Sphinx Schooling

Yup. It happens to be that time of year where people start school, so I thought I would share some pictures of us doing school last year:

That's right. Our school consists of making Sphinx faces for Egyptology.
Giles:

Bracie:

If you study ancient civilizations, eventually you come across the tale of the Sphinx.

I think Mom deserves an A.

Serious Randomness.

On a whim, I asked Mom today, what was a Very Random Incident in her life.

After thinking several seconds, she responded,

"Once, at a chocolate festival in Yakima, I won a prize: a purple and green inflatable kayak."

For real. Isn't that random??? Since when did chocolate festivals hand out kayaks? Why purple and green?

I challenge YOU! Gentle readers, if you can come up with a real life incident more random than that, I shall actually try my hand at making an award for you.

TTFN! I think I am going to go look for some chocolate.

Mother's Day

My mom trumps your mom.

happy birthday Mom!

Ophelia, the car-jacking hoodlum

The only known picture of Ophelia in a Beanie

is one where I am attempting to look like my non-existent cousin "Asher." The only other times that I wear beanies are when it is below 30 degrees or I am working away at my job: Alpaca Pasture Maintenance. "But why?" You, gentle reader, ask, "Why has Ophelia come up with this unbreakable fashion rule of no-beanies-in-public?"
I'll explain. One morning last March, having an I-don't-care day, I slapped a beanie on my crown and jumped in the car as we were running errands on that particular day. Like usual, I wore a pair of comfy, faded blue jeans. The air had a bite to it, so I pulled on my well-broken in grey hoody. I stayed in the car most of the time, but when Mom approached the coffee shop, she told me to hop out and take Ava to the bathroom while she went through the drive-thru. I did as asked, and then I walked round to our van, which was at the last window of the drive-thru. I opened the car door to put Ava in her car seat when I heard a startled gasp.
"Ma'am! The cashier said shrilly through the window, "some person is trying to get into your car!"
Mom turned around, slowly, slowly. "That person," she stated, "is my daughter." Then, I got in the car, and we drove away, quickly, very quickly.
Since that fateful day, I have never worn a beanie at a public place.

My Mother, the Hoarse Whisperer

For a whopping 10 days, me pooor mither (pronounced with a heavy brogue) hadn't had her voice. She could only whisper. This was right before Christmas, and one evening as we sat around the tree Mom decided to treat us with a sample of singing without a voice.

Bracie is lip-synchronising for her because like me, mom is camera shy. The only difference between us is that she is mom and can order us not to take her picture. *Sigh*

My mother, the Egg Princess

Here's a lovely little report that I wrote about my mom.

When my mother was 18, she and some friends flew to Nushygak, Alaska, to work in a Salmon cannery. The nearest phone was 40 minutes away by boat, or 20 minutes away by plane. At first, she worked not many hours, and she would scrounge for the old job. Cleaning the shower stalls was one such job. Mom tells us it was the most disgusting job that she had ever done, and she cleaned them by mixing ammonia and bleach together, (which can kill you,) and dumping them all over the bathroom. Fortunately, she survived the experience. However, mom was not stuck scrubbing toilets for long, because the harder you worked, the better the job you got, and mom was a hard worker. Soon, she was promoted to being an egg princess. An egg princess’ job is to slit open the fish and take out all the eggs. This job was called egg “princess” because it was considered one of the better jobs. Even so, mom worked 16 hours a day on average. At the peak of the season, everybody worked 23 hours a day. The entire work force wore yellow slickers to protect their clothes from being coated in salmon guts. Mom remembers once, a man was showing some new comers how to chop fish heads off on a machine that had a vertical blade that chomped up and down. While the machine was running, he told the workers, “One thing you must never do is stick your hand in the machine, like this:” He stuck his hand in the machine and chopped his hand off. Many of the workers were Japanese and often they would invite mom and her friends over to dinner. Mom describes it as a pleasant experience, always with delicious authentic Japanese food, except once, when it was not so delicious. “One time,” she recalls, “we stayed over there to have special meso soup. Now, meso soup is quite good, but this was special meso soup. I wanted to see what special meso soup looked like, so I peered into the pot- Do you know what chum eggs are? They are huge marble sized salmon eggs. Well, I looked into the pot, and floating around in it were huge, slimy chum eggs, and FINS! Smelly, underbelly fins.” But mom tells me that they had a baker who made absolutely divine pastries. The particular cannery mom worked at could not sell fish to the US because the quality was too poor. Mom told me that one time, the fisherman left huge bins of fish on the docks for four days. If you touched the fish, they were so incredibly old that your thumb would easily go through them. But they processed and packaged it anyway. Mom worked at the cannery for 5 weeks and she earned $4000 dollars. She tells me that when she received her pay check, she was thinking, “This is it?” Now, my mother, the former egg princess has resolved never to eat canned fish again.

P.S. Mom is not nearly old enough to have these pictures be her personal ones. I simply googled Nushagak Alaska cannery.