Racur G

I don't know if Racur G is in the movie version, but he certainly was an important part of the TV show!

Mom & Me

a guest post from Cathy!


Click to see more pictures
from the campout!Mikey and I had a great time with the Cub Scouts the past weekend. There were wagon races, archery, BB's and much more wild western fun to be be had. Mikey did quite well on the BB shooting range. He seemed to really enjoy making things with leather. He made a bracelet that said "mom and me" on it. He also made a necklace too. I really enjoyed the fresh air and watching him play with the other cubs. That evening we enjoyed a nice campfire outside with the other scouts. We sang an old western favorite "Ghost Chickens in the Sky" which Mikey kept singing periodically throughout the weekend… hehe. That night we ended up staying with the other moms and kids in a tent they had brought. The reason was that the wind was picking up and the the flaps on the canvas rental tents kept blowing in the cold wind… brrrr… guess they felt sorry for us! So all and all it was a nice weekend. Exhausting… but nice!

Tornado Alley

Wednesday nights are church nights for us. We probably would go anyway... I went on Wednesday nights long before I joined the choir at Grace (it's very healthy to have a little bit of Word and fellowship in the middle of the week)... but now we pretty much have to go because we have choir practice immediately after the service. Tonight Cathy wasn't feeling well, though, so Mikey and I went on to church while she and Hannah stayed home. On the way there the weather looked pretty average, but little did we know there was something really brewing! Church started at 7, and maybe 15 or 20 minutes into the service, right in the middle of one of the songs, Pastor Geof, who was supposed to speak while Pastor Bob is away on a missions trip to the Ukraine and a couple of other places, stopped the service and told us that tornadoes were headed right our direction, and that we should all calmly move into the tornado-shelter children's building. A few minutes earlier Cathy had called my mom (who was sitting next to me) and told her that the tornado sirens were going off at our house, which is about nine miles to the North of the church. I wound up with my mom and dad and a bunch of friends from choir in the 5-year-old classroom, not really knowing exactly where Mikey was but knowing he was being safely taken care of in another one of the tornado shelter rooms (he was). Cathy wound up in the closet at home, probably squeezing Hannah so hard her eyes bugged out. Down in the classroom where I was, we basically picked back up where we left off and sang a bunch more praise choruses. The tornadoes apparently missed the church and the house both, and service and rehearsal were both canceled. Without the storms, about this time we would be in the middle of choir practice... but instead I'm at home blogging. God took care of us!

UPDATE: another account of the same incident from another dad who goes to Grace here.

Batchin' It: The Rest Of The Story

Well... the day went well. I got the bills paid, and I got Mikey's room partially cleared out... turns out that it's more than one day's work, even for a cowboy like me! I got a lot of that done, and I did get the bills all paid.
Sky CaptainCathy was freaking out that someone we know would see our lawn not mowed, so I had to take Hannah over to Meme's house for a while so that I could mow. Meme has acquired a boarder... an afghan hound named Sky Captain. So anyway... I never did get to watch the show I wanted to watch, but I did take in a few interesting science shows on National Geographic Channel. One was called Accidental Genius and it was about what are called "savants"... people who have extraordinary abilities due to brain damage (like Rain Man). Then I watched an episode of Naked Science called "Alien Safari"; that was all about the possibility of life on other planets in our solar system (turns out there might be simple life forms on quite a few planets and moons). Cathy and Mikey had a great time today; they're sleeping out in a tent tonight! Hope they keep warm; it's supposed to dip down into the upper 30s tonight. Brr!

So, anyone reading this has gained a huge amount of insight into the life of a modern dad whose wife is out of town for the day. Probably more than you ever wanted to know. Why I felt compelled to blog twice today, I'll never know. One of the savants has a compulsion to paint pictures of his head on all the walls and ceilings of his house, so maybe I'm brain-damaged today. Ha!!!

Batchin' It

Well, not exactly batchin' it... 'cause I got the cutest baby in the universe with me! As I mentioned at the end of my post yesterday, Cathy and Mikey are at the Mom & Me Cub Scouts campout. They left this morning at 6am (we got up at 4:15 to get ready! I think for the Dad & Lad this year Mikey and I got up at, I don't know, maybe 6am! Anyway, it was a crazy night and a crazy morning, but Hannah and I came home and slept until about 9 or so (unusual for me to be able to sleep in the daytime... usually I wake up if there's daylight. I must have been pooped!) and then we got up and got a bottle and watched a little TV (a documentary about TobyMac that Cathy had recorded for me), and then I put together Hannah's new bouncy activity center (her legs don't reach the ground yet D'OH!!) I took a shower and then sat down to read my daily online comics, and then I started this quick blog post. Hannah just woke up from her brief nap in the bouncy seat... probably before long she's going to want a bottle, and I need to get some lunch before then or else I'll be starving while she's eating!

I still have a lot to do today... I have to get online and pay a bunch of bills, but first I need to do something in Mikey's room. He's got so many toys in there that things are totally out of control and he is overwhelmed... I'm going to go in there today and put all of the toys that are either old and too young for him, or too cheap to worry about, or broken from being stepped on (!), and throw them in a huge box we have from when we got our rocking chair. When he gets home, his room will be worth being in again! After that, he's going to have to keep his room tidy on his own! I'm just stepping in to give him a leg up on things. I don't think he'll be too upset about it, because I think he's become frustrated with it himself. And if we tell him we can have a garage sale and he can maybe get some money, I think he might be cool with that! Anyway, I expect that task to take most of the afternoon. After that I'll do my bill thing, and then hopefully I'll have time to sit down and finally watch the finale of The Sarah Connor Chronicles that I DVR'd in like February or whenever (it can be tough to find time to watch something that's a little rough for an 8-year-old and of no interest to the other adult in the house!) Cathy wants me to mow the lawn, but really my priority is Mikey's room. I can mow the lawn tomorrow, maybe, but I can only do what I need to do in his room with him not here. If I finish his room before sundown, who knows? Maybe the lawn will got some attention after all!

Cathy has the camera with her, and we just put a 1GB SD card in it, so hopefully she'll get lots of great pictures of the Mom & Me. Check back next week and see what she came up with! (Maybe I can even get her to write a guest blog... WOOHOO!)

Caturday 5/3/2008

moar funny pictures

This one was also captioned this way, but I think mine is funnier, don't you? (Don't forget to click on the picture above to vote!)

"Invisible (whatever)" is another one of those LOLCat running gags I mentioned last week...

Nine Great Years

Today is anniversary number nine for me and Cathy. Nine great years! Not every minute was great, but there were definitely enough great minutes to call it good.

Evidence that we're apparently doing a good job as a couple came to light last night as we were having an anniversary dinner at Charleston's. I use the word "light" in a metaphorical sense, of course; dinner at Charleston's is a candlelight thing, so don't drop anything black on the floor or you'll never see it again! Anyway... we had finished our meals and the waitress asked us if we were going to have dessert. Usually Cathy orders a dessert she wants and we share it, so she ordered her dessert, and there was a rather awkward silence... and then the waitress (rather awkwardly) asked Cathy if we were on the same ticket.

"Well, yes, we're married!" Cathy said.

The waitress apparently saw us enjoying being together, talking and visiting, and thought we were a not-married couple on a date! Now, what better commentary could you have on your marriage than to have a stranger assume that you were enjoying each other's company far too much to actually be married? It made Cathy and me feel pretty good to have that kind of thing happen to us after nine years of marriage. (To be fair, that particular waitress, though attentive and friendly, was a bit dingy. She forgot to bring dressing with my salad, brought Cathy the wrong dessert—which we kept anyway and enjoyed immensely—and then she actually gave us someone else's receipt and credit card. Good thing we're honest!)

As I was giving thanks for our meal before we started our salads, I also thanked God for nine great years. After I got done praying, Cathy remarked that she thought for a second that I was going to pray for God to give us "nine more!" hehe okay that's not QUITE as many as I had in mind!

Then we went to see Expelled, the new Ben Stein movie which is sort of documentary-ish, and we really liked it. We were still talking about it when we got to my mom's house to pick up Hannah. There wasn't too much in it that I haven't been at least vaguely aware of for some time (except the actual evidence that scientists and journalists that mention Intelligent Design as an alternative to the Theory of Evolution have been severely punished by the establishment) but I think Cathy learned a thing or two. And actually, although I was already aware of the issues, they were presented in such a way that I was able to kind of connect and ground some things that had been floating around free in my head for a while. Check my "Christian Life" blog tomorrow for some commentary inspired by the movie and the whole evolution vs. creation debate.

The reason we couldn't go out tonight, our actual anniversary and a Friday night, was that Cathy and Mikey are going on the Cub Scouts "Mom & Me" campout tomorrow. So Cathy needs all the rest she can get! I'll try to remember to send the camera with her and see if she can get some good pictures. So all day Saturday and then Sunday morning it's just me & Hannah! Yay! Daddy time!!!!