Melting Mom's Annoyance the Easy Way

If you ever want to make your Mom instantly forgive you for weeks and weeks of random bad sleep habits, just perform the following four easy steps:

1. Place your adorable little chubby hands on either side of you mom's face.

2. Turn your mom's head until she is facing you.

3. Say, "Mommy, you're pretty. I love you!"

4. Kiss her on the nose.

INSTANT MELT. Guaranteed.

Who's Going on a Picnik with Me?

Remember the sort of contest for 3 months of free premium Picnik access? Well, we have winners. I tried asking Alexis to pick the winners, but every time I asked her for a number, she would count to nine. We can't have nine winners. So, I consulted Mr. Google and he recommended a random number generator site. Here we go:



Comment number 2 belonged to Karen and 37 was Caramama. Email me by Monday morning to claim your goodies. If you don't, I'm giving them to somebody who pays better attention. ;-)

Our 'Hood is Diverse, Yo

When we first moved to this neighborhood, it was very lacking in the diversity department. Everyone pretty much fell into one of two groups: there were the retirees who had grown weary of their over-sized homes and decided to move into smaller quarters, and there were the young couples/singles who were just starting out. Over the last six years, we've watched as our neighborhood has slowly become a little more diverse.

Early on, there wasn't a single kid anywhere. Now, for the first time, we have our very own gang of no-good punks. As they are constantly playing in the street unsupervised, and have not developed a healthy fear of oncoming traffic, I don't expect them to be a problem for long. I'm pretty sure one of the remaining retirees will manage to take out the whole lot of them in one clean swoop. If one of the snots manages to escape crazy Granny and her Buick, he will probably fall victim to drowning in our pond. Along with their lack of respect for cars, the hooligans also don't understand the words, "Get out of my yard, you stupid brat!" or "If I catch you stepping on my flowers again, I'm calling the police!" (I'm looking for a new line if anyone has any ideas. I'd prefer something that doesn't make me sound 80.)

While people with kids were moving in, they brought with them a wider range of ethnicities. We live in a very white part of town and are lacking a lot of the diversity that you will find in most of Pittsburgh. However, I'm pretty sure you could (finally) put together an entire rainbow of people with various belief systems if your were to go door-to-door selling Girl Scout cookies. In fact, there's probably more diversity in our little 'hood than in all the rest of our township combined.

But now we seem to have achieved a whole new level of diversity in our little corner of the world. The photos are a little fuzzy, but I pinky swear that they are what I say they are.

First up, we have the trash that the garbage guys decided they weren't picking up this morning. This isn't the first time we've seen this sort of pile, and it's probably not the last. Just for the record, two people live in the house and there was no party this past weekend. I'm positive.



In and of itself, that is quite an amazing feat. Now couple it with the pile of incoming packages that were no more than 50 feet from the proof that we have some serious white trash alcoholics in our midst:



I feel really bad for the lady that lives in between those two.