ShannonAlbert.com - June 2009

Disco style, including the dog.

So my friend Amanda gets me fabulous gifts from places like Williams-Sonoma and Brookstone. I get her fabulous gifts like a chef's hat for her dog (monogrammed with his name!).

She just received my Christmas gifts for this year in the mail which include these gems:

Shot glasses made of ice!


A kitchen scrubber that you can blow bubbles with (see my previous post regarding my love of bubbles)...


A mini tape gun just like the big ones - in purple!


Ice cubes shaped like the Titanic. Titanic/Titonic...get it?


And the pièce de résistance.....

A stamp for bread to make it Holy Toast!


For my birthday, Amanda got me a gift card to Brookstone which she knows I love. I hadn't been there in a while but quickly knew what I'd be spending it on: The Grocery List Assistant.



This little guy can either stick magnetically or be mounted to the wall. You tell it what you'd like to add to your grocery list and it uses voice recognition software to add it to its memory. When you're ready to go to the store, you hit the print button and it prints it out organized by category on a paper that looks like a receipt.

This is a demo of how it works: Demo

Here's Blake demonstrating it:
Preface: He's 7 and had a hard time working the video camera while demonstrating plus narrating. Also, the device doesn't seem to recognize the sing-songy tone of kids voices so it never knows what he's saying. For Payton, Andy and I, it understands us and prints fine. Blake happens to love this little gadget (shock!) so I had him do the demo.



So thankful to have Amanda to exchange gifts with - who else would pretend to love such odd things and give me fabulous gifts in return?

CNN debuted hologram technology where they "beam" people into the studio. Awesome.

Hundreds line up downtown for early voting

I love John King and his crazy map on CNN. He's just so passionate about it. SNL on Thursday spoofed him and cracked me up so much that Andy said it was the most he'd seen me laugh.

Move the slider to 5:20 to start seeing the magical map.

Man, I love her.

I love Tina Fey.

Who else is looking forward to the VP debate with the giddiness of a teenager at a Jonas Brothers concert?

Tina Fey as Sarah Palin. Amy Poehler as Hillary. I love how Tina's impression is spot on and thus makes Sarah look like an idiot next to Hillary. Did I say that out loud?

- Seeing soldiers filing in by the dozens or hundreds at the airport. I saw this a couple of times when we lived in Texas and it makes me cry every time. Very moving.


- Talented kids. There's something so moving about kids doing things really well. Many of the Olympians were just teenagers and that put me in tears several times while watching. This girl, Charise Pempengco, is as good of a singer as Whitney, Celine or Mariah. And she's just a kid.


- Seeing other people, especially men, cry. It's almost like crying is contagious.

- The "Slipping through my fingers" scene from Mamma Mia


- Almost anything by Fantasia. I know that many people don't even like her singing let alone get really moved by it. I've never cried so much as I did when she sang "I'm Here" in The Color Purple musical.


- Reading people's weight loss stories. I know how hard it's been to lose 20-ish pounds so the stories of people losing much more are especially moving. One of my favorite's is from RonisWeigh.com.

- Really great photos such as those at The Big Picture. Recent example:


- Traveling. I love it and often find myself teary-eyed when we're somewhere new and I am incredibly grateful to be able to do it when we can.

- When the kids are getting along well and being sweet to each other. They usually fight but the times they get along and are nice to each other almost make up for it. (It should be noted that Blake punched Payton 0.7 seconds after this photo was taken. I'm glad I captured this rare moment on camera.)


- Seeing JT live. No need to remind me that I'm a 33-year-old mother of two or that he's a former boy band member or try to convince me he's a tool (is it bad that I don't see what's so bad about him in this video that tries to do just that?). I love him. The end.

- Seeing little old ladies that remind me of my grandma. I miss her.

- Seeing airplanes fly over closely. I'm actually surprised more people don't feel this way but people usually think I'm crazy. I think it's an amazing feat that tons of metal can go hurling through the air at hundreds of miles an hour. Seeing it up close is so moving to me (so moving that I used to drive to work and pass by an airport daily and if an airplane would be flying right over the highway, tears would just start streaming down my face). Don't even get me started on air shows....little slice of heaven right there.


- Fireworks accompanied by patriotic music. Gets me every time.

- a million other things that will elicit a response from Andy or the kids saying "you're crying again?!"

(As a side note, things that don't make me cry: personal issues, work, frustration, using it to be manipulative. I know plenty of people who do though...not that there's anything wrong with that.)

Payton: What's that license plate say?
Me: Metallica.
Payton: What's that?
Me: A band.
Payton: An oldies band?
Me: 80s.
Payton: oldies.

And then yesterday, I was showing Payton videos of the band Ludo and telling her that Kami really loved them and I was learning to love their music. Afterward, she said "omg, that sounds like music I listen to...I can't believe OLD people like it."

We're having a Halloween Party at our house this year for Payton's friends. Being in 8th grade is kind of in between - too big to trick-or-treat, not big enough to do anything on your own - so we're having the kids at our house for fun that night.

So in typical Payton style, she started setting up committees to plan the party - decorations, food, technical, music, etc. So the party planning committee met at our house this evening for pizza, ice cream, planning and fun.




And the evening ended with a round of "light as a feather, stiff as a board" which is apparently a lot of fun when you're in 8th grade.



Payton declared that tonight was "awesome! Thank you so much mom!" Hopefully the real party will be as much fun when we have dozens of them in our house. If they are all as polite as the kids were tonight, we'll be in good shape. If only they could be a bit quieter. :)

While Payton was out-of-town, we redid her room. I shouldn't say redid since it was never really done. She's been sleeping with a mattress on the floor because her old bed didn't fit into the new space.

This is a video I made last weekend to show my mom what we'd done and now that Payton's back, I can post it here.

Bang-bang-bang is what we listen to all day at work while construction goes on. Seems the city finally decided to do something about this short bridge but we are all mourning the loss of our favorite type of entertainment - trucks running into the bridge.

Try to imagine that Soulja Boy is playing.

Andy lets Payton drive in the parking lot around her school. It's a big parking lot and she drove for probably 8-10 minutes making a couple of laps around the school...very slowly.




Try to ignore me nagging Blake. He was running right out into the parking lot where she was going to be driving.

Last night, Andy and Blake went to a Wingnuts game (local minor league baseball team). On Tuesday, Andy said he'd like to take Blake soon and on Wednesday, I got an opportunity to get free tickets from work to sit in a skybox at the game. Andy and Blake went and sat in the skybox with some of my co-workers. Blake had a great time, my co-workers said he was hyper (maybe due to the cupcakes and Coke he was being fed by dad?) and everybody seemed to have enjoyed themselves.



One part of the game made CNN today. Andy left this part out when he was telling me about the game!

After seeing the video below, I thought it would be interesting to take a photo everyday and then put them together to see the changes over the years. I haven't started that process yet but this site makes it easier to put all of your pics together so you can make your own.

On our trip to Texas last month, Amanda and I went on a big shopping spree and she bought FitFlop shoes which are flip flops that are supposed to help your legs and butt get in shape. They are a little pricey but she wanted to give them a try. Besides, Amanda is a sucker for an Oprah recommendation.

She wore them for a while and didn't notice a big change so she decided to write to Fox 4 News for their "Deal or Dud" segment, recommending that they check into this product and see what they thought. Little did she know that within a couple of days, they'd be asking her to appear in the segment to test them out.

Wednesday night, the segment aired and the video was also posted online. Find out if the shoes are a deal or dud!

Amanda's TV debut