Dave's Daily

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

The Visit is Over

Well, our week long visit from my mother-in-law went very well I thought. We all had a good time and I think we just wore her out with our busy lifestyle. HA! My parents came down on Saturday (14th) along with my grandmother and we all went out to a movie (we got a babysitter for our young daughter). Needless to say, this was an event that is sure not to happen very often. My grandmother is 94 and I have no idea when the last time (or if this was the first time) she'd ever been to a movie theater and the getting together of my wife's mother and my parents just doesn't happen very often either. So, it may not have been a "once-in-a-lifetime" event (as they were all together at our wedding), the gathering was certainly one that doesn't happen very often.

On Monday (16th), my mother-in-law was to head home on the Amtrak train that has a station here. My wife took her to the station and found out that they were working on the tracks and so the train wouldn't be running. There was a big bus that was to take the passengers to the next station to catch the train, but my wife decided to drive her halfway home to meet the other family members that were going to pick her up. So, my wife had a lot more driving involved than she'd planned on that day and the weather was rainy all day too which didn't help. But, we got "mom" all shipped back home all in one piece. Due to that, I had to take off work a little early to pick my son up from school. That was a nice little break for me too. Ha!

I had one bad thing happen on Sunday (15th) night. I was scheduled to work in the TV room at church to run the lyric projectors, etc. Afterwards, I was going to work some more on my editing project to finish up the Missionettes Crowning video. I went to load up the project and found out that someone had deleted my project folder. I was fuming upset! I just lost over 10+ hours of editing time not to mention non-replaceable files! AAH!! I still haven't found out who exactly did it, but I have a good idea as the files were there the previous Wednesday night when I worked on it. I think they were mistakenly deleted to free up some drive space to record this past Sunday's sermon. I still have the original source material on DVRs, but I put a lot of time doing a multi-camera edit and I'm not about to go through all of that again. So now the parents will get a more streamlined version. I am still a little upset about that.... ugh.

Oh well, the weather is really nice today and tomorrow...

Blessings!

Friday, October 13, 2006

Sorry

I knew this would happen. Since it is hard to find time to update this blog at home with so much stuff going on, and not being able to update it at work anymore, I knew that it would happen. I have slacked off on updating the blog. I have found a new way to update it here at work, so until that option no longer works, I'll see if I can get back to updating on a regular basis.

Let me try to catch up on some of the activities I've done since the last update...

My mom turned 73 and my dad turned 68 back in July. My maternal grandmother turned 94 at the end of July too. I had a cousin and sister-in-law that had birthdays in July also. Happy Birthday to all of you!!

For the last two days of July and the first full week of August, I took off work and went with my son to a Royal Rangers Advancement Academy camp. Royal Rangers is like the Boy Scouts, but is run by the Assemblies of God denomination. This was like a mini boot camp where the boys worked on various merits all day with cabin and uniform inspections each morning. It was very hot that week too as a heatwave was in full force. No A/C in the cabins, but thankfully we had electricity so we were able to run fans (which just blew hot air around). We got to do some neat things in the various classes in which I got to help teach, but I also learned a lot too in some of them. Got to go on some field trips too so that meant some nice A/C time in the van! :-) Did I mention it was hot that week. It was so hot that one day the camp leader let the boys wear shorts which had never happened in the 16 year history of the camp (it was about 104 degrees that day). The main uniform was a camp t-shirt and jeans.

On August 25th, we had a bad storm blow in that morning and lightning somehow blew out power to the WHOLE town. It took the power company a little over an hour to get it back online in some areas. It was pretty wild. I had just dropped off my son at school went it hit (about 7:45am).

In September we saw the 40th anniversary of the TV show Star Trek. My dad, a friend and I went to Huntsville, AL for the 30th anniversary convention which was pretty cool. The 40th one was held in Las Vegas. Sounded like a lot of fun. Star Trek has been my fav show for a long time. :-) Oct. 5-7, the auction house Christie's had a huge auction of Star Trek props, costumes, miniatures, etc. from the CBS/Paramount vaults. I was able to watch a little bit of the auction online through the History Channel's website. I heard the auction brought in more than 7 million dollars! Wow!

My sister turned 37 in September! Happy Birthday Sis!

At the end of September, my wife and I broke down and got cell phones. We held out as long as we could, but finally decided they would be a nice thing to have for emergencies and convenience. We got Samsung c417 models and are pretty nice. So we could tell who's phone was who's, I took a picture of her for my phone's wallpaper and she took a picture of me for her phone's wallpaper. Now, when I open my phone, I get to see my beautiful wife! Awesome! :-)

Last weekend (Oct 6th) we went up to visit my mother-in-law's house and we got together with my brother-in-law's family for a wiener roast/s'more's night. Their little town was having a Fall Festival that weekend too, so on Saturday (7th) we went downtown and they had carnival rides, etc. My daughter thought she wanted to right the merry-go-round, but after getting on, she started crying and so we got her off before the ride even began! :-) My son rode the ferris wheel and a few other rides. It was a neat day. There was even a parade through town, so the kids got a lot of candy too. We came back home on Sunday (8th) with an extra visitor. My mother-in-law came back with us for a week visit to our house. It's the first time she's done something like this, but she wanted to come see how "our life" is like for a week. We've been running her ragged all week. Ha! She leaves on Monday 16th and will ride the Amtrak train back home which will be another first for her.

Monday, Oct 9th was a holiday from work for me (Columbus Day), so we all went to a neighboring town (which is bigger) and did a little early Christmas shopping for the kids. Our son is in school, so it makes it a little easier to buy stuff and also the selection is a little better at this time. It was a little harder this year as our daughter is 4 now and it was harder to keep her from seeing what we were buying. :-)

Guess that's enough for now. I hope to be able to update the blog a little more often now that I have a way to do it here at work (for now).

Blessings!