Our Frisbie friends are moving. So I have been collecting boxes from our basement to give them to help them pack up. We will miss them and hope they find lots of friends in their new city.
FYI boil order is still on, we had to go buy water at the store.**
*I am writing this after the fact as though it is current, and pre-dating my post. As it is my site, I reserve the right to do so.
**How embarassing
We were planning on doing our Christmas shopping tomorrow, but then we looked at the weather forecast and decided that today would be much better for the trip. So we went to town**. We got almost all the shopping done, and I think we even came in under our self-imposed budget. Yay us! The bad weather was supposed to start this evening and wouldn’t you know it, just as we pulled onto our street the sprinkle drops began. We made it home before it got bad.
From this trip we realized that shopping with a list is good***, shopping 2-3 weeks ahead of schedule you will more than likely find what you are looking for, and going on a Monday or Tuesday will provide less crowded stores, and much more courteous fellow shoppers.
*I am writing this after the fact as though it is current, and pre-dating my post. As it is my site, I reserve the right to do so.
**Springfield
***Not just the names, but what you want to get each person too
Monday I went to the store for some milk. I love milk, however I do not love the price… That is a whole different topic that I am keeping far from my post. The odd thing is that I only purchased one gallon of milk, but the receipt shows 2 items sold. Here is a picture of the receipt.
I just thought this was funny.
While Jacob was at band rehearsal I did some grocery shopping. When I was exiting the store a stranger came up to me and asked if he could ask me “a silly question.” I asked if it would cost money, he said it would not, and it would “only take two minutes.” So, I thought to myself, “I could go for a silly question, it has been a while since I have heard a good silly question.” So I told him he could ask.
He started with, “Where are you from?”
Me: (thinking- this is not silly) Here in town
Stranger: Are you really from here or did you move here from another place? (indicating he was doing a survey for the local university)
Me: I moved here
Stranger: Me too, I am from California. Where are you from originally?
Me: I was born in Iowa
Stranger: Well I am here with 1400 other people trying to collect points towards a scholarship fund, and there is a contest to see who can collect the most points talking to people. This scholarship will pay for school and beer. Do you drink?
Me: No
Stranger: Then it is for books and tuition. Do you ever read magazines?
Me: Sometimes
Stranger: (handing me a card with magazine names on it) Do you ever read cosmo?
Me: No
Stranger: (takes back card and hands me a card with different magazines titles and explains) Each magazine subscription is worth different points. If you were to get a post card in the mail, what would you prefer? Tropical, funny, romantic or exotic?
Me: Funny.
Stranger: That would be me in my boxers.
Me: Laughed (very abruptly, I may have hurt his ego…)
Stranger: That was supposed to be a joke. Are there any two that you are interested in?
Me: (so he was trying to get money…) There is only one I would be interested in.
Stranger: Ask me how much it would cost.
Me: No thanks, I can read it for free at my in-laws’ house.
Stranger: There are 1400 of us out here and if you buy a subscription, you can tell them*
Me: (*interrupting him) That I have already donated to the “beer fund”?
Stranger: (Laughed) Never heard that answer before. Would you be able to buy a gift subscription to go to a homeless shelter?
Me: I don’t think so.
Stranger: Just go away.
Me: (walked away, and drove home)
**I stopped quoting the conversation because he used lots of profanity, and I really do not care for that. Which, while I do not approve, had he only used one word in a very logical point in the conversation, I may have considered buying the one subscription, but the words kept slipping, and I decided secondhand reading is good enough for me. Besides, by the time he got around to the real point, he had taken about four minutes of my time. And, I still didn’t get a good silly question out of my “two” minutes!
No, there is too much; let me just give you the pictures. These are signs found in my town this week….
& 
They say that money can’t buy happiness, and money can’t buy love.
What money CAN buy is….a dishwasher.
And when two people who both hate doing dishes fall in love and get married, that is money well spent on making those two people happier and helping them remember how much they love each other.
So money may not be able to buy happiness, but it can sure help.
We have been in the middle of a move across town. So while I have been packing I have been slacking on this blog site (if only that were the only area in my life). Now that the packing is done perhaps I can keep myself on track with this. We’ll just have to see about that, considering we still have to UNpack.
I have some slide shows I need to show-off, however my computer seems to shut off when I try to render video to a different format now.
More videos to come as soon as possible, but here are some pictures.
Mallory’s Birthday Party:
Every time I turned around this is what I found:
The first slide show is from May, my niece’s (Lydia) birthday at the zoo. For some reason my video editing software hates me and all I could accomplish to add at this time is this video and one of Gavyn playing in the water at the zoo, and an orange baby.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wJrN9rEdFE[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSCZdnJFM6A[/youtube]
The next day we went to Lockridge, Iowa to see my Uncle Shannon and his wife Vy:
Noah and his parents Martin and Ashley
Kite Flying Fun with Dan (and Jacob too):
This is really turkey for brains – ground turkey that is. Jacob said it came out of the package that way.
Dave Wetmore was the Grand Marshall for the Macomb Heritage Days Parade! There were two bagpipe bands.
This is “not someone playing with” my camera on 4 July 2007:
cousins 
Both of RondaJo’s girls seem to love doing this:
Water time:
The girls made it look so fun, Matt had to give it a try:
Fireworks:
Imagine going on a Youth Conference to serve food, ten years after you graduate high school. Upon arriving and seeing the youth get on the buses, you discover that one of the bus drivers is none other than your high school principal. That is right folks, Bob Bowen is a bus driver for Burlington Trailways:
The first day of this conference was my birthday (12 July – in case you were wondering) and this was the beautiful evening sky we saw:
With all the crazy gas price fluctuations, we all “know” that gas is “cheaper” in Missouri, however while in Kansas City, MO I was surprised to see these prices:
$31-32 for a gallon of gas???
I apologize for such a long entry, and promise there are more videos to come as soon as I get the computer to work with me.
Yesterday we took a trip “to town.” For those of you who are wondering, I do not mean Wal-Mart, I mean Springfield. We went to Best Buy, looked around and realized that we still didn’t find anything to waste our hard earned money on, so we left. As we waited along the side walk for the rest of our group to emerge from the store, we saw this couple walk out. That is a normal occurance, however the woman was walking (or should I say waddling) funny. My first thought was that she had knee problems, as she couldn’t seem to bend her legs. She took a few more steps and suddenly it was obvious what the problem was. Under her long full skirt hem appeared a box, about the size of a DVD player box. She was in broad daylight stealing from the store. My father-in-law went in to tell the store security guy what we witnessed, and the guy wouldn’t believe him.
On the 4th of this month (a Friday) I went over to my friend Heather’s house to help her set up for a garage sale. The sale was advertised to start at 4pm. At noon we had barely set the tables up and were just beginning to bring things out of her house. Our other friends, Chris and Margaret, were there dropping things off and had their van in the driveway. At the moment Chris and Margaret were getting ready to leave, two older ladies pulled up in front of the driveway and blocked them in, got out of the car and started “garage saleing.” We told them that we didn’t have much of our stuff out and that it didn’t start till 4 anyhow, but they continued shopping. One of the things we DID have out was a mouse pad that I had been given for free 10 years ago, as a joke I priced it at “3¢ OBO” and other free things of little or no value to us. These two women took the free stuff leaving only a few things behind AND they took the 3¢ OBO mouse pad. Normally we would have waived the fee, say if they had arrived after the starting hour…. But because they came 4 hours early and blocked in our friend’s van, we made them pay the 3¢. (This gets even better.) Heather had to step in to get change for the woman; while she was inside I was in the garage holding Logan and watching the woman continue to look, had I not been out there she would have walked off with more things, she kept looking at her bag and had her hands on a photo album and looking at me to see if she could sneak it. All the while blocking Chris and Margaret in.
I just can’t believe it! And my eyes saw it!
Lately, I’ve become increasingly enamored with a woman named Kathy Sierra. Ok, not really with her – I don’t even know her – but with her writing. Kathy writes a blog she calls Creating Passionate Users. She’s got one of those “let’s change the world and here’s why and here’s how” attitudes, where “the world” is “the way we do business.”
Kathy’s post today is particularly striking. “Success” should not mean “Management” basically questions the entire model of how promotions in business work. She points out that while businesses always want to promote their people into management positions, a lot of people (especially technical people like programmers and engineers) don’t want those jobs. They take them because the pay and benefits are better, but they don’t necessarily involve doing the things they actually want to do.
While Kathy does discuss some of the reasons for this, I think one thing she misses is that the people running the business are the people who LIKE management-type things, so they think that promoting people along those lines is a great reward. Like in so many other areas, they don’t realize that everyone has the same goals as them. This could be part of the reason why this happens.
I think this is part of the reason I enjoy being self-employed. With nearly total autonomy, I get to make sure that most of my work is things I actually want to do. If there was a company where the defined career path was increased opportunity to do the things I want to do, and decreased necessity of doing the things I don’t want to do, I would consider working there.
Really.
I have a sad tale to cry. My car is dying, maybe.
This car stalls and rattles when driving slower than 30 m.p.h. There appears to be somthing wrong in one of the cylinders. This could be an easy cleaning job, or it could be a really expesive fix. If it is the latter, it would cost more to fix than the car would be worth in tip-top shape.
Also, this is my first car, so there is a slight emotional attachment. However, I think I could get over that, especially if I had the oportunity to disassemble it piece by piece.
Oh, and I have to have transportation to keep my job, minor detail.