Baby on the inside!

We are in Minneapolis, awaiting the firstborn the next generation. Me, mom, pops, and Tanya descended upon Jess's vacant house, which she is now as big as.

We've had rolicking midwest storms night after night, and my job is to fix the pre-war toilet downstairs.

Jess shows no signs of laboring, and the spud shows no signs of exiting - I'm afraid I'll miss the event when I go home to start classes early next week.

Roof called on account of...

Omigod! Squee! The roofers actually came over for a preview today (unannounced and I was on the toilet, but still).

We'd hoped to start the roof on Monday, when we get back from Cinci and Alexis won't be working nights. But this guy stood in our driveway and let us know that he won't be able to start next week,

"I'm going on a Bear Hunt."

I swear my eye brows hovered about an inch above my scalp, and I leaned forward to ask incredulously: "Bear hunt? Really?"

That's Michigan for you.


Really, though, who do you want doing your roof? I think a bear hunter might just be perfect. Furthermore, he didn't skip a beat when I mentioned that Alexis's car would need to be pushed (not driven) to make way for the dumpster.

I think I'll ask him to push it into the front yard.

My - -



brings all the -



to the yard.

And they're like: "It's better than yours."

Damn right, it's better than yours.



You can't eat it, 'cause it's way too large.

(Vernor's can is for scale, not for bragging...well, the mushroom is for bragging, I bet YOU don't have a giant mushroom a'growin'.)

Finally revealed

I am due in Lansing tomorrow to present a marketing piece that will hopefully help this community coalition stay afloat in Michigan's horrible non-profit economic environment. Of course, being the grad student I am, I've been sitting on this crap for weeks and am just now getting to it - and I discover two things that annoy me deeply:

1. I have been ignoring emails (what can I say, I like to let the conversation unfold and absorb it as a whole), but the board (of which I have only met three members) has agreed that they don't want to present "sob stories" (I am not proposing sob stories, rather sappy-happy success stories) and therefore will agree only to present vague stories of programming offered and number of people served.

Yeah, that's compelling.

2. As I read through a grant proposal that I was just given, I discover that their primary teen health program consists of three components:

Nutrition
Abstinence
Teen parenting skills

(Completion of the Abstinence-Only program guarantees you a spot (9 months later) in the very-popular Parenting Skills program.) For god's sake, am I the only one reading this?

I know you have to follow the non-profit dollars where they lead, but ABSTINENCE programming !?

I feel so dirty.

After the storm

We've had a long, slow, lovely rain today. Just beautiful, and now the night is alive with sound. It's been a dry and quiet summer - I didn't realize what we'd been missing.

I, for one, welcome my new mushroom overlord.

It came up a few days ago, and it's been spreading and spreading. I'm not sure how large it will go, but it's already bigger than Beastie.