Northern Moments

Woo hoo….I’ve been tagged by Jenni in KS, who is just tired of me not posting!

Here are the rules:
1. The rules of the game get posted at the beginning.
2. Each player answers the questions about themselves.
3. At the end of the post, the player tags 5 people and posts their name, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog.

As these rules are arbitraryily written by someone with no power…I fully plan to disregard the last one, mostly because I am lazy, and they can’t do anything about it anyway. Hee hee hee.

What was I doing 10 years ago:

My children were 6, 4, almost 3 & 1. Which means I was probably doing laundry. We lived in Peter’s Creek Alaska, and I believe I had just started selling Creative Memories, which was my first break out of “just being mom”, and made for a bit of a head rush.

Five Snacks I enjoy:

1. Coffee (is that a snack?)
2. Ice cream…. coffee flavored
3. Doritos…but I try not to buy them
4. Cheese
5. Jalepeno artichoke spread from Costco with rice crackers….mmmm

In the Real World:

I’m not too different than I present myself on my blog. I’m a bit scatterbrained. Forget to fix my hair sometimes. Not too often though…I think I am usually fairly put together, at least I start out that way…but I don’t spend anytime making sure I stay put together. I love to talk, and any shyness, I had as a child has flown out the window.

Things I would do if I were a billionaire:
1. Buy my husband a boat.
2. Buy more books.
3. Have a full time housekeeper.

Five jobs that I have had:
1. Ice cream scooper at the Old Time Icecream Parlor at Alaskaland, an old time theme park, where we had to wear long skirts and gingham aprons, but because it was so warm in our store (interior Alaska can hit 100 in the summer…and we had no air conditioning, and a lot of machinery putting off heat) we tried to get away with wearing shorts and gingham aprons.
2. A restraunt hostess for Westours Holland America. This is when I developed my fear of tourists, but I was thrilled to find out that “tour tourists” and “B&B tourists” are entirely different.
3. Ice Cream Scooper for Baskin Robbins….this seemed like an obvious transition, but it didn’t last all that long…the owner of the store kept telling us, that his shipment of normal sized shirts never showed up…and so all that he had were extra small polos. Then we noticed that all of us girls were rather large busted… very, very suspecious. On my last day there I found a stash of many different sized shirts.
4. My friends and I created our own catering company, preparing meals for a newly formed tour company, run by other friends, Northern Alaska Tour Co. NATC is now very successful. Our catering company folded.
5. During college, at Oregon State, I worked in the library inputting all the new books.
6. I’m going to list 6, because I actually believe that is all the jobs I have ever had, until my current situation of B&B owner & bookstore owner. I worked for National Bank of Alaska for 2 years in the VISA department, until Amanda made her arrival.

Three of my habits:

1. I never stay on a schedule
2. I can’t stop reading once I have started a book
3. I like to sneak spoonfuls of ice cream out of the fridge. (this is like the 5th time I have mentioned ice cream in my post.)

Five places I have lived:

1. Fairbanks Alaska
2. Minneapolis, MN (when I was 2 while my dad was getting his PhD) then we moved back to Fairbanks.
3. Uppsala Sweden (when I was 12, while my dad was on a sabbatical)
4. Corvallis, Oregon
5. Anchorage, Alaska

What do you want others to get from your blog?

Whatever they want!

If anyone wants to be tagged from this post, please feel free.

I have been meaning to purchase Blake’s ticket to Battle Creek MI for Gymnastics Nationals for weeks now…really. Every night, I would think, “OK, I’ve got to do that tonight.” But I have been busier than I have ever been in my whole life, sleep deprived, and not even home. So last night I sat down to purchase his ticket, and realized that he is leaving TOMORROW. Do I win the bad mother award? I guess I shouldn’t even bother throwing that retorical question out there, as the answer is fairly obvious. We won’t talk about the bad wife award which I also won, because when you wait that long to purchase a ticket, the price is not pretty. It is also fun when you log in the reservation request, then go report the horrible amount to your husband, and then upon trying to purchase it, the price somehow goes up another $100. Eeeekkkk. At least he is staying in a REALLY Cheap, and probably very NASTY hotel, which makes up for the VERY EXPENSIVE ticket, for a child who is only competing in one event, in which there is no hope that he will even qualify for finals…. opps…there goes my mind…off on meaningless tangents. OK…Now I am going to take myself, and my mind, to the store… but I better get some coffee first, because I think I need it!

For those few die-hard readers…who have been wondering where I’ve been, I’m back! 

In the last 2 weeks, we have done 5 curriculum fairs for Pandemonium Booksellers. 

We started off in Peter’s Creek, a lovely 20 miles away. 

Then we flew to Juneau…600 miles away. 

Next to the big one in Anchorage…45 miles and an amazing TWO feet of snow, into which I flipped a whole box of books, including Susan Wise Bauer’s Well Trained Mind.  That makes me a very bad person.  

So then the snow melted and we braved the 350 mile drive to Fairbanks, where we pitched our stuff on Monday and Tuesday, and then drove 10 hours south for the Fair in Soldotna on Wednesday, and then back home to Wasilla after the fair.  Those beds in the motorhome came in really handy for everybody but Leny, who was driving. 

Now I am going to bed 

My house is a pile of books… beautiful curriculum everywhere!  It has been really fun receiving all of it…I’m like a kid in a candy store.

We have 2 employees working for us full time now…my bookstore manager and the cafe manager.  Of course, I don’t have a store…so we have taken over the schoolroom.  The kids do all their work on the couch anyway, so it doesn’t really make that much difference.  Except, I am so distracted, there isn’t all that much school happening.  I am trying not to feel too guilty about that.  Connor was starting to really resent that I wasn’t always focused on him, so Leny has started taking him everywhere with him.  It has been wonderful in a multitude of ways.  Amanda & Blake are quite content being independent teenagers.  Delaney just kind of hangs out with me.

Speaking of Blake, he competed yesterday in Portland at the Regional Competition.  We had some hope that he would qualify for Nationals, but not enough hope to actually buy the ticket.  So much to his chagrin, he qualified (yeah!) but only in one event, the floor.  His whole meet was marred by a giant rip he received during his first event on pommel.  They bandaged and taped his hand, but that affected his performance on pommel and high-bar.  Our region seems to be really s…l…o…w…in actually posting the scores somewhere, so I can see how he did in relations to others.  The mom who he was with called me, but we had a bad connection, and it is just hard to collect all the details.  He placed 2nd on floor with a 13.6 and didn’t do to badly on vault with a 13.4.  So he only gets partial bragging rights, not full!  Good for the humility!

For 4 days this week, I shuttle my kids daily, to 3 different sites, so that we can find out what they don’t know what they know.  I am actually highly opposed to testing, but I like having the $5000 a year to spend on curriculum and gymnastics that we get from our wonderful (really!) homeschool program, so my kids can suffer a bit. 

The problem is, they aren’t really suffering.  OK, Delaney has quite a bit of angst about her self defined lack of knowledge.  But I have to say she seemed rather pleased with her writing test yesterday.  Today will be math.  And Science on Friday.  She asked "The science will just be about planets right? Because that is ALL I know."

Connor was really pleased too.  He jumped in the car all pumped up, and said "We had to write a one page report about who we thought deserved to have a special stamp made.  I wrote ‘Ninjas.  Why? Because they are Ninjas.’" 

He was so pleased, I felt bad exploding with "What were you thinking! ?  Arrrgghhh!"  He answered, still quite pleased "I don’t know, I’m a Ninja." 

He also continued on about how mean the teacher was.  "I was barely talking," (Connor never stops talking) "and he came and told me, if I didn’t stop talking, he was going to take my test away and I would be done!" 

Do you realize how many trips to the principal office, I have saved by homeschooling this child?  Oh. My. Word.

Can I just say that Blake and Delaney are nicely behaved test takers.  Really.

The Ninja theme, apparently fully embraced by all the other 7th grade boys at Connor’s testing location, has continued since then.  Last night on the way home from church, Blake ripped off his seat belt, and jumped in the back seat to try to strangle the Ninja, who had taken up residence there. 

It was a peaceful moment.  I did pull over.

The Ninja is still alive.  Why? Because he is a Ninja.

I love testing.