We'll Miss You Uncle Reed

Lester “Reed” Richardson passed away on June 23rd 2009. This kind and gentle man was born in Texas to a military family and was raised and educated in Washington State. After serving in the Army for two years, including a tour of duty in Viet Nam, Reed joined the Washington State Patrol. He retuned to college and earned a BA degree in Business Administration from the University of Puget Sound in 1982. He had a successful career as an accountant, working at several business firms and taught business classes at Pierce College in Washington. Reed relocated to Southern California in 1999 continuing his work as an accountant. He was a member of Saint Michael’s Parish in Poway where he was an active member of the Knights of Columbus, sponsored several RCIA candidates and taught one year of High School Religious Education. He also was a volunteer for the International Relief Team of San Diego that served victims of the Cedar Fires. Reed’s hobby was wood working and he loved to play golf and watch various sports on TV. Devoted husband, son, brother, father, and grandfather, Reed was predeceased by his father L.R. He is survived by his loving wife Teresa, his mother Emma Frances, daughter Lara Jaeger and her husband Geoff, grandchildren Megan, Jessica, Jake and Lucy, son, Raymond, brother Bob and his wife Rayanne, stepchildren, Daniel, Olivia, and Victoria, step grandsons Jason and Garrett, his Uncle Buddy, Aunt, Betty, Uncle Fred and numerous nieces and nephews. Mass will be celebrated Wednesday July 1st at 2:00 pm at St. Michael’s Catholic Church, 15546 Pomerado Rd, Poway, reception to follow. Reed is truly loved and will be missed by all.

Tar, baby

So, I took the flock to the La Brea Tar Pits this past week. I've insisted that they take a break from all those brainless activities that make a summer vacation,.. .a summer vacation.

I got us out the door not too shabbily at 8:30 - 9:00 ish and we made it to La Brea just like the iPhone said. Then, the iPhone decided to play hardball with me when I took a wrong turn on La Brea Blvd. - it refused to continue routing me to my destination. In fact, it pretended to not know that the tar pits existed. I don't think it had really gotten over Spring vacation when it was navigating me and I still ended up in Disneyland, instead of the Ontario Airport. I had no idea the iPhone had a built in IQ meter, but apparently I don't qualify for ownership.

I've never led anyone on, dear iPhone, in my lack of navigational skills. I am the first to laugh hysterically at the fact that I have an actual degree in geography, but I can not find my way out of a paper bag with a Thomas Guide. Or, that I work for a company that makes mapping software for a living, but fail to know which way is east unless I see the sun and say the rhyme in my head "lefty westy,.."

So, little iPhone, I'm sorry I turn you on your head so I can figure out where I am (represented by that pulsing blue dot that looks a lot like my blood pressure when I've been in the car with five crazed children for almost two hours in LA traffic and have lost sight of my termination point) and where I am supposed to turn in time to actually turn there. Unless that iPhone grows arms out of its sides and takes control of the wheel, I will continue to get lost. YOU GOT AN APP FOR THAT?

Anyway, I digress. We get to the parking lot. They only take cash for the $8 parking fee. I have only a five dollar bill and no ATM card in my purse. (what is a trip if it's not adventurous, eh? No vocanoes to hoist myself on? Well, I'll drive into LA with no cash or gas, but with five kids and see where it takes me,..) The gatekeeper takes pity on me and waves me in anyway. We park, J finds his wallet and lets me borrow three bucks with very high interest, I assure you. I give the money to the man.

The museum is beautiful, if you can get past that tar smell. For God's sake, don't you think the people of LA would put some sort of proposition on the ballot next time to take care of the stench?

Nice grounds for rolling down, running away from mom (especially fun if you are only one year old and can make EVERY PERSON IN THE UNIVERSE yell loudly at me 'Your baby is over here!" Yes, people, I have an eyeball on it. I haven't lost one yet. Kid, I mean. Or eyeball for that matter.)

The musuem itself is very nice and would be more fun if museums didn't make all five of my children deathly hungry just as the credit card is processed. I make them suffer through two movies and trapse the whole way 'round. I point out the real life paleontologists who are hacking away at fossils behind the glass. I make them walk in the aboretum and ask them all sorts of annoying educational questions before we go back outside to gnaw on some granola bars.

We then go find PIT 91 - reminds me of Area 51, but this has massive amounts of old bones. Now that the children have fuel for their brain cells, they find this marginally more interesting. Five minutes pass, so we trapse to the snack bar for $25 worth of coke and chips. Then go and spend more time in the gift shop than in the museum. Leave. Actually find the freeway all by myself with no help from any electronic devices.

Only have gas in the Suburban for oh, 60ish miles. Decide to gun it out of massively annoying traffic and see how long I can coast down hills to the Valley while all the babes sleep. Decide to exit right before the warning light. Pull into gas station - that only takes cash - and go back out into extremely bad traffic looking for gas station. Try to look composed as children all wake up and ask what's going on. Fume on in to credit card accepting station and fill 'er up. Then, fill up the kids again, because it's been, oh, what? an hour? Starving. In and Out is nearby. Make it through the meal until the very end when Fifi spills my dt. coke onto my lap. Now, THAT will keep me awake for the rest of the ride.

Put a sweatshirt on the car seat and turn on the seat heater in hopes that by the time I have to stop for food again on the way home, I won't look like I just peed my pants.

Get home in time for dinner. Remember hubby is at a meeting til late and I'm in charge of dinner. Run to store for pizza and beer. Call it a night. Get ready for the next field trip back to the Science Museum. And the good thing? I've been there before and vaguely know where it is,...

Musings on the 21st Century

Well, I did it. I'm hip again, at least in my own convoluted mind. Not only do I have a blog, a facebook account, I've dabbled in LinkedIn, but I tweated. For those of you who don't know, tweating is basically the ability to use a computer to send random thoughts to the entire populace with a quick push of a button. It's pretty frightening.

I tweated on a white paper I copyedited for a rocket scientist at NASA who uses my company's software to perform space optimization. Okay, so I don't know if he's an actual rocket scientist, but it makes me feel smarter. Anyway, you post 140 characters (ack!Good thing I'm usually at a loss for words!) on whatever you feel like and it gets sent into the cybersphere. In about 5 seconds (the amount of time it could take you to think "OMG, what have I done?!?") you can see that many unknowns out in the world have read your tweat and indeed, clicked on any info you included, like the URL to said whitepaper.

When I say unknown, I mean unknown. It tracks and categorizes the trackers into 'HUMAN' and 'BOT'. Yes, Virginia, we are living in a TRANSFORMER/TERMINATOR world. I never thought I'd have to worry about robots tracking my information in cyberspace. Perhaps I should move.

That may be scary, but I am finding that these new fangled technologies can be a boon to my life; for example, now that we have secured a mobile phone for our preteen boy, I've never had so many conversations with the kid in my entire life. And I don't mean by communicating via voice, like we 20th century folks would assume you would do, especially using a PHONE; I'm letting my fingers do the talking - I've done better parenting through texting in the last three months than I have in the other 12 years of that kid's life.

We've had in depth conversations about everything. I'm finding that I can do virtual parenting from virtually anywhere in the world. Who needs a babysitter when you have a rule oriented, bossy 12 year old in charge (or so he thinks) of everyone in his domain. I've been distracted in many meetings at work by texts such as "K ate 16 poptarts - is that okay?"and "Z is calling me names, can I hit him?", "Can we watch JAWS?", and "WHERE R U?"

Woops. Gotta go. I think there is a BOT at the door texting to get in.

Tivo Queen

I used to be anyway. The master of the DVR,.. .the keeper of the vault of soulless TV shows that were always there if I wanted to watch them; kind of a security blanket. Not that I would, mind you. We try and be kind of social in this household, which means limiting hours of TV viewing and game playing, spending time doing other things. Oh who am I kidding, I'm not as quick as those little whipper snappers I live with. Their little fingers have been engineered to dial in just the correct HD channel quicker than I can say 'But Oprah's on!'

I used to have all sorts of things in my collection, like House and Grey's Anatomy and Top Chef and the Colbert Report. Then I noticed my shows were getting deleted before I even got to view them. I'd see Fringe displayed, blink, and then it was gone. In it's place is an assortment of Yo Gabba Gabba (this is like an earthquake emergency kit - gotta have something fun and dancable to distract frenzied infants and toddlers. It's on virtual 'do-not-destroy' orders), Night in HD, MythBusters, Engineering Marvels, Dinosaur Shows, Things-that-Eat-You-in-the-Ocean-so-you-should-never-go-boogieboarding-again from the Discovery Channel and really - how many Hockey games do we have to record? Huh? Who said all these little nature and true fact show loving, sports obsessed little boys could run ripshod over my DVR?

Not that it matters anyway. Once and a while I force my will on my youngsters. "IT'S MY TURN!" I bellow. Just to turn on something that either gets immediately drowned out by all sorts of urgent requests, or is deemed inappropriate for child viewing. Forget it. Which channel is Noggin, again?

Happy Monday

I can't spend too much time playing in my favorite sandbox, what with all the whining and carrying on (who knew children demanded so much attention??? Fifi will only go find her shoes so many times before I have to really deal with her).

I've got to do stuff like this today.

Getting ready for the day actually involved getting six people ready for the day. As I was attempting my 3 year-old's fine blond tresses, which gnarl quite nicely, as though her head was a drill bit and she was burrowing into her pillow,... I asked her "Did an owl make a nest in your hair?" To which she looked at me very seriously and responded, "No, I'm not a tree."

Well, duh, mom.

Which reminds me of the last time I was helping at her preschool, pushing this totally cute little boy on a swing. He gave me all sorts of wise words of wisdom, my two favorites by far were:

* "Yeah, my dad's a human."

and

*"Did you know we are all manimals?"

Here's to a great week, if not a great month!

Yucaipa Town Street Roller Hockey Derby

... or "why it's important for every American to have healthcare", or, "what shall I call the street hockey equipment wing that needs to be added to my house now that we have 2 tons of stuff?" or "Now is the time to buy stock in BandAid!"

Did I mention Hubby took the kids to an ice hockey game? So, I've been battling the ol' 'can I take ice hockey lessons?' question from various small boy children for quite some time; just a disturbing gnat buzzing around every once and a while. To which I answer - and this is the 21st century momism for small children; the 'I-told-you-so' for this generation - "GOOGLE IT!" So, when the 9 year old went on the ol' Apple and got all those little dots on the map then asked me where Ontario was, I told him Canada, much, much too far to drive for ice hockey lessons. (Is that a sin?)

The question has been irritating enough for me to actually be looking forward to three boys in football four evenings a week starting at the end of July; and about three months worth of six hours jam packed with football games each and every Saturday spread all over various locations in the lovely Inland Empire. Complete with two small children in tow who can't navigate bleachers all that well yet, and really need to eat something besides Pepsi, snickers bars and nachos, the usual snack bar staples.

Then, the brown earth truck arrived (UPS to those who don't know) and instead of the usual 'OldNavyBananaRepublictheGapAthleta' box drop off, (just because I'm homebound with five kids in various stages of maturity doesn't mean I can't look good in the process), they instead left boxes from stores like 'RollerHockeyMonkey' and the like.

First there was the frantic digging in the garage for pads and the stealing of mom's roller blades by the 12 year old and the borrowing of preschool hockey sticks from the neighbor kid.

Then the neighbor dad took it up a notch and went twirling around the neighborhood on his rollerblades; impossibly lithe and graceful for someone who installs gas pipe in commercial buildings for a living.

So, hubby decided to first replace his own rollerblades (his had previously been offered to the moving gods in one of our intercontinental transits from one continent to another). Then he ordered a virtual bouquet of hockey sticks - left handies and right handies, goalie sticks etc,...

So now, instead of watching this in the afternoon:



Now there is this:



Seriously, as if we needed another reason for the neighborhood to not be pleased with us; now we have the cracking of sticks, pucks flying at 35 miles an hour, car drivers having to actually pay attention as they navigate their cars past our elbow of the street, hoots and hollers. It just wasn't enough to have two big dogs and five kids plus their friends ransacking the area.

Just yesterday evening hubby arrived home with 60 feet of PVC pipe and erected what can only be thought of as one of the Wonders of the Engineering World; two of the biggest street hockey goals I have ever laid eyes on. I'd have taken a picture, but they wouldn't fit in the camera frame. I am just waiting for the Discovery Channel vans to pull up and put us on some show about big construction.



Zach is amazed at hubby's prowess on the skates. And that he goes well beyond 7 feet tall with those wheels on. I'd get out of his way if I were you, little 9 year old.





Score!



Is that a tear?



You have much to learn little 7 year old grasshopper,..



So, hubby has all sorts of crazy ideas tumbling around in his head, like me, the old wife, and the B (mini me) donning skates and slicing a few into the ol' goal. To this I say, "HA!"

As hubby was in all honesty carrying the B around the sidewalks while she dangled her skate encased feet over the cement, I told him he was seeing a virtual time capsule: this was me as a child. Absolutely no athletic prowess WHATSOEVER. Don't opposites attract? Well, here you go. Those stories of not being able to walk and chew gum? Tripping while jogging in place? They are NOT EMBELLISHMENTS!

Yes, it's a seriously whiplashing 180 to go from three little boys who could skateboard before they could walk; Jared was riding a two wheeler by the time he was the B's age; the B can't fathom how the peddles on the tricycle work. Why do you think I enjoy horseback riding? Because something else moves for you; you just sit there and keep your heels down, back straight. I can almost handle that.

Hubby, do you remember when we lived in Newport Beach? And went to the boardwalk, a mere half a block from our apartment? And rollerbladed? And you pretended you didn't know me when I'd crash and burn? And you dragged me to Huntington Beach, invited by our friend who worked for K2 at the time, to try out new rollerblades and be totally schooled by all those bladers? And you left me clinging for dear life to light poles as I navigated down tiny slopes? Somethings can't be forgiven, even after 16 years of marriage.

Fifi on the other hand,... she's a force of nature. Too bad they don't make skates in infant sizes,...



Don't let the pink bunny helmet, diaper and white flower sandals fool you. She means business.

Happy Friday

I actually stole this from June Cleaver After a Six Pack - yet another Catholic mother with a wicked sense of humor.