life on the wand

Friday night was kind of crazy. We had kids over for a while in the evening and I didn't get to bed until well after midnight. John (due home from Germany) called from Atlanta saying his flight was delayed due to weather. Turns out they (the mission group he was traveling with) finally got back to Oklahoma City about 11 PM. I expected John and his friends to arrive at our house about 0230. Ben and Lynne had called earlier in the day and announced they were coming for the weekend from New Orleans since Ben had a three-day weekend. Based on when they called I expected a 0500 or later arrival. Well, about 0230 we got a call from John. He and the two people he was riding with were broken down north of Denton and needed rescuing. Philip and I got a bunch of tools and drove up there, arriving about 0330. The serpentine belt had come off but seemed to be in pretty good shape, so we worked with flashlights in the pouring rain and managed to get the belt back on. We ran the engine for a couple of minutes and everything seemed okay so we headed back home, arriving without further incident about 0500. I went to bed again and woke up at 0730. I learned that Lynne and Ben had arrived about an hour earlier. I tried going back to bed but couldn't sleep and so I started on my weekend project: Ethernet!!
0 comments

Two of the fence posts in the back yard had broken (rotted) and needed to be replaced. Philip and I started digging out the old posts on Thursday after I got home from work. Because of our experience of digging out the post "stump" from when the fence section blew over in a windstorm several months ago we decided to rig up a tripod and used a come-along to winch the concreted post bases out of the ground.

We got one of the posts out of the ground before dark but only had the second one loose by dark. On Friday Ed helped Philip during the day and they got the second post stump out. Last night I set the two posts and this morning/afternoon put the fence sections back together.

After the fence job was complete Philip and my nephew David helped me put an awning up on our back patio.

This took several more hours of effort, but by 6:30 we were sitting under a nice motorized remote-controlled awning.

0 comments

Last Sunday we were driving on Main Street in Lewisville and heard a "thunk" sound as something hit the van. It was loud enough that I looked to the right front corner of the van expecting to see feathers flying up. Nothing. Hmm. When we arrived at Wal-Mart Joyce got out and exclaimed "Come see what hit the van!" Incredible! Who'd ever have thought this possible! I wonder what the odds were that the can would hit exactly where it did and stick.


We had just bought Philip and Cara inexpensive digital cameras from the clearance rack at Sears so we were able to record this. Too bad Philip hadn't set the date on his camera yet. It was actually June 17, 2007.
0 comments

My mom's finger slipped a line in the address book as she was writing my address and ended up with my uncle's ZIP code on my Texas address. It looks like it was mailed from Imperial CA on 5/30/07 and it arrived at my house today. That is pretty long for Priority Mail. But, it got here. Looking at the marks on the package, I wonder if they found the correct ZIP, wrote it on the package, put it back in the mail stream, and then when it ended up back in Maine a second time they realized that the sorting machines were picking up the barcode on the meter marking and then they crossed it out with a permanent marker and on the third attempt it made it to Texas. That is my suspicion, anyway.
0 comments

It was warm today. Philip and I worked on trimming the bushes, trimming the grass, and cleaning up the leftover bits. Mostly I did the trimming and he did the cleaning, but we swapped a little bit. I think the cleaning was not done with much attention to detail, but maybe well enough to not be a disgrace to the neighborhood. The bushes in the front yard look better, though the finger I got caught in the hedge trimmer looks worse :-(
0 comments

Well, one thing Joyce found to do was "remodel" John's bedroom. She pulled all the stuff out, painted the walls, removed the carpeting and baseboards, and then needed help putting down a new wood floor. We decided to try to get the floor done on Thursday after I got home from work so it would be ready to move Philip into when he got back from camp on Friday. Here are some of the pictures of us working on the floor.


We worked until about 3 AM and got the floor down and the baseboard back on, but we still need to caulk the baseboard, touch up some of the paint, and put the outlet covers and such back on.

3 comments

Philip and Cara left for a church youth camp today about 2 PM. I've been importing and sorting pictures on my computer and Joyce took a nap. Now what? A whole week without kids or school? What will we do!
0 comments

Well, not the first time I have ever run 5K, nor the first time I have ever been timed in a run, but the first time I have run a timed race for fun! Highland Village has a festival each year called the Highland Village Days,
Red, White & Blue Festival. This is the first year they added a run to the festival. I read about it last night in the paper and decided if I woke up in time this morning I would go and see what it was all about. I went for a run yesterday morning and could barely complete 2.8 miles in 30 minutes, so I didn't have much hope I would do the 3.1 mile run in less than 30 minutes but that was my goal. There were about 220 runners and I have no idea where in the bunch I came in, though it must have been somewhere in the last half. They haven't published any times and only announced the time for the fastest male (18:16) and female (20:55), both runners were on the local high school cross country team. They said the course was pretty tough, but since this is my first it was hard for me to judge. There were a lot of fairly steep hills, and most of the people I passed were walking up those hills. My overall time was about 27:45, which was much better than I expected. One of the reasons I did as well as I did was because of young runners that were very inspiring!

These guys were actually running the 1K fun run, but there were some not much older that ran the whole 5K faster than I did.
0 comments

While recycling all the free local newspapers that are constantly provided unsolicited to our house, we noticed that the Flower Mound community choir called "Voices of Flower Mound" were giving a concert at Parker Square this evening. With the kids off at a church youth event Joyce and I were alone, so we decided to go to the concert and investigate Parker Square. The weather was pleasant enough, but we didn't think about all the rain we have been having so the blanket we took to sit on didn't protect us very well from the damp ground. We recognized some of the songs, enjoyed most, and observed that the ratio of female to male singers was something like 5 to 1. There are no auditions to sing with this volunteer group, so if you are interested in singing you should join them!
1 comments