Today we went to get pictures taken at J.C. Penney’s.
The appointment was at 9:20 AM – the store didn’t open until 10:00 AM.
So we went to the door thinking, “Surely the wouldn’t schedule us
for an appointment earlier than the store was open.”
We were wrong.
However, we were able to get in through the hair salon’s door and
then on into the studio.
At the studio we sat for nearly 45 minutes waiting to be shot.
Our appointment being when it was we were flashed at 10:15.

Abby was pretty upset by this and opted to play ‘hard-to-smile.’
Eventually we got 5 reasonable shots of her doing various things and
barely eeked out a semi smile from her for the family pictures.
Furthermore they offered us, for a mere $5.00, the opportunity to
receive digital pictures via email.
We declined since the last time they got my $5.00 the JPEG images
they sent were of such low quality that one may have confused us
for an impressionistic piece.

You Are Now a Number

I coded some bits and pieces in my PHP to do some minor tracking
of site readers.
Not a lot mind you because I’m not interested in the numbers
themselves, I’m working on a statists package for fun.
Maybe I’m crazy, but I enjoy the idea of doing up charts and what
not.

Dinner for 5

For dinner we went out with Mike and Louanne Mason, our good friends
and owners of Best Basket
, a fabulous gift basket company.
Mike also took the pictures of Abby that are currently up on the site.
It was fun and Abby did multiple firsts, including saying ‘thank you’
(in ASL).
Mike always tries to have Abby play with him, but sometimes she’s
been a little shy.
Not tonight.
Abby laughed and played and colored with Mike on her placemat.
Which reminds me, I should have her ‘draw’ some things so I can scan
them and get them up on the site.

Loose Ends

Sojo Site

I finished up the first phase of the Sojourner
Site.
I’ve got more things I’ll add for phase 2, but it will be good for
them to have a fresher look and some updated content.
I’m excited for them to be able to have a modern site (in coding)
and some updated content since the last site had content from
2 or more years ago.

Holes in Your Head

For my birthday our friends the Cobb’s gave me Holes, the
movie.
It’s a kick in the pants and weaves all sorts of fun fiction together
for a great family oriented movie.
Although I do think that John Voight is secretly related to Christopher Walken.
The flash file shown here doesn’t do it justice, but I suppose you’ll just have to see the movie to see what I mean.

Resting in Him,

Randy “Big Brother” Peterman

Last Friday was Halloween.
We didn’t celebrate it because we’re fundamentalist killjoys.
However, we did go up to Sherman where Jessica’s cousin’s family did
celebrate it, and it was great fun watching the little ones get
excited.
It was not fun to see the 14 year old’s doing Halloween.
I think their parents should have said, “No, you’re not 8 any more.
Plus the odor from your body is going to cause the people answering
their doors to pass out. And I know you, you’ll steel their candy.”

I did have fun with one slightly older kid though, because when he/she
(hard to tell with the gory makeup on) came to the door I said to
Morgan,
“What a nice ballerina costume.”
To which Morgan replied, “That’s not a ballerina!”
Of course it wasn’t a ballerina, it was a kid dressed up as a mauled
white kid who was feeling creative, just like all of the other
mauled white kids.

What happened to the good old days when there were 300 supermen
running around with 600 princesses behind them?
What happened to the day when your parents went with you and
made you say, “Thank you.”
And who wouldn’t let you eat all of the candy before you got home
because they wanted to check it for small weapons of mass
destruction embedded in the center of a chewy caramel candy.
I remember those days, my mom was the one handing out raisin
boxes (98% of which were thrown away).

In fact, my brother and I made it a policy to warn the other kids in
the neighborhood that mom was going to be giving away the candy.
It was our public service announcement.

“This is a test of the emergency broadcast system.
The following is a warning, if you do not heed the warning you may
find yourself the recipient of non-candy objects.
Non-candy objects in this case refers to Raisins.
Eat them at your own risk…”

To make matters worse, we would get our candy picked through, and
anything mom didn’t want us to eat was given out to costumed kids
later on in the evening (this was 100% of the candy that had food
coloring, particularly anything red).
We were sorry that we couldn’t eat all of the candy at once, too.
I imagine that I might have died, become diabetic, or simply wet my
pants and forgotten my name for a half an hour (which would have
made www.icantremember.com my domain).

Saturday and Sunday

Saturday we kicked into full gear and started working on the kitchen.
Doug and Amanda’s kitchen is in the process of a complete remodel.
We stripped it down to the sheetrock (and replaced some of that) and then,
shortly after that (Sunday) Amanda and Jessica took the rented snot
blower (my name for the spackling device with compressor) and spackled
the walls and ceiling.
No animals were harmed, but the kids were pooped and cranky.
The house was pretty trashed since the kitchen was emptied of all of
its guts with few exceptions.