We've been having a lot of fun with them here, and I'm glad that I'll be going to CO within a week after they leave to help with my Aidan withdrawals, hee hee...
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Easter Pics
Chaelomen, MJ, Frik, Sarah and I got the kiddos pics taken on Saturday. I just thought I'd share my favorites!
Monday, March 17, 2008
What we learn from 4 years of college...
I was editing Sarah's research paper and found this sentence to be particulary excellent:
"The when there is a low marriage rate in general it shows that marriage is not as encouraged in that group so, consequently the people who do decided to marry would do so older because there is less pressure from the community surrounding them."
Yeah. Made sense to me.
Saturday, March 15, 2008
There Are 10 Kinds Of People In This World…
Infinitely cooler than the clip I posted earlier:
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcDshWmhF4A]
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcDshWmhF4A]
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Don't Swear at the Dishwasher...
So I typically don't swear. The words will come into my mind from time to time when I'm frustrated, but they usually stop there and don't escape my mouth. However, a couple times in the past week or so, I've let my swear shield down. The stupid thing is that it's always been when i'm alone so it's not like it's any different from having just said it in my head.
Part 2 of my story starts a couple days ago when the dishwasher started leaving an annoying film on all the dishes. I was frustrated, but didn't swear. Well today, while I was home alone of course, I said "Damn Dishwasher" to it's face. I know. It was terribly vulgar.
I told frik he'd have to take a look at it when he got home. Well... he did... and in the process of pulling it out to see if it was having problems draining, the dishwasher decided to retaliate against me. The water input hose slipped off and started spraying HOT water all over the kitchen. 2 things you need to know about our house is that it has incredible water pressure and that the water heater does it's job very effectively. I started freaking out asking Erik where the shut off was (down in the crawl space, of course) and he started freaking out trying to grab the hot hose from beneath the counter so that he could aim it somewhere besides our faces.
Finally he got the hose and started pointing it at the back door (which was still closed) and yelled at me to open it, which I did, then took the hose and pointed it out the door while he went and shut off the water. And thus we avoided flooding our house beyond the kitchen.
The best part is that Duke thinks this whole thing is a game, which we didn't realize until after the 30 seconds or so of panic, when I saw him jumping around in circles, wagging his tail stump, and trying to find his ball.
Erik told me I'm not allowed to swear at our appliances anymore.
Monday, March 10, 2008
What a great find!
One and a half blog posts in a row :-0I just stumbled across an awesome new, really old, track from Collective Soul(If you're not a fan you can leave now). This song, Beautiful World, was originally released on the Hints Allegations and Things Left Unsaid album by Rising Storm Records. Shortly thereafter CS signed a record deal with Atlantic who re-released the album--minus this track! WTH!? Presumably the music gods at Atlantic didn't think the song "had the right sound" or some asinine thing like that. Thanks guys >:( I love being marketed to.Evil record companies aside, I've been listening to it on a loop for an hour or two now and I REALLY like it. It's almost like the Collective Soul from 2007 traveled back in time to record it. Ever since CS's contract with Atlantic ended in 2001 their new stuff has been more varied than the stuff they released under contract, and this song sounds a LOT like some of their new stuff. All this time I had been thinking that their sound was evolving as they got old, but I think a more accurate observation would be that Atlantic was restricting their creative freedom.
Anyway, now that I've geeked out on Collective Soul you can all carry on with your day.
Monday, March 3, 2008
Funny you should ask...
In other news, Frik has posted a new blog entry (gasp!) You should all check it out :)
Oh, and cops are jerks. (no offense, Berserk) We found out the other day that Frik's phone is either malfunctioning or has a serious design flaw. If you press any combination of 9's and 1's, even while the key lock is on, it will dial 911. So he was in class the other day and called 911 in his pocket. They called him back but he didn't answer because he was in class. So they left a message saying that they were sending someone out. He calls me at home when he gets the message to see if any cops came by, and they hadn't. We were trying to figure out where they would coming too, though, and couldn't tell if it'd be somewhere on campus or our house or my parent's house in CO, since that's the address the cell phone company has.
Well... about a half hour later, I'm feeding the baby and there's a knock at the door. I go to the door and see one of provo's finest waiting to see what sort of emergency we are experiencing. He asks me if Erik is here, I said no, that he's in class, but that he called and said that he got a message saying that someone would be coming by. I was apologetic and respectful and told him that we didn't know what we were supposed to have done.
He was less respectful, though. He told me that we needed to call Erik, so I went to get my cell phone to call him. I told the officer that Erik's phone was acting up and that the call might not go through (his phone hasn't been ringing when people call, either). The officer scolded me, saying that it would have saved him the trouble of coming out there if Erik had called back when he got the message. He said that if Erik's phone was going to keep acting up, they were going to have to keep coming to our house. He also kept referencing the last time they came out in December (they haven't been to our house since we moved in). finally, when I was able to get ahold of Erik, he started mumbling about how we need to get his phone fixed and walked away.
Now, it's true that we do need to correct the problem with Erik's phone. I told the officer that we were looking at replacing it as soon as we found this problem. If I had known it would call 911 whenever it felt like it, we would have replaced it long ago. He treated me like I was intentionally making him run all over the city for no reason, and while I can appreciate that it's frustrating to show up somewhere that you're not needed, I wish he had been at least a little bit respectful of me and the fact that I did not intend to make him drive all the way to... central provo... about 10 blocks away from the police station.
Anyway, he left me frazzled and I cried b/c I felt like some kind of criminal based on how he was treating me. And then I got over it and decided that the image that sesame street and mr. rogers paints of police officers is false.
They are good and important, but their job is more of punishing bad people than helping good people.
NOBODY'S GONNA RAIN ON MY PARADE!!!
Saturday, March 1, 2008
We Now Resume Our Regularly Scheduled Blogging
My blog is back and chances are I won't be blogging any more often than I used to. I think of stuff to blog all the time, but when I sit down to post, I find I have absolutely nothing to say. Like right now for instance... I suppose I should pretend to bring everyone up to date.
Since my last post:
We are no longer living out of boxes. YAY! In fact, just the other day I cleared out and reorganized the storage under the stairs. The stuff that previously filled the entire storage space, is now taking up only a small fraction of that. The rest of this newly discovered space is going to start filling up with canned food and other things which we never had space for before. In addition to that, a few weeks ago when the O's were in town for the baby blessing, we finally got the ceiling fans installed. It was about twenty times more work than I was expecting but it was well worth it. The fans look great and of course it's nice to have them for all the fanning-type stuff they do. We also replaced a lot of the lighting fixtures, found a place for everything, and just generally made our house into a home. There are a few things left to do around the house, like finish painting, but I don't know when we'll get around to that, and I don't much care. The house, as it stands now, is awesome. It actually feels more like home than our first apartment did, which is saying a LOT since our first apartment was... well.. our first apartment. If it weren't for Duke we'd probably still be there. Strange how life has a way of kicking you out of your comfort zone. In my experience it's always been for the better so I have nothing to complain about.
Another piece of old news; the promotion I posted about almost a year ago--I got it. Not that time around but on my next time applying. I don't enjoy my job as much as I used to, but that has nothing to do with the promotion and everything to do with the degradation of the work environment due mostly to the gross mismanagement of anything and everything at the hands of our MBA-toting overlords. I feel a Dilbert strip is needed here to fully illustrate my point:
On the other hand, they just lined our pockets with big fat bonuses and respectable raises, so the plans for a coup d’état have been placed on hold...for the time being.
Alice is big news too. HUGE news actually. She's easily the awesome'nest piece of baby that I ever saw. I love her to tiny little pieces (which isn't hard since shes made of tiny little pieces). Carolyn being at home is really great too. We definitely miss having the extra paycheck. Unfortunately, living on my income alone is something that we're not quite prepared to do. But, if everything goes as planned, we should be in a position to do just that in a few months. We've been budgeting our money pretty strictly without killing ourselves over it, and I think it's been a raging success. And by that I mean we've managed to cut our monthly spending by well over a thousand dollars. Which wasn't too hard when you consider the way we were throwing money around before that. But back on topic; Having Carolyn at home is really great. The house is cleaned, the baby is loved, food is cooked, It's just a really nice arrangement.
Working full-time and going to school full time is really starting to wear me down. I think my survival instincts have kicked in at this point and neither my work nor my studies are getting the attention they deserve. I haven't decided what to do about that yet. I think the one thing I have decided is that I will not be taking as many classes in the future. There's a point where you've worked so consistently, for so long, that you start to loose your sanity and your perception of time looses all definition. I have long since passed that point, and I am learning some things about myself in the process. I don't handle stress well, but I also don't handle stress badly. Instead, I just don't handle stress. When I get stressed, I somehow subconsciously prioritize everything that's stressing me out, and then I just drop everything that doesn't fit my schedule. sometimes important stuff gets bumped off my list, but it doesn't matter because I've prepared myself for those consequences and I take it all in stride. That's not to say I don't get stressed or that it doesn't wear me down, but that is the way that I deal with it. I think I'd loose my mind if I didn't.
It's ridiculously late now. I'll post again in a few months ;) Maybe I'll have managed to regain some of my sanity by then.
Since my last post:
We are no longer living out of boxes. YAY! In fact, just the other day I cleared out and reorganized the storage under the stairs. The stuff that previously filled the entire storage space, is now taking up only a small fraction of that. The rest of this newly discovered space is going to start filling up with canned food and other things which we never had space for before. In addition to that, a few weeks ago when the O's were in town for the baby blessing, we finally got the ceiling fans installed. It was about twenty times more work than I was expecting but it was well worth it. The fans look great and of course it's nice to have them for all the fanning-type stuff they do. We also replaced a lot of the lighting fixtures, found a place for everything, and just generally made our house into a home. There are a few things left to do around the house, like finish painting, but I don't know when we'll get around to that, and I don't much care. The house, as it stands now, is awesome. It actually feels more like home than our first apartment did, which is saying a LOT since our first apartment was... well.. our first apartment. If it weren't for Duke we'd probably still be there. Strange how life has a way of kicking you out of your comfort zone. In my experience it's always been for the better so I have nothing to complain about.
Another piece of old news; the promotion I posted about almost a year ago--I got it. Not that time around but on my next time applying. I don't enjoy my job as much as I used to, but that has nothing to do with the promotion and everything to do with the degradation of the work environment due mostly to the gross mismanagement of anything and everything at the hands of our MBA-toting overlords. I feel a Dilbert strip is needed here to fully illustrate my point:
On the other hand, they just lined our pockets with big fat bonuses and respectable raises, so the plans for a coup d’état have been placed on hold...for the time being.
Alice is big news too. HUGE news actually. She's easily the awesome'nest piece of baby that I ever saw. I love her to tiny little pieces (which isn't hard since shes made of tiny little pieces). Carolyn being at home is really great too. We definitely miss having the extra paycheck. Unfortunately, living on my income alone is something that we're not quite prepared to do. But, if everything goes as planned, we should be in a position to do just that in a few months. We've been budgeting our money pretty strictly without killing ourselves over it, and I think it's been a raging success. And by that I mean we've managed to cut our monthly spending by well over a thousand dollars. Which wasn't too hard when you consider the way we were throwing money around before that. But back on topic; Having Carolyn at home is really great. The house is cleaned, the baby is loved, food is cooked, It's just a really nice arrangement.
Working full-time and going to school full time is really starting to wear me down. I think my survival instincts have kicked in at this point and neither my work nor my studies are getting the attention they deserve. I haven't decided what to do about that yet. I think the one thing I have decided is that I will not be taking as many classes in the future. There's a point where you've worked so consistently, for so long, that you start to loose your sanity and your perception of time looses all definition. I have long since passed that point, and I am learning some things about myself in the process. I don't handle stress well, but I also don't handle stress badly. Instead, I just don't handle stress. When I get stressed, I somehow subconsciously prioritize everything that's stressing me out, and then I just drop everything that doesn't fit my schedule. sometimes important stuff gets bumped off my list, but it doesn't matter because I've prepared myself for those consequences and I take it all in stride. That's not to say I don't get stressed or that it doesn't wear me down, but that is the way that I deal with it. I think I'd loose my mind if I didn't.
It's ridiculously late now. I'll post again in a few months ;) Maybe I'll have managed to regain some of my sanity by then.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)