YAY!!! It's cantaloupe season!

This week has been crazy and completely devoid of fun! My stressful, unpleasant project is almost done, and I will feel like a new woman once that is finished and signed off on. Home has been full of chores, trying to make a dent in our many half-finished projects inside and out. Half-finished is probably more wishful thinking than reality, though. My body is complaining that I spent today and tonight (when we weren't working on homeschooling) trying to fix our old computer and get it up and running and scraping the basement floor in the office area so we could put carpet tiles down. Our old carpeting was destroyed last time our pipe froze and exploded down there. We've been meaning to replace the carpet since we got the pipe fixed, but are just now getting around to it. I made a little progress, but my hands and lower back are punishing me for it now. It makes me feel old!

We had an appliance repair man come this morning to look at the refridgerator that died. This is the one we keep in the basement to store our buying-club food. We are able to save money in the buying club by getting our organic/vegan food through them, but we have to buy in bulk. We lost hundreds of dollars of food when the fridge died, and it will take a long time to replace that! Fortunately he was able to fix the fridge for $100, which was great since we couldn't afford to replace the thing right now. It's fairly old, so we were nervous that it wouldn't be fixable, but as it turned out, it wasn't a big deal.

L. had her friend Emily spend the night tonight. That's a huge treat for her. E. is such a sweetie, and we don't get to see them (her and her family) nearly often enough. Unfortunately, that left poor Hunter as the odd man out, since the girls wanted "girl time". He was very bored and lonely, so he was my shadow for the day. As soon as he got home from school, he came over and helped me scrape the floor, put some carpet tiles down, work on the computer, and make pizza for dinner. Since he helped make the pizzas, he asked if he could stay for dinner, so he joined us for dinner while the girls ate up in L's room.

M. is in the midst of his plant sale, and the only time he is not working for the next couple of weeks, he will be in IL attending a wedding for an old friend of his. We won't get to see him awake for the forseeable future, and that is really hard on L. especially. The whole thing irritates the piss out of me, but since expressing it is pointless, I will continue to channel it into working on house projects.

I'm still on a rampage about that worthless bitch, Palin. Good god, I can't believe how many American citizens are so stupid that they have jumped on board basically because she is attractive and made some funny jokes. Yeah, that makes for a great politician. I cannot believe that when it comes down to it, women are still evaluated and judged primarily as eye candy. She is setting women back by decades and isn't remotely in the same class as Hillary, despite claiming that she is. That seems to be the only criteria her "fabulous" speech was based on, as there was certainly no content and nothing that indicated she is remotely qualified to run the country. She doesn't even raise her own children. What kind of monster willingly leaves a three-day old baby to return to a job that requires much more than 40 hours a week?! When I was forced to return to work after my leave was up, I cried every single day. For months. I would NOT have gone back after two months if had ANY other alternative. When I did return, I only went back at 30 hrs a week rather than 40, though. It's even more sickening that it's a handicapped child she is abandoning! I am a feminist--even a chauvanist according to some. Women do have the right to choices, freedom, and equality, however, once we make the choice to become mothers, our children should come first. This thing, for all her 'soccer mom' pro-family BS does nothing but talk. She is selfish and unnatural and shouldn't even claim the title of mother. Perhaps a little more time spent with her children (along with the appropriate education) could have prevented her little girl from getting knocked up and breeding. It's really quite easy to try to force women to breed, removing all choice, when she never actually has to raise and spend time with her kids. She's really working the mileage about being so noble in choosing not to abort the DS baby. Really, how noble is it when she drops it and abandons it to return to her life of child-free, no, make that handicapped-child-free corrupt governing. Maybe the other women in her situation, who had to make less-noble choices and opt to terminate the pregnancy with handicapped children didn't have the luxury of squatting, dropping, and returning to life as normal without being impacted by the child. They had to make the realistic choice of say, quitting a job they couldn't afford to quit to stay home and care for the special needs child, for the rest of their life. Lifelong daycare for a special-needs child is something that most women in that situation cannot afford. How dare that piece of human filth imply that she is better than any other women in similar situation! There are just so many things profoundly wrong with this beast, I could write a book. I really could. But since I try to spend every non-working, waking moment with my children, I would never rob them of their mother for something so pointless.

Our vegan cat food arrived via UPS, and as soon as we brought it in, Hallie staked it out. We didn't even get the box opened. I originally ran to grab my camera, because she and Lila were both standing in identical positions on top of the box. Of course by the time I returned from grabbing my camera off the kitchen counter, nosy little Lila had jumped off to see where I had gone. Hallie, was not about to give up her prime spot on the yummy cat food.