Day 6: A photo of an animal you'd love to keep as a pet

A photo of an animal I'd love to keep as a pet, eh?  (Geez, this blog challenge is all photos.  Not a whole lot of writing to do.)  Okay, I'll play along.  I live on a farm, so saying cow or horse or goat would be silly since we already have those animals.  Pigs stink.  (Okay, their poop stinks.  But still.)  Unicorns are hard to find and when you do, they're ridiculously expensive.  (Ha!  Gotcha!)  Rodents...not so much.  (They are incredible poop factories.  We've had rabbits and guinea pigs and all. they. do. is poop.  Pooppooppooppoop!)  I'd love to have chickens, but I don't really consider them pets.  They're not really all that cuddly.

So what would I love to keep as a pet?  Behold...

(Photo from Noozhawk)

Alpacas!  They are adorable, they're useful (alpaca fiber is ahhh-mazing) and they're adorable.  I know I said adorable twice, but look at those faces!  How can you resist that face?  But seriously, click the link under the picture to read a very interesting article about how "green" alpacas are.  As a crocheter, I would la-la-la-LOVE to have access to all the alpaca fiber I could want.

But mostly I want one because they're superduper cute.  What can I say?  I'm a sucker for an adorable widdle alpaca punim.

Day 5: A photo of yourself two years ago

It is so hard to find a picture of myself (well, one that doesn't make me cringe, anyway) because I'm always the one behind the camera.  But here's one from my birthday two years ago.  39 years young.  The last year of my thirties.  Almost the end of an era.

Good grief.  I'm getting old!

Day 4: Your favorite photograph of your best friend

So this post has been vexing me greatly since last night.  I've been tearing my house apart trying to find my favorite photo of my best friend, and it's MISSING.  You'd think a friendship that's spanned nearly 30 years would have produced more photos, but for the life of me, I cannot find what I'm looking for!

I'm going to dig for an old picture to compare, but for now, here's a photo of us from August when we did Color Me Rad.

And just in case you wanted to see the "after":

That's Kim.  My best friend since 1984.  7th grade.  Ms. Saveikis' class.  We've been through it all together-middle school, high school, our weddings, the births of our kids, the loss of our fathers, and all of the everyday stuff in between.  She's the first person I call when something happens.  I don't know what I'd do without her--she's the sister I never had.  And yes, I'm totally getting sloppy and sentimental here.  That's how I roll!

Edited to add:  I found an old picture!  It's not the one I was looking for, but it's actually even older.  This is from my confirmation party.  We were in 8th grade, so that would make it 1986.  And yes, those are Mr. Potato Head accessories on our faces.  We were soooo awesomely cool.

Day 3: Your favorite store

Well, this is certainly a broad topic.  What store is my favorite depends on what I'm shopping for.  Shopping is serious business, and I like to patronize places where I'm gonna get the most bang for my buck, because that's usually all I have to spend:  a buck.

For groceries, I love Aldi.  For craft supplies, I like Joann Fabric.  For home improvement stuff, I like Home Depot.  For clothes, it's Lane Bryant.  For home stuff and pretty much everything else, I like Target, but only if I pronounce it Tar-zhay, because I'm fancy like that.

I also go to The Big Evil (aka Walmart, aka Hellmart), though I feel dirty and ashamed of myself while I shop.  Unfortunately, they usually are the ones who have the things I can't get at the other places.  And they do have really low prices, which is good when you're poor folk like us.

And when I have disposable income (you know, the one time a year that happens), I love to hit the outlets.  You have to be a savvy shopper to tell the difference between a good deal and when you're getting swindled, but that's a challenge I'll take any day.  I'm kooky--I like to brag about how little I spent on something.  The cheaper the better!

Day 2: The picture of health

Today's post is supposed to be a picture of something I ate today.  Heh heh...here it is:

Guess which week of the month it is?  *grins*

Day 1: Dun dun DUN...and so it begins.

Oh hi.  It's me, Jen.  Today is the first day of the rest of my life my latest 30-day blog challenge.  I'm supposed to post a picture of myself and a description of how my day was.  Should be easy enough!  

So that's me up there.  All chubby cheeks and freckles.  Taken at Disney World on October 9th.  Pure serendipity that someone aimed the camera at me and actually captured a photo that didn't make me cringe.

Today is Thursday, November 1, 2012.  At some point today, I woke up.  I don't remember specifically when that was, but I know it was earlier than I wanted because I didn't get to bed until 3:30 (don't judge me!) and didn't fall asleep until 5:30ish.  At 7:30 I made a deal with the devil (aka my husband) and promised something I'll regret in order to convince him he was the one who wanted to get the kids up and ready for school.  My wake up call was literally a phone call from my mom.  We talked for about 46 seconds then she gave me the bum's rush because my brother was at the door.  Fine.  Wake me for nothing, whydontcha.  I bopped around on Facebook (after I peed, because that always comes first) for a while, then got up and made coffee.  Mmmm...coffee.  Yummy.  Took a shower at some point because I couldn't remember if I had one of those yesterday (I'm 76.4% sure I didn't) and put on clothes.  Spent an inordinate amount of time cleaning up other people's crap and complaining about it the whole time.  (My semi-internal monologue sounds something like this:  "Freaking kids.  Are they allergic to the freaking hamper?  Or flushing the toilet?  Or swishing their icky toothpaste down the drain?  Why are their dirty socks in my clean bedroom?  Ack!  What is this sticky spot on the floor?  Pleaseohplease don't let it be cat hoark.  Oh good, it's only a semi-eaten, half-melted, gooey pile of lollipop.  I swear by all that's good and holy, if their rooms aren't clean by tomorrow, they're gonna get 7 pair of undies and socks, one outfit and one pair of jammies and THAT'S IT!  I don't care if the other kids call them names.  I'm sick of finding dirty underwear IN THE LIVING ROOM!"

Pause ranting long enough to make lunch.  Decide the heck with it, the house is clean enough that if someone showed up unannounced I'd only be partially humiliated, and went in to hibernate on my bed with a good movie and my crocheting.  And a pile of cats.  Who wanted to play with the yarn, but would settle for "making biscuits" on the finished project, thereby pulling a zillion threads loose and making it look like poo.  Thanks, cats.  Maybe we need a little refresher about how much better it is to live in a "forever" home versus the animal shelter?

After perusing the contents of the fridge, I decided today would be Eat all the Leftovers Day, which works for me because we have all those leftovers thanks to me cooking my little heart out all week.  The kids were happy because they each got a nice plateful of their favorite meal from this week.  I was happy because I didn't have to cook.  It was win-win!

So how was my day?  On a scale of 1 to 10, it was about a 5.  It wasn't great, but it wasn't awful.  It was a Thursday.  Though it may be creeping up toward a six, because there's a new episode of Project Runway All-Stars on tonight.  Backstabbing and weird looking clothes?  Yes, please!

I challenge myself!

Tomorrow seems like the perfect day to start a new blog challenge.  I'm going against my better judgement and doing a 30-day challenge again, but this time, it's lighter and fluffier and has half the calories and one-third less fat than last year's 30-day challenge.  (I have no idea what that even means.  I'm feeling giddy from all the gravy I had at dinner tonight.)

November is also NaNoWriMo (aka. National Novel Writing Month), which seems kind of fitting for a blog challenge.  And while I'll probably never write a novel (Or maybe I will, you never know.  I'll probably start ten, if I know myself, and I'm pretty sure I do), I can at least pump out a few paragraphs a day on some silly topics, right?  That last sentence alone, with all of its asides and parenthetical thoughts, would probably drive any editor to drink.  Maybe I'll write a novel just so I can watch members of the publishing field descend into madness.  Sounds like my idea of fun!

It's that time again...

...to resurrect the ol' blog.  Looking back at my last entries, I see I failed miserably at the 30-day blog challenge.  Not surprising, since I can't seem to focus my attention on anything for 30 seconds, let alone 30 days.

Today's activities include purging/cleaning/organizing my bedroom and laundry.  Mounds and mounds and mounds of laundry.  And just when I think all the laundry is done, I'll find more laundry!  If only laundry was a finite task, eh?  Wouldn't that just be the bee's knees?

Saturday night/Sunday morning marks the end of Daylight Savings Time.  I can feel the seasonal affective disorder kicking in already.  It doesn't help that Hurricane Sandy has blessed (ha!) us with rain for 5 days now, so we're going into the shorter days with a deficit of sunlight.  Maybe blogging will help me get through these dark days of winter.  Perhaps I should go a-Googling to find a blog challenge.  And maybe this time I'll actually finish it!  I should look for a shorter challenge so as not to set the bar quite so high.

I guess I should get back to cleaning my room.  I always feel like such a teenager when I say that.  And I'm pretty sure if my mom saw the state of my bedroom right now, I'd be grounded for a really, really, REALLY long time!