Paczki Day

It's Paczki Day! Or Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday, whichever language you like.

I had never heard of paczki before moving to metro Detroit, even though my grandmother was Polish and we only lived about two hours from Detroit growing up. Let me tell you, I was missing out for 20 some years!

We don't get a chance to go to Hamtramck to get the real thing, so we have to settle for Dunkin Donuts or Tim Horton's or if we're really desperate, the inferior imitations from the grocery store.

So I took the kids to Dunkin Donuts this morning and we each got a paczki: Alyssa - Bavarian cream, Brendan - blueberry, me - lemon. And then I got to eat half of Brendan's. Lucas got to play with a paper cup and napkin.

Now I'm enjoying my cup of yummy Dunkin Donuts coffee because it was too hot to drink the whole time we were there. Ahhhh!

Happy Paczki Day to all!

Sometimes I wish I couldn't do math

Brendan is in preschool. Preschool costs money. Specifically, in his case, $120 per month. He goes three days per week and he's there for two and a half hours each time. His preschool program is run by our school district, so their calendar is the same as the regular school calendar.

February is a short month, not only because it has less days than the other months, but also because our school district takes a week-long mid-winter break in February. So he misses out on three days there. The week at the end of January and beginning of February was set aside for preschool conferences and there were no preschool classes during that week. One day of February missed there. Then school was cancelled for two days (for him, actually three days for the regular school kids) because of the weather, one day for extreme cold and one day for snow. And one day his class went on a field trip.

As long nothing happens to the last two remaining days that he should be in school in February, he will have been at school for five days this month. That's $24 for each day and $9.60 for each hour. I think the school owes me a refund.

Happy Valentine's Day and other stuff

I made this for Valentine's Day:

It was pretty good, basically a glorified brownie (you can't see the brownie part in the picture because it was on the bottom). It looks pretty though. It made a mess when we tried to cut it because the white cheesecake layer didn't have enough time to chill in the fridge, but we were in a hurry because Alyssa had to go to a Brownie meeting. I'm glad I didn't try to take it out of the pan like I was supposed to!

I got nothing for Valentine's Day. Big surprise. Jeff was excused after half a day from jury duty, but couldn't manage to use that time to go to the yarn shop. He told me, "I was going to go to that place, but the shuttle was right there." Oh, the shuttle, wouldn't want to disappoint the shuttle! And of course, he couldn't be bothered to drive his own car there. Hmmph. So he came back home and cleared the snow out of the driveway. I protested by taking a 2 hour nap with Lucas. Which just made things worse because he decided he needed a nap too, and didn't bother doing any of the things (like folding the laundry) that I could have been doing, so I had to do them later anyway. Hmmph again. And he has no clue that I was even irritated. Okay, I'm over it now.

Lucas is 10 months old today. Look at my cutie!

He still shows not the slightest interest in crawling, or moving around in any other way except in someone's arms, which he likes a lot! I was trying to get a picture of his lone two teeth, but nothing doing yet. He still doesn't sleep worth a darn and has been especially bad the past few days because he's been stuffed up. It's a good thing he's so cute! He has been eating better lately, so that's nice. Here are a few other recent pictures:

The Experiment

Today is Valentine's Day. It's also the day Jeff has to go to jury duty. That means he has to spend probably the entire day in the city that is the county seat for our county. It's not a big city, but it's a lot different than Suburbanland where we live with strip malls on every main corner and hundreds of houses in subdivision after subdivision. Besides the courthouse and some other government buildings, there are lots of little shops around the downtown area.

So, I found a listing for a yarn shop very close to courthouse. Yarn shops are pretty rare in Suburbanland. I went to mapquest and plotted out the one tenth of a mile route to this shop from the courthouse. And I left the printout, along with a note about it being Valentine's Day and since he would be right there anyway, possibly killing time around lunch or something, that he should check it out and get a Valentine's Day present for his favorite knitter.

The big question is: will he actually do it? The jury's out (pun intended). He thinks knitting is a useless waste of time. I know he'd probably rather have his teeth drilled than to go into a yarn shop, especially by himself. The weather is extremely bad today - snowing, cold, windy, even school is closed. I'm sure he wouldn't take a stroll just for the heck of it. And I don't even know if the place actually exists as I've never been there and the listing could very well be out of date.

I'll be very impressed if he goes, even more impressed if he buys me something (anything, I don't care in the least what he ends up with) but I'll still love him if he does nothing. Stay tuned...

Too bad they don't have the guts

I saw a cute ad that I liked during the Super Bowl. You can see it here.

Then came the ridiculous outcry from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. People. It's a ROBOT. Robots cannot commit suicide. They are NOT HUMAN.

I was so glad to read in the paper that GM was standing by their ad and not changing it.

And then today I had to read this article. This makes me so angry! GM has to cave to a few oversensitive people, bow and scrape and try not to offend them because they got their fee-fees hurt. Please!

Why does something this stupid, something that maybe a few hundred people got their panties in a bunch about, cause a huge company to cower and change what they originally said they would not? And the bigger question is: why does the outrage and protest of millions of people over something real, like the senseless war in Iraq, make nothing happen? That is screwed up.