Five Question Friday

Welcome to Friday folks, like most of my weeks lately, this one seems to have flown by yet still taken FOREVER! How is that possible? And the next week is not going to go any slower. In the next seven days we have the following:

• Going to Lansing
• Taking Liam to see his first ever movie in the theater, Cars 2, which is appropriate since we have seen the first Cars movie like a bajillion times [Would you believe I Googled “bajillion” to make sure I was spelling it correctly and Google had the answer? Yes, you probably would. I should share my Google search terms with you sometime… they are amusing and varied.]
• A family BBQ to celebrate my SIL’s birthday and my birthday
• Church
• Tailgating
• U2 concert!!!!! [I’ve only been waiting my whole life for this concert, what is the last year that we’ve had to wait since the concert was rescheduled due to Bono’s back surgery]
• Full work days Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday to make up for taking Monday off (plus my normal hours on Thursday). I just started a big project for work that has 150 hours slated to it and it needs to be done by the end of July – that’s 30 hours a week for the next 5 weeks, in addition to the regular work I do. It’s going to be a bit busy. But I’d rather be busy than bored. And I’d rather make money for my business than not.
• Taking Liam to his first friend birthday party at the zoo – I’m so excited to just drop him off and not have to be responsible [we’ve sort of avoided the whole birthday party-going until now because once he goes to one, I know he’ll have bigger plans for his own, considering it has been an uber popular topic of conversation for the past two months and his birthday isn’t for another month-and-a-half, I’d say we’re in for it]
• Walking with Sandy
• And that brings us back to Friday, my birthday – which is incidentally the exact middle day of the year [that means 2011 is HALF over – oh my!]

So there you go, that’s where my mind is today… how about a little Five Question Friday?

1. What is your current favorite tv show?
If I’m going to be honest [and I usually am, though never in a hurtful way], I’d have to say Vampire Diaries. And as my friend, Jenny can attest, it’s addictive (I encouraged her to borrow my first season DVD set and she was hooked – I like company with my age-inappropriate addictions). But I also love, love, love Modern Family and Cougar Town is growing on me. And then there’s In Plain Sight and Game of Thrones (which I’ve only gotten to watch a few times when we lucked into free HBO weekends with DirecTV).

2. What’s the worst haircut you ever got?
Prior to the start of sixth grade, I begged my mom to let me get a perm. I had gotten one at the start of fifth grade and it made my stick-straight hair mildly wavy (though mostly just frizzy). I also decided I wanted to try out bangs. This was a bad decision and I should have been forewarned that it was a bad decision when I saw the woman who was going to cut my hair. She had bangs but they were not good bangs (there’s a good life lesson for you: never get your hair cut by someone who has bad hair). My hair was probably a good 5 inches past my shoulders and rather than leaving the section of hair for my bangs out of the rollers, she did all my hair up (mistake #1). No matter how she cut my bangs, they were going to be curly. Then instead of cutting a row of bangs over my forehead, she cut a square of bangs on the top of my head (mistake #2). So I ended up with what can only be considered a mullet, a curly-ish, frizzy mullet. It was all kinds of wrong.

3. What was something that you did as a child that you thought you were so cool for doing?
I am quite certain I thought everything I did as a child was so cool. I didn’t realize until middle school that wearing glasses, having braces and playing the violin (plus having a mullet) completely negated all possibility of coolness. And in the ultimate level of nerdiness, which at the time I thought was totally cool, in 4th grade I read the most books of anyone in my class. Our teacher kept track of the books we read by writing one on each line of an oversized index card (I remember they were orange and I thought that was cool). My first card she dutifully filled out each line with a book, probably listing 20-some titles on the card but once she got through the third card, she started fitting as many authors as she could on a card, realizing that she didn’t want to cut down an extra tree to keep tracking of my reading. I filled 8 cards that year. I think I still have those cards somewhere, they will be the first thing thrown away if I’m ever on an episode of Hoarders.

4. Do you have any GREAT frugal family fun tips?
I don’t have much to say about this one… we definitely try to save money wherever we can, but nothing I’d call great. Our favorite low-cost, high-ROI activity is visiting one of our local orchards, Schwalliers Country Basket. It’s about two hours of entertainment for $2.50 (to pay for the obligatory homemade donuts and grain to feed the goats, plus they give you free apples when you go in their store). The kids feed goats, pet farm animals, climb the hay bales, walk around in the apple orchard, dig in the corn box and go down the slide (again and again and again). I highly recommend it to any locals.

5. Would you drive across country if you had the money to fly?
Depends on what the reason for the trip was. I love road trips but if I only had a week and needed to go to the west coast, I’d fly (though I’d have to leave Jack home, I can’t imagine him on a plane for more than 30 minutes). But if we had unlimited time and the kids were older, I’d totally drive, hitting all the sites along the way.