It is official...

It has now thundered in February.
You know what THAT means, right?

Because the Brothers G-Wink are 13 year old boys at heart...

But my favorite part:

Alley is right there between the boys, watching them play hockey on the PlayStation III and cheering them on. Just as happy as can be.

Explain this to me...

I have lived in my house now for almost two years. Well, two years in May, but close enough.

Back in the fall of 2009, I ordered tickets to a series of concerts. The company had my old address on file (for simplicity’s sake, let’s say I used to live on Casanova Street and currently live on Dodger Avenue), and – as a result – I never received said tickets. And, ironically, this was still in the six month window the post office promised to continue to forward my mail.

But you expect stuff like this to happen when you move. You try to remember to update as many things as possible, but things go astray. It happens.

Last month we were invited to a party, but never received the invitation. The sender has accidentally transposed the last two digits of our Dodger zip code, and the post office returned the invitation to her. Never mind that you can Google our address and it comes up without the zip, but whatever. Apparently, an accurate zip code is very important to the USPS.

As for receiving mail from my old house on Casanova, though? Yeah, that hasn't happened in nearly a year and a half. Well, until two days ago when a jury summons landed in my mailbox.

And, yes, I updated my address on my drivers license AND voter registration card. That was done within a month of purchasing our current home on Dodger back in May of 2009. Which begs the question: Why did my jury summons go to my old address on Casanova? And - more importantly - why did the USPS deliver it to my current address on Dodger? There wasn't even a delay. It was postmarked two days before it arrived. And there wasn't even a mail forwarding stamp on the envelope. It simply arrived like it was addressed to me on Dodger instead of Casanova.

I just don't get it.

I find this nearly as puzzling as the City of Dallas Special Collections Department, which for reasons completely unknown to me, has my alarm permit registered to my old house on Casanova and my MAILING address listed on Dodger. I have called. Emailed. Mailed letters. Everything. And, yet, they still don't seem to understand that I want my alarm permit for my CURRENT home on Dodger. I have even cancelled my existing alarm permit with the city and reapplied. Nothing seems to work.

Maybe it is just me?

My little sister is engaged!

Happy Gnome!

Requisite Ring Bling Photo

Don't know. It just made me giggle.

Awkward (for the photographer), but cute!

SUPER YAY!

On compromise and chandeliers...

After years and years of patiently waiting, planning, researching and saving, Trevor finally has his new TV.

He actually bought it ten days ago, but it took awhile to schedule the electrician and coordinate the install. The delay was really my fault because I forced a compromise: if Trevor was going to insist on turning my living room into a man cave, I was going to insist the silly thing be hung on the wall. And while the electrician was here, I also figured he could tend to my list of minor electrical-issue-that-have-slowly-been-driving-me-crazy. Of course, most of the things that drive me crazy are things that Trevor hasn't even noticed, which is the main reason why I haven't dealt with them in the (nearly) two years that we have lived here. After all, it is hard to justify why you want to cut a hole in the ceiling and move the chandelier in the dining room over to the right six inches when your husband has never noticed that said chandelier isn't perfectly centered over the dining room table in the first place. But now, after years of waiting, we both have what we want. Trevor: a giant TV. Me: a TV hung on the wall and a perfectly centered chandelier.

And that, my friends, is just how our marriage works.

New problem: The hole in my ceiling needs to the patched and painted. And if we need to hire a painter to fix it, he might as well do some...painting. Have I mentioned that all the walls in my house are the same neutral yellowy color? Might be time to remedy that.

“If you've never seen an elephant ski, you've never been on acid.”

Imagine you are going to an early morning meeting at the Women's Museum, and you look to your left and there is an elephant. Because that is what happened to me this morning.

And no. We don't have a lot of elephants wandering around Fair Park. At least not on most Wednesdays. And never behind the DAR house.

The first coherent line ever spoken was ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

This Sunday we got to teach the kiddos about Jesus walking on water. The lesson involved a craft where each kid got to cut out his or her own Saint Peter and glue/tape him to a popsicle stick. Once this was accomplished, they could each individually reenact the Biblical scene by using their Saint Peter-on-a-stick and moving him between a drawing of a boat and an illustration of Jesus walking on water.

The girls, by and large, took the lesson seriously, while the boys seemed to get the most entertainment out of making dear, old Saint Peter sink dramatically to the bottom of the Sea of Galilee.

Obviously, some got more out of the story than others.

Cut to the end of the class when, while packing up their completed crafts, Bible versus, etc., the students started stating the following:

"Where is my Peter?"

"She touched my Peter!"

"His Peter is on the floor!"

"Whose Peter is this?"

"Uh, oh! I broke my Peter!"

"When I get home, I am going to play with my Peter!"

Good thing that the kids were too busy packing up to notice that their teachers were all laughing so hard they were crying. And even if they had, none of them would have understood WHY we were laughing. You gotta love six and seven year olds.

And that, my friends, is why Trevor and I might not be mature enough to teach Sunday School.

Why I can't wait for spring (and the grass to grow back)...

Yes. Underneath all that dead grass is Gypsy Kitty Woo.
This is a daily occurrence.