Wild and Wet Weekend

As posted before, last Friday, my wife and I got to go on one of our rare date nights *without* the kids. We went to a local steakhouse where the food was just awesome. KC Strip cooked to perfection. That doesn't happen too often it seems. Then we stopped by Dairy Queen for just a small hot fudge sundae. The desserts in fancy restaurants are way too expensive, plus we were already pretty stuffed as it was and just wanted something small to top it off. Then we headed to the theatre to see a play entitled, "The Family That Nobody Wanted." Based on a true story, it's about a family that adopted 12 children from various ethnic backgrounds back in the 50's when that was looked down upon. They did a very good job with the play.

Saturday, it rained. And rained. And rained some more. It rained ALL day! My son had a basketball game in the morning, but since our daughter hasn't been feeling too good, I stayed home with her to keep her out of the damp weather so she wouldn't get any worse. Didn't really do a whole lot that day.

Sunday, after church, my son had to play in a "surprise" basketball game. We found out Friday when he brought home a tourney schedule that the first round was on Sunday. This game wasn't on the schedule they provided at the beginning of the year, so it was a little bit of a surprise. Plus, it was held in a town 25 miles away! They won their game, barely... (by just one point!) so there were going to have to play again later in the afternoon. We didn't stick around for the second game as there was a special event for the kids at church that night and we didn't want to hang around town for four hours. My daughter started to get her low fever symptoms again when we got home, so I stayed home with her while my wife and son went to church. Thankfully, she started feeling better by bedtime. Hopefully she's getting over it.

Today I went to a retirement reception for a guy that has worked here where I work for 29 years. As per tradition, they cut off his tie. It was kind of neat to see all the other retirees that had "gone on before" and was back to help celebrate. Congrats Roger B.!

Blessings!

Hot Date Tonight!

Got a babysitter, bringing pizza home for the kids and so the beautiful wife and I are going out tonight. :-) We're heading to dinner at a local steak house and then heading to a local theatre to catch a play. We were going to go to a movie, but changed our minds due to the fact that we needed to save a little money as we're getting kind of low in the ol' checking account here towards the end of the month. Since the play tickets were a lot less than the movie tickets, well... the play won out. We've never been disappointed by the plays put on at this theatre, so I know it will be very good and this one is suppose to be more of a comedy. So, I'm looking forward to it... and when you have a gorgeous women on your arm, how can it be anything but a perfect evening? :-)

Blessings!

Happy Birthday to Me!!

Well, this post is a day late, but I just didn't have time to do one yesterday. The day started off right with my wife making me breakfast. :-) There was also a Birthday balloon tied to my chair too! :-) After I got to work, a co-worker brought in doughnuts! Awesome! I decided that since it was my special day, I was going to take off at noon which I did. I had lunch uptown with my good friend Joe at the local Greek restaurant where I had a great Gyro sandwich. After lunch I just took some time for myself and went to Target to buy a few things for myself. It was a beautiful day outside, so I went home and played with the dog a bit outside. My wife fixed a wonderful dinner with fried chicken, mashed potatoes & gravy, green beans, and biscuits! And, we even had a chocolate birthday cake for dessert! Afterwards, I opened a few gifts. My daughter wasn't feeling too good with running a low grade fever, so my wife stayed home with her while my son and I went to church. After church we got home for me to see the last 10 mins of our local college men's b-ball team get their behinds spanked by the visiting team. Oh well, I guess the *whole* day can't be great... :-)

Oh yeah, I also had to renew my driver's license yesterday also. I was a little worried as this past year my eyesight has gotten a little bit worse. I've never worn glasses, but I fear it won't be long. Anyway, when it got to the vision test, there are three boxes with five letters in each box. The left hand box tests the vision in your left eye, the center box tests your combined vision, and the right hand box tests your right eye. I had no trouble with the first two boxes, but since my right eye is a little weaker, the right hand box was a little blurry. I started to freak... Oh no, I'm gonna fail... The lady said, "just guess", so I kind of did. I could sort of make out the letters, so I guessed as best I could and I only missed one of the letters! Imagine that! So, I passed and am renewed until 2012! :-)

I received emails from family and friends wishing me birthday greetings too. I've got a wonderful family and I really and truly appreciate God's blessing in my life.

Oh, and in case you're wondering... I turned 41.... :-)

Blessings!

Shopping and Birthday

It's not quite my birthday yet (still a few days off), but today is one of my sister-in-law's birthday. Happy Birthday Kath!

Had a busy day on Saturday. My son had a basketball game at 9am and my parents came down to watch. My wife wasn't able to go has she had a haircut/highlite appointment that took until noon! She finally made it home and then we all went out for lunch at Ruby Tuesdays to celebrate my birthday. After lunch, my parents went back home and later that afternoon we took my son over to a friend's house for a birthday party. After dropping him off, we went to the mall to do some birthday shopping for me. I found some shirts, pants and ties and the best part was that they were all on sale! :-) Clothes? For your birthday you may ask? Well, I did order a Sony PSP Giga Pak, so hopefully that will be coming soon... :-)

Sunday was mostly the normal routine, except we had a guest speaker. I also watch most of the first half of the Steelers/Broncos game. The associate pastor at our church is a HUGE Steelers fan. He is always getting harassed because of that too! :-)

Had a little bit of potty training troubles with our daughter yesterday (Sunday) too. Not sure if she just wasn't feeling good or what, but we had way too many accidents than normal. Stressed out my wife and I quite a bit. She also woke up twice during the night to go to the bathroom and that always makes for a rough night in trying to get back to sleep. But, we survived...

Blessings!

Friday!

Yeah, it's finally Friday and almost time to head home! Whoo Hoo!

Birthday wishes go out to my cousin Wesley... He's 45 today! Looking good old man!

My parents are coming down tomorrow to watch my son play in his basketball game and to spend some "birthday" time with me (my birthday is next week).

I tried that analog video converter with another computer I have and it worked great. At least it captured 45 mins of video straight without a dropped frame. Now I just have to move the captured file to my laptop for editing. I'll be trying that this weekend.

Have a good weekend!
Blessings!

Life Events

Today marks a few of life's events. A great-aunt of my wife's passed away last Saturday (14th). Today would have been her 87th birthday. We just found out about her passing yesterday though. I got her obituary online and also created an obit webpage on my family genealogy site. My mother-in-law has always said that this particular aunt was were favorite aunt.

Today is also Edgar Allen Poe's birthday. Of those that don't know him, he is one of the famous poet and story-tellers of all time. There was an article on the CNN website stating that there has been a mysterious visitor to Poe's grave that comes every year on this date leaving roses and a bottle of cognac. He's been doing this for the past 57 years although via some notes left by the visitor(s), a changing of the guard occurred in 1994. Some suggest that a son took over for his father. You can read about it HERE.

Another big event that happened today was NASA's launch of the New Horizon probe to Pluto. It's a super-fast "bullet" which will reach a speed of 47,000 mph and will take 10 years to reach the far out planet. It'll pass our moon in 9 hours and get to Jupiter in one year. Just amazing. You can read more about it at CNN HERE.

We also hit record breaking temps today where I live. The record was set at 61 degrees back in 1974 and we've hit almost 70 degrees today. We've had three record breaking weather days in just the first 19 days of January... The weather guy said last night on the news that this will probably be the warmest January on record. Don't break out the t-shirts and shorts just yet... We're getting rain/snow tomorrow and February/March is usually filled with lots of winter weather.

Blessings!

Slower?

Well, this week has started a little slow too. But I did enjoy my three day weekend.

I mentioned in my last post about an Analog-DV converter coming on Friday. Well, it did arrive, but my wife wasn't at home when it came and since the UPS guy needed a signature, they didn't leave it. I really wanted to play with it over the weekend, but had to wait now until Monday.

On Saturday (15th) I went to the Men's Breakfast that was held at my church. They can sure put out a spread... scrambled eggs, sausage links, biscuits and gravy, hashbrowns, etc... I get full by just the smell of it all! Sunday (16th) had the normal church stuff happening. Monday was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which was a holiday for me. I still didn't get to sleep in as I had to take the car in to get the oil changed. My appointment was a 7:30am. The front right tire also had been having a very slow leak in it, so I had them check that out too. Turns out there was a small nail in the tire! Glad to get that fixed as I would have hated to have my wife and kids stuck out somewhere with a flat.

My wife went out to eat lunch with a friend and then went shopping for some stuff for the house at a Hobby Lobby store. Meanwhile, my UPS package came right after lunch! Now, my laptop is only a 1.6 GHz machine. The recommended speed was 1.8 and they really said you should have at least a 2.0 GHz for this converter, but like other things, manufacturers sometimes bump those figures up. But, I guess in this case they didn't as after trying it out, the software kept stopping and reporting that my machine couldn't support the bandwidth. Bummer! I do have a desktop machine that is 1.8 GHz, so I guess I'll try it with that next.

Tuesday (17th) evening I attended my church board meeting. This is the dreaded annual budget review/proposal meeting to set the church budget for the next year. We were a little down this past year in giving, so cut backs were in store for this new budget year. It's never fun and makes for long meetings. I didn't get home until about 10:30pm. We did have a little bit of excitement though... During the meeting, an outside door to the room we were meeting in came open and a city police officer came in. He said that a security alarm went off in part of the building. The pastor went with the officer and they checked everything out, but didn't find anything. Good thing! :-)

Blessings!

Slow...

Man, this week has been pretty slow. And the weather has been crazy too. Yesterday it was over 60 degrees and we woke up this morning with it snowing! It came down pretty heavy, but no real accumulation and it's all gone now. Crazy I tell ya!

We have this lockable fire-proof file box and when we moved a year ago, we locked it so the lid wouldn't fly open during the move. Well, as you've guessed, we haven't been able to find the key to it now. I've got to get my driver's license renewed this month and need some id papers out of it. So I finally broke down and order some new keys from the manufacturer. They came within a day. Wow, that was fast! The best part was that the replacement key worked! :-) Hey, ya never know sometimes...

I also ordered an analog video capture device to work with the USB port for my laptop. Before, I've always had to capture the video from a VCR to my DV camera, then capture from the camera to the computer. What a hassle! So, this device will save me a step and hopefully get better quality captures from my old VHS tapes. That should be here today too.

We have a three day weekend due to Martin Luther King's Day. Cool... I could use an extra day.

We also have a Men's Breakfast at church tomorrow morning. That's always great food and fellowship.

Blessings!

Roller Derby!

Well, it wasn't quite like that, but we did have a great time roller skating at our church skate night at the local roller rink. The best part was it was free! Our 3 year-old daughter was so excited all afternoon. Going skating was all she could talk about. I also tried the limbo competition, which all the little kids always win, but I did make it to the last round where I then hit my head on the pole, knocking it down. Oh well, maybe next time... NOT! It's at least gratifying to be one of the last "big" people left in the last round. HA! A lot of people from church were there and we all had a lot of fun. But, man... I was pretty sore afterwards... I don't go skating that often and my muscles were letting me know! :-)

Blessings!

Beautiful Weekend

Man, we had really nice weather this past weekend. We got to get outside and enjoyed it some. My son had a school basketball game Saturday morning. His team easily defeated the other team 30-12. There is one kid on my son's team that will grow up to be a very great basketball player if he keeps it up.

Sunday was our normal church-going day. My wife got to wear her new outfit and looked simply gorgeous in it. Of course, she just looks simply gorgeous anyway... :-)

Tonight, our church is sponsoring an All-church skate night at the local roller rink. That is always fun and yes, I'm going to try to win at the Limbo game... I never make it under the pole in the last round, but it's fun to try!

Looking like we might get a little snow tonight/tomorrow too... Oh boy!

Blessings!

Lady Love....

Saw where singer Lou Rawls lost his fight with cancer this morning. He was 72. His hey-day was a little before my time, but I've always like that song "Lady Love." RIP Lou...

Yea! It's Friday!

Blessings!

Happy Birthday

January seems to be a big birthday month for our family. Today is my nephew Kevin's 7th birthday. Happy Birthday Kevin!!! Later on this month, two of my cousins have birthdays and of course my own is coming up as well. :-)

Today at work, I helped out another department with a big PC conversion. It's a big "couple month" long deal, and others from various agencies are helping. We hit a snag today as this one women absolutely refused to log off her PC so we could make the changes. It took getting the agency's director to "urge" her to "get along." Due to some other stuff, we still wasn't able to do the conversion in that area, so it was all for naught. In a small way, I guess that lady won after all. Grrr.

Hopefully, it'll be a quiet evening at home tonight... :-)

Blessings!

New Year's Weekend Wrap Up

Wow... It's a new year already... 2005 seems to have just flown by without stopping, although I'm sure there are a lot of people glad to see 2005 go, especially if you live in the Gulf of Mexico region.

Last Friday, Dec. 30th, I took off another day from work to give myself another four-day weekend. We all went to the local mall for a bit, and after not being able to take the kids' whining any longer, we headed home (they hate shopping - unless it's for their stuff). My wife later went to the grocery store to pick up a few items for our New Year's party. She also made a few of the things she was going to serve the next night too. My son was asked by a friend from school to go to the local college men's basketball game and then spend the night afterwards, so he was gone that night. So, after putting our daughter to bed, my wife and I watched Star Wars Episode III. She hadn't seen it yet, so it was a fun movie night for us. :-)

Saturday, my wife did a little bit more grocery shopping and picked up our son from his friend's house. I also dusted and vacuumed the house to get ready for the party. After all the cleaning and preparing was done, we took it easy in the afternoon. At 7:00PM our guests started to arrive. We had only invited two other couples and their kids over, so it was a quaint little gathering. We had fingerfoods and enjoyed the company. After eating we all gathered around and played a game of Uno Attack. It's similar to regular Uno, except you have this device that may or may mot spit out extra cards at you when you push it's button. It was a lot of fun and my wife won the game. We got done playing about 11:45 PM, just enough time to get around the TV and watch the ball drop in New York. It's amazing how many people gather in Times Square. I wonder how hard it is to get to a porta potty if you need one? Of course, we all kissed our mates at the stroke of Midnight and then our guests headed home shortly afterwards.

Sunday morning, our church just had one 10 AM service instead of the regular two morning services, so that made it nice not to have to get up too early since we stayed up so late the night before. After lunch, I watched a little football. I was hoping that the Steelers would lose so the Chiefs (who played a awesome game) would make the playoffs... But, it was not to be. :-( We were going to take down our Christmas tree and decorations, but we were all still too tired, so we left all that stuff for the next day.

I had Monday off as a regular holiday. My wife first mentioned about going off to a mall a couple of hours away, but it was a gloomy day and I really didn't feel like driving that far, and besides, we had to get the Christmas tree and stuff put away, so that's what we did. It took a good part of the morning getting all that stuff done. We also cleaned and rearranged stuff in the workroom to give us more room in there. Looks nice in there for now! :-)

Tonight, we're going to a funeral visitation for a lady from our church. She was 70 years old, and fought a good fight against cancer. She worked part time at the church as a receptionist and was a really nice lady. Her funeral is tomorrow morning. I can only take comfort knowing that she is finally at peace and rest in the arms of the Lord.

Blessings!

New Year's Hangover

It's always hard to come back to work after having a few extra days off and trying to catch up with everything that piled up while you are gone. Therefore, I'll post my big New Year's weekend wrap up tomorrow when I'll feel more like doing it. :-)

Blessings!