This house is no exception. The problem is, as a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, I really have no excuse other than the children. So I’ll be taking on a new challenge over the next few days (with! pictures!). I’m going to organize my house by applying Lean Six Sigma Methods – 5S, Visual Controls, etc.

My goal is to spend 60-90 minutes in one area every day on a 5S activity and photograph it when I am done as the visual control piece. The visual controls will hopefully serve as checks for the children on whether their chores are done well enough. Wish me Luck!

I spent ten months in the desert. Now, this is my eight block evening walk.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Tetons

Cave of the Winds

Garden of the Gods, Colorado

And, best of all…

Trader Joe’s

I was told this was civilized country and that is the truth.  For it’s size, El Paso has nothing.  Here in the Evergreen State, we have everything.  I need to locate more places that deliver dinner but you know I will.   Pictures will also be forthcoming.  I promise.

For now, the job search begins in earnest and I am finally going to get my other blogs running too.  Peace.

Friday’s my birthday and the annual case of pissed off has come early.  Nice.

I’m lonesome, bored and grumpy.  In fact I am probably lonesome because I’ve declared myself mostly unfit for human consumption.  Last week, we went to get Texas Drivers’ licenses (yup, I’m fixin’ to leave and I converted anyway) and my social security card – which has been in my wallet for at least a decade – wasn’t there.  Well, I had all my other documentation except for that and the clerk wouldn’t give me a break and I went OFF on her.  It wasn’t even her fault.  It was totally uncharacteristic of me and I was so ashamed of myself that after going down the road a piece to get verification of my social security number and order a replacement, I made a point to go back to that office and apologize for being a total bitch.  DH was with me and I had to confess to him that I am not happy with one single aspect of life at the moment.

No, I’m not hitting my friend the Lexapro just yet, but the kids are driving me nuts, the hubby’s crankiness with his class (you know something I have TOTAL control over), and my sheer, complete and utter boredom are just a bit more than I feel like dealing with.  I miss school (or just having a freakin’ job!), I’m sick to death of homeschooling and the “I didn’t feel like doing it so I’m just going to say “I don’t know” when you ask me why my homework is done” syndrome.  This is an ongoing problem as is the “You failed it.  Again.  Do it over.  Again” complex.  I am 100% sure (in case I haven’t said this before) that we will not under any circumstances homeschool next year.

Now I wish I knew the way out of this funk…Orders might help.  A job would for sure.  Neither is within my control.  I’ll start with a nap.

there’s us.  The AGRs are in a great state of flux that is hopefully ending soon.  Initially, the AGR MSG’s were going to be held over until after the SGM board results come out in July(How’s that for alphabet soup?).  Thankfully, someone put a bug in the right ear and that has changed.  Hopefully, we’ll have orders this week and hopefully they won’t be for Harlingen.  Wichita isn’t my first choice, but it isn’t Harlingen and that, my friends is something.

But the net effect of all this in-limbo-ness and this “I don’t want to go there”-ness is that everyone is cranky.  Rather than adapting a “Fuck it, let’s have some fun!” we’re all collectively kind of crawling into our shells and waiting for the moving trucks to arrive.  It sucks.  It escalates the suckiness of remedial Army kindergarten to a different level.  All this uncertainty and unhappiness dominates conversation and just makes us crabbier as we absorb our friend’s pissed off, add it to our own and pass it along the line.    Add a crabby-sick-of-school-this-is-a-total-waste husband in the picture and you may as well forget it.  We’re all crawling into our closets  and cleaning out our stuff and just waiting for this to be over with.  Unfortunately, without orders, no one knows when that will be.

I have developed an extremely pissy attitude(okay, pissier attitude) and I’m not afraid to share it.  At this point in time, truthfully, we are 100% not sure about where we will be living six months from now.  We have assignment advice – which is meaningless at this time – sending us to Wichita, Kansas in late September.  It’s better than Harlingen, I’ll grant you, but I’ve been looking for jobs there and it is disheartening.  You know since I am not in school, I need a job.  Not financially but MENTALLY I need a job.  Plus if DiscoverIndies is ever to be a full-on go, I need a little traveling and spending money.  I’m lucky I have a husband who humors my whims in this area.    But the minute I find a job in Wichita, the AGR will send us someplace else.  Wichita also means someone’s going to points east in 2010.  Won’t that be great?  Sure.

Another thing contributing to my pissy attitude is sheer boredom.  We haven’t extended or received any social invitations in a few weeks and I am bored out of my skull.  So I am amusing myself slightly by cooking for the family as though we have actual friends.  Cool huh?  We indulged ourselves in a new gas grill and inaugurated it with a grilled turkey and a grilled ham on Easter Sunday.  The night before, our previous gas grill sealed its fate by having inadequate size to hold three cedar planks for salmon.  Plus it has hot spots and is four years old so it was due for replacement.  Were I a product reviewer, I would tell you that the new grill is phenomenal.  You can even add wood chips of your choice to enhance the flavor.  We used hickory with the turkey and ham and it was phenomenal.  I also highly recommend this as a ham glaze.  Don’t let the “hot pepper” scare you.  It’s not at all hot, just tangy, sweet and delicious.

Did I ever show you these?

Those’d be herbs in pots on the patio and real-live vegetables in containers in my backyard.  The herb pots contain your garden variety assortment of herbs and are doing quite well.  It’s nice to go out back and snip what I need for dinner plus the green breaks up the HP brown.  HP is very, very brown, dusty and windy.  For Sunday’s turkey, I snipped sage, thyme and rosemary.  I know.  Now you’re hungry and no, I don’t care.  If you want to eat my cooking, show up at my house.  It’s pretty simple.  Hell, invite me over!  I’ll cook.  Seriously.  I love cooking.  I even clean up my own messes.

Last a quick update on the 1 bag, 5 dinners thing I promised.  We’re two dinners in.  The shopping list did not fit in 1 bag, but probably would have fit into two and I did have to adjust the recipes and the shopping to feed five or six instead of four as applicable.  The shopping took less than 30 minutes (nice!) and the bill came to about $55.00.  The total was $65 but I had to buy some other stuff so I don’t think that’s too bad.  It doesn’t cover lunches or breakfast though so I’d estimate a weekly grocery bill in the $75 range with those included and closer to $100 per week if you go a little all-in like we have on the weekends.  Cedar plank grilled salmon isn’t cheap but it is totally worth it.

I’m getting really keyed up on being frugal to conserve money for Discover Indies and also to explore whether it is possible to be a frugal grocery shopper without stockpiling.  As an Army family, stockpiling doesn’t make sense because of how often we move and how little storage space military housing typically has.  We have a chest freezer and I do try to use it but we’re already in the stage where we need to start drawing that stash down.  Six months is a long time but some of those big bags of vegetables will take a long time to use up too!  Especially with summer and the welcome anschluss of fresh produce coming.

What suggestions do you have for living frugally without stockpiling?

Stay tuned tomorrow for a totally awesome (long overdue) kids post.

Here are your first shots from New Mexico. They don’t do it justice because they’re just some snaps from a rest area and because I’m a crappy photographer.

I’ll work on getting you a few more in the next couple of years. I promise.

In the “What I Had For Lunch” category, things are going fine except I’d like to know my school schedule and find an income stream.

Peace. Enjoy the pictures.

Things in SATE land have been quite chaotic to say the least for the past several months.  Summer vacation, as parents everywhere know, never is and with the PCS Fairly gazing lovingly upon us it has been a little worse.  Throw in an adoption and adding a teenager to the house and the crazy meter pegs.

Here’s what we’ve been up to:

May 2:  The Czar moves in permanently.

June 6:  Last day of school for all parties involved (‘cept me – I was done May 28 with all my work for the semester)

June 6 – 8: The Queen B and I spend a lovely weekend at Route 66 Raceway getting a nitro fix.  Oh how I love my nitro.

June 13 – 15th:  Father’s Day Camping Trip.  When we commence on our big adventure this Friday, the plan is to go to Ft. Bliss by way of South Dakota because we’ll have a week before our housing is available and because with three kids and two dogs in the cars, we thought short stretches would be best.  So we took a couple of trips to make sure that everything in the camper works and that the newness of camping had worn off a little bit.  All went well and a good time was had by all.  I should interject at this point that the campers next to us were obnoxious.  From the 10 or 11 year old kid that cried to his mom that my boys were “picking on him and calling him names” that I subsequently heard calling a little girl on the beach a “fat bitch” to his mother who is one of those people that tells you not only her whole life story but those of her children within the first five minutes of meeting her AND THEN proceeds to drink all our beer by the campfire and including the husband who’s only audible presence all weekend was arguing with his wife on Sunday morning.  “Will you just use your fucking head?”  Sounds like an asshole, but the wife didn’t seem real great at thinking for herself so I understand that frustration.  On the bright side, her four year old daughter and our five year old son got along famously all weekend and that’s always fun to watch.  The five of us had a nice time.  The weather was great and no one got hurt.  Perfect.

June 20 -22.  WORST. CAMPING. TRIP. EVER.

This weekend was our first trip with the dogs.  It would have have been fine except for a few little “issues”.  First, like a good proactive dog owner, I treated the dogs with flea and tick repellant the morning of the trip.  Well, Champ proceeded to lick the stuff off Maddie’s neck.  Now I know what nerve gas works like.  He got so sick that he was throwing up in the truck ten minutes after we left the house (after seeming okay when we left).  By the time we got to the campground (about 50 minutes later), he was in a full on “episode” thanks to the nerve agent in the tick medicine.  Including eating leaves and dirt, extreme thirst and a mini-seizure.  I honestly thought my dog was going to die right there.  He recovered quickly after some more water and a little time but in the middle of the night, the nausea returned.  Can I ask you what is a more wonderful sound to hear in the middle of the night while laying semi-awake in a pop-up campier than the sound of a dog  barfing his guts out?

To improve upon that, with gas nearly $4.00 a gallon, I have to drive the dogs home in the morning because they’re not allowed on the hiking trails.  UGH.  To all you useless pet owners who don’t clean up after them and thus ruin it for everyone I say a mighty “Fuck you!  Thanks for ruining everything for the rest of us.”  But I bite the bullet and take the puppies home and return to the park for a day of hiking, fun and sun.  Another day with perfect weather.

One small problem:  The Khan.  See, he’s five, right?  And eating and drinking are not his priority.  Playing and running are.  Well, with temps in the mid 80’s that’s a bad idea.  He proceded to get dehydrated or a bit of heat exhaustion or something.  Saturday night of this big adventure HE was the one throwing up in the camper.  To make it worse, The Khan feels really bad about things like throwing up.  After he was potty trained – the very rare accident would cause a meltdown -”I’m a bad boy!” kind of thing.  So it’s the middle of the night and his majesty is vomiting and crying and apologizing and all I want to do is sleep in my nice comfy bed in my house instead of my camper.  UGH.

June 28 -29th:  Niece’s wedding and Twins – Brewers game.  Very fun.  I have determined that every time I see the Twins play in the dome two great things happen:  The Twins win and the Yankees lose.  Granted this is based on only two observation opportunities, but the potential is there.  If it is true, I wish I had season tickets.  I hate the Yankees so much.  I don’t hate the Brewers but the way they played that day definitely earned them the loss.

July 1:  Queen B goes to Houston.  I miss her so much.

July 3:  Finalization of the Czar’s adoption and cookout in Tunnel City

July 4:  The farewell tour continues at my mother-in-law’s house.

July 5:  Repeat July 4 at my mother’s house

July 6:  Repeat above except as a welcome-home party for a friend’s kid that just got back from Basic and AIT.

And here we are:  Tomorrow the movers show up to pack our stuff.  Thursday the truck is loaded and Friday we start driving to El Paso.  So despite this teaser round of bloggy mediocrity (I know bloggy goodness and this isn’t bloggy goodness), you’ll definitely be blogless until the 21st.

At least the matter of how I’ll amuse myself in El Paso is settled.  I applied for admission to the PhD program in Management at NMSU and have been accepted.  Classes begin August 18.  Get ready for two years of my bitching about that!

Stay safe and come back in two weeks for the latest.  Peace.

Here’s the thing about Army training: it’s written at about an eighth grade education level so if you’re above that (as most people are) you’re bored shitless. I’m expecting to be full-on bored shitless for the entire three days of orientation but, on the bright side, I should get to see a friend I haven’t seen since 1991! And! This friend makes amazing margaritas. You call that a double bonus.

We have to go to this orientation in anticipation of the big move to Texas. I have no idea what to expect except it will suck. As anticipatory training, I was supposed to take these AFTB classes. Each is 9 hours of training according to the program. They’re online, self-paced and worthless. I completed all three 9-hour courses in about sixty minutes. Yes, my friends, you too can be AFTB Level III educated on your lunch break. In this training you get to learn dumb stuff like how to read a pay stub and how to write a check. I was also quite relieved to learn that if he’s deployed my “husband should make arrangements to pay all the bills by allotment” you know, so I don’t dirty my hands with money. Or is it because I don’t know how to write a check?

Regardless, I must go to this orientation and I must put my best Army Wife smile on and pretend to like it. I’ve been asking for an agenda without success and that, especially for Army stuff, is a very. bad. sign.

So how do I entertain myself next week?  Leave your suggestions in the comments and the best suggestion will win a very special prize hand selected by me during our trip next week!

First, I offer you the before pictures of our entertainment center area. Specifically, these photos are of the space where DVDs are shelved.

As you can see, the number of DVDs exceeds the available storage space to the point where DVDs are piled up on the floor making quite a mess. Messes drive me crazy. Did I mention that?

Now I would like to present the After photos. After I ordered these babies from Case Logic and put the DVDs in them. All of the grown up movies (rated PG-13 and up except for Harry Potter) are in one and all the kids movies are in the other. Each holds 96 discs so all of the DVDs in the house are now in one centralized location.

Now the DVD shelves look like this:

Notice that now all the video games in the house are also in a central location. We moved the consoles to the living room to gain control over how much time people spend playing video games. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have curbed our addiction (Sarge’s especially ) one bit.

Note: The small stack of DVDs visibly out of place in the photo is going to be given away. It is no longer on the entertainment center.

The end result is that our entertainment center area looks like this:

How would you score that on the improvement scale? I do need to make sure the PS2 Controllers are moved to the empty basket on the bottom shelf, but I think it looks much better. Your thoughts?

Another of my ongoing missions is to take Alton Brown’s advice and “BANISH THE UNITASKERS!” from the kitchen and elsewhere. So I leave you with the first of my banish or cherish polls:

I purchased this punchbowl at a garage sale. It is clear glass and includes 12 cups plus a ladle. I have had it at least two years and have never used it. When we entertain, we usually go with soda, etc. rather than punch, see? And I think that if we did ever serve punch or sangria or some such, a large pitcher with more functions would be just as useful. I have even seen some quite elegant plastic pitchers that would be more durable for our travels. On the other hand, it is quite pretty and I harbor many fantasies of neat little gatherings where it might possibly be useful some day. It is equally likely the Army movers will manage to break it into a million pieces on one of our many upcoming moves.

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