A Challenge!

If you're like me, you love doing hard things (relatively)! And if you're not like me, well you still might want to do this. Or not. :)
I decided that I am going to try and get up at a certain time every morning for the whole month of July. The time, is 5:30am. It shouldn't be too hard, considering I have been waking up then (with an alarm usually...) for the past two months. I just need to get up and not lay in bed  for another two hours. :)
Hopefully I will be able to post everyday, or almost everyday and tell you when I got up.

Some hard things I DON'T like doing. Such as cleaning the disgusting basement with my brothers tonight. Yuck! And it was really hard for me not to get $25 out of the deal. See I was in charge of the boys, and my mom told them if they didn't work my standards, then Pete had to give me $15 and Daniel had to give me $10. They did a really bad job of working to my standards. But I didn't make them give me money, and I didn't tell my parents what a bad job they did.

Yesterday Pete decided to start making a fort. It is behind the compost piles in our yard (which we are getting rid of as soon as we find free plastic 55gal. drums with lids, build holders for the drums, and put it all in their...) and it is underground! It is only about two feet deep so far, because we had to make it wider twice, but it is getting along nicely. And since it is right by the gate on the wooden fence that goes into the woods, we decided to make a dirt pile in the woods, me and Sodom made a dirt path too it, so when I'm driving (or walking and carrying them) the little kid wheelbarrows we are using to move the dirt in, it (or me) doesn't get caught in all the little tree/weeds/rocks/sticks/garbage that is there. And if our parents say we have to fill it in, then we have the dirt in one spot.
We named the whole place 'Israel'. It all started when I kept referring to the one shovel as the turf shovel. I knew I didn't have the right word, I just couldn't come up with the one I wanted. Finally Pete remembered it is called a sod shovel (you know the flat sqaurish ones???) so then I named it Sodom. Then Pete named his shovel (which is actually mine ;) Gomorrah. And we named the whole place Israel. And we were going to figure out the names of the other plain cities (Sodom and Gomorrah were two of five Cities of the Plains) and give them to the three hand shovels. And name the dirt pile, the road, the fort, and so on and so forth.
After thinking about it for awhile (we were working during all this time) we decided we shouldn't name all our stuff after cities around Sodom and Gomorrah, since they were really bad cities. I kept the name Sodom for my sod shovel though, because it used to have a black handle, and one day when I was shoveling gravel in our driveway with it, the handle (which I was holding in my right hand) flew off (it had been rotting, but I didn't know that) and hit me in the mouth. So that shovel isn't that good. Also it is really short for some reason, and even shorter since the handle is gone, and it's for sod, which I currently don't need a shovel for sod. Oh well, at least I have a shovel. Now I am sure you are all bored to death of this so I will stop.

This morning around 7:30 I ran (walked quickly is more like it) across the street to babysit the neighbors grandkids, as they were taking their daughter to the hospital for her surgery. I am not sure what it was for though, but please pray for her and them.
It was a really easy babysitting job, but kinda boring because I had nothing to do except watch TV. And that meant Food Network since I couldn't find national geographics and FN only has boring shows on in the morning, no challenges. Like one where some guy was making pancakes, cooked apples, and maragritas (or something like that) for breakfast. And he kept talking about his supper-de-dupperly fluffy pancakes made with ricotta cheese, and buttermilk and blah, blah, blah, they were SO thin! I make bad pancakes way thicker than that, and my good pancakes (oh by the way I have an awesome recipe for pancakes, but at risk of sounding like the TV dude, I'll just say it works for me, and it doesn't use cheese) are like four times taller than his. Then there was this one where a lady showed you how to put a roast in a crockpot with veggies and canned tomatoes, make a salad which was pre-mixed greens, walnuts and raspberry dressing (raspberry jam, djon mustard, oil, and maybe something else), and PB&J sundae (mix jam with softened ice cream, re-freeze, then top with melted chunky peanut butter that was mixed with sugar or something, and put bread chunks which were toasted in sugar and butter on top. BoRiNg!
At 11am the daughter's friend came over with her two kids so I could go home. Oh, and the grandkids were still sleeping when I left so watching them was super easy (and if they had woken up they could eat anything they wanted, watched TV, or played outside, so that's just as easy.
I am going to try to get a linky thing on this post so if you want to join my nameless challenge you can! :)
Well if I really am going to get up at 5:30am tomorrow, I should go to bed NOW.
Goodnight!