I love that Netflix keeps your history of movie rentals and returns. Or not returns.

The Tale of Despereaux. Shipped 4/30/09. Purchased 8/8/09.

I don’t even know if the kids watched it before it disappeared. Vanished without a trace.

I just now found it. Three hundred sixty-nine days after purchase. After having packed, moved and unpacked an entire house.

Buried in the stack of blank, writeable CDs. Of course.

Wonder if they would give me my money back if I returned it…

Somebody gave us this portable Boggle game as a thank you for some volunteer work I made the kids do. It’s pretty cool, and the kids have been playing with it, the way it was intended to be played, some of the time.

I’ve been sick all week. Of course, my husband has been gone all week. I was so bad that at some point I made lemonade using a canister of mix, but I accidentally used twice the amount. And I drank that, all week, with only a vague idea that it was really really sweet.

The boys came home on Thursday. Fritz came home coughing. I didn’t give it to him. Early this morning I relocated my exhausted body to the couch for some more rest. The elevated position helps a bit with my congestion. A few hours later, Fritz woke me up and told me his fever was really high. How high? “A hundred and six,” he said. That got me wide awake fast. Of course, it wasn’t 106, it was 100.6. Big difference.

We were supposed to go camping this weekend. The healthy ones are disappointed. I’d be disappointed too if my head didn’t throb.

Friday morning, first thing, my computer broke. Same exact problem as last November. At least this time they were honest and said it would take 3 weeks to send me a new computer. I didn’t call them. The kids had swim lessons in the morning, so I had no time, and later, I knew I would not be…polite. I waited until Bill returned from Oklahoma, and let him call them. At least this time I can use Bill’s laptop for all my school planning and to pay bills online. And to blog.

Or maybe I’ll just get some other stuff done around the house.

Right after my breathing doesn’t involve achy coughing.

Around these parts, school starts at the beginning of August. I like to follow, roughly, the local school calendar, which means we only have two more weeks of summer vacation. I could take more, but I’m trying a new plan this year where I am scheduling one very light school week every 4 or 5 weeks. That’s the week where I hope to neatly fit things like dentist appointments or field trips or post-summer vacations at the beach.

Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Kansas…all these places I’ve lived. Typical exterminator service plans in these areas are offered on a quarterly basis. There were times perhaps when I wanted them out sooner, but for the most part, 4 treatments a year seemed to work.

Down here, the guy comes monthly. I thought it was excessive at first, but since my landlord included it in our rent, I wasn’t going to argue. When my girlfriend contacted a different company, they said the same thing. I had seen very few bugs in the house, so I figured I shouldn’t mess with a good thing.

Every time he would come, he would ask me: “Seen any bugs?” Perhaps I had seen one small silverfish in the last month. Or a spider. He would grimly nod his head and charge off to deal with the invertebrates that dared cross his spray lines.

A few weeks ago, Bill killed a roach. I don’t do roaches. I just don’t. They scare me. They make me scream. They make me cry. So, when the bug guy called to set up a date to come, I told him about the roach.

“Yeah, you’ll see those,” he replied.

“Oh, no, don’t tell me that,” I whimpered.

“Ah, come on,” he said, “This is Georgia.”

Between the bugs and the heat, I’m becoming convinced that joining a mission in a poor country and helping them build water treatment facilities (my retirement plan) is something I just don’t have the fortitude to do. Or maybe this time in the Deep South is part of my training. And I’m failing.

This morning, I took something into the laundry room and turned to find a roach on its back in the doorway. I do not know how I missed it coming in, but now I was trapped. I am not fooled by the “dead bug” ploy. I have experience enough with roaches to know they aren’t dead unless they are squashed.

“Fritz,” I called with alarm in my voice, “get your father!” Bill came quickly, worriedly.

Good man. He didn’t even tease me about hiding behind the washer from a dead bug.

I did warn him that it wasn’t dead, and sure enough, he witnessed some wiggling legs right before he crushed it. My hero. What would I do without him?

Laundry. Until the thing managed to get away.

It occurred to me yesterday that I didn’t have to wait a month to see if my electricity saving measures were having an effect. The electric company did tell me what the meter reading was on May 31st, and I can read numbers off a digital meter and do the subtraction.

So I did. And then I divided by the 8.5 days that we were into the month and the number was HIGHER than my average usage for May. After completely freaking out, I realized that I had not begun trying to save energy until 5 days or so into the month, so the numbers were skewed.

This morning, I tried to find the scrap paper where I wrote yesterday’s reading down and could not find it. I estimated what it was and then did the math and that number was so astronomical I wanted to cry. I decided my estimate was wrong, but to confirm this, I’ve gone out twice this morning to check the reading. So far, in 4 hours, I’ve used 6 kwh. I’m totally cool with that. That would only be 36 kwh per day, compared to the 121 kwh per day I had last month.

Except, of course, that mornings are not quite as hot as the afternoons. At least I’ll have a baseline and I can see how efficient my A/C units aren’t. My goal is 90 kwh per day or less. I’m willing to be extra hot on the weekdays to make things more comfortable when hubby is home on the weekends.

May’s electric bill was high. You would think I kept the thermometer set at 68 degrees or something similar, which certainly is not the case.

Coincidentally, the morning of the day I got the electric bill, I was upstairs for perhaps the third time before lunch and noted, with some amount of annoyance, that I was turning every single light off for the third time that morning. Little fairies seem to magically appear whenever I go downstairs and flip all the switches. So, my kids are getting a fair amount of blame for the expense and have been clearly instructed to keep the lights off or else. I’m not sure they know how serious I am, but when they find out that or else means no TV in the afternoon, it might help jog their memories.

I thought that keeping the upstairs thermostat at 80 was reasonable, but I’ve moved that to 85. The downstairs one is now at 80 from 78. At night, I switch those temperatures. If the bill is not significantly better next month, I will turn off the A/C, at least when my husband isn’t home.

But I suspect that the biggest culprit is the clothes dryer. Eight people generate quite a bit of laundry. My clothesline broke last month, and I used the dryer a lot. The line is now fixed and I have vowed to not use the dryer at all, unless I am desperate. This will be a challenge. The humidity levels are already pretty high, so it takes maybe 2 hours for thicker articles to dry out. I have limited space, so hanging up 4 or 5 loads just isn’t possible. And we seem to get a deluge every afternoon; anything hung up after 2 pm is at a serious risk of getting even wetter if it’s still up when the storm passes through.

I am on a mission. If you know any other energy saving tips, please let me know. Nighttime temps are above 70 degrees down here, so opening the windows at night isn’t going to help much. I did that in April, with much success, but summer comes early down here.

So far, the weekend has been great.

We cleaned the garage. This is a big deal. We’ve been here for 4 months now and the garage was the last major mess left. My husband can now park his car in the garage. And I ordered two of these bike stands, because several bikes do not have kick stands, and those that do rarely seem to be upright. Hoping that the kids will properly store their bikes vertically which will help to keep the floor clear.

Bill has been working with the boys on scouting projects. They have enjoyed working together immensely. I’m happy to have an improved, sturdier shelf in the back of my van to aide in carrying 30 bags of groceries home.

Bill also took the older girls out to a lunch date yesterday, and then he ran errands with Mary in the afternoon so she would have her special time with dad. Peter got to play catch one-on-one. And I had a lunch date with him today. Everybody has wanted – and gotten – their piece of the most popular man in the world…well, in our world, at least.

I baked zucchini bread and walnut date bread. I ran errands. I ran 4 miles. I biked 10 miles (2 yesterday and 8 today – ouch).

Bill replaced the left turn blinker on my van. It’s been out for 4 months. It’s amazing how a simple 5 minute job can make you feel so good when it’s finally done.

And we bought a classical guitar today. I didn’t really wake up this morning and say, “I think I’ll buy a guitar,” but somehow that’s what I ended up doing. Now I need to learn how to play it.

And I still have tomorrow. Wonder what trouble we’ll get into then.

A recent informal survey shows that, if offered blue corn chips and no other alternatives, four out of six children will reject the blue corn chips outright and the other two will consume only a fraction of what they would had they been white or yellow corn chips, leaving many left for parents to consume all by themselves.

I am brilliant.