Blue needs a little sister.

Yes he does, and here she is!

My Negative One Year Anniversary Present from Matthew

Um, and edit...as I published this post I realized I should maybe clarify the title - Nothing about my present was negative, and neither was our anniversary. I went around calling Memorial Day weekend our "Negative One Year Anniversary" it's a year before our wedding. In case anybody was a little worried. That's all it was about!! May 25th, 2013 everyone. By the way. In case you hadn't heard. :)

Two new family members have been adopted in the last few weeks, one of them has a tail and one has an engine. One has fur and one four wheels. I'll let you figure out which one is which.

This one doesn't have a name yet because I have not received my license plate with which to choose letters for a name. However, it is a Honda Fit and it is a present from my amazing fiance.

 Matthew just showed up at Food Rite on Memorial Day and took my car to Jackson. We had heard about an Altima available for trade and thought it might be a good, even trade for the Maxima, with better gas mileage. Matt sent me a text saying no on the Altima, but there might be something else there I would want. And then he shows up about 10 hours later with one of these. He's making payments on it, so I guess we have to get married now because that's a pretty serious commitment ^_^

Pennsylvania Seculeses: Watch this space! You'll be seeing this baby roll up at your front door in about 3 weeks!

The McCaslin family loves hatchbacks.

Plenty of room for two carseats PLUS lots of storage space whenever we need it! That third seat, where the carseat would normally go, folds up for underseat storage, the whole back seat folds flat, and the bigger backseat, where the two seats are in this picture, also can fold up to put stuff underneath. Super cool!

Oh, and I needn't mention the difference in gas mileage. Aside from only having a 10-gallon tank, making my gas fillups about a third cheaper every time than they were in the Maxima, it gets between 35 and 40 miles to a gallon. Which is a lot, considering it's basically a low-setting minivan. Sorry Mom, it's definitely not an Up Car. But there is LOTS of head room, giving it the illusion from the outside of being one! Haha.

I love it, and Matthew knew I would. With as little as I know about cars, the Honda Fit is the one car I actually talk about seriously liking the look and driving ability. We see/hear about it a lot on Top Gear, our vice of choice (although lately he's been getting into Dirty Jobs and Mythbusters - no no no) but in England it's called the Honda Jazz. I'll be honest, I like that name a lot better. I kinda wanna change the little emblem on back to one that says Jazz. It's on the list of expenses :P

Stay tuned for my next post, which is about our other adopted family member ^_^ She came just a little bit later in the week after this girl arrived.

TTYL, TFMM.

:-D

A Ketchup Post

Here's what I think we all need to do regarding mine and Matthew's life - we need to do some serious ketching up. You saw my last post where I grovelled for forgiveness from all of my friends and family. Well, the grovelling is over. I'm here. Not really - I have to go to work in about half an hour and I haven't gotten dressed yet so this is going to be a Speedy Gonzalez kind of post. Like usual. I gotta start setting aside writing time for when I get home and I'm not babysitting and I don't need to fix dinner right away. Today won't be one of those days because I'll be picking up T+L on the way home from work today.

I want to give you beautiful picture updates of everything we've done, I really do. Why am I not going to do that? Because this week just so happened to be Lara's graduation from Pre-School. No connection, you think. That's where you are mistaken. You see, Matthew and I both skipped out of work for an early lunch (really early, we left around 9:30 from our respective workplaces) in order to go to her graduation at 10. We arrived at the school (he picked me up because Food Rite is on the way from his work to her school, precious right?) just at 10:00 AM, and Lara's mommy told us that apparently the note sent home was wrong, and it didn't start until 10:30. This was a problem. We both had to be back at work pretty darn close to 10:30, and now it was looking more like we wouldn't be able to leave until like 11:00. Matt did some quick finagling and called up Nanny to come watch her graduate in our stead. We stayed justttt long enough to see Miss Adorable herself looking all kinds of cute and super excited about graduating, and then we had to skip out. We gave Nanny the camera, though, so all of my pictures that I've taken over the last 2 or 3 weeks are MIA until I get it from her. She has requested a date with her grandchildren tomorrow, though, so I'll make sure to exchange camera for babies tomorrow.

What else has happened? Hm..............................................

Here are some pictures that I owe from awhile back that never quite made it into posts. That's a bit of what has happened. :)

Lara - Look Mawy I can drive with my eyes closed!! She was very impressed with herself.

Lara inside of a set of tires being a ham as usual. We couldn't get Thomas to do the same...they have very different opinions of pictures being taken of them.

Lara the future mechanic learning from Daddy

This picture warrants some serious explanation. We are in the Walmart parking lot where we had to wait an hour for our pictures (Daddy's birthday present) to be done. The kids had gotten new umbrellas for Easter which they were obsessed with, but hadn't gotten to use for real since it hadn't rained yet. I promised to keep them in the trunk of the car so we could use them if it started to rain while we weren't at home. While we were waiting at Walmart, the rain started. For awhile we played in the empty part of the parking lot, over by the pharmacy. This didn't last long, though, because I didn't have an umbrella so I was cold and wet. I had the absolutely brilliant idea to get back in the car, recline the two front seats, and open the sun roof. My car became an instant April Wonderland. The next picture is also a very cute representation of what we got up to while we were waiting.

So happy that it finally started raining!

Thomas loves science projects. We found this one in a Family Fun magazine (Thanks Aunt Sue!) We created a balloon zipline where the air in the balloon is the force which carries a drinking straw down a line of dental floss. They loooved it. We kept it up all weekend and there are still balloons floating around! Not literally floating...I guess sitting. Sitting around.

Once the balloon is off, there is serious excitement in watching it fly 10 feet by itself. See here - excitement. I'm not entirely sure what Lara is grabbing onto. I guess maybe the balloon. She caught it mid-flight!

So there ya go. A little bit of all the fun we've gotten up to. But wait, there's more! More to come whenever I get the camera back from Nanny.

See Y'all!
TFMM

I'm Sorry.

I feel awful. Never yet did you receive all of those adorable pictures I took with updates to go with them. And I'm not even going to give them to you yet. Because I want to prioritize cleaning the house on my day off of work, my job that you didn't even know about yet because I haven't posted about it since I was hired. Sheesh. If any people were calling me a friend exclusively based on my posting habits, I would probably be off their list by now. Luckily I'm pretty sure the only people that read this have other connections to me besides this blog.

So, my dears, I will be back. I promise you. I will write a gosh darn blog post. And it will be a good one. It might be long. Get your waters and orange slices ready. But right now, I'm going to clean the house. And go grocery shopping, because I have priorities and they mostly revolve around cockroaches not crawling around my house and also not starving to death.

But after those two things, definitely blogging. That's definitely what comes after those two. My priorities are logical and practical, thankyouverymuch.

Loves!
TFMM

Fantabblyastic News!

When I typed out that ridiculous title, the post was actually going to be about my Tennessee residency for college this summer. In the last 30 seconds since typing that, however, I realized I have other fantabblyastic (now that I had to type it twice I just feel stupid for even thinking of it the first time...) news: My big brother Johnny has lived for a whole 23 years! That's a lot of years without getting struck by lightning or anything else crazy like that! So I'm very happy that it was his birthday yesterday. Whenever it's a loved one's birthday, I always smile and feel the need to tell everyone why that day is special, every time that I write down the date. Which, when you work in a deli that needs to keep track of expiration dates and stuff, is quite a lot.

So, Ynnohj, although neither of us are as cute or stylish as we were in this picture, I still hope you had a great one. We haven't been together to celebrate in awhile so I have no idea what all you got up to yesterday. Hopefully somebody made you a cake :) If not, I'll make one for you this weekend for Mother's Day.

Moving on!

After all of the stress and trips to the library and searching for a notary public in the nearby vicinity on Monday, everything worked out. The college wrote me an email on Tuesday afternoon saying that I had been granted in-state residency. Holla holla! This means that I will be starting classes in the first week of July and not stopping until I have a degree. Hopefully. If I, say, get married or have kids or something...I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. Until then, college. Because minimum wage is very difficult to live on, especially when your car gets 19 miles to a gallon and you live 20 minutes away from your minimum wage job and have to like, pay for stuff.

Anyway chitlins, that's my good news for the day. And I know, I know there is more going on in my life. I haven't told you about any of the cool stuff that we got up to last weekend. I didn't even tell you what was Wonderful about Yesterday. It's rough going. I will be stuck in an airport for enormous quantities of tomorrow afternoon so expect updates tomorrow night (maybe earlier, it depends on if Houston has free wi-fi in the airport.)

I must go get ready for work at 9:00. It's been lovely.

See Y'all!

TFMM

Low on Time, So I'll Just Give A Topical Update

Here I am at 4:55 AM, sitting at my computer with a cup of coffee. I thought it would be more painful than it was to wake up at 4:30, which probably has something to do with being sleepy enough to get ready for bed at 9:00 last night.

The reason that I am on this computer at 4:55, however, is the point of this blog post. I finally got a real, regularly-paid paycheck at Food Rite working with my future stepmother-in-law, and I am scheduled for 6:00 AM today. Yawn. But it's a job! And I can get the right hours to pick up Thomas and Lara from school on Fridays and most Thursdays. So that's all I'm asking for.

In slightly other news, I have to fax a bunch of forms over to UT Martin this morning, quick fast and in a hurry, in order to prove that I deserve in-state tuition. I sure do hope that it all gets in on time! If that doesn't work out, it may have to be one more semester of working instead of taking classes. I thought I was through with all that, but perhaps not.

Right, it is now 5:00 AM on the dot, and I must get ready to leave. Newbern Food-Rite is about a 20 minute drive and I like to get there early, ESPECIALLY if it's early and I'm sleepy and will take a long time to get around. :-)

Stay tuned for updates on all kinds of things. We're going to have a big ole time! Although I must warn you, I may prioritize laundry and dishes over the blog this week. When I get home around lunch time, it feels more than a little sinful to hop on the computer (because it was $800! That would be dangerous and irresponsible!) than to eliminate the dishes in the sink or, I dunno, vacuum something.

So you just keep your ears peeled okay kids? I promise you won't go unupdated. I have birthday parties, graduation parties, throw up, car trouble, and subbing to talk to you about. It may take awhile to get it all out, but just you wait okay?

See Y'all!
Although I can't see any of y'all right now because it's 5:00 AM and the sun hasn't come up yet ;)
TFMM

Weekend [Critter] Recap

"SO, Mary, what did you do this weekend?"

Killed bugs.

 And the point of this post is mostly to talk about the bugs, but I will not be able to leave it at that, oh no. Because when we returned to Matthew's house after his dad's birthday party on Saturday, there was also a possum outside of our house. We figured he was stealing Blue's food or trying to break into our trash. I don't have a picture because we all got inside as fast as possible and hoped it would go away. Success! We never saw it again. I'm guessing Blue and he scrapped outside, and Blue, being the most ferocious of kitty cats, probably beat him down and told him that's HIS trash, none available for you sir thank you.

You already saw these guys.

Large alive spider. And Payless Sperry knockoff.

Large dead spider and little guy who wanted to eat him.

 That was just the beginning. Luckily I had the Big Strong Man nearby for all the other critters that we found over the weekend.

Let's see, Thomas showed me the spider he killed with Daddy's flip flop early on Saturday. I was proud and told him he'd be good when the Big Strong Man isn't around. On Saturday morning Lara went to get into her purse that she uses to carry stuffed animals from place to place. No sooner had she picked out the yellow bunny she wanted then the purse flew across the room and Lara was screaming. I mean WAILING. She was so. Traumatized. We figured out why...a spider the same size as the one that freaked me out on Friday was crawling around inside of her purse, about to come eat her just as soon as she dared move that bunny. Didn't take a picture because Lara was just too terrified.

Then, come Sunday evening, I was getting ready to go to choir practice at church when I found this interesting specimen (actually, it should be plural. Specimens.) Here we have two enormous dead spiders caught in a spider web. I'm thinking this picture doesn't do justice to the real situation because you can't see the BEAST that killed them. It was about a third of the size of either enormo dead spider! It was tiny and, apparently, mighty! I wasn't scared or freaking out about that one...but I did take a picture and call Matt over to see it because I thought it was pretty impressive. That little guy must have been mighty poisonous to his friends Tweedlespider and Spiderdum!

And here we have this morning. I returned from my covert operation with Aunt Kerry Lee to find this in my bathroom...it actually appeared to already be dead, but just to be safe, I squashed its yellow-brown guts out with my hulking work boots. Those things make me invicible, as far as I've been able to tell.

So there you go. The house has been sprayed, and it rained really hard today. I'm hoping those two combined efforts will keep the animals a little further away from my bedroom than they have been lately!

On the subject of animals, here's a cat that decided the ideal hang out during a rain storm was on top of my car:

Of course, as soon as he saw me looking at him, he jumped right off the car to come see me. I was lucky I managed to get this picture before he was pawing at the door to come inside. He looked at me, like, "Can't you see it is monSOONing outside? Why would you be so cold hearted and keep me out here?" And I said back, "You lost all chance of me feeling sorry for you when you decided it was a good idea to sit on the car in the pouring rain."

Speaking of Blue, did you know Matthew and I give him a Russian accent whenever we talk for him? Which we do a lot of. Blue is very present whenever we're pretty much anywhere around the house. He's quite the feline. So we have a tendency to pretend he's taking part in our conversation...do you do that with your pets and/or nonverbal children? Matt and I are guilty guilty guilty. Baby Austin, Teri's new little guy, gets to say all kinds of interesting things vicariously through us. And Blue, the bobcat Russian blue, gets to do the very same, but his is with a Russian accent. Naturally.

And those crazy Russians, they just like to sit outside in the rain, I guess.

There ya have it folks!

See Y'all!

TFMM