Today was my grandma’s birthday, and we had a dinner for her. My mom made potato soup, and it was really good - and that’s really saying something since I typically don’t care for it. And we also had chips and lunch meat for sandwiches. My mom made a caramel apple cake. Cakes seem to be her specialty. She likes to experiment with them. Most of the time they turn out pretty good, but there have been a few botched efforts, such as the Kool Aid cake.

After we ate and the presents were opened, my mom, Allyson and I went to Goodwill, TJ Maxx and Kohls. I found a cute shirt at TJ Maxx, and a couple of pairs of shoes at Kohls. I also went shopping yesterday and got a shirt at Maurice’s before I stopped by Sears to pick up a gift card for my grandma’s birthday.

I really need to buy some new make-up. I’ve been trying to take care of my skin, washing it at night - especially when I’ve been wearing make-up, and then moisturizing with some facial lotion. I almost bought a blackhead remover while I was at Target yesterday. I know that Clean and Clear has a product for that, but sometimes that brand dries out my skin, so I was kind of reluctant to get it. I might go to Wal-Mart tomorrow and see if I can find some other brand for the same thing, and see about buying some new foundation while I’m at it. I’ve almost spent all of my birthday money, which is just kind of depressing.

On a completely random note, I burnt my tongue eating the potato soup today and it hurts.

Whew, I’m trying to play catch up with watching Heroes. I missed out on about the last half of the second season last year because I was busy writing for NaNoWriMo. I haven’t decided if I’m going to do it again this year, but I have a feeling if I do, then I’m going to be behind on several shows pretty fast.

My mom, sister and Tori stopped by earlier. They went shopping. No surprise there. There was a show on about a couple that has sextuplets, and we were trying to fathom having that many babies all at once. It would be such a huge job. I mean, even if they had a Bob stroller with the two seats, that still wouldn’t be enough. I have seen the three seater kinds of strollers, but I think they’d still be hard to come by. I think about trying to deal with six of Tori, and there’s no way. I couldn’t deal, and she’s not even here all the time. Crazy.

My Labor Day weekend was pretty uneventful. We just had a cookout yesterday. Pretty standard - Hamburgers, hot dogs, potato salad, baked beans, cole slaw, brownies, and a few other miscellaneous items. It was all delicious, of course. We stuffed ourselves silly. Then my mom suggested we go shopping. It is without a doubt her favorite past time. Allyson managed to find quite a few good buys. Then I got three of the $5 graphic tees from Old Navy, and two pairs of their pajama shorts, which were also $5. I wish I could have found some pants. I always have the hardest time with them.

I can’t believe it’s already September. It’s nearly time to start boxing up my summer clothes and bringing out the fall clothing. I cringe at the thought of going out into the garage and moving boxes around. It’s pretty scary in there. Every year my grandpa claims he’s waiting for that perfect day to get my brother and cousins out here to help him clean it out. If he’s waiting for the perfect day, I can pretty much guess that it’s just never going to happen.

Tori had her first day of preschool today. I can’t believe she’s old enough to go. It seems impossible that she’s already four. Time flies entirely too quickly. I have a birthday coming up this month, which I’m adamantly trying to pretend isn’t happening, and at the end of the year my brother will be fifteen. That’s just too bizarre to try to fathom. I still think of him as a little kid. Maybe because I just don’t want him to grow up. It makes me feel old, but I guess he’ll always be my baby brother regardless of how old either of us are.

Well, I’ve had a busy weekend so far. Friday I went shopping with my mom, Blaine and Cody. The boys wanted to buy some new clothes for school. They managed to blow all of their money pretty quickly. I didn’t see too much, but I did buy Tori’s gift.

My brother is a hoot. He loves to do impressions of people. He was doing them of Bart and my uncle. Crazy kid. Along the way he and Cody spotted some used Harleys for sale along the road and babbled about that. Then my brother was trying to convince my mom to buy him an Eclipse from some guy that was selling them somewhere. I really didn’t get the details. I usually just sort of shut off after a while. I think I’m getting the hang of this selective hearing thing. We dropped Blaine and Cody off to meet their girlfriends at the park, and I hung out at my mom’s house most of the day.

Tori was with Mitch, and Allyson was supposed to pick her up at his house while she was in town. She had to go straightened out some stuff with the financial aid office at school, and she was going to get her afterwards, but Mitch decided to change plans and said he’d bring her into town later. He was supposed to drop her off between four and five, and Allyson called when she didn’t hear from him, and he’d made some more plans and said it wouldn’t be until later, so, naturally, she was upset. Then he called back a couple of hours later to say he was on his way into town. It should have taken him thirty minutes to go to the house. He didn’t show up for another hour and a half. So Bart had a few words with him. I won’t get into the details, but I think Allyson and Mitch had talked through things enough to be civil and have a tentative schedule for seeing Tori.

Then today we had Tori’s birthday party out at the park. She had a strawberry cake with chocolate chips in it that my mom made for her. She seemed to enjoy opening her presents and she played in the park with Dennis’ (Allyson’s new boyfriend) niece.

Tomorrow I have the last of the family reunions to attend. I’m anticipating a lot of food and a lot of people, as there is every year.

Another day closer to Breaking Dawn. I should start singing “I Will Survive” to convince myself I’m going to make it to August 2nd. I doubt it would help and would probably only result in embarrassment, but whatever.

I went to the mall with my mom yesterday. She wanted to see if she could get some waterproof pants - like a pancho - for my brother since his jeans were getting soaked during detassling. Then I came home and listened to the live MuggleCast. I think I’ll have to download it and listen again because it cut out a few times on me and Firefox also froze once or twice. Very annoying.

So my grandpa got in trouble with my grandma last week. She looked out the window and saw that he decided to attach some of his ham radio antenna’s to Tori’s swing set. It’s one of those wooden swing sets, so it’s pretty sturdy, but even so, it looks ridiculous. I think he might had taken one of them down. He’s such a clutter bug sometimes.