It's a Disaster!

Well, not really, but we're in the midst of doing our yearly Disaster Recovery project here at work. We send our backup tapes offsite to a recovery site and then try to recover our production systems like we would in a real disaster. Since I'd have to work late yesterday (Jul 30th), I came in at noon and had to stay until about 9pm. The Operating System people had been at it, restoring the system since about 7am and were there past midnight. It's kind of fun and gets you out of the office for awhile.

This past weekend, we went up to visit my wife's mom. Had a nice visit, got to go swimming, and ate some good food. We made it back to town on Sunday (29th) just in time to help celebrate my grandmother's (my mom's mom) 95th birthday. She's been having some health problems lately and is currently recovering in a nursing home, but generally, she's been doing very well. Congrats to her. We had a big fish fry at my cousin Kevin's new house for the occasion.

Today is payday (yippee!) and the day when our big 3% cost of living increase kicks in. Well, mine actually turned out to be about 2.91%, but I'm not complaining... at least it's something and better than nothing!!

I finally got a wireless router installed and working at home, but it's not putting out a very strong signal. I got the router free, so I'm going by Best Buy after work to see if I can get an antenna to help boost the signal. I got my PS3 hooked up through it now and I've been downloading some game demos. Works pretty neat!

Can't believe that tomorrow is already August 1st... School will be starting soon... wow.

Blessings!

Living In The Fast Lane

Last Thursday (July 19th) I ordered my upgrade to DSL at home. I've been living with dial-up for WAY too long now. The very next day my DSL modem arrived with the promise date of Tuesday, July 24th for service activation. True to their word, just as I arrived home after work yesterday, the phone company truck was there. The guy checked out the line for any problems and said it looked very good and I was good to go. That evening I finally had time to check it all out and after going through all the install stuff, I was finally cruising at DSL speed. WHOO HOO! I've finally made it to the fast lane in the information super-highway!

My wife took the kids today to go see the movie "Ratatouille." My wife is not a big fan of movies in general as most of them are either too trashy, profane, or in the case of kids movies, full of bathroom humor. She called me at work after they got home to say she really loved this movie and wanted to see it again. I guess this one will make it to our DVD library. :-)

Well, we still haven't recovered my wife's wedding ring. We're still hoping and believing that it will be returned, but it will have to be in God's timing. My wife is a little worried as the diamond that was set in the ring was given to us by her mother as it was the diamond in her original wedding ring. We're going to go up to her mom's house for a visit this weekend and my wife isn't looking forward to telling her the bad news.

I made it through another Missionette Honor Star Crowning service this last Sunday night. Thankfully this year there was only ONE girl (compared to some years with 9-12 girls). I just stayed at the church all afternoon to create the photo montage and other items for the evening and it worked out great.

Blessings!

Saturday the 14th

Yeah, Friday the 13th is "suppose" to be the bad day (which last Friday was a 13th day). But Saturday the 14th was even worse this time around. It didn't start off so bad though, there was a Men's Breakfast event at the church. Man, they do some good cooking! We had all the works; scrambled eggs, sausage links, hash browns, biscuits and gravy, etc. I had to take my son to a play practice afterwards, so he and my daughter went with me. My daughter went because my wife was going to get her hair done that morning. And did she ever. Thus, the beginning of the badness.

She had high-lighted her hair for a long time, but recently began to just color it instead. Well, she wanted to go back to high-lighting it. The stylist said she'd have to apply low-lights first to get it back to it's "normal" color before doing the actual high-lights the next time. I guess from the way she describes it, the lighting in the room isn't the best, so she didn't really notice it until she got home later that day (she did some shopping after getting her hair *done*). Her hair was pretty dark with blond-ish streaks in it. It really didn't look *too* bad, but she was not happy at all. She called the stylist back and she said to give it five days and it'll look a lot better and to get out in the sun too. I played with the kids in our little pool for awhile and she sat out in the sun. By evening time, she was still very upset to the point of tears. She hardly slept all night and wouldn't even go to church with us on Sunday. The stylist was suppose to be going on vacation right after that which made it worse, but my wife called her Sunday morning anyway and the stylist told her to come to the shop to try to do something to it. They mixed some bleach with other stuff and a few hours later, she came home and looked almost like she did before. She was pretty happy after that.... Except...

Remember I mentioned about going shopping after getting her hair done? Well that afternoon, she couldn't find her wedding ring. We looked all over the house for it. She thought she took it off to put on sunscreen for the kids when we were going to play in the pool. We couldn't find it anywhere. Then it hit her... when trying on a blouse at a store in the mall, she didn't want to snag it when taking it off, so she removed her ring and forgot to put it back on. We called the store and she even talked to the lady that helped her earlier in the day. She checked, but no ring. We talked to the mall office/security to let them know and then we even called the police station. Since we live in the county, we had to drive in to the station to fill out a report. By this time it was close to 9pm. The kids already had their PJ's on, so I just stayed in the car while my wife filled out the report. We're also putting a LOST classified in the paper. We're just praying that whoever took it will be convicted enough to return it and not keep it or try to pawn it. Which reminds me... I'd better check eBay too.

So, as you can see... We got hit by a double whammy on Saturday... It wasn't a very good weekend.

My Dad celebrated his 69th birthday back on July 11th and I have a sister-in-law that celebrated her 51st b-day on the 10th.

Taking my dog to the vet this afternoon for his yearly checkup. So fun. :-)

Blessings!

The VACATION

Wow... getting a little bit behind on my updates... :-)

"Mr. Wizard" Don Herbert died on June 12th. I remember watching Mr. Wizard's World on Nickelodeon awhile back and remembering that was such a cool show.

June 14th was my daughter's 5th birthday. On the Saturday following that (16th) we had a little birthday party for her and invited 3 of her closest friends from church. We had an impossible to break open pinata, cake and the "opening of presents", but mostly they just all played together doing various things.

My brother-in-law turned the big 5-0 on June 20th! Congrats to him!! :-)

The big event in June was our big family vacation. We took off on Sunday, June 24th for the Smokey Mountains in Tennessee. We rented a cabin and spent three nights. It was a really nice cabin with a pool table, Jacuzzi, hot tub, and even an X-Box. We spent one whole day in downtown Gatlinburg visiting the shops and the aquarium (mucho expensive!!). The following two days we spent driving around in the mountains. Very beautiful!! On the way home we also made stops in Metropolis, IL ("home of Superman") and at the Cahokia Mounds (Indian settlement where they built mounds out of dirt - It was the largest city in the Americas until around 1300 AD). We had a great trip and the kids got along pretty well for the most part. I would have liked to do more hiking on the trails in the mountains, but just couldn't do those things with a five year old. ha! We finally got back home Saturday evening (June 30th).

Yesterday was my mom's 74th birthday! Happy Birthday Mom!! Her mom, my grandmother, was in the hospital since last Friday (which I didn't find out about until yesterday), so last night I went and visited her for awhile. She is dealing with a small bout of phlegm in her throat and was having difficulties breathing and swallowing. She seemed to be doing pretty good last night though.

Tomorrow is the Fourth of July! Time to shoot the fireworks, fly the flag, fire up the grill, and just be thankful for the freedoms we have. Remember to keep our troops in your thoughts and prayers.

Blessings!