i am...

i am a diet pepsi whore. so is rob. the bottles are mine, the cans are his.

i am also the family bottle redemption clerk so i get to take these back to walmart and feed the machines to get our deposit money back. i hate it when the machines are full or the scary looking people with garbage bags full of cans are there. my mother used to work customer service at a grocery store where they would accept pop cans at the counter in back. she has lots of tales of people bringing in garbage bags FULL of cans, not necessarily in clean condition...and sometimes with a dead mouse or live spiders way down in the bottom of the bag. people would just leave the bags out in their garage and bring them in 'when they got around to it.' my mother was transferred to another part of the store long before the redemption machines put in an appearance. these days, i think there should be a limit on how many garbage bags one person can redeem at once. it's not unusual to see a person with 3 bags at the machines. i'm wondering if they use that money to supplement their welfare checks or what. it has to take forever to empty those bags.

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i am mentally reviewing my purchases for the kids' christmas presents and i believe i have NOT bought any gifts which require batteries. i believe this is the first christmas as a mom that that has happened! we're going the puzzle and dollhouse route this season. while other parents are looking at the new game systems, we're going granola. (i personally don't understand why parents buy these systems for their kids. rob compared it to his parents buying him an original atari when he was 9. point for rob, but ataris were/are cool. and there was not a lot of blood or cursing on an atari game. the most you had to be worried about was a white square shooting blocks at your yellow square.) it seems like kids don't get enough fresh air or exercise, why would you buy a gaming system to encourage this? rob might use the excuse how it teaches hand/eye coordination. he may be right, but dammit, can't we get a pingpong table to do that instead? or a game of jacks? or a good old fashioned acorn fight every fall? (i'm reliving my childhood here...my brother and i would have acorn fights, the perfect place to launch an attack was from the bed of my dad's pickup truck. it was always parked right under an oaktree.)

i am guilty of keeping the kids inside too much. before elisha was born we played outside a lot, mostly it was cade helping me garden and reese running laps around the house (she likes to run...don't know how she could be MY daughter). but with a tiny baby, it's a little hard to orchestrate outside playtime. it's almost 55 outside and sunny today, we should be out there right now. the sun sets in about 3 hours (rolling eyes here, i hate short winter days).

i am wondering if winter days will last a bit longer when we move to georgia? it's further south, but not quite the bahamas.

and now the baby has woken up. damn.

i am outta here.