Call Me Adolfo

I just got a copy of my credit report. I should have done this months ago, I knew back in October when we purchased our Kia that there was something hinkey on it.
"We aren't going to put your name on the loan, your credit doesn't look so great, not with your bankrupcy and all..."
HUH?

Well, I finally asked for copies, first from Trans Union, who think I am Robin B Reeder. (I do not have a middle name.) And that I lived in Tempe at Beth's house, and that I have an American Express card. (Luckily that person is keeping that card current.) I tried to do an online dispute late last night, frustrated that about the only personal thing I can change is my phone number. I gave up and will simply have to write them a letter.

It got so much better this morning when I then printed out 23 pages from Experian. Did you know I am also Roberto Adolfo Franco ? Sounds JUST LIKE ME, no wonder they got us mixed up!! Apparently I had so much credit debt, I filed for bankrupcy and all this bad news will follow me for another decade or so! I live somewhere in either Fresno or Montecito, they know me over at Sacramento Superior court, and I've been sued by an employer it seems. You didn't know Robin was such a bad-ass, did you? (okay, a strong word there for a family blog read by the Stake president, but Ruffian and Fiend just didn't seem like they'd offer the same punch.)

I will print out a third report from another agency when we get more printer ink. And I shall write strongly worded disputes to them to get this back to order. My biggest question is whether this Adolfo character has my same Soc Security number. If he does, that will be such a big hassle and entail law enforcement intervention, right? And if he does not, then why in the world did they attach him to ME?? Grrrrr.

Luckily I haven't had need to open any credit other than our car last fall, we are not interested in any more credit cards. ( It does explain now why Chase dropped my card when it expired a year ago. NOT because I wasn't using it, they say it is because I was 30 days late on a payment THREE years previous. But now I see how Adolfo's sordid life has sullied my reputation.)

Here is where I started, to be certain I was giving my personal info to a credible source:
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer/credit/cre34.shtm
Once a year you can order a report (I never asked for my 'score') from each agency, and it should be free.

Working Lunch

I was at Aubrey's Monday, helping with the last day of Summer Academy. 8 little 3-5 yr olds all experimenting with markers and paper towels and water. Then after their needed snacks of Goldfish and Craisins, they broke into two groups to play. The boys played with a pirate ship and the little girls brought out dollies and all the strollers, etc, to make for serious Mommy/Baby play. Well, except for Sarah Princess (I asked her her name so I could write on her cup, and she told me Sarah Princess. Aubrey tells me Sarah means princess... and since Sarah has 4 older brothers, she's retaining her royal identity.)


Sarah played pirate ship with the bigger boys, but the only remaining little action figure to be found was Buzz Lightyear, but she made do. She has brothers, she knows how to hold her own with all the big boys.

Little Whit-Whit getting ready to go to lunch - - ->

After the kids left and we did some clean-up, I took Aubrey's 3, plus Jamie's bbf, Kayla, out to Mickey D's for lunch. (I bought me some Boston Market first.) That way they could romp and such before and during and after eating their burgers. The grampa behind me had FIVE in his group, bigger boys running loudly back to the table, then back to the playground, while he got a little work done on his phone. At the end as he was packing up, I commented to him about how nice it was to keep them corralled there, and he said they'd already been to the movies that morning, and STILL had all this energy!!

I, too, was working after a fashion; I had also brought along Beth. I knew she stayed home from her job that day since we'd gotten home so late the night before from our Sea World trip, so we went and picked her up. She, however, opted to take her quarter pounder around the corner in a booth by herself in the QUIET, away from the shrieking children.

Today is lunch out with Kraig, he and I will go somewhere to eat and even run errands, and he will put his John Hancock to my end-of-the-month billing that I need to turn in tomorrow morning. He calls it "Paper-signing Day". I call it another working lunch!

Rent-a-Son

When I married a man with 5 sisters and one brother, I guess I shouldn't have expected a houseful of boys. And having no sons at all isn't really a great surprise to us. We KNEW Aubrey would be a girl. Then 2 years later, we hoped Brenda would be a girl so we would have two in a row. 5 years after that, I had a dream and KNEW we were having a boy. We named him Warren Kincaid, after my grandfather. But that was back in the caveman days before Sonagrams, and apparently dreams are even less reliable than ultrasounds - we did NOT have a boy! When she was born, Jim said, "It's a girl, Robin!" And I literally answered with, "Are you SURE!?" (I was so certain of Warren, I made Jim's manly T-shirts into nighties for my little boy - poor Chelsea had a lot of blue things when she was an infant.)

So then 7 years later when we finally got Danielle, we picked out a boy name just in case, a 'D' name, Dane Joseph. And the one ultrasound they allowed did NOT show anything 'cus she was curled up asleep. We had to wait once again and be surprised - or NOT, since we had another little girl. We were totally fine about it since we knew girls and she would fit right in.
She was GORGEOUS (well, all of them are, but she got the most compliments.) So we were surprised when a waitress thought she was a boy. Jim was kind about it: "That's okay, you didn't know we specialized in girls." That was us, procreative specialists. We love our four lovely daughters.
But when it comes to yardwork, we've felt a little shorted. The girls all have taken turns helping stack wood and mow lawns, but over the years we found ourselves hiring local young men to do what we didn't seem to find time to do. I never did much more than mow and garden, so I didn't understand the fine art of trimming and edging that goes along with that.

Today as I watched Alec and his dad out front, I realized that every time a new young man has come to do the lawns and weed and trim bushes, his dad has come along with him. First was Adam Snider back in Sandy, UT. His dad and he got down on their knees together as he showed him how THEY edged the lawn - not with the electric trimmer, no no! They did it by hand, inch by inch around where the grass met the driveway and walk. Adam was learning how to work, and learning the satisfaction of a job well done.

A couple of years ago Chris Otterson came with three of his sons Alec, Adam and Andrew (who did this for us in trade for their clarinet lessons) and he showed them the ropes.

Last year, Thomas Russon was here alongside Brent, working out in the sun, helping him get the hang of the weed-whacker and persnickety mower.

And today we had Dale and Alec Porter. For a day that promised to be 108, coming in the morning helped a lot as it was hitting 90 by the time Alec was done. He got the hang of the trimmer and weed-whacker and clippers, and did a great job... the yard looks really nice! Thanks, Alec!

Canyon Lake

I get to do a lot of fun things with the ARC, things I wouldn't have done on my own. So I jumped at the chance to take my peeps on the Dolly Steamboat ride out on Canyon Lake. The lake is 45 minutes from our house and I've been on it many times with our friends, wake boarding. Well, I drove the boat, the girls and Hyte wakeboarded and rode the tubes.

But the Dolly is a whole other ride, slowly chugging up the lake as the boats and jet skis go zipping by. As we pull away from the dock, some music comes on and I realize it is "Hello Dolly," how appropriate. The captain begins his mild patter about the history of the man-made lake as we cruise up past Mormon Flat dam. Four dams were built on the Salt River, this one over a settlement called Mormon Flats, where settlers stopped on their way to new homes in Arizona. The narrow canyon makes for a deep lake, and high cliff walls that are a geologists dream. Captain tells us these canyons were formed from 3 old volcanos that collapsed a loooonngg time ago, and the cliff walls have all sorts of visible history.



We really did get to see a lot of wild life... I now wish I'd taken binoculars. We saw hawks and turkey vultures circling above, and I was really excited when someone pointed out a couple of mountain goats jumping around high up on one of the cliffs. We saw very old Saguaro cacti, and I was impressed with a few of the flowers the captain pointed out to us. One is called the century plant. It lives a long time, then blooms once, then dies. And we saw several of them in bloom. (My photos did them no justice so I've borrowed a better pic.)

Beth and Robert didn't ever go up top, we were all comfortable just sitting at the tables by the open window. It wasn't hot at all there on the water, despite the fact when we got back home it was 103.

Most of the time the captain was silent and we quietly floated up and then down the lake, all the time with some quiet music like Enya playing and setting a mood. But one of the passengers just had to pipe up when she realized they were playing the theme to "Titanic." Somehow that just seems inappropriate for a boat ride, don't you think?

The Sentinals

We have some helpers poolside at our house, I call them the sentinals. They come from home depot, and the one in the foreground even has a little solar panel on his head and can occasionally on his own turn his head to survey the scene. Their presence has severely curtailed poolside gatherings among the avian crowd, a needed change. I really don't mind an occasional grackle coming by to wash his food - in fact, I watched one doing so right alongside Mr Owl here; it either wasn't fooled by the plastic, staring eyes, or else it just never felt threatened enough even by a large (albeit stationary,) plastic owl. The birds (mostly pigeons) really like to do a little meet-n-greet on the gentle slope of the 'beach entry,' there to the right of Mr Owl. So while I considered painting a sign that said, "I don't pee in your birdbath, so don't you poop in my pool, " Jim invited Mr Owl for a little vacay at the Reeder resort.
Up on the waterfall you can see his stiff-necked brother owl,
stationed to ward off potential bathers. I watched it work within minutes of his placement, as a sparrow zoomed in and landed on the large rock bottom right, only to take off the microsecond he landed, having looked up and seen the predatory bird keeping watch.
Less pigeons, sparrows, and grackles means less of their offending poop. (some dried remnants are there right in front of the closer owl.) It's fun to watch some bird flying in, swooping down toward the pool, and then immediately soaring up and over the back fence to look elsewhere for a pond. It's also easier now for Papa to keep the water clean for the grandkids. When they are around, he calls to 'do the colors,' where they get water from the pool and they fill tubes with the colorful reactants in his test kit. He was a chemist when I married him, so this is his favorite part of owning the pool. And now his owl assistants make this task easier.

Oh Mr Sun, Sun, Mr Golden Sun,,,,

Arizona excells in sunshine, I think everyone knows that. And the saying, "It's a dry heat" is perfectly legit - I have lived in Florida and other equally muggy states, drier is way better. 85 and humid is WAY worse than 100, 105. But then it hits 115 and you question why you continue to live in such a hellish clime.
So we put the sun to use... there are of course, solar panels on many houses, and we've done that in the past. (I would SO love to have a solar-run home, but it isn't cost effective yet to really go completely off the grid... not unless you build it into your initial home and mortgage.) The best we did was to pick a house with a lot of south-facing windows, for the solar gain in the winter.
And to further the solar experience, I bought a Solar Oven. And I COOK with it!! It works! It is basically a black plastic box with a clear top. The top is thick and hollow, two layers of clear plastic with a space of air in between. The box itself has thick, hollow walls. Here's a pic of what I bought, and I paid pretty much that price. http://www.solarovens.org/buy.html (The second one with the two pots for 167.) The oven was designed to be useful in the most backwards, undeveloped areas of the world, so they could cook and also purify water.

And did you know you can also purify water in those little 16oz water bottles you keep recycling? Just filter any water as clear as you can, then fill the bottle and set in the sun... UV rays kill even bacteria and parasites! They have tested the water, the bottles don't leach anything into the water, and it has totally changed school attendance in poor areas of Africa 'cus the kids don't keep getting sick and missing school. In the morning they lay bottles of water across the tin roof of the school, and by afternon the water is drinkable. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4786216.stm

So MY oven just bakes things for me - I've made casseroles, stews, baked rolls... I don't use it all that often, but it's nice to know it really does work, and on a hot day I don't need to turn on our oven, I can just use the sun!

Oh, so here is my latest try - I made sundried tomatoes! My bush keeps giving me these little roma tomatoes and so I've given a LOT of them away to neighbors, and decided finally to try drying them. I just sliced them in half and sprinkled on sea salt and a little oregano, and set them out there for 3 days, venting open the top an inch. And you can see the shrunken final outcome. I just went online for instructions and the first page said to set them out in the sun, covered with some cheesecloth or something, to keep the bugs off, and then 22 days later you have these tomatoes! (22?)Needless to say, I kept looking.

I'm going to do some more tomorrow. I haven't figured out what to do with my finished product, I just know I once had a great pasta with them in it, they are pretty sweet. For now I've put them in a baggie, sucked out the air and tossed it into the freezer. Any suggestions?
UPDATE- I made an alfredo sauce with some Penne pasta, put in a little bacon, peas and the tomatoes. Mmmm!!