Thursday, May 31st, 2007

Kind of a busy day for me...started out with getting my hair cut and running a few errands, (put gas in the van & run to the grocery store for milk). Also we are babysitting for Bradon today when normally we just have him on Friday. Adam works this afternoon so will run him to work and go to the post office. Mark needs some 2 cent stamps and I was going to buy them at the grocery store this morning, but they were out. I would like to avoid the PO if I can since the line are always so long, so may just try to stop at the Martin's uptown instead. Tonight I have worship team practice and will pick Adam up from work right before I go there. Mark Kerk has been teaching Adam how to run the sound system at church and since he will be with me at worship team tonight he is going to run the sound for us. Mark will come and help him set things up and then Adam will be on his own.

For Mother's Day and my Birthday, Mark and the boys bought me Season 1 & 2 of "I Love Lucy" on DVD. I just love that show and so have been watching one or two episodes most afternoons. It is a nice fun break in the middle of the day. I am going to go and watch it in just a bit while I eat my lunch.

Adam is doing another practice essay for the SAT right now, much to his disappointment, because he would much rather be on the computer playing a game. Oh well!

Photos from Potato Creek

More Photos from Potato Creek

Wednesday, May 30th

Today we are going to run some errands, if Jared will get on the ball and get his school work done. He has been saving money for an Ipod and now that he has enough it is burning a hole in his pocket. LOL! So, he really wants to go out today and buy it, but I told him that it all depends on him and how soon he can get done with school. I also would like to run to Hobby Lobby and look at stamps that are on sale, but that can wait if need be.

We need to be back no later than mid afternoon as Jeremy Lininger is coming over this afternoon for a while. He is working on training to become a paramedic and this weekend he has his practicals, which is a test to finish part of it up. But, before he can do that he needs to practice assessments on a few people and has asked to practice on us. I said that was fine as long as he wasn't going to poke us with a needle or anything. He assured me no one would get hurt. Wheww!

Tonight Jared has a baseball game and Mark has a meeting at church, but he may have to skip it so he can work on the pool. (Adam too!) It is nice having a in-ground pool of our own, but I will tell you it is a lot of work, especially when it needs to be painted. That is one hard job! I really do not like painting at all, but painting a pool and getting prepped is awful! I helped paint the walls last night and I had about all I could take. The roller was really heavy and paint is really sticky and doesn't go very far when being rolled. Plus to make things more difficult, our pool has a *small* ledge all the way around the deep end that we had to try to balance on and not slide down into the deep part while still painting the walls. I am sore this morning in places I didn't no existed. (in my shoulders and back mostly.) So, needless to say, I am glad that Jared has a game tonight so I won't have to help with the pool! The paint has to sit for nearly 2 weeks to be sure it is completely dry before we can fill the pool up again, so we really do need to get it done because at this point for me at least, by the time the water is warm enough for swimming it will be nearly July! Okay, there was my whine for the day!

I am liking this....

The more I play around with blogger the more I like it! I have found out a way to make a slide show of all of my scrapbook layouts, (you can see the slide show on the left), and figured out how to link to photo albums that I have in Winkflash, (you can see a link to the whole album of photos that I took on our vacation!). This really has so many more options than 360 did, and that is very nice!

Today is a stay at home day all day long and I can hardly believe that. It has been quite a long time since we have had a day like this. Seems like even if we have a day at home, there is always something in the evening. It is going to be a nice day today, nearly 90 degrees, but hopefully not too humid.

Adam and I have been doing some college exploration online and I made him take a SAT essay practice test this afternoon since he is taking the SAT on Saturday. He is not looking forward to it, but I keep stressing to him how important it is for him to do really well! At this point, I think he will be taking some dual credit courses next year at Bethel College, (or maybe IUSB, but it looks like Bethel is cheaper), and then for his first year of college he will probably go to one of the local colleges as well. Then for his sophomore year he will go off to some place that will be more in the area in which he wants to do his major. His latest interest is Marine Biology and we found that the University of North Carolina has a great Marine Biology/Science program and it is located in Wilmington, NC, which is where we stayed all night last year the night before we went to our rental home on Holden Beach. Wilmington is also the home of the Battleship USS North Carolina that we visited. Who knows if he will really end up going there, but we sent for info. The bad thing is that it is pretty far from home, but the good thing is, it will give us a good reason to have to go back to the beach!

Memorial Day, 2007

Yesterday as is our yearly family tradition, we went to Potato Creek. We left church right after the service, (couldn't miss that since I was on worship team!), came home to change and pick up Tucker and then were off to the park. The weather was not good when we left as it had been raining most of the morning and didn't stop until mid-afternoon. I got a funny photo of Joe, Mark and Dad cooking our hot dogs while holding umbrellas in the pouring down rain. I will be sure to post it here once I download it from my camera. Later in the afternoon, it finally stopped raining and we were able to move the chairs outside instead of sitting inside of our shelter. We walked to the nature center for a while and mostly we sat around talking and eating! Kassie brought her boyfriend, Brody, with her and they took a couple of walks with Jared. Adam just hung around with us mostly. Kim brought Keely, (sp??), her Lhasa, but she didn't really want to have much to do with Tucker. He really wanted to play like he plays with Chloe, but Keely was being a bit of a snob and just ignored him most of the time. She is obsessed with her ball and everytime someone would throw it, she would tear off after it and Tucker would tear off after her. She didn't think to much about that. We all got a kick out of watching it though.

Today, Monday, we spent most of the day working on the pool. UGH! We had to drain it to get ready to paint it, but before the painting it has to be scraped and sanded. Honestly, I haven't helped with too much of it up to this point as most of the time I busy with other things, but I did help with a lot of the sanding today. It is hot and dirty work and definitely not fun. I think we are pretty much done with that part now. It still needs to be power washed and then it will be ready for painting. Later in the afternoon, we went over to Labordes house for a cookout. They are in our FIF group this time around with the VanDaeles. They weren't able to make it though, but we went to Labordes anyway. Nancy's parents where there as well as Ken & Mary Lou Stewart. Rachel had been away with some friends, but she got back just about the time we were finished with dinner. The weather today was just perfect, and we sat outside all evening and had a nice time.

A couple of nights ago, the boys and I started watching the movie, "The Patriot", but since it was so long, we only watched half of it and we finally finished watching the end of it tonight. We borrowed 5 movies from the library this week and I don't think we are going to get through all of them! I watched Mona Lisa smiles Friday night and it wasn't quite what I expected, but it was pretty good, I guess.

Switching to Blogger for now....

Well, I have been messing around with Blogger quite a bit today and think I am going to try to start using this instead of Yahoo 360. There are just things about 360 that are annoying to me and even though Blogger still isn't exactly what I would like to find in a blog, I think I like it better. I do like the photo albums in 360, but I don't always find them easy to work with, so we will try this for a while and see how it goes. For some reason both Yahoo Photos that is associated with 360 and Picasa Web Albums that is associated with Blogger, are very slow to load....very slow, and that is something that bothers me, but I think maybe the other advantages of Blogger will make it worth waiting for Picasa Albums to load since I won't be using photos every time I post to my blog.

Just testing this out to see if I want to move my blog here!
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Chicago Layouts

Pevious Blogs....

I was going to start switching over my old blogs from 360 to here at Blogger, but I think that it is going to take too much time to do all of that. So, to make it easier, all of the old blog posts can still be found at: Yahoo 360