What I've learned (since yesterday)

Living on a budget is a lot harder than I thought it would be and even though the little budget monitor in Quicken with the colored bars says I've overspent in six categories with two weeks left in January, I'm in the yellow in six more and green in the other twenty so it's all right.

My herbal tea tastes a lot better with lemon in it and it's worth $3.99 a bag to have the lemons in the house so I can drink it that way.

My family prefers to talk my ear off at the end of the day when I'm flat on my back in bed and hovering between guilty attentiveness and desperately sought after oblivion.

Some days my boys are perfectly ready to sit at the table and study math or listen to French tapes but other days they only settle down once they've been outside and beaten each other over the head with foam wrapped pvc pipes.

Darning a sock using six different colors of embroidery floss is a lot more satisfying than using just plain white. Sometimes I wish the holes were on the tops of my socks so I could more readily admire my patch jobs.

Doing embroidery is the best way to watch a scary movie because I'm so concentrated on what I'm doing that I can't see the graphic torture scenes that seem to be prominently featured in every dvd we get the the library lately and which will haunt me until the day I die.

The mail does get delivered on Martin Luther King Jr.'s actual birthday so this year my quarterly tax payment for January 15 will be one day late.

I don't need to print out my favorite color palette to use for a reference because it's in my head.

Drying sheets on a clothes line in the sun beats tumble drying every single time even if it takes two days on account of rain.

When I call my mother and there's an awkward silence in the middle of our conversation it's because she's holding the phone away from her ear and she can't tell that I've stopped talking.

I can sit on the couch for three hours at a time watching a football game between two teams that I couldn't care less about.

Sometimes when a child gets up in the middle of the night it's not because he's in agony from a muscle cramp or having an asthma attack or sleepwalking but just because he needs to use the bathroom.

As long as my son wants me to stop whatever I'm doing to come admire his computer animation project I will do it, even if I don't share his same fascination for mechanical killing machines and stick men.

Popcorn with butter and salt and Parmesan cheese will never take the place of Lay's Potato Chips with sour cream but it's pretty close.

The little signs indicating the changing seasons in northern Florida include: lizards and window frogs disappearing sometime around Christmas; red maples putting out new leaves at New Year's; seed packets going on sale at Walgreen's ten for a dollar two weeks before the Super Bowl.

Driving like a jerk just happens when you're in an SUV. When I drive my Natural Disaster other drivers slam on their brakes anticipating that I'll cut them off, so I usually do because when everyone is going 80 mph it's not a good idea to be messing with people's expectations.