Do Not Overtighten !!!

Over the weekend I was trying to get some projects done around the house.

Saturday was shot in the butt when I had to go into work from 6am to 11am. And of course Andrew had a tummy ache Saturday morning so he was crying and screaming for about two hours as Jenny tried and tried to rock him to sleep from 12am to 2am-ish. He finally rolls over, cracks a fart, and falls asleap. So about 3 hours of actual sleep before the alarm went off. I Came home from work and basically watched kids until she got home from work and then we just spent a quiet night home. I would have tried to get my work done Saturday night when she got home, but it is such a pain in the butt with William trying to "help" and I was just dog tired. That and I had to cut off all of the water in the house to repair the shower and didn't feel like doing that with the family there. I figured Sunday when Jen and the kids are over at the in-laws I can sneak away and get some stuff done. Of course I am so tired I fell asleep in the chair and I miss the end of the Notre Dame game...son of a b***ch. They were playing like crap and wasn't expecting them to win anyway, but I just miss one of the greatest comebacks of the year. I woke up just enough toward the end of the game to see what I thought was the score through sleepy eyes. I told Jen in the morning that I was dreaming, or I missed a great comeback. I missed a great comeback.

Sunday morning was William's turn to get up crying and screaming at 4 am. Now usually when he gets up in the middle of the night, I can put him back down in bed and he immediately goes to sleep, but something was bugging him. So about an hour of him fussing around, HE rolls over, cracks a fart, and goes to sleep. What is it with our kids and gas??? I am saying it was the bag of popcorn that he had in the afternoon. After that, the kids kinda sleep in and we get up and had breakfast. We head over to the in-laws around noon for the usual lunch/visit and hear about their vacation to colonial Williamsburg. So I sneak away around 4pm and head to my brother's house to return a miter saw that I "borrowed". So after two house of shooting the shit with my brother I head home to get my stuff done. I didn't realize that it was so late so I basically had about an hour to get two projects done before heading back to the in-laws to pick up Jen and the kids. So I kill the water in the house and replace a cartridge in the shower handle that should fix the leaking problem. I go down to the basement to turn the water back on to the house, and by the time I get back upstairs the shower is running, which is usually a good thing, but not when the knob is in the "off" position. I thought for a second that I had installed this cartridge upside down, but I didn't. I quickly fixed the problem and it worked fine after that. Next was replacing the ballcock in the toilet downstairs. Yeah I know.. I said "ballcock" (snicker) . When replacing this part you have to bolt the part in the bottom of the tank. It said in bold letters DO NOT OVERTIGHTEN. Excuse me? so you have to guess how tight to put on this bolt. Not tight enough to crack the tank, but tight enough so it doesn't leak all over the place. I just snugged it enough and just prayed it was enough. Shortly after replacing this part I headed out door to pick up the family, hoping and praying that I wouldn't come home to a toilet leaking all over the place and a shower erupting like a geyser. But so far so good, no leaks, but it's still nagging me enough that I want to tighten stuff a little bit more, but when I do that kind of stuff, that's when I get into trouble. Hopefully I will soon forget about it.

Blown Away

Monday we took Andrew back to Rileys to have his eye looked at again. Much to what we expected nothing has changed and we scheduled surgery for October 12th to try and correct his eye problem. Still sucks that this happened to him, but again it could have been alot worse.

The part of the trip that blew me away was a trip to the Casleton Mall in Indy. After some walking around, killing time before his appointment, we decided to grab something to eat. We had some chicken from chick-fil-a where Andrew experienced his first taste of fast food, and it loved it. After I ate I went into the bathroom to wash up after lunch. After washing my hands I noticed that they had the hand blowers and not paper towels. I hate these hand blowers since it takes forever to actually dry your hands and even after two cycles they are never dry and you always end up wiping the last bits of water off on your clothes. I know why they do it, and I don't really want to kill trees for my convenience, but it's just annoying. So I put my hands under the jet and it turns on automatically...the air came out so fast and so much that it actually scared me a little since I am not used to that from an air dryer. It was like putting your hand under an air chuck on an air compressor at 100 psi. After only 10 or 15 seconds under this power-jet my hands were totally dry. Wheeeeeee. Finally, someone gets how to make something like that actually works right.

Sigh....Yeah it's the little things that impress me.

Ye olde festival

Saturday we decided to take the kids to experience the jonny appleseed festival. Actually we just went because my mom was working a booth and asked us to stop by. Now amazingly I have never been to this festival in my life. Somehow I actually got out of going to this festival in my 7 years of working in radio, going everywhere from Farm focus in Van Wert to the flat rock creek fall festival in BFE. I have heard over the years that it is a pretty nice festival with good food and crafts for sale in tents. Now I am not a knick-knack or "country decor" kinda person, but Jenny is, or at least she was until we were married. But hey, Jen might like it and I know my mom would love to see the kids...

The festival is at the coliseum... kinda. The memorial coliseum is a huge indoor complex that can house concerts and other huge events including home and garden show and the like, but this festival is in the grassy area on the other side of the parking lot from the coliseum (close to the gravesite of Jonny Appleseed). They try to keep the event with a certain "period" feel with tents instead of booths, and all the vendors wearing "period" or close to "period" clothing. So the feel is that you are walking back in the the 1800's. So I knew that the festival was in the grassy area outside of the parking lot, what I found out is that the festival is spread out over a 4 square mile area, not in the flat area, but in a very hilly area with narrow passageways to different areas that hold anywhere from 6 to 30 tents. There are little areas of tents around these trees, and those trees. It was like a treasure hunt trying to find where the tent was my mom was working. We finally found a map at the information tent and after a few minutes of trying to figure out where we were we finally saw her tent. Trying to get there was a major pain in the ass, in a mass of humanity on narrow passageways, pushing a stoller, up and down hills in deep grass, sometimes carrying william in 80 degree weather... am I having fun yet? We get to the tent a few minutes after the time she was supposed to leave and of course she was gone. Damn. We found out later that she actually left alot earlier since she wasn't feeling that well. Maybe we should have told her we were coming, but we wanted to surprise her. So we tried to make the best of it walking around looking at the crafts and food tents trying to decide what to eat. We were going to buy food from mom's tent, but the line was too long. On another note, It just amazes me how stupid people are in walking around these festivals. It's bad enough trying to push a stroller through a crowd, but these idiots just stop in the middle of the crowd to look around, or they will walk backward looking at whatever and not paying attention to where they are going. I almost saw a fight right in front of me where this guy ran into anther guy because he wasn't paying attention. But hey we survived, we didn't buy anything crafty, but did end up spending almost $15 on crappy food that wasn't even filling. $2 popcorn, $4 funnel cake (they had funnel cake in the 1800's?) $5 bottle of root beer, $4 apple dumpling. Of course Jen and I got little to none of this food with the two human vacuum cleaners with us. Finally after 2 hours of walking around and fighting the crowd we decided to call it a day and made it back to the car. I seriously doubt that I will ever go back to this festival, or if I do it won't be until both kids can walk on their own the whole time. There were some cool parts to the festival. They had some neat reenactments, and a couple of drum and bugle corps bands that were fun to see and William seemed to enjoy that, so maybe, for the kids, I will go back again. There were some people from the "God squad" on the sidewalk giving away free bibles. I almost got one just to say I got something free from the festival.

Happy Anniversary

I just realized that this Saturday will be my one year anniversary for this blog. Man it's seems like I have been doing this a whole lot longer than one year. I know I am a relative newbie to blogs compared to monkeyjack and some others.

I have made 126 entries (127 counting this one) so far, and with pretty decent content. Some rambling and bitching, but overall entertaining I think.

How cool is that?

How cool is it that we can watch live TV from the space shuttle on the internet. The video is totally awesome. I have been watching them work on the international space station for the past couple of days. Not really watching, more like just having the window open and occasionally seeing what they are up to. It's just so cool to see live images. No longer do you have to count on network TV to cover what they are doing (when they feel like it), or see a 20 second blip on the news. Its nice to know that schools can have access to what they are doing whenever they want for educational purposes. The work they are doing is tedious so it's like watching paint dry or grass grow, but interesting non the less.

www.nasa.gov

Oh God that was funny!

A coworker just walked up to the copy machine and I came up behind him, going to another part of the building. I decided to stop and talk to him a minute, but he was standing in front of the copier with a puzzled look so I paused a minute and got real close behind him. I said, "what are you doing?" and scared the living crap out of him. He must have jumped at least a foot and probably gave himself whiplash turning his head. I laughed so hard I was almost on the floor. I am just lucky he didn't come out swinging or I would have really been on the floor. Lucky for me he found it just as humorous. I found out that he was actually trying to figure out a paper jam and trying to overhear a conversation from our boss in the next room, so he was distracted. I told him that's what he gets for eavesdropping.

Are they really worth 6%???

I am stuck proof reading Real Estate and Homes this week. We have to look over every page of this 400+ page book every other week to make sure have the correct pictures with the correct descriptions and look for typos. We used to retype all of the text on the pages, but we currently have this toy where we can just "flow" the text submitted by the realtor (from email or disc) into the ad. It's pretty bad but not uncommon to find a mistake that we typed in, but its amazing how bad the mistakes are that COME FROM THE REALTOR. I know they abbreviate stuff, but these mistakes are horrendous and could have been easily found if they would have just read it once before submitting it. I am not sure if the mistake comes from the realtor or from a secretary in the office, but dang. I am not sure if they don't care since they know we proof read it and they think we will find and correct their mistakes, but it just annoying that they couldn't take the 30 seconds to proof read their own crap. They are making all of the money from selling these houses!!! And of course the realtor will be the first one screaming for a refund if a mistake actually get published in the magazine. I would love to talk to these yahoos and give them the old G.I.G.O. discussion.

School Daze

William still has a speech delay. He talks a little bit where we can actually understand him, and we know he can understand us a little bit since when we ask him to do something he actually does it. We have been working on it for over a year now with speech therapy and other testing to see why he doesn't' speak. Doctors and specialists are almost certain that it isn't autism, just a speech delay. When he turned 3 years old he aged out of the free state sponsored program and then became the responsibility of the school system. After more meetings and testing (that Jen had to deal with for months) we finally decided to send him to two hours of school , 5 days a week. So far it's been just over a week and he still seems to like going and doesn't realize that it's school. I was so scared that when Jen dropped him off that there would be a meltdown (from both of them) or that he would wander off, or the million other things that a parent worries about when trusting your kid to the school system. Most parents don't have to deal with it at 3 years old with a child that doesn't speak, so terrified was an understatement. It's still a concern, but luckily it's a class with only 5 kids and at least two teachers so I feel a little better. Tonight we go to a "back to school night" so hopefully some more of my fears will be taken care of.

I feel lucky to have Jen since she has the "job" now of getting him to school every day (no way we are putting him on a bus) and arranging to pick him up with trying to fit in work every once in a while.

Bad Luck

My In-laws live on the north side of town. They actually almost live in Leo/Cedarville because they are so close. For some reason they get their haircuts from a barber/hair stylist on the south side of town. So basically they drive half an hour one way for their haircuts. They are loyal to their barber, I will have to give them that. I think that the barber moved to that end of town and that's why they drive all that way for a haircut. About a month ago they were getting their hair cut and decided to grab some lunch since they were on that end of town. They ended up going to Pizza Hut. Unfortunately an employee had hepatitis A which is highly contagious, so they both had to get shots to make sure they didn't catch the disease. Fortunately the tab for the shot was picked up by Pizza Hut. So, for something they have done every couple of months ends up getting them a possible contagious disease and shots. Bad Luck.

The kicker to the story is that they brought home leftovers that my brother in-law ended up eating, so he had to get a shot too, and he wasn't even there. Bad luck in a box.