Valentine Mickeys, Winter Rock, Cub Scouts, Clouds, and March Elmos

A lot of fun stuff has been going on, but I just hate to blog about it until I've had time to upload the pictures! Here's the rundown on the Jones family since Valentine's Day...

Valentine's Day fell on a Sunday this year, but Cathy and I went out on Saturday. We went to see a movie called Valentine's Day and then we went to Macaroni Grill and had some dinner. We really enjoyed each other's company; it was a fun night.

The reason we went out the night before is that we had something special planned for the kids on Valentine's Day:



Disney Live! Rockin' Road Show! (Seriously, that's the name... I'm not making it up!) It was so much fun... we had to spring for the cheapest seats, way up in the rafters, but as it turned out, the cheap seats are actually box seats! We spent part of the time actually sitting on barstools, with as much room as we wanted. The action was a long way away, but I brought some binoculars so we could have a closer look if we wanted to. Hannah especially loved seeing Cinderella (even though she hasn't seen the movie yet) and she bounced with Tigger until way after Tigger stopped bouncing! And, of course, Mickey Mouse was the star of the show! Hannah got a cute new purse with a Minnie Mouse bow on it as a souvenir. Here's a bunch of (kind of blurry) pictures we took at the show!

At Mikey's Cub Scout pack's annual Blue & Gold Banquet, Mikey (with a few of his denmates) received his Webelos rank. Congratulations, Mikey! He worked hard for this one!

Winter Jam was on the 25th. It was at the huge BOK Center this year; in previous years it's been at the much smaller Mabee Center and it's been packed to overflowing and turning people away. BOK Center was full but not cram-packed, so that was good. Third Day was the big headliner this year, and Newsong was there as always, but the newly-Taited Newsboys were also on the roster, as well as Fireflight, Tenth Avenue North, and a couple of other bands. Mikey was really pumped about Third Day, but Cathy and I have never been fans. After seeing the show, though, Cathy was starting to turn into a fan! There were some difficulties with the sound system, and Third Day almost didn't get to play at all; Mac Powell even came out and played a song with just himself on acoustic guitar! But finally they got the sound working right again, and Third Day played a full set, and they sounded great. Mikey loved it! Newsboys actually put on a better show than when we saw them a few months ago; I don't know if it was the bigger crowd or the fact that they've been performing with Michael Tait on lead vox for a while now, but it was incredible. Hannah was at Meme's house, so she wasn't there, but the three of us had a terrific time at the show.

Here are the (also a little blurry) pictures of Winter Jam!

Last weekend we went out to the Baby Fest and Family Expo, which we generally go to every year; most of it is kind of like a trade show for stuff people think parents might want to buy, but they always have Jupiter Jumps and other blowups for the kids to play on, and my friend James is usually there making balloon creations. Our friend Danny Cahill spoke, too, but we couldn't make it out in time to hear him. Hannah also got to meet Elmo, Winnie the Pooh, a lion, a teddy bear, and a dalmation. Admission is free, so it was a fun thing to do on a Saturday afternoon! Here are all of the pictures we took, and here's one that illustrates just how much fun Mikey was having, sliding on one of the blow-ups:



On a more meteorological note, I ride the city bus to work every day, which means that I take lots of walks through our neighborhood. Here are some pictures of the beautiful clouds at sunset a few days ago. You just don't always notice that kind of thing when you're doing 40 miles per hour through town in traffic!

February Catchup

A couple of important things have happened recently, and they've made it to our Flickr account but haven't made it to this blog yet. So here goes!

Last Saturday was Pinewood Derby for Mikey's Cub Scout pack, Pack 137. Saturday morning Papaw Jones and I took Mikey to Home Depot to the Kids Workshop to build a car display stand... it's maddeningly close to being just the right size to display a Pinewood Derby car! We thought it would be perfect, but it's a little bit too low for comfort. Still works though, so not a total bust!

At Pack 137 we're not particularly competitive at Pinewood Derby; they run a couple of races for each den so the boys get to race their friends, then later you can sign up for family-built car races or to race kids in other dens. Mikey's car wasn't the fastest one, but it wasn't the slowest either! He had a great time taking "instant replay" video with his video camera that Papaw Angel got him for Christmas the year before last. Meme and Papaw Jones were there too, to cheer him on and eat some pizza. Enjoy the few pictures below, or visit this page for the whole batch.

        

Back up to New Years Weekend... a few pictures from our great trip home to Shreveport (mostly Mikey and/or Hannah in Grandpa's back yard) are up on this page. Here's one of them:

Weird Weather

Last Friday we closed the office in anticipation of the huge snow and ice storm that was being forecast. It was supposed to start snowing Thursday morning and not stop until late Friday, or maybe even Saturday. Well, it finally started snowing midday Friday, after a lot of rain and some ice. Here's the view I saw from my front porch Friday evening... isn't it pretty?

Saturday I took a walk to get some pictures of what was going on. You can see the whole set here, but I've included a small sample below. You'll notice that there was a lot of beauty to see, and you can also see in one picture that the ice on the tree limbs was as big around as my finger. I measured almost 5½" of snow on a picnic table in my back yard, and the ice must have been about ¼" under that. Needless to say, we stayed home, although as you can see from the pictures, the roads were basically clear by Saturday afternoon. We also had a couple of pretty mean icicles in the backyard... longer than my yardstick!

Here's my favorite picture of the day for irony:


I think tryouts may be postponed.

Needless to say, two 5+ inch snowstorms in less than a month (see this post for more about the snowstorm a month earlier) is odd weather for Tulsa. We've also had several extremely foggy days. Today was one of them. Look what I found when I got downtown for work!

This morning:

Similar pictures in clear conditions:

If you want to see the whole foggy batch, look for it right here.

Less snot - more ice

Monday morning I stayed home from work to take Hannah to the doctor... she had been congested and coughing since the Wednesday or Thursday before, and because she would cough and cry during the night, nobody in the house was getting very much sleep. Turns out she just had some congestion, and swollen tonsils probably irritated by the coughing and making it worse. We've known for a long time that her air passages are a little narrow, so every bit counts for her. :) They gave us a prescription for some medicine, and she's feeling much better... but now Cathy spent so much time sleep-deprived that she's feeling sick! Everybody is slowly getting better, although there is still quite a bit of coughing happening around here.

Tonight in Tulsa is literally the calm before the storm. Tomorrow we are expected to start getting rain, then freezing rain, then sleet, then maybe a little snow by Friday morning. Everybody is thinking about the horrible ice storm we had in 2007; depending on which weather forecast you watch, this is either expected to be as bad as that one, or not really quite as bad. The power company is much better prepared this time; they've been cutting tree limbs more regularly since then, and they have already called in extra help from nearby unaffected areas, so if people start to lose power, PSO should be able to get it back up much more quickly than they did then. We'll see what happens; my main concern in these kinds of situations is to make sure we keep warm if the power goes out. Luckily for us, our heater runs on natural gas... WOO-HOO! But our blower is electric... D'OH!! So when the power goes out, we don't have heat in the house. Worst case scenario, we have relatives with fireplaces and we'll go over to one of their houses until the power is back up.

Fox 23 is predicting that we'll wind up with 2"-4" of snow/sleet on top of .25" of ice before it's over with. It will be below freezing all weekend, and dip back above 32 by about Sunday afternoon. Low of nine degrees Saturday evening! Should be exciting! :)

Yuv

Last night we were headed into church. I had taken Hannah out of her car seat and was carrying her in my right arm. She was asking me where her binky was, and I was telling her I didn't have it. "I checked all my pockets twice, and I don't have it!" I said. (Turns out I was wrong... I found it this morning in a pocket I had forgotten to check!) So I was walking across the parking lot with her, and she turned her head and kissed my shoulder, and she said, "I yuv you, Daddy!"

There are some moments in parenting that make it all worthwhile. :)

The Jones Flood of 2010

I was at my Mom and Dad's house last Sunday, installing a printer driver on her computer, when the call came. Cathy had gone to the store, leaving me and Mikey and Hannah over at Mom & Dad's so I could fix up her computer, and she had just gotten home. "Come home!" she said, and I could hear the stress in her voice. "There's a flood in the garage, and water is spraying everywhere!"

Cathy has been known, from time to time, to overreact to water in the garage; one time the "flood" she reported wasn't enough water to quench a grown-up's thirst on a hot day. But I could tell she was totally freaking out this time, so I hurried as quickly as I could. Turns out, her stress was justified. When I got there I looked through the window into the garage to see a vertical slot in the wall above the clothes washer, and water was indeed spraying out of it at an alarming rate. There was so much water it was running down the driveway, freezing in place and making the driveway even more treacherous than it already was! After the snow on Christmas Eve, our time above freezing had been limited, so one of the pipes that supplied water to the laundry had frozen and broken. The water was shooting out of it with so much force that it had drilled a hole in the sheet rock and it actually was spraying out into the garage.

In our nine years of living in this house, our garage has only flooded one time before. A year or so ago, it rained and rained for several weeks straight, and the water table was so high that we got some water in the garage. That was NOTHING compared to this. We shut off the water at the street (Dad had come with me) and surveyed the damage. Our garage is a good inch lower than the driveway, so you can imagine if the water was draining off onto the driveway... it was pretty deep! When I stepped down into it wearing my boots, it covered the toes. I grabbed my snow shovel, which was right near the side door of the garage, and started shoveling out water; I figured it was the quickest way to get a bunch of water out of there. It actually worked fairly well; I got most of the water out in oh, maybe an hour or so.

I had learned some things in that last flood, and the main something I had learned was this: wet cardboard must be gotten rid of as immediately as possible. This is because cardboard, left wet on concrete for a week or so, becomes very slimy and disgusting, and anything that is inside that cardboard mildews and has to be thrown away. So once I had the water under control, I started trying to get things out of the wet boxes and get them out of the garage. Knowing that pipes were likely breaking all over town, I called a friend of ours who is a contractor, remodeling houses for a big part of his livelihood. I needed to get the pipe fixed as soon as possible... I couldn't afford to wait until Tuesday or Wednesday for a plumber while my family lived in a house with no water!

Dwayne answered the phone with a groggy voice. He had spent the weekend on Guard duty, and he had been taking a nap. I told him basically what was going on, and he came over right away. Long story short, he wasn't able to fix the problem that day (although he tried) because he didn't have the part he needed, but when the supply store opened the next day, he went out and got the part he needed, and we were fine before noon on Monday. It's awesome to have friends who are so competent at what they do, and so willing to help out a friend in dire straits! He is definitely getting a meal out with us in the near future!

The one thing that really differentiated this flood from the last one was that this was clean water, not muddy rainwater that had seeped in from outside. Most of our stuff was also already up off the ground from that former episode, too, so although I threw out a lot of cardboard and set a lot of stuff out to dry, not very much of any consequence got thrown away (in fact, a lot of stuff that I did throw away wasn't as much water-damaged as just needed to go anyway). It was kind of like spring cleaning in January! And I did find some old pictures from several different eras of my life, Cathy's life, and our life together, and I got to take inventory of all the CDs full of pictures that were out there. I found some pictures from the wedding that originally brought me, Kevin and Candi (and Littlefoot) to Tulsa, and some even older pictures of me from high school. I found a Goodbye card that my youth group gave me when I was leaving Shreveport to go to college at ORU. I found a report Cathy wrote on marriage for a class when she was about 17 (VERY interesting reading!) and a bunch of bubble-gum cards with pictures from Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and Bogus Journey. It was fun to experience and share some of those things again!

One week later, there are still some things out there that are damp. Some of the cardboard is still outside; the garbage collection will only take so much at once. But things are basically back to normal; the garage is much clearer; and I'm committed, once it warms up, to doing a real spring cleaning. This is a great excuse to simplify and remove some of the junk from our life!

New Year's in Shreveport

Wow... I feel pretty rested today. It's Friday, and I've just recovered from our trip to Shreveport last weekend! Too much fun all at once, I guess!

New Year's Day the office where I work is always closed, so since it was Friday we decided to take a day of vacation and make a 4-day weekend out of it. So we loaded up in the car and headed down to Shreveport! My Grandpa, Uncle and Aunt live there, and we keep trying to find chances to go visit. They've only got a chance to see Hannah once, about a year ago, so we knew she wouldn't probably even remember them. Gotta get the kids exposed to the Fam, right?

Well, she certainly exposed us to something. Tulsa to Shreveport is about a 6-hour drive if you don't stop, but we generally stop around Paris, Texas (which is roughly 3 hours from either end of the trip) for a break and usually a meal at McD's or somewhere. We stopped to eat a clown-burger and get some Happy Meals with talking chipmunks in them, got a potty break/diaper change, let the kids play for a few, then headed on out. Well, the late lunch plus the long car ride plus the afternoon sun flashing through the bare tree trunks was apparently too much for poor Hannah... about an hour or so after we left Paris TX, she gave us her lunch back.

So we were in a dilemna... two hours from our destination and a car seat full of something you don't really want to smell for two hours! We stopped at the first gas station we saw, and while Cathy took Hannah into the bathroom and changed her clothes and rinsed the fouled ones out in the sink, I stood there in the parking lot with some paper towels and tried to get as much of the stuff out of the car seat as I could. Then we sat Hannah on a blanket we were willing to sacrifice for the evening and drove to the closest Dollar General, where we bought a huge bottle of their generic version of Febreze, took the baby out of the seat, and sprayed it down, then sat her back down on the blanket again. Miraculously, although everything was still damp, our field cleaning job did the trick well enough that we smelled very little on the rest of the trip. Hannah was never sick after that, and none of the rest of us had any queasiness, so we figure it was motion sickness (as opposed to a virus or food poisoning). Even so, I'll bet it's a while before Cathy wants to stop at that McD's again!

We had a terrific time on the weekend. Grandpa's great; he gets tired easily, still gets his bouts of upset stomach, and keeps the house unbelievably hot in winter (the thermometer on the thermostat said 85 degrees one time that I checked!), but we love him so much. My Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Elaine hung out with us for a big part of the weekend, too, and they're always fun. This trip they took us to the Norton Art Gallery, which I've always heard about but never remember visiting. Grandpa loves to go out to eat, so we went out to Cracker Barrel (sort of a favorite for our family when we're on trips) and one of Grandpa's favorite places, which Uncle Jimmy calls "The Green Weenie". We missed my cousin Derick again this time; he was unavailable this time and last for different reasons, but I'm sure we'll get to see him again eventually!

We got to visit with some old friends of mine this time... we went over to Tom & Pam's house for some ferocious Wii playing with them and their two boys (Mikey especially liked the Monster Truck racing game they have, in which you basically crush everything you can see until you get tired of crushing stuff). This time we also made it out to a service at my church there, Word of Life Center, and ran into several people... Chad Giddens, Glen Ware, even Tom's sister Lisa (who I didn't recognize at first because she was like 16 the last time I saw her, and that was a LONG time ago!) We saw Chad's wife Dixie, up on stage during the music portion of the service, but we didn't get to talk to her, or Pastor Sam and Becky Carr either, although Dixie told me later on Facebook that she and Becky had spotted us from the stage and Becky told her an embarrassing story about me from when I was a teenager. :)

It was a great weekend; no puking occurred on the way home (although we did eat at Taco Bell and not McD's!) and we didn't even see any of the snow until after we got off the Indian Nations Turnpike. We're hoping to make this at least a twice-yearly trip for us instead of just this annual thing we seem to have fallen into, so it won't be long before we do it again!