More Work!

Amanda's stay is over. We drove her to the airport the other day. She has been a tremendous help while she stayed with us, especially with the baby. We all enjoyed having her stay with us through the holidays. Well, except for the last night she was here. That was the night she tried to start a civil war in our house. Thankfully, we all survived the battle, even the boy.

On the drive to the airport it struck me. Who's going to pick up the slack and help out after she leaves? I started to casually beg her into staying longer. When I saw that my efforts were not paying off, I asked Cari the question.

"Now that Amanda is leaving, does that mean I have to help out with the baby again?"

"Yes.", was all Cari said. It isn't the quantity of words that made an impact on me. It was her tone.

Favorite Quote of the Week

Referring to a day out geocaching. . .

Roadrunner said:

"not a bad day using multi-billion dollar government satellites to track down Tupperware in the woods."

New Years Day

Yeah, it was already a week ago. It feels much longer than that to me. I didn't have to work on the first this year. It was cold and VERY windy that day. So we decided to load up the van and go for a walk in the park.

Wow that wind was cold.

We walked around Falls park for a while and took some pictures. It was fun, but it was so cold, that it was a little less fun. When we got home and I started looking at the pictures we had taken,

I found this one. I asked the boy what he was doing and he said he didn't remember.

On our way back to the car Amanda fell in love. I really think this is love at first site. The guy was a little cold to her at first. But once she got her arms around him and gave him a kiss, he warmed right up.

After the park, we took the kids to Chuck-E-Cheese.

We all squeezed into the booth and let Chuck sketch us. It's a pretty good picture. I'll get it scanned for you someday when I have more time. I feel like it is should be Wednesday or Thursday, but I just checked and it's still Monday. Oh, man!

Well, New Years was a great day. Let's hope they are all like that (but warmer) this year.

Upstate Geocaching

I had a great day today. Rake, his daughter (Little One), and Roadrunner drove up to my area for a day of geocaching. We got started around 8:30am.

At one of our first finds of the day, Little One was having a hard time opening the container. She handed it to Roadrunner. He also was having a hard time opening it at first. That's when Rake suggested that a man open it. Little One gave a quick look around and said, "Where's a man?"

We all felt much better about ourselves after that.

Another one of our earlier finds was at this location:

We would discover, after some amount of searching, that the cache was under our feet. It turns out that Little One was standing on it during this picture. The cache was not a plastic container, but one of those hollow rocks you would hide a key in. It blended in perfectly. So much, that when Roadrunner started digging through the rocks a bit, he tossed the cache to the side.

The white cup Rake is holding in this shot came from a scary convenient store that I hope Roadrunner will tell about in his blog. He took some photos in that place. I'll tell you that it wasn't the entire shelf of bagged pickles that scared me most.

One of my favorite views of the day was this old bridge.

A metal structure with a timber floor, coated with asphalt. The bridge is in the woods near the existing bridge. I would not have ever seen the old bridge just by driving past. Thank Geocaching for this find. The bridge is covered in trees and briers. We crossed the bridge then had to make our way down a steep slope. I know this picture may not make it look very steep, but trust me. I was holding every tree branch to not slide the whole way.

Roadrunner found the one near the bridge very quickly.

On our way out, we had to push through some nasty vines and bushes.

After lunch, Rake decided to build a bird house. By hand. With no hammer.

You can see he was very proud of it.

Thanks to Rake's excellent planning, we were able to track down 16 caches today.

The four of us all had a great day. I really appreciate the three of them driving so far to spare me from a long trip. It was great to meet you guys, we'll have to get together again. And really, I don't mind driving. I can come your way too.

I'll end with this picture that shows a common theme in our day. Little One getting surrounded by cameras as she does our dirty work of fetching and re hiding the caches.

Hibiscus

We keep this potted tree outside during the spring and summer. During the winter it tries to survive in front of the window near our dining table.

This lunch seems thin

Last week one day I called Cari while walking to the car on my lunch break. I was carrying my bottle of water and peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I asked what they were doing and she said that they were headed out to lunch. Not just any restaurant, my FAVORITE Mexican restaurant.

I tried to make her feel bad as I bit into my sandwich. It might have worked a little bit, but she was still going.

That night at dinner, I asked the kids what they had for lunch. Randy had casadia. I answered him by telling him I drank water for lunch. Next was the girl. She told me how good her tacos were. I told her my jelly was plain. Cari was groaning at this point. She didn't want to hear any more. She offered to make my lunch for the next day. I accepted.

The next morning I had to leave the house by 5:30am. I took a look around in the refrigerator and didn't see a made lunch. I quickly put together a small lunch and went to work. When I called her at lunch time I didn't mention about the food. After a few minutes, she remembered and said that she really would make my lunch for the NEXT day.

Well, that night, as we got into bed, Cari jumped up and went downstairs. I knew that she had forgotten again. I wasn't going to say anything. She came back up within two minutes. I was thinking, "that won't be a very good lunch". She was waving $10 as she entered the room.

"Chik-fil-a will make your lunch for you tomorrow", she declared.

Although she didn't make my lunch herself, she delegated that job to someone else. I called Cari and thanked her for making such a tasty lunch.

224

My last post of 2007. Post number 224 this year.

I debated for a while this morning what I would write about. I have a few things to tell you but I'm not sure I should end the year with a post picking on Cari.

I also have a video to put together for you titled, "WAGON OF DOOM!"

There just won't be time to get that together today.

Maybe I should tell you about taking pictures during church.

I think I'll just start 2008 with those ideas.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Cow Milk

Did you know that a cow has to give birth to produce milk?

You probably did. Not me. For some reason, I always thought that cows just produced milk. It was one of their jobs. Just an endless supply of milk.

Recently, I was talking to a former dairy farmer and he was talking about constantly breeding the cows to keep them producing. I didn't let on to my ignorance. I just nodded my head as if I was saying, "of course!" The farmer talked about keeping very careful records about pregnancy, birth, and milk production. Due to the aggressiveness of bulls, they impregnated their cows artificially.

I got home and Cari was breastfeeding the baby. I shared my new knowledge with her. "Did you know cows work like people? They have to give birth to produce milk too."

She just stared at me. Either she just learned something new or she couldn't believe I just figured it out. I'm not sure which one it was and I wasn't going to ask.

Christmas morning

Here's the house at 2am when I went to bed:

Here's a photo of Christmas exploding:

Here's a photo from 9am Christmas morning:

Kinda reminds me of last year. Do you see the trend?

Randy was the first one up, he's always the first one up. It was around 5:30am. Cari sent him back to bed. Around six, he was back up and walking around. I got up with him. We went down to examine what Santa left in the house. Around 6:30 he went up and got the rest of the house up.

Cari always does a good job of trying to pace us while we unwrap gifts. She sits at the tree, guarding the presents. Holding back the ravaging claws of the kids. Through her careful shopping, she has ensured each child will open the EXACT same number of presents. She hands one to each. They tear it open in about two seconds, show off their newest prize possession, then prepare themselves for the next box.

The rest of our day was spent together playing games, watching movies, and eating the great meal Cari prepared. I also tried to cut my finger off while opening some toys.

By that evening, I could tell Cari was ready to move on from Christmas, but she was too tired. When I got home from work yesterday, it was all gone. The toy Santas, the Nativity, the tree.

Things are mostly back to normal today. Everyone like normal, right?

Christmas games

I'll write about Christmas morning in the next post or two. I'm too tired tonight.

One of the games we opened this morning was Jenga.

Here's a few photos of us playing.

As you can see, Amanda knocked over our record breaking tower. The girl in that 2nd photo doesn't belong to me, but she had fun playing.

25

What's the number 25 mean to you? What does it make you think of?

A quarter?

The atomic number of Manganese?

The size of the full roster on a major league baseball team?

The number of days your sister in law is staying with you?

Yeah, that's right. She's here for 25 days. That is by far the longest anyone, except our kids, has stayed with us. She's already been here almost a week.

This really isn't a problem for us. So far she has been very helpful with the baby. She has also helped Cari finish Christmas shopping. That kept me from having to brave the mall the other day.

The only problem I have had with her so far is her camera. She always has that camera on her. When I am tempted to do something stupid, I have to stop and check for her. Like the day I was tasting some breast milk from the baby's bottle. With Amanda's laptop, that kind of thing shows up on Facebook within the hour.

For now, I'm camping out in my office.

Cari just knocked on the door. Someone tell her I'll be out in 19 days.

Not that I'm counting.

Explore!

I was inspired by The Rake and his trip last weekend. So, yesterday I went out to do some exploring. Here's a map of my trip:


I'm finishing my map in Google maps. When I'm done, I'll put a link up. If you are interested, you will be able to view my route in more detail and see the photos on the map. You can also turn on satellite view in Google maps.

My first stop was to the town of Central. Central was founded by the railroad when they set their headquarters there in the late 1800's. It is 133 miles to Atlanta and 133 miles to Charlotte. They have a museum in the building of an old Victorian house. It is only open on Sunday's, so I walked through their gardens. There are a lot of statues, fountains, and benches. Most of the statues were wearing scarves and hats.

My next stop was across town to the Central Roller Mill. I'm sure this building used to be a center of economic activity. Today it is a safety hazard. I walked around the building and took some pictures. You can see inside through all the broken windows that there is still a lot of equipment inside. In a couple of places you can see the original wood framed windows and support beams. In all the wood, you could see that it was roughly milled lumber. It almost seemed as if they milled it with an axe and got "close enough".
After I left the mill, I went down Gaines street toward a bridge I had seen before. It is one of the scariest bridges to drive on around here. It is an all wood construction that crosses a double set of rails. Up close you can see that the boards were coated with a tar or oil. The bridge is barely wide enough for two cars.
Across the street from the bridge is the New Olive Grove Missionary Baptist church. Like many old churches in this area, there is a cemetery next to the building.

Up keep at the cemetery didn't seem very high. There were a lot of over turned flower pots, a large tree that had fallen and not been picked up, and an entire section of tomb stones I could not reach because they were located in a dense stand of trees.
One of the most interesting things I found were several stones that were hand carved. The spelling was way off on these. Obviously written by an uneducated person. This one says:

Roada (can't read last name) Died June 26, 1918

You can see how they wrote it

There were also a few of these stones. It looks like a hub from a wheel or a part of a pulley. The center was filled with concrete and the message carved in. I could not make out many words on any of these. The last word on this one appears to be some form of Johnson.
The cemetery obviously belonged to a group of poor, uneducated people. There are some more modern looking stones and even some recently placed stones. It was very interesting walking through there.

On my way to Six Mile, I turned off at the community of Cateechee. I found this brick building there:

There were lots of signs warning trespassers. Next door to this was a trailer home that looked occupied. I stayed in the car. The community is mostly old mill homes and trailers. The streets were narrow, and I started to wonder if I should be out there. Once I got home I learned there is a large mill along a creek in Cateechee. The mill is the reason the community was formed. I'll go back someday and check out the mill and get some photos. I believe the building has been demolished and just the ruble and foundation are left. The name Cateechee is named for a woman from the Choctaw tribe. She was kidnapped by the Cherokee during a battle and kept as a slave. In her tribe of Choctaw her name was Issaqueena. A white man that did a lot of trading with the Cherokee fell in love with Cateechee. When she over heard the indians planning an attack on Fort Cambridge she snuck out and traveled 96 miles to warn the settlers. She ended up marrying that man.

That is the story told in tradition. The men building the mill named the town for her. The neighboring town on the railway is named Norris. Named for the owner of the mill.

On my way home I had an emergency. Marked by the red triangle in my map. It was at that point that I had to go to the bathroom REALLY bad. So bad, that it hurt. There obviously is nothing but a few homes and cattle out where I was. I started feeling around the backseat for a bottle as I drove. I couldn't find one suitable. I looked down at my bottle of Gatoraid that I was drinking. I hadn't drank even half of it. As bad as I had to go, I didn't want to waste my drink.

I barely made it home. When I pulled into the driveway, I left the car door open and rushed inside.

After such a great trip, it was almost ruined by those painful last ten minutes.

Favorite Video of the Week

Here's my favorite video of the week. I could watch this over and over... at least the first fifteen seconds. They use some bad language, so don't have your volume up if kids are nearby.

via videosift.com

What I love the most is the sincere concern from the cameraman.

SIX DEGREES

Pain shoots through my body

With his help, I put together a basketball goal for Randy a few days back. It wasn't overly complicated to do, but did require about one hundred nuts and bolts. Some of the Chinese directions didn't make any sense and I had to rely on common sense for some of it. That means I had to do some parts twice.

The next morning at work my arms were killing me. It was all in the wrist and forearm. Had I only tightened one hundred nuts it would have been ok. It was undoing and redoing my mistakes that killed me.

That night at work I was taking apart some cardboard displays. I had to flatten them and decided not to use my sore arms. I stepped into the large box and started kicking the corners out until flat.

About ten minutes later I knew something wasn't right. I sat in the car to drive home and my shins were in great pain. I thought about the drive home, holding my foot on the gas pedal. OUCH!

I think I'm going to just take today to rest.