girls out, one with injury and the other for failing classes, they are down to only 6-7 girls that can play freshman basketball.  So the coach is wanting her to play.  I can't make it to the game tonight which is probably better because I might have given the coach an earful.