along the journey

Nothing like an afternoon cry- I decided to go through to Cincy Vineyards website and watched the video of Gordon-Olson for Jesus- where Robbie and Alan were fighting to have their baby appear as baby jesus in the Christmas play. Both of them had prepared “home videos” of why each of their kids would be better as Jesus. I cried! It’s so hard to be away from there. It was definately home. I’m crying now. I miss it bunches. Anyway- Alan has a website for his baby- Gordon Fuller Dot Net. Gordon is adorable!

I was just thinking that I needed to write about how we’ve got almost a brand new bathroom. Well it’s not brand new, nor is most of it’s contents, however, it’s got a new floor, new tile, new paint and a new vanity. Darin and I assembled the vanity last night, needing to cut holes special for the way it goes into the wall. We didnt’ finish by putting the top(sink) on because there was a bit more that had to be done. Darin started working on it shortly after Amy got home from work this afternoon, as he put the top on the vanity we had a problem. The vanity is too big! It’s just right wide, but deep it’s too long. We were running around like crazy last night trying to get it in before midnight, thinking we done good, went to bed. Argh! How stinky. We’ve got bible study (life group) tonight at our house. It’d kind of be nice to have a completely usable bathroom, but it’s not gonna work like that I guess! We may just leave the sink on and worry about making it look pretty this weekend.

Oh yeah, this past weekend I was able to get most of my phone lines run the way I wanted to. We were able to get the toilet bolted down, without leaks, and the bathroom painted. We really should have taken before/after pictures of this house. This weekend I plan on taking pictures of the exterior of the house, yard, and neighborhood.

You haven’t lived until you’ve been shat upon.

Oh the things I have to look forward to as a dad! I love you Caleb!

btw- more Googlewhacking revealed that one, not mine though but on Metafilter there’s a thread about it- this time it was spanking and hydrofluorocarbons

While Googlewhacking today, closeted hippopotamus lead me to www.sturtle.com. This guy lives in New Orleans, and at the time of the hit- was working on a play! And even has a quote from Christopher Durang. I thought that was pretty neat.

“I really miss doing shows and want to get back into the habit by working on something at least once a year. A friend of mine once told me I was happiest when working on a show” - I know this feeling. I’ve been feeling it a lot lately. This guy Dave was saying he hasn’t done a show in 3 years. I’m glad it’s not been that long for me. I guess my last show was Track and Field, back in June or July- I can’t even remember. So much has happened since then, most of which has prevented me from doing any extra-curricular activities… certainly not theater. Yesterday while surfing the internet (imagine that) I found a site of a new theater, really close to my house, about 10 minutes or so, so I called them. The lady I talked to said she’d forward my name over to the Technical Director, but she talked to me for a while. I don’t know if they need people or not, but the lady sounded excited to hear from me.

In other news, I’ve been neglecting my ‘blog lately, Dad’s gonna send me an email and yell! He really reads them, and feels connected when he’s able to keep up to date on my life. I miss them a lot. I started messing with some other software, Drupal and pMachine both are ‘blogging-type CMS (Content Management Systems) that run using PHP and mySQL, and can be installed and run on my webhost. I’ve tried other stuff that has not been too succesful getting Greymatter or Moveable Type running… so I’m happy to find a system that I can use completely locally. I know most of you don’t care that you’re reading my blog from members.evolt.org/tuxhedoh as opposed to dean-o.org/blog - but I do. Thanks for supporting me.

We worked a lot around the house last weekend, parents were in town! Darin and I were basically the workers as Dad is pretty much unable to do much work with his broken arm and all which, by the way, is healing great. Darin and I ripped out the old floor in the main bathroom, clear to the joists. In the meantime punctured a copper pipe with the sawsall. Amy, Stacey, and I worked on cleaning up the basement. We consolidated many boxes into many fewer boxes, and got them out of Staceys room. I cleaned out the storage closet, and made another pile of trash that needs to be taken to the dump. I’d really like to turn our back storage closet into a dark room, Darin, he wants to put a kitchenette in there, which I say will work, running water is needed in a darkroom.

Tonight there’s a workers banquet for church workers! We were supposed to RSVP by Wednesday, I was sitting here yesterday thinking about what we’ve got to do this weekend and realized that I hadn’t RSVP’ed, so I called them up, just in time. Hopefully they’ll have good food! I’m excited about it.

Amy’s brothers father-in-law (Amy’s brothers wife is also Amy) died Thursday night, apparently dropped dead in front of Amy and her son. The funeral is this weekend, Amy’s definately going, but I’m not sure that I’m going to go. If I don’t I plan on finishing up the bathroom, taking piles of trash to the dump, and possibly re-running our phone lines. I really do enjoy working on the house, even though it takes a lot out of me. Hopefully we’ll be ready for an appraisal first week in Februrary. I know I have to fix the gutters before than too. Well pray for us, think good thoughts, whatever it is that you do, that we’ll be able to get this done and appraised!

I took these pictures last night Our baby is such a ham!

I really did mean to link it to it’s source. I’m sorry for leaving it open, but glad it was noticed.

Oh so sick. I feel just awful. Caleb and Amy too. We’re not doing too well. I stayed at home yesterday to take Caleb to the doctor. She gave us an antibiotic and some abutrol to help him get the plegm up.

This past weekend Darin and I did a bit of work around the house, not nearly as much as we wanted to, but we did make some progress, mostly involving removing the toilet and vanity from bathroom A in preparation to replace the floor, and removing the vanity from bathroom B in preparation for replacing the floor (just tile this time) in there. We bought a dryer from home depot. Now there’s a story:

We had a list of things we needed from the Depot. At the bottom of the list were things that I’d like not necessarily needed. One of which was a dryer. Since Darin’s been at the house we’ve really needed the dryer to dry instead of toss our clothes around as they dried. So it was definately needed, just not on the top of our list. Christmas Eve the Depot gave us a piece of plastic which authorized us to get stuff from their stores for free…. not really, but it’s sorta like that. That’s when I got the washing machine. So I checked the credit limit and we still had quite a bit of credit left. So we went and looked at the appliances and found the dryer that matches our washer. There was no price on it, but the next model down had a price of $356 or something. We told the sales person that we wanted to get the dryer but first wanted to know how much it costs. He told us he was having problems with the computer and it would take him a bit. So after 30 minutes of gathering the other stuff on the list, a lady walks up to us and lets us know that he had to go home and she was going to get us taken care of, still not knowing the price. So they had the dryer loaded on a cart before we even knew what the price was. So we didn’t know what the price was until they scanned it at the register. We were charging it, what did we care, we knew it wouldn’t be much more that $356. It scanned in at $166. One hundred and sixty-six DOLLARS!!!!! ! ! ! dollars!!! We were amazed, the cashier mentioned what an excellent deal it was, and we wheeled it out. The model below was $356- so the next model should cost more or so you’d think. So we got a new Dryer. And get this….. it dries our clothes!

So that’s one reason why I like the Depot, but there’s been other instances where I’ve decided I’ll take my business elsewhere, more specifically, a special order window was ordered the day after Christmas- with an ETA of 1/5/02. And until last night, no one knew when it would be there, or why it’d taken so long. I called yesterday afternoon and raised hell. They told me that it was definately on a truck that should arrive by Wednesday, but just to play it safe they added some padding saying it’d be in on Friday. Last night we got a call- the window was in. But both Darin and Amy failed to tell me until this morning.

Well I’m gonna go cough up my other lung. Ah been checking out Radio 8 it’s pretty cool. If you want to keep your own blog- that’s another option.

Well poor caleb is sick. He’s got RSV, which is some sort for respiratory infection. Poor baby is waking up all night long, having trouble breathing. We just bring him into the bed with us and try to soothe him the best we can. It’s really been tough. Darin being here has been great. I hope it stays that way, but I’m sure it won’t. Living arangements like this are not always easy, as we can remember from our time at Rachels house.

This weeks weather has been interesting. Sunday night, sleet, snow, freezing rain. Monday a bit of the same. Tuesday freezing rain, Wednesday in the 60’s, yesterday mid 40s, today warm rain. It’s strange.

I’m going to the opening ceremony for a Tibetan Healing Mandala today at one of the museums. Then I’ll be going sometime next week to check on the status. I’ve always wanted to see one of these things.

Darin started his own blog last night. I’m going to try and help him develop some computer/internet skills, help him become more marketable. Right now he’s babysitting for us, but he wants to get a job relatively soon. He also fixed my truck yesterday, at least he put a starter in it for me. It’s got a bad battery, so we’ve not decided what to do about replacing it. Money is tight, especially knowing we need to pay rent. I don’t know that we’ll be able to, but knowing I’m paying my mother rent, makes me especially weary about paying it late, I never cared when it was some no name corporation. Still wouldn’t. It’s all principle I guess.

Christmas Pictures