I love black and white photography. I enjoy Ansel Adams, sure, but I have enjoyed black and white photography outside of his work as well. Today the sun was shining in through my egress and I snapped a few shots with my mac. Not quite archive quality but the light was inspiring. My hair is not.
I spread sawdust all over the floor this weekend. I rubbed it into the carpet. On purpose. I paid money to do so. Life is weird like that. Apparently my carpet is cleaner due to the sawdust. I keep spotting bits of it that my vacuum failed to suck up. Argh.
Its snowing outside
I love April’s winter weather
Flowers get frostbite
Yesterday we were instructed by a specialist to get rid of our couch & matching chair downstairs and to get our heating ducts cleaned out as well as get our carpets shampooed due to Jessica having a severe allergy to… pet dander! Yippee! The good news is that we now know some of what has been sucking the energy out of her day-to-day life for several years now. The bad news is that we had to go look at couches last night. At a furniture store. With three hundred variations on the same theme: big, wide, huge couches. Our basement, where the problem area is, has a narrow, skinny, awkward stairway down into it which makes getting any furniture up or down it difficult.
We finally picked one set which was twice as much as I had wanted to spend but significantly better than anything else and would actually fit down our stairway. I helped pick the house, so I get to live with narrow stairways. I’m excited we’ll be ordering them today because it will be good to help resolve Jessica’s issues. I’m just hoping that my family will understand if we show up at their houses with dust masks on 😉
Tell me if we shouldn’t have seen this coming:
1) Move into a house that the previous owners had dogs into while Jessica’s preggers and she’s low on energy, but we think she’s pregnant
2) Jessica’s mom moves in with us for many months with her dog – we think Jessica just had a baby so why shouldn’t she still be tired all of the time
3) We get a dog after Jessica’s mom leaves with her dog – and say, “Hey, the puppy keeps us up at night so why shouldn’t she be tired.”
4) We get rid of the puppy because Jessica is allergic to the puppy
Why we didn’t think, “Puppy-ness is still all around us – lets replace furniture and spend gobs of money to totally cleanse our environment?”
Do you ever have those conversations that just kill you with laughter? Each exchange of the conversation builds up to an even funnier ‘bit’? Me, too. Except that I can never remember then when I’m sitting in front of my computer. Its like my brain shuts off. I could walk away from this keyboard, have an exchange with Jessica, laugh, laugh, and laugh some more, come back here and my mind would be blank. It would be like I never talked to Jessica except for having a vague recollection of laughing with her.
I would say, “If I had a nickel for every time I had a funny conversation…,” except that a nickel isn’t worth as much any more, and you’d just feel worse that I have the memory of a flea.
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Yesterday as I was paying at the pump (and by paying at the pump I mean paying a lot of money for gas at the pump – why are these prices back?) a vagrant stopped by my pump and waited until I was finished pumping the gas to ask for money that would be freely given. It would be a better return on my money than the gas in a certain respect, but I’ll leave that alone for now and outline the conversation.
Panhandle Pete: “Hey, man, can you spare any change?”
Cheap Peterman: “No, I paid with a credit card and I don’t carry cash.” [which was in no way a lie, but possibly too much information]
Panhandle Pete: “Can you spare some goatee?” [flashing his toothless grin]
If I had given him some money I would have snatched it back at that moment. What?! Am I a proteinous follicle monster?
Update: This afternoon I put a tiny amount of gel into my beard to help straighten it out because it was getting messy. I think I may have a problem.
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I love the band switchfoot. The lyrics are pensive, and often thoughtful. The rock is amazingly good, and the compositions are always impressive to me. Attention to detail definitely is definitely a fitting description for their whole sound. They’ve created a new music video that references video games, pop-culture and paper-mation. Right on guys! See it on YouTube!
Tonight Abby had swimming lessons, but as we left Evelyn just lost it. She cried and cried and cried. Tears streamed down her face that we would leave without her. We could have been going to Hell [Michigan] and she’d have wanted to come with us. Of course somewhere in Nebraska she’d throw an equally intense fit because she was still in the car. She’s become quite the drama queen. I’m praying the God sends a miracle our direction to cause her quaint little happy-all-of-the-time attitude to come back.
Pulling into the parking lot at the recreation center I realized that about 25% more people wanted to recreate than could park in the parking lot. No amount of patience that I could have or have supernaturally given to me was going to free up enough parking spots for me to fit in and get Abby to her lesson in time. So I parked around the side of the park on a side street and we walked to the pool. I think we cleared the quarter mile in about 6 minutes which was good given that Abby is so short and I’m so slow for being in the near prone coding position I sit in all day. [my legal team would like me to state that I don’t actually sit in the prone positionwhile coding lest I be released from contracts for being lazy]
Abby’s swimming lesson went well. She didn’t panic when the teacher instructed her to rest on her back (while being supported by the instructor’s arms). She didn’t panic when the teacher tied a lead weight to her middle and dropped her into the deep end. Abby was well behaved. [My legal department wants me to tell you that no weights were tied to Abby and the deep end of the kiddy pool is only 4 feet deep at most]
Of course the teenaged girl who was doing the group lessons appeared to be maybe fifteen or sixteen years in age if I’m generous. Its hard for me in my nearly-thirty state to just look at a teenaged person and say, “That person is [some number] years old.” My ability to judge ages for people on the whole is weaker now, but the teenagers throw me for a huge loop. I’m even finding some early 20 year olds hard to distinguish from teenagers. It is as if there’s some conspiracy to make me feel very old now. It won’t work, I’ll get plastic surgery and face lifts until I’m 45 and then I’ll just let it all go.
I’m hoping to bring the camera to Wednesday’s lesson. That way you can see pictures of this instructor with Abby and tell me that she isn’t barely older than Abby 😉
Abby was playing tic-tac-toe with Jessica last night.
After a few cat’s games [no winner] Abby asked me, “Dad, how do I defeat mom?”
If I only knew…