Happy Thanksgiving 2009

I just got a call from my parents that my sister & her family have arrived. Let the holiday festivities begin!

The older I get, the more I seem to like Thanksgiving. In fact, it rivals Christmas as my favorite holiday. There's just something wonderful about gathering together with family (or friends) and enjoying one another's company over a meal filled with comfort foods. When you add to that the smell of roasting turkey and the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, what's not to like?

Last year I posted a short pilgrim story that C had written in kindergarten. To be fair, I thought I would let K handle this year's tribute to the holiday.

I know I have a lot to be thankful for. Now I can add the fact that I'm not a turkey to my list of blessings.

May your your turkey be juicy, may your gravy be smooth and may you enjoy the smiles and laughter of those around you.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

The dining room dilemma

The dining room is the first room you see when you come to visit us here at the house of Crackers and quite frankly it's pretty uninspiring. The walls are a golden tan color, the floors are a honey stained wood and the dining room set is also a light golden hue. Even the fabric on the dining chairs is a solid color in the tan/gold family.


The only bits of color in the room are an area rug (whose primary colors are...you guessed it gold and brown with some bits of red & green), the curtains (which are red & gold plaid - Mr. Crackers thinks they look like they belong in a Harry Potter movie) and a mirror and hutch which are both painted a barn red.



I had been trying to think of something inexpensive to give the space some color without making it too dark. Usually when faced with this problem my first instinct is to paint, but since I wasn't sure what color to use, I had been mulling over some other options. A couple of months ago, it occurred to me that if I could recover the chairs it would be a really easy (and cheap) way to refresh the whole space.

So, last week I ventured to a local fabric store with my Mom and the paint swatches for the walls and the red hutch to see what I could do about giving the room a new look. I found a fabric that I really liked that matched my paint colors & ever better, fit into my budget.

Ta da...

I really thought it was pretty. I was bold and looked really good against the light wood and walls. I was really proud of myself - I was going to make a dramatic impact in a room and pull everything together for under $100.00. Wahoo!

Except, that once I started recovering the chairs, I noticed something. You see, while the fabric looked great against the walls and really set off the honey color of the furniture, it did not really match the carpet... at all. It turns out that the red in the carpet was not really the same red that the hutch & the mirror were painted and um... the brown in the background of the fabric is completely different than the brown in the carpet. Ooops!

Not only that, but it seems that the pattern I chose for the chairs doesn't really work well with the pattern in the carpet. In fact, they kind of fight each other for your attention.

Unfortunately, the room which was so boring that it was putting me to sleep is now filled with so many competing patterns that it is starting to give Mr. Crackers a headache (Sorry Mr. Crackers, I had forgotten about the patterned couch in the sitting room, oops.)

This picture doesn't quite illustrate the cacophony of pattern that assaults your eye when you come into the room. But trust me...it's a lot to take in.

So now Mr. Crackers & I are talking about either replacing the carpet (which would be significantly more than my $50.00 budget for re-decorating this room) or replacing the Harry Potter curtains (a far more likely scenario that is not nearly as budget crushing as getting a new rug.)

Oh well, I guess I won't send in my audition tape for HGTV's Design Star this year.

Finding the right look...

I've mentioned in previous posts that my 6 year old son has been doing some experimenting with his personal style lately.

You may recall that at the beginning of the school year he was going for what I like to call "The Erkel" look. This uber-conservative style had him buttoning all of his uniform shirts to the top & tucking them into his pants so tightly that I feared he was limiting the mobility of the top half of his body. Since a lot of his time is spent in his school uniform his means of self expression is somewhat limited, so I tend to just let him do his thing.

One day about a month ago he declared that he wanted his hair put into "standing up spikes" for school that morning. I asked him what inspired this new style & he just said he thought it would look cool. So, I got out the gel & went to work. He got a couple of smiles & speculative glances, but overall he must have had at least some postive feedback since he's still at it. These days though he does it all on his own. "I don't need help Mom! I can do it myself!"

I have to say that I think he is starting to express his mood with hair gel. Some days he wets his hair & gels it into spikes on his head. Other days he gels it flat against his head and brushes it all forward (this look kind of creeps me out a bit & I can't seem to resist trying to get it to part off to the side) and then unexpectedly on other days he just leaves alone and goes au naturel.

My point is, I'm never quite sure what kind of hair style the day will bring. Case in point, this past Friday. Both of the kids were off school for teacher in-service days and the only plan we had for the day was a quick trip to K's pre-school for a 15 minute teacher conference. C had gone to the school back in the day & he was excited to see all his old teachers again. He was even more excited about the fact that we were heading to Toys R Us right after the conference so both of them could look around & start putting together a Christmas list (Santa Claus, Mr. Crackers' and I are trying to save a little money this year with all the pre-season sales that are going on).

Do you want to see what kind of hair style that the excitement of a no-school day paired with a trip to a toy store produces?

Wow-ee!
Yep, it's a "faux"hawk. I really have no idea where he's getting this stuff. I volunteer at his periochial school & I can tell you that all the boys I've ever seen there are pretty clean cut looking. I've never even seen a boy with long hair there.

His hairstyle made quite an impression with his former pre-school teachers. That is for certain.

What can I say? I guess he's trying to find his look. I'm a little afraid of what is in store for us in his teen years. If he's sporting a "faux"hawk at 6 what is he going to come up with at 16?! (shudder, shudder...).

I guess only time (& hair gel) will tell.

More bang for your entertainment buck.

Earlier this week we went to the end of season pizza party for C's soccer team. After dinner most of the boys dissapeared into the game room never to be seen again. After a few minutes I wandered to the back room to see what my hooligan was up to. Large groups of unattended 7-8 year old boys make me nervous.



When I got to the room, this was the scene before me. There are at least 9 boys clustered around a video game watching a teammate play. You'll notice that C looks like he is using the top of the game as some sort of hand hold. I'm not sure what he was standing on, but I wasn't going to tell him to get down. That would mean I would actually have to supply him with his own money to play games.

Playing a video game at your local pizza parlor = $.50
Letting all your friends watch you play for free = priceless!

Tales from the utility room...

About 2 years ago, Mr. Crackers & I bought ourselves a new water heater from a store that we'll call Smears. We've bought a lot of appliances from this company over the years (including a water heater that we installed in our previous home) and never had a problem until Mabel came into our lives (I have decided for no particular reason that I am going to refer to our water heater as Mabel for the rest of this post. It's just been one of those kind of days...)

Now Mabel (the water heater) worked really well for the first 2 months after we got her. We had hot water when we needed it & we never gave her a second thought.

Apparently though, Mabel was getting lonely & decided she needed some additional attention. So she decided that she would shut herself down overnight so that Mr. Crackers & I would be faced with an ice cold shower the following morning. This way she could ensure that we no longer took her powers of heating water for granted & would stop down and pay her a visit from time to time.

It didn't take more than a few days of cold showers for Mr. Crackers & I to call up our local Smears repairman to see what was going on. He came out & declared that the problem was that dirt & debris was getting into the water heater Mabel & causing the pilot light to shut off. All we had to do, he said, was get down on our bellies & use a shower brush to clean the screen near the pilot light and then use a vacuum cleaner to suck it all out.

Oh, is that all??

To me this seemed seemed a little strange, since I had lived on my own for almost 20 years & had never had to do this before. When I conveyed this sentiment to the Smears repairman, he said that these new water heaters were extra sensitive & that as long as we regularly cleaned her out that we could expect Mabel to have a long and healthy life.

And so, I got down on my belly every few weeks to clean out Mabel's nether regions with a shower brush (see exhibit A above). And every evening for the next 18 months, I would check the pilot light on the water heater before I went to bed.

But despite the cleanings & my vigilant checking of the pilot light, Mr. Crackers & I spent the next 18 months playing a game of Russian roulette "the shower edition". We'd have weeks go by where hot water was plentiful & we rejoiced in our warm morning shower. Then, randomly we would wake up (even though I checked the pilot light the night before) & we'd be faced with water cold enough to freeze the tenders off a polar bear.

Finally, after the frequency of the cold showers started to wear on us, I called the local Smears repairman again. He came to the house & after a quick check told us "Oh, it's the pilot light assembly. That has gone bad on a lot of these models. All we have to do is just change that out & everything should work again for you."

I told him our story about the ritual cleaning of the water heater & he shot me a look that said "Hey there crazy, do you mind leaving the utility room so I can get to work actually fixing your problem?" So I left him to his repairs feeling a little silly for having spent the past 18 months cleaning a water heater whose actual problem was a malfunctioning pilot light assembly. But, as long as the problem was fixed and we had hot water, I was ready to let bygones be bygones.

After that last visit, all was well again for a couple of months until.... yep, you guessed it, once again we were facing arctic morning showers. Needless to say, Mr. Crackers & I were starting to get more than a little cranky about the whole water heater problem. Mabel was definitely becoming a gigantic thorn in my ever widening backside.

I told the third Smears repairman all of our woes the moment he set foot in our house. I led him downstairs to the utility room explaining what had occurred at all of the previous visits & told him that we were really, really tired of the cold showers. As I turned to leave him to his job, he stopped me & said "Don't move! I can tell what your problem is just by looking at your hot water heater. Come over here."

I figured he was some kind of hot water heater whisperer or something. Clearly this man had a gift. I walked over to the water heater & looked where he was excitedly pointing. Apparently the problem as our flue. It was not venting properly. He could tell that by all the SCORCH marks on the top of the poor old Mabel. When I looked, I discovered he was right - Poor Mabel's topside had 4 distinct scorch marks. Yikes!

After receiving this concerning news we called our HVAC guy to look at Mabel's flue & since he was there we asked him to go ahead & do the annual service on our furnace. The furnace was rapidly approaching the 20 year mark & we'd been hoping to extend the life of it a bit by making sure we got serviced and checked every year.

Well, the good news was that the flue was going to be easy to repair, the bad news was that our furnace looked like it was not going to quite make it through the winter.

"How bad is it?" I asked. "Are we right on the edge of needing a new furnace?"

The repairman looked at me kindly (& kid of pityingly) and said. "Well, let me put it this way: your toes are already over the edge and you are starting to lose your balance. Even a slight breeze could push you right over. My recommendation is that you start thinking about a new furnace."

It's a good thing we had a lot of cash lying around the house that we didn't know what to do with. Oh wait... I must have gotten us confused with another family. We didn't have piles of cash, but we did have a problem that needed a serious solution. After the initial panic subsided, we were able to secure a short term interest free loan from the bank of kind-hearted and generous family members (or KHGFM).

After receiving many bids & getting many worried looks from HVAC contractors who left our house after seeing our furnace asking us "You have a working CO monitor right?" We finally got a new furnace (& AC unit since that was also teetering very close to end of it's natural life) installed yesterday.

Here it is....TA DA!

Isn't it beautiful?

OK, I know it's pretty utilitarian looking. Man, you'd think for all the money these things cost they could make them look a little prettier. I mean can we add a little color here? How about red, or even a nice chocolate brown color?


I'm thinking of hanging Christmas lights on it...what do you think? We spent so much money that I feel like we should be doing more with it than just using it to heat our house. I'm considering using it as a backdrop for our annual Christmas Card portrait.

We'll save the new AC unit for the Easter pictures this spring.

Oh and by the way, we had hot water this morning for our shower thanks to Mabel and her brand new flue.