How many funeral visitations will I go to before it stops being about my grandparents?

I lost this the last time I deep cleaned my kitchen. This morning, I found it again.

My friend Skeet had an interesting tweet tonight. Seems she was offered $4800 per month to take a porn link. Man alive. Four thousand eight hundred bucks, ya’ll! Wow. That’s like …. one sixth of our total income for last year.

That’s like, enough to bring our mortgage current and get a second car and that would just be for the first month. The second month, I could get the rest of what the kids need as far as clothes and shoes for the winter, and do some serious home repairs that we just haven’t been able to cover.

Fortyeighthundredbucks. I am ashamed to admit it, but I said I would consider it for such a price. I let some situational ethics come into play. How embarrassing is that? The fact of the matter is that no matter what my temporary circumstance, my situation remains constant. I’m a Child of the King, and I can’t do that. It would grieve my Father.

You know what snapped me out of my delusion? zoo_ninja tweeted up and said
@cassknits OMG you said WHAT?
@cassknits it would be to the @skeeterbess offer that all those I thought were pure, are referring to
and then, even as I was writing this post he said
@cassknits it’s a scam I get them all the time. Stay true to your principles and good things will come.

Turns out, it’s pretty much a scam. You have to not only host the link, but spam a gazillion people a day to try to get then to take the link as well. But still. Lord have mercy, what was I possibly thinking? How could I ever look my kids in the eye again? How could I ever explain such a thing to the youth I have charge over? There is no amount of money that could possibly make that offer worth taking.

However, if you can think of a way for me to make that much money and still hold my head up, I’m listening.

Sorry, ya’ll, I spent Friday in a spin, remember? I never got my weekly weight posted, though I did get on the scale. I have to tell you, I was pretty scared. I came back weighing a bit more than I did when I left, and truly, I expected it, because….well, when I travel certain things just stop working like they should, and that’s all I will say about that. Once I got back home, things started getting back to normal, and I lost quite steadily all through the week, ending up at 152.8, down a pound since September 5th. Not quite goal, but I was happy with it, since I spent 5 days eating restaurant food, and maybe having a few drinks. *cough*

Now that I am back home, I am continuing to walk during practices, but it is sure getting nippy out there in the evenings. I don’t think I will much be wanting to go outside for walking once practices end, so I am looking at alternatives. I’ve been thinking for awhile that I want to try yoga, but I am not sure that assuming contortionist positions that leave me precariously balanced is the wisest course of action, living here as I do with lots of active little people. I’ve been thinking I would be better off with some sort of dance or aerobics, and if they could join me, well that would be good, too.

With all that in mind, I was intrigued when I saw this XFLOWSION contest. XFLOWSION combines dance, power yoga and martial arts into a program that promises to burn fat and tone muscle. That translates to less jiggle in my wiggle, and that would suit me just fine. It was designed by Eric Paskel, who has trained some fine Hollywood hotties, and if it’s good enough for Hollywood, it’s good enough for me. At least as far as exercise. Some of that other Hollywood stuff, I’m just not real sure about, but we won’t go there just now, either.

Now listen: there is no getting around the fact that this post is compensated, but you know I would not lie to you. The reason I am writing this post is not for the money. No. I want the videos. They are offering 20 bloggers the exercise DVDs, and I want them, because I think they will genuinely meet the need I have for fun exercise that I can do with the kids around. And maybe they will join me and not laugh at me, and then that’s just an all around win, don’t you think?

A couple of months ago, I told one of my sons that he could read a book of our bookshelf. Umm, hat sounds weird. I mean he asked if he could read a book of “this shelf”, and I said yes, any shelf “over there”. It was quiet time, and I was trying to work, so I just needed him to pick a book already, any book! Read!

Anyway, he picked a book, and read it for a bout three seconds before he called out, “hey, what’s this paper?”

Well, that paper happened to be a check that my aunt had written for my cousin’s youth council dues, way back in the day. My cousin and I had served on Youth Council together in high school, and although I can no longer remember the purpose and function of the program, I do remember that we had a lot of fun going all the way to the county seat for the monthly meetings.

Can you see the huge amount of the dues? Here is a close-up:

Yeah, a whopping $5. Can you name an extra curricular activity today that costs just five bucks?

And here is another thing. My kids have never met this cousin. We were tight as tight could be all through high school, and then we had a fight one day, and never made it right, and haven’t really spoken since. Actually, that’s not even true. What really happened is that she spoke a word of truth to me that I wasn’t ready to hear, and I quit talking to her. And by the time I realized several years later that she was saying something I should hear, it was too late. I called her a while back, and she was convinced that I must want something. Of course, there was quite a bit of stuff going on in our extended family at the time, but I had no ulterior motive with my call. I just wanted to say hello.

And one more thing. I keep this picture in my bedroom. I bought it only because it looks so much like my cousin. Love you, Shirley. Miss you, still!

Still rocking the amazing hair from Friday on Saturday night. It’s an exciting life, isn’t it?

I finally caught up on my feed reading this morning, and Have a few things to share with you. There would have been more, but my system crashed and I lost a lot of the pieces I wanted to go back and read and share.

Need a good laugh? Check out these 10 amazingly simple home remedies. You will likely bust a gut. No remedy for that.

Think you have bad financial habits? Find out which one is the hardest habit to break.

That’s it. I spent the rest of the evening taming this:

and getting my work schedule into Google Calendar. Doesn’t a clean desk just feel so good?

Autumn is starting (here in the US, anyway), and kids are heading back to school–does the changing season change your reading habits? Less time? More? Are you just in the mood for different kinds of books than you were over the summer?

One thing I missed while I was spinning my wheels yesterday was the Booking Through Thursday meme. I hate that. I don’t always answer the questions, but I do at least like to look! Fall generrally means more reading time for me, since the kids are in practice, and that measn I am held captive at the ball park for a couple hours three times per week. But this fall, I am doing more walking and talking during practice, and less reading than I did last year. And as most of you know, I am still reading magazines during practice, too. What all that means is that I am not reading as many books as I would like. Still. Though I did read on on the way home from Vegas that had me snorting with laughter.

My Horizontal Life is rip-roaringly funny in a way that only a book about sex can be. Unless you are one of those people who doesn’t get that there are very few things funnier than sex. And true, sex can can be joyful and intense and even serious, but it is also very, very funny. Seriously, take away the candle light and the lingerie, and it’s just…funny. Now I am interested to read her other book, Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea. It ought not to take more than 6 hours or so to read, if I can find 6 quiet ones to string together again, LOL! In real life time, it will probably take months to get through it, though.

BTW, have you noticed how the colors on uk books are so much different than the ones here? Much more subdued, as if they didn’t really on the brightness to attract readers, and instead relied on the words. Interesting concept, that.