Ahh cow.. we knew you so well

(Marcus might not want to read this)

This weekend while my dad and stepmom were visiting, my brother offered to cook dinner for them on Saturday night. I offered to have the dinner at our house since our house is kid-proofed and easier to handle to two boys on the home field. So everyone gets together at our house and my brother brings over the meat. He informs us that this is fresh meat from my sister-in-law's co-workers ranch. Usually I don't know the history of my meat, but I do now. I should be happy that I actually know that this cow wasn't fed steroids, and preservatives, but it's also a little unnerving not buying the meat from the grocery. I mean it's not like we got the meat out of the back of a pick-up truck, but the processing of meat and grading of meat is there for a purpose. We fired up the grill and cooked the known, but unnamed, cow. It was a little fatty, but pretty good meat. We have a few more cuts in the freezer to try.

Ding Dong

My dad and stepmom were visiting this weekend from Alababa (whoa nelly). I knew that they were heading over to my house so I unlocked the front door figuring that they might just walk in since it was our house. Even if they didn't just walk in, if William heard the "Ding Dong" of the doorbell he might run to the front door and let them in. So I am in the front room playing with my sons and I hear the door bell ring. I ask William "who's that?" and he gets excited and heads to the front door. I am waiting to hear my dad or stepmom say something like "HI WILLIAM" , but it is quiet so I decide to investigate. I thought maybe I had relocked the door by mistake. As I rounded the hallway I see my son holding open the front door to two kids selling candy for their baseball team. Oops. It's so funny to see the two kids looking at my son and wondering "is he alone? what do we do? is this the man of the house? is there a dollar in his piggy bank to complete the sale?". I buy a candy bar from the kids and they went on their way. A half hour later the door bell rings again. This time when William heads toward the front door it's actuall my dad and stepmom and I hear "HI WILLIAM!". Thats the way it should be...

Monday.... of course

This didn't happen today, but it was a few Mondays ago....

I was doing my usual rush rush rush thing to get ready for work and out the door to make it to work on time. If I recall correctly the whole family was asleep so William was not "helping" me get ready. So, cool, just about on time to get out the door I decide to clean my glasses like I usually do every morning. (I hate dirty glasses). So I am cleaning them with my micro-cloth cleaning cloth and all of a sudden I feel the lens pop out of the frame. DAMN. I have had this problem before where the screw on the side would back out enough for the lens to pop out, but upon further review I see that the actual frame has broken by the noseguard. WTF!!! I never had that happen before. So time to find plan "B", not too easy on a groggy, Monday morning. I am trying to think of where I have an old pair of glasses that I can wear. I also remember that I have one more pair of my monthly contact lenses left that I can pop in too. Jen wakes up just enough to tell me where my spare glasses are at and I decide to cannibalize my new glasses for a screw to put into the old frames (the old frames are where the screw would back out and was lost). So quick fix and I head out the door. I had not worn these glasses in at least 6 years so even though I could function with these glasses they just proved to me how bad my eyesight was since I couldn't read very well at any distance.

An option that my co-worker pointed out was to have the frames welded. I forgot about that. So I took them to a place that would weld the frames for like $18. Cool, that will work. But when I got the glasses back the weld looked like it was done by a 8 year old, and the frames were distorted so they don't fit well anymore. So Back to the old frames.

Now the decision has to be made. I really don't want to go back to my optometrist for new expensive frames. I started wearing my contacts again, but I am lazy when it comes to putting them in, and I just wore them to work (I am looking into 24 hour lenses now). I am also going to the cheapy stores to see what kind of frames that I can get from them as well (you can't beat buy 1 get one). I would love to do lasik, but just don't have the money. Damn

Date

Sunday my wife and I had the rare opportunity to go out to lunch alone at a nice restaurant (the factory). We had a real good time just having a good meal and talking to each other without worrying if william is going to trip the waiter or if andrew is going to chuck all over the place... peaceful... ahhhhhh. We ended up sitting there for two hours talking about everyting except kids and stuff we had to do. We did end up running over the Menards for some light bulbs before heading home. Can I say it was nice holding hands with my wife in a Menards store looking for light bulbs? Well it was. I am thinking that now that we are moved into the house and the major projects are just about done that we need to make "date night" or even
"date weekend afternoon" happen a couple times a month

Picture Time

Saturday we went to Jenny's church to have our family picture taken for the church directory, and also to get a picture with the in-laws at the same time. We arrived to the church on time, but it was windy and cold as heck so I let the family out at the door and parked the car. I went back into the church and a few minutes later they called our name... things going smoothly so far. With my kids you never know which ones are going to show up. William who loves to pose, smile and say "cheese"? Nope, we got stuck with William the fuss who was good for about 2 pictures and then decided he had enough. Both kids were comming off colds so I can't really blame him for being fussy. So after a little bit of a battle we had our pictures done. With this process the pictures are digital so we just wait and someone brings up our pictures on the computer and we order them. I really wasn't plannig on buying any pictures since this was basicly for the church directory and we just had a good family picture taken for christmas, but you never know if you get a good one. After a half hour wait we were escorted back to a computer viewing room and the girl gave us a whole sales pitch about all that was available and showed us examples. I wasn't too interested. Finally she pulled up the pictures and they were pretty bad. If william wasn't smiling or looking at the camera, andrew was crying, jenny was trying to calm andrew and I had a very bad hair day (from walking in from the parking lot). So she has us choose a few of the best of the worse and she starts talking about packages when I hear numbers of 210, 179... DOLLARS???? All we said we wanted was 3 5x7's of the two boys and that was it. I even told her I thought the pictures were horrible (no fault of the photographer). So finally we just asked for the 3 5x7's ONLY and the free 8x10 and it was still $60. Next time we take pictures I am going to make sure the kids feel well and I have a freakin mirror to look at.

Animated Gifs

I am a big user of animated gifs on my website. I just like that fact that it makes the pages a little more interesting to look at. While searching for more gifs to use I came upon a program that lets me create my own. So I have been playing with what I can do. I call this one "DANCE MONKEY"

Opportunity Missed

We had a party at our house a couple weeks ago. After everyone had left I realized that Keith had left his camera at our house. The typical thing to do a few years ago would be to fill up the rest of his pictures with pictures of goofy stuff and maybe a few shots of my butt. The fun part about that, is the person would never know what was on the roll of film until they got it developed. But his camera is a digital camera with a display so no such opportunity to make him waste money on developing a roll of film.

Upon further examination this camera is capable of over 300 pictures. That's a lot of pictures of my butt. So I decided I better get going, and took about 10 pictures of the cat for a start. I thought better of taking lewd pictures of my butt or whatnot, since I don't trust Keith with the pictures or what he might do with them. I put the camera down with the plan on picking up the next night for a retrospective video montage of dirty diapers or something just as good, but darn my luck, Keith needed his camera the next day and his wife picked it up during the day. Damn..

Shotgun Baptism

Sunday we had Andrew baptised. This was the last Sunday available for baptisms before the priest's vacation and Lent (they don't baptise during lent I guess). After the service about half the church didn't empty and we found out that we were one of about 7 kids being baptised that day. They had families line up on one side and kids/parents/god parents on the other side. Seeing 7 kids wearing white in a row was funny and reminded me of the shotgun wedding scene from "7 brides for 7 brothers". We waited our turn and Andrew was baptised. Overall a good day with family, where we headed back to our house for some food, drinks, and conversation.

hot glass + water = BOOOOOOM!!

I was making caramel corn for a party at my house the other night and ran out of 9 x 13 pans so I decided to use my wife's good pyrex glass dish. The recipe requires a little cook time in the oven to coat the popcorn. I made 3 batches at the same time. I started to pull them out of the oven and noticed that the caramel corn in the glass dish was actually burning the bottom of the popcorn. So I quickly got the caramel corn out of the dish throwing away the burnt stuff. But even with the pan empty, it continued to burn onto the bottom of the dish. Knowing that my wife really likes this dish, I didn't want to ruin it so I decided to stop the burning. I am not an idiot, and I know not to put water into the dish... or was it just cold water? So I put a little bit of hot water into the dish to stop the burning. The water quick evaporated and it sat there for a few minutes and continued to smoke in the kitchen. I am thinking that I have friends coming over and I really don't want them to smell smoke and think I don't know how to cook so I decide to take action. I figure it has been long enough for the dish to cool off and since the last bit of water didn't do any harm it would be alright to use some more water. I put this dish under the faucet and BANG !!! The dish exploded in the sink. At worse I thought it would just crack or something, but no it EXPLODED. I was worried about a little smoke with people coming over, but now I have to deal with broken glass all over the place. So I quickly clean up the glass and of course get some down the drain which entails me tearing apart the garbage disposal the next day. A few beers later I forgot about the dish and had a good time. Maybe I will just leave the cooking to my wife. I know she would like that and so would the cookware.

That Darned Cat

Our cat has gotten into a routine every morning. I get up and take my shower. When I come out of the bathroom she is laying on the floor meowing wanting to be fed. For some reason when we moved into the new house she wants to be fed all the time. I don't know if she has a tapeworm or if my in-laws were feeding her a little more food when she lived with them for 6 months. Well I think she was getting mad that we weren't getting up early enough to feed her and she was getting hungry. About two weeks ago our 2.5 year old started coming into our room earlier and earlier which would get us up earlier than we wanted. I just happened to wonder... was the cat going into our son's room to wake him up (creaky door), which in turn would wake us up, which in turn would get her fed? IT'S A CONSPIRACY. So I oiled the door hinges and we started closing the door all the way on my son's door. Well I don't think my theory was proved because ever since then my son keeps coming into our room pretty early in the morning. It was just a coincidence but I wouldn't put it past that darned cat