Rancho Cucamonga

Once again I've gotten off track about posting -- sorry about that, devoted fans. We had two really gruesome weekend trips that I was going to post about and then didn't, because they were so gruesome. Coming up this weekend: yet another trip, which I hope will not be gruesome. We are going to a 5th birthday party in Torrance on Sunday and then staying overnight at a hotel in Glendale which supposedly has a HEATED pool and is right next door to a family-style restaurant and right across the street from a big mall. If all goes well, we might go to the L.A. Zoo on Memorial Day, since our hotel is 2 miles from the zoo. But as we all know, all will NOT go well -- probably the pool's heater will be broken, or the entire pool will be closed for repairs, the mall will be closed for renovations, the zoo will be closed because all the animals are sick, my credit card will be cancelled, the car will get a flat tire... Anyway, think good thoughts for us.

Life continues apace in the potty mouth department. Boos have stopped calling everyone a booty butt, but pretty much every other word they say has something to do with bodily functions. It's my fault, partly. We had a cute book out of the library a few weeks ago called The Very Kind Rich Lady and Her One Hundred Dogs by Chinlun Lee.The one hundred dogs of the title are pictured individually and named, and some of the names are a bit suggestive, shall we say (Pipi, Tinkle, etc.). To get through the book you have to read all one hundred dog names twice, and when I got tired of reading the regular names, I would make some up, such as Poop, Dirty Diaper, and Gas. What can I say, I'm a four-year-old at heart. Anyway, this caused great hilarity and almost immediately got out of hand, and so now, even though the book has been back at the library for over a week, Baby A and Baby B are still calling everything Dirty Stinky Diaper, Poopoo Head, Smelly Gas, and other similar names.

How long does this phase last? And how long would it have lasted if I hadn't made it worse?

The two trips that I didn't want to write about... OK, I'll write just a little. The first one was to Rancho Cucamonga, which is about 125 miles straight south from here. Why did we go to Rancho Cucamonga? Because that's where we bought my computer (used) last fall, at a little shop called PC Mart, and my computer was clearly dying. I don't know if there's a place in Ridgecrest that fixes computers, but even if there were, I wouldn't take a computer there, because one thing Ridgecrest is not good at is SERVICE of any sort. So we drove to Rancho Cucamonga. It turned out the hard drive was dying, so we had to get a new one. Unfortunately, on my computer there was a sticker that said it had a 60 GB hard drive, so that's what the guy replaced it with. Unfortunately, my computer ACTUALLY had a 140 GB hard drive. When this was noticed, we had already spent about 4 hours in Rancho Cucamonga and it was too late to have the guy replace the hard drive and reformat it and all that stuff. And we just couldn't come back. (It was exactly the sort of thing that would have happened in Ridgecrest. Might as well just have stayed home. On the plus side, the twins learned how to say Rancho Cucamonga.)

So now I have a 60 GB hard drive, which means my photos won't fit on it. This is OK because I have lost all my photos (they were supposedly on my backup drive, but I can't find them). Lots of them are on the Kodak photo sharing site, but since the Kodak photo sharing site is GOING OUT OF BUSINESS, that's not going to be much help for long.

I am getting madder and madder as I type. I hate computers.

While we were waiting for the guy to fix the computer incorrectly, we went out to lunch (involving the usual screaming and general mayhem) and then drove off to look for a place to recycle the carload of Styrofoam that Rocket Boy had insisted on bringing along (because of course you can't recycle it in Ridgecrest) and which was blocking my visibility. We drove a long ways to a recycling place, only to be told that the minimum charge was $29 and they didn't accept Styrofoam anyway. So then we had to drive to ANOTHER recycling place, miles and miles away, and fortunately that place DID accept Styrofoam, so we got rid of it,

but not before I had a total nervous breakdown, complete with requests for divorce and pointing out to Rocket Boy that the carbon footprint involved in driving all these extra miles to the recycling place was a LOT bigger than any savings to the Earth from recycling the stupid Styrofoam. It really wasn't such a bad experience as all that, but I had wanted to go to the Rancho Cucamonga mall, and now there wasn't time.

Also it was hot and humid (to us desert rats, anyway).

Anyway, the next day was Mother's Day and Rocket Boy and the twins gave me a beautiful hanging basket (my request)

which two days later just completely died on me. We moved it to a more protected location and I watered it and watered it, and now the white petunias have come back, but all the pink ones are dead and gone. Oh well.

Anyway, this is why I haven't been blogging recently. I think I'll stop here and not describe the other disastrous trip, which involved a TRAIN. Maybe in a day or two, if I feel ambitious. I'm sure you can hardly wait.