Photographic Essay: Smoky Hill High Student Trash

My house is in a neighborhood that's right across the main thoroughfare from Smoky Hill High School. Then Laredo Middle School is just beyond that. I love this. As long as we're here, my children will never have to know the torment of The Bus. I had some Bad Bus Times, in middle school mainly.

So there's a lot of foot traffic through our neighborhood and past our house, with high school and middle school kids coming and going. Plus the High School has a an open campus and a weirdy three-on, one-off daily schedule, so the kids are going by pretty much all the time. Mostly they're kids that live over in Sunburst Townhomes. Bless its heart, some really great people live in Sunburst Townhomes, including the Incredible Zirker Family. But also some not-so-savory people live in there. It's a big place.

Here is my photographic essay of things left by these friends as they traipse past my home. And this is just from this morning, not including the trash I picked off the lawn yesterday and the things I've recently had to kick into the street for not wanting to touch them with my hands.

1. Random scrap of litter. Looks like a gum wrapper.





2. Straw. The kids are constantly going to 7-11 or Taco Bell and ditching their "leftovers" in public places like my sidewalk.

3. Cigarette pack. This was technically on the neighbor's lawn and I know they don't smoke... But at least the teens got their money's worth by going for the 100s.

4. Plastic baggie. This is far from the grodiest thing I've seen left by the miscreants...oops! I mean Leaders of Tomorrow!

...on looking more closely, though, you'll see why I decided to do this photographic essay.

Because I am enraged at the number of terminally ill students with chronic pain that have to walk themselves to high school! This is an outrage! Yeah. If you can't catch my feelings on "medical" marijuana, then perhaps I haven't been cynical enough here. Maybe I'll do a whole 'nother post on why medical marijuana is a farce and anyone who really thinks sick people need it real bad are lying to themselves and our state. Or maybe I just said my piece, amen.

Quilt Blockin'

Here's a recent installment in the $5 Block o' the Month. They're really going half-square and quarter-square triangle crazy on these. It's a lot of triangles.

O Tannenbaum

I have become involved in a block of the month, self-administered by a group of quilting and crafting friends. There are maybe five of us and we all went in on the pattern for a fabulous christmas quilt called O Tannenbaum. Here's a link to one of the many quilt shops online that have it:

www.quakertownquilts.com/OTannenbaum.shtml

Here's the first month's block. It's paper-foundation piecing. It's fun to see how each lady's fabrics make her block different, plus everyone's interpretation of the instructions...

Big WibNews!

Baby #6 decided to stick around after all!

That's the whole news.

PS there's actually more: I went for an ultrasound today and there was a baby with a heartbeat and everything. Due date, May 20-something. That is all.

I Love Living Here!

We live close enough to DIA, Buckley Air Force Base, the Air Force Academy, and several smaller airports that there is a good deal of air traffic over our home and in our surrounding skies. The cool thing is, you can totally hear when it's something totally cool, as opposed to just some commercial jetliner or somebody's private jet. And at Buckley, the fighter jets periodically go out on training missions or whatever, and they go in sets of two or three or sometimes four. I love this so much. I can hear the roar and run out my front door and see two or three superfast jets in the sky above my neighbor's house. Or else the huge military helicopters. I just love that they're not as diddly and weak as your usual air traffic.

So there's this park, and it's a lot closer to Buckley Air Force Base than my house. It's a major attraction because it has water-squirting features. We were at this park with some friends a few weeks ago. I heard the familiar roar of my beloved butt-kicker fighter jets, so I turned around to where I knew they'd be taking off and THEY WERE RIGHT THERE, right behind us. They were SO CLOSE. It was awesome. They're so loud and roar-y and they could totally kill you dead in a second if they wanted to. I love them. One took off, and then within a minute at most another one roared off the ground and then another one. I can't stress just how cool I think they are and how cool it is to be RIGHT THERE watching them take off from so close. It's like going to the air show but it's all the time.

And so, I conclude this topic with this statement: I love living here. It is the bombiest! Not real bombs. We mostly get fighter jets and not bombers anyway.

I'm No Realtor But This is My Take

There's a new concept in finance lately, and that is the idea of being "upside-down" on your home loan, owing more money for your home than it's worth. I think this is a ridiculous idea and a stupid reason to be alarmed. The fact is, home "values" fluctuate so widely that maybe up to half the time, you ARE going to owe more than your home is "worth." Wah, wah, stop yer whinin' about being so-called "upside down" on a home loan because whatever you could re-sell your home for at any given point is for just that: a given point. It could be back up 50,000 dollars tomorrow (not likely though, eh?).

All I'm saying is that you KNOW when you sign all those trillion papers for a mortgage and home purchase, that you are agreeing to a pretty arbitrary price and that's the amount you're going to be on the hook for, for the next 30 years. I declare the following statement to be true: THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS BEING UPSIDE DOWN IN A HOME MORTGAGE, THERE'S ONLY BEING ON THE HOOK FOR A CERTAIN AMOUNT.

Squeamish Much?

If you're easily grossed out and/or don't want to know the very intimate details of something I did the other morning, just skip to a different web page. Just go right now. I won't be offended.

But YOU might be offended if you stick around, because my news is GROSS.

I cleaned out my ears. I couldn't hear and my ears were hurting. I used a bulb syringe and some of those cleany drops. What is not in my ears anymore was FOUL. You know those cap-erasers for pencils? That you have to buy for school kids but which never get used? That is the approximate size and shape of what-is-not-in-my-ears-anymore. Yes, it's true. And after the first one appeared in the sink, I made Seth look at it. And then I heard the second one pop out of the other ear.

This is gross. This is truly disgustifying. I know this. But this is my news. For the last two days I have felt like I was wearing a plastic helmet because everything is so loud and echoey with my new ear-situation. Also there might have been a little water left in there because my ears are notorious for having water stuck in them. It's terribly grody news, but it's good news.