LYLAS

Who wants to exchange school pictures with me? Got mine back today...

I suppose it's nice of the studio to give all of the faculty free picture packets when they get photos taken, but really, what am I going to do with all of these photos?

The freebies do help us get more teachers to get their pictures taken for the yearbook, I think, but I wonder what they do with them all?

In other school news, I also forgot my lunch today, so I had to run out to McDonald's in the Wal-Mart two minutes away from school to grab some grub. Thank God it's close. Our 25 minute lunch break doesn't really give an opportunity for fancy-pants lunches out every day.

It's almost bedtime - it's a school night.

Barack Rolled

You've got to check this out. I wish I could get the code so I could put it right on here, but I'm not THAT good of a blogger.

I used to love the song - back in the day.

I can't believe that someone would take all the time to do all of that cutting and synching the song and video.

Maybe he should make a video for the song "Too Much Time on My Hands."

She's trying, she's really trying

A note from my friend Amy, over at Pens and Needles:

Anyone who has kindly linked to my blog from theirs, could you please change your links to this address: http://web.me.com/adevault

or, try this link. Then, bookmark it!

There can me no "www" and there can be no ".mac" and there can be no "my blog."

The .mac part is because of the switch to MobileMe, and the my blog part is because I finally figured out why when someone RSSed to my blog, it listed it as "My Blog" and not "Pens & Needles." But when I changed that name, it changed the address. So sorry for the trouble.

Amy

•••

So let's see what she's been up to (besides pulling her hair out over the MobileMe change.

Wanna make a teacher happy?

All you need to do is head to the dollar store the night before school starts, and pick up a couple of plastic baskets.

Seriously, it's all she needs. Friends and family of Betsy - break out those Christmas and birthday lists - Amy has uncovered the secret to making Bets smile...

Happy Hostess

If you've rolled on over to the Bets Week Ever, you've probably heard all about the dinner/GH party.

(That's Guitar Hero, not General Hospital, for the uninitiated among you.)

Unlike some people, whose houses still have messed up paint and unfinished bathroom beadboard, Betsy's house is all put together, so she was ready to host a party! We've still got a little work to do here at Casa de Chittum.

T-Pain and Amy check out the ol' Guitar Hero. Thankfully, Mitzi's guitar hero is almost like a traveling set, and she has two guitars!

We got to eat Egg Pie (Mitzi's quiche, renamed courtesy of TJ), orange Jell-O salad, an incredibly yummy bread and cheese concoction made by Amy, and some sort of ice cream sandwich Cool Whip dessert by Betsy. All of it was good - we need to do these dinner parties more often.

It's been a long time since we all just got together and chilled. Weird summer schedules, getting moved back into school rooms, school starting, etc., has pushed fun stuff to the back burner. Hopefully, we can get back in the routine!

K-State fans! Are you ready?

That big smile on my face was about 55 points into K-State's 69-10 victory over Montana State last night in Manhattan. That, and the fact that we had great seats that only cost $15 apiece helped too.

It was Fort Riley day at the game, so there was a special section of military folk, and a huge ceremony at the beginning. Most of the ceremony is stuff they do every game - read the Preamble to the Constitutions, say the Pledge of Allegiance, the national anthem (of course), and the patriotic fanfare song that the Pride of Wildcat Land plays, but this time, they also honored veterans of all branches of the military who were in attendance.

About halfway through the third quarter, the soldiers starting helping Willie with the traditional push-ups following K-State scores. By the end of the night, the mascot had done something like 500 pushups. Good thing the mascot nose is so big he doesn't actually have to go all the way to the ground...
Our seats were in Row 18, in the south endzone. One of the new teachers at school is a K-Stater, and he sold us his tickets because he and his wife weren't able to make it. Before the game, we "hatchbacked" in the grain science parking area. We packed a picnic so we could eat before we went into to the game. Since we weren't actually grilling, and there was only two of us, I told Adam I didn't think we could actually call it "tailgating."

You can see that it wasn't exactly blue skies, but the weather wasn't too bad. It rained the whole way to Manhattan, stopped for a while, and then right before halftime, it stared drizzling and raining a bit. Our Gore-Tex jackets kept us nice and dry.

I can't remember the last time I got to go to a game, so I was pretty excited. We're going again on Sept. 27th. Same deal on the tickets. At least that game is in the afternoon, so we won't have to come home quite so late!

What's new with the Chittums?

The Repubs might have postponed/altered events at their shindig earlier this week because of the storm, but not the Chittums.

We just returned from a 4-mile run in a steady rain. According to all the meteorologists, even here in KC we're feeling the after-effects of Gustav, so I'll assume they're right and that's what we ran through tonight.

By the time we got back, our clothes were soaked and my hair was dripping, but the cool rain was a nice change from the 90-degree temps plus humidity that Stacey and I ran through Monday morning.

Friday and Saturday of Labor Day weekend, we finally got completely out of and cleaned out the ol' Dunes apartment. What does that mean?

No more Spitness Center.
No more stupid neighbors staying up until 3 a.m. right outside our door.
No more landscapers cutting the grass at 7 a.m. on summer weekdays.
No more living in a place that smells like a smoking hotel room.

We're pretty satisfied with that particular turn of events. It's nice to be a one-household family again. You'd think that would mean we got a lot done here over the long weekend. Hmmm, not really. We took it easy with some visitors instead.

I've got some photos to post, but I'm lazy and still haven't reloaded Photoshop on my laptop since it crashed. I'll get to those, probably this weekend.

Stacey brought the kids up and we went to the T-Bones game Saturday night. It was beautiful! The weather was perfect, the ballpark was nice, and there was a huge crowd! It's what minor league baseball could be in Wichita if people would get off their butts and go to games once in a while. It was also dollar night, so we enjoyed some dollar dogs, dollar waters and dollar peanuts.

Definitely had to partake in some dollar Tums when we got home.

With the kids, we played some Wii, took them to play at both of our neighborhood parks, and did a little shopping. It was a good weekend all around. Once they were tucked safely in the car headed back to Doodah, we did some yardwork.

Adam cut the grass, and I worked to clear out our tomato patch. So far this year, I've harvested a bunch of chocolate cherry tomatoes (an heirloom variety that are great snacks), but no regular tomatoes. Maybe our last stab at cleaning and restaking the plants will yield a few fruit before the end of the summer.

(I have photos of those too, guess you'll just have to wait!)

I think that's enough random junk for now. Go check out Betsy's blog to see the project she worked on over the weekend.

Kickball double-header tomorrow night. I'm sure they'll be a few good stories out of that, considering last week, I showed up for my first game with the new team and surprise! There was TJ, Amy's husband, playing on the same team! And, since our team is called El Guapo, we had some pretty fly Mexican music playing the whole game. I think I could probably start a whole new blog just about kickball stuff if I really put my mind to it!

Bedtime.