My husband is a welder. He works nine plus hours a day with …uhm.. hot stuff! He wears welders grade suntan lotion (it’s not actually called suntan lotion, but basically, that’s what it is) on his face and also has a Miller helmet that completely covers his face. Because the helmet is auto darkening ,and has a point eight, or something like that, reaction time, he doesn’t even need to lift his visor to tack his parts. (tacking is putting tiny beads of wealdment on two parts to hold them together while the welder prepares to make one long continuous weld)

So tell me why the man manages to come home from work at least once a week with a sunburn? Oh sorry, a welders burn? That would be because on those days he neglects to put his Welder’s block on. Yeah. Dummy. So for days afterwards, he has a cherry red face and neck, and then for days after that, his face peels! It’s gross, to tell the truth, and it is SO preventable!

I keep telling him that he needs to take better care of himself becuase when he is older, if he keeps repeatedly burning his face, he will have leathery skin like those old ladies on the beach who spend too much time in the sun! And when his face peels I am always on his case to use an exfoliate for a little mini microdermabrasion, but he keeps ignoring me!

(and secretly, it pisses me off to no end that he doesn’t seem to give a damn what he looks liek! have a little self pride, man! Sheesh!)

I am pretty sure that skin cancer is not a risk from him burning his face at work, I think it;s the UV rays from the sun, not the actual burn that causes that, but he WILL age prematurely if he deosn’t start taking better care of himself!

Today was the day we drove down to my dad’s for my Step Mother’s birthday party. It wasn’t a party in the real sense of the word, just my boys and husband (and of course me), my dad, his wife and my Granny, but it was sure a lot of fun.

The pictures, what few I took are still on my sd card in my camera, and since the camera is allllllll the way over on the table, you won’t get to see any of them today! Unfortunately, I forgot to check my battery before we left so I arrived at my dad’s with a flashing red battery light and only managed 5 or so pictures before it died completely! Thank goodness it is a lithium rechargeable battery! Our first digital camera ( a 2.5 MP), used AA batteries and after one picture with the flash was taken, the battery would be too drained for us to get the pictures off it. it was such a  nasty camera, there wasn’t even an external spot for an SD card!

AHNYway. I took a few pictures that I am positive are great shots, so tomorrow when I have a minute, I will download them and pop them up for you all to see!

So.

Last year I completly forgot about my Step mother’s birthday. More than that actually. last year I had no idea when her birthday was. it wasn’t until she and i were both on facebook when I saw her birthdate. I was four days late. (

This year, the hubs and I decided that we would not only remember her birthday, but that we would bake her a very special cake to commemorate it.

See, My stepmother has an awesomely huge collection of teddy bears and angels. She loves them! So when we saw this 3D bear shaped pan in the store, we bought it. We bought it, we brought it home and we made it. or should I say, attempted to make it.

Yeah. Fail. big time. And it was our fault too. See the cake pan called for use to use a mix of a regular ‘layer cake” and a pound cake, but we went ahead and bought a boxed cake mix and tried it like that.

So fine, that didn’t work, we got online and started searching for pound cake recipes. I will admit, we were way put off. All the recipes kept saying that things have to be done perfectly or the cake iwll not work out, there were so many little things that had to be done too! So then we searched to see if you coudl buy a boxed pound cake mix, and were elated to see that you can. Yeah. YOU can, I can’t. becuase we looked in nine differnt stores and could not find a single box!

So, we gave up. For now. But with the birthday party tomorrow, we went with Plan B:

Coffee is good.