Bowels of Mercies

I love the King James translation of the Bible for its strong language and there is something oddly poetic about it.  However, this morning I was reading Abby’s Bible she received when she was born in Grapevine and we were taking a look at Colossians 3 where the translators in 1611 wrote ‘put on … bowels of mercies.’  Abby’s 3 year old mind couldn’t comprehend what was being said.  🙂  Unfortunately I find myself reading like when I was a Spanish student: I translate to modern English from the 1611 English so that I can comprehend what is being said.

For those of you less savvy Paul was writing have a heart of mercy in modern vernacular.

My First Professional Massage

I have never had a professional massage before Friday evening.  My dad use to work on sore muscles in our backs and necks when we’d get injuries from crazy stunts and such, Jessica has on occassion massaged my back, and ironically my best friend from the fourth grade through High School’s mom was a masseuse – but I never went to her for a massage.  So Friday night, as I stated before, I got a massage as part of my recovery from the auto accident.  Jessica has been saying how wonderful they are for some time.
The first half had some sensitiviy and pain involved where I was tender and had some deep tension in my muscles, but I couldn’t tell you about the second half: I fell asleep!  When living la vida loco it is hard to remember that things like this can reduce stress, reduce pain, and reduce being awake.  I don’t know how much a massage costs (this one was part of my treatment) normally, but I have seen them for $45.00 and hour or more, and every couple months this could be the perfect treat and decompression method for me.  I’m sold on the idea now.

However, no matter how Jessica talks about getting her nails done, I’m not getting mine done.

Flux Capacitors

I am cleaning out my system today.  I went through my RSS feeds and removed the ones I dont’ care about that I subscribed to to see if I would grow to care about them.  I tossed a handful and removed my ‘Business’ folder because none of what was being written about in that set of feeds held anything for me any longer.  I’m cleaning out my inbox.  Its time for me to get things done.  It just works better for me to have clean ‘data inputs.’  I’ll keep an archive of stuff, but in the end, lots of junk is getting cleaned out.  It feels like a good colon cleansing – or so I’m told 😉

Do You Google?

If you use Google, try googling with Blingo.  They share part of their revenue from ad clicks with users by doing random giveaways.  The results are the same as Google, but you can also win prizes.  Its kind of like what you’re used to, but with free stuff.  Check it out.  And by prizes I mean money and iPods.

Make with the Pictures Already

Some folks have asked where the pictures of our new car are. And by some I mean me, I had promised them but haven’t delivered yet. The reason? Tomorrow the windows are being tinted and we’re having 22″ rims put on with low profile tires. Then the car will be as we negotiated, and on top of that? It’ll be clean 🙂 Apparently rain and sprinkles put spots on cars. Who knew?

I did also want to say how thoroughly impressed I am with my experience so far. I had to drive in the rain, break quickly, and drive carefully with sleeping passengers all in one day – and the CR-V handled fantastically. The rear seats recline as well as the front seats so that back seat passengers can catch a nap if needed (or sleep all night if we’re on a road trip from heck). I strongly recommend the CR-V so far and am quite impressed with everything in it with a few minor exceptions:

  1. The ‘three on the tree’ stick gets in the way of the fade and balance controls. Normally people don’t mess with those every day but I do because Abby may want to listen to “Popular Disney Princess Songs” but I don’t.
  2. The rear window latch requires that you close the window harder than you think you should or else the sensor flickers on and off over bumps on the dashboard. The window is surely closed, but the sensor still flickers. I’m going to ask them to look at this tomorrow.
  3. It has a tape player as well as a CD player.

With a short list like this, one of them being a minor, minor issue, one of them probably being a small repair job and one of them is me picking on a non-issue (the tape player), we’re really, really happy with our Honda.

Abby’s First Baseball Game

Grandpas and Abby

Tonight I took Abby to her first (professional) Baseball game. This is a big thing for me for several reasons. First, let me also point out that Grandpas Peterman and Forland were there (it was also Clair’s first pro game). Grandpa Peer will more than likely get roped into going to a professional baseball game with Abby whether he likes it or not 🙂 Second, it was with the San Fransisco Giants, which was my first professional baseball game that my dad took my brother and I to [they lost to the Cubs]. Third, my grandpa Martin never got to take my brother and I to a pro ball game because he died of a surprise aneurism before he got the chance [we were scheduled to go to one with him later on in the year he passed away]. My grandpa Martin was a Giants fan. So tonight was the culmination of 2/3rds of something I want to give to Abby: baseball games with grandpas [Grandpa Peer is the other third]. She’s a girl, so she probably won’t care like I do about baseball, but she’s also excited about things that are new, which this certainly was.

Abby watches with excitementThe Rockies really did a number on the Giants in the second inning. They scored 4. Later the Giants scored a total of 3
runs, but the Rockies kept ahead ending with 5. My granpa Martin would more than likely have been muttering at the idiot players dragging his team’s name in the mud 🙂 I think that the only thing he’d have joined in on was the booing for Barry Bonds. I haven’t heard a crowd make such a stink in person. When Bonds came up to the plate the crowd made it known that they didn’t appreciate his steroid fueled record.

Abby had fun and I bought her a purple foam finger that she enjoyed waving in the air yelling, “Go Rockies, Go!” The Rockies went, and I was glad that we had come 🙂

I Was Tired

I was tired last night and came home from attempted firework watching and brushed my teeth and just crashed into bed.  Jessica, being a good mother actually was working on getting Abby to bed.  She woke me up to come participate in parenthood.  I sleepily stepped out of our room and participated in the nightly prayers and saying goodnight… like I normally do.  Then I did something not normal.  As a side effect of being so tired I brushed my teeth again.  I was about halfway through the brushing when I realized that it was my second brushing.  I finished because it seemed like a good thing to do and then went back to bed.  I don’t know when Jessica got into bed…I was out again quickly.

Fourth of July

So to celebrate the Independence of the United States we did racks of ribs.  Jessica and I don’t have a lot of experience in feeding large groups ribs so we bought 4 racks.  That would be roughly the gross national income of a small country in ribs, but I guess I’m a generous host.  Jessica had read that you should count on half a rack for each person eating.  We had 8 people (7+2 youth + 1 Abby) so I got four.  I think combined everyone ate about 1.3 racks of ribs.  So we have left overs.

LOTS of leftovers.  At least the local grocery store was open when my propane tank went dry on me 🙂  The ribs were good, but took about 5 hours to cook so it was a labor of love.  And my love, Jessica, did most of that while I went to help my buddy Craig chop up wood from his tree that had blown into the neighbor’s yard during our funky storms of the last three days.

Speaking of storms we went out to watch fireworks in the car.  In the rain.  In a Toy ‘R’ Us parking lot.  And the fireworks did not come… because rain and fire do not play well together, sort of like Pam Anderson and the 1700’s shakers [the shakers believed in celibacy].  One thing that was fun though is that we had Kailey & Trystan with Abby, Jess and I so we played the camping game.  That’s the one where you say, “I’m going camping and I’m going to bring [insert item name] to start it and then each person has to add one item to the end of the list after reciting it from memory.  One of the tricks to the game is that you can add complicated adjectives to the items so it can be the ‘ooey-gooey green sleeping bag’ instead of the ‘sleeping bag.’  Abby did surprisingly well.  I, on the other hand, did poorly due to being quite tired.

I think fun was had by all and in the end I still have about 3 pounds of ribs to eat.  Tonight?  Abby’s first baseball game, if it doesn’t get rained out.

Royal Gorge Route

The Train We Were On
Today we went down to Colorado Springs.  And kept going.  Right on down to Highway 50 heading West.  Had we kept going we’d have passed my old house in Carson City at some point in time later in the week.  However, we stopped at the Royal Gorge.  We went on the Royal Gorge train and enjoyed some lovely views of rock, water and sky.  We also enjoyed some lovely views of bathrooms without toilet paper, employees not doing things in a logical fashion, and tourists doing dumb things (and no, we were not looking in the mirror).

I’ll write more about it tomorrow, as for now I’m exhausted and need to go to bed…  Just had to avoid NOT writing something.