Happy New Year!

2007 is upon us. I hope everyone has their resolutions in order and their 2006 worries properly filed away. This year will be a great year for Jodi and I. This year we will add another member to our family (Lyric) and buy our first home. We will be drinking our sparkling grape juice and listening to Auld Lang Syne performed by the Glenn Miller Orchestra tonight while attempting to figure out what the song is supposed to be saying. We wanted to wish you all a very happy and safe new ye...

Read More

Back-Up Camera

Maybe it takes a twisted sense of humor to notice these things. Maybe everyone who saw this product made this observation. I don't know which of these is true, but I thought that I'd share with you what I saw. I can just hear the voice-over advertisement: "Backing up a vehicle can be hazardous. Knowing your surroundings while in the driver's seat can be a guessing game that leaves you losing all too often. This year alone, over a million Americans could lose their lives under the rear tires of the family station wagon. However, using the latest technological innovations, VR3 has designed a new life-saving device specifically designed for...

Read More

There's Music In My Veins

I'm sure that all of my blog readers know already that I love music. You all are privy to my past musical obsessions, my current musical hobbies, and the future American citizen that my wife and I are manufacturing who is to be named Lyric. What you may not know is that my family tree has been a'rockin' for quite some time.His name was John Davenport and although it turns out that he was my mother's step-father and not my mother's biological father and therefore no relation to me, I still count him as my grandfather. After all, I didn't even know that he wasn't my blood until I was in my later teens. And, of course, it made no difference to me...

Read More

Merry Christmas!!!

...

Read More

Fixed Photo

Here is an example of the power of GIMP! The puddle was a distraction to the natural beauty of the photo, so it got the boot. Thanks, GI...

Read More

Picture Practice

Last night, my wife and I went to dinner with our friends, James and Jennie, at Thai House. The food was exquisite. The atmosphere was warm and inviting. The service was friendly. The owners were photographed with Don Johnson. It was a perfect meal.After dinner, we went downtown and took some photos in Jordan Valley Park. We took advantage of the endless background possibilities and took lots of pictures of ourselves in front of various things. Here is a picture without us in it that I thought turned out really nice. Minus the puddle.I'll use GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) to take that puddle out of the picture later. GIMP is basically...

Read More

St. Louis Trip

This last Friday we ran to St. Louis to see Jodi's sister, Diana, graduate from Interior Design School. We stayed the night and hung out all day Saturday. We had a lot of fun. Although, I must warn you about something important, but not well known. If you stay anywhere near the business district right off I-55 don't expect to walk to a restaurant on the weekend. Apparently, while there are a large number of eateries in the area, they are all closed on Saturday. I'm not sure of the exact number of miles that we walked, but if we had walked straight from the hotel to the mall where we ate it would have been 1.4 miles one way. However, we...

Read More

New Slideshow

...

Read More

International Harvester

About two weeks ago a friend of Jodi's aunt brought over several large boxes full of clothes and had told us to go through them and take what we could use and give away or donate the rest. We got a couple shirts for Jacob out of the deal, but aside from that there wasn't much in our sizes. So, we passed on the fortune to several others. But before doing so Jodi did save one shirt that she recognized as an International shirt. No, the shirt hasn't traveled the world like those magic pants that managed to create a sisterhood. International. As in the manufacturer of diesel trucks. Her dad drove one at one point in time. So, she decided...

Read More

Useless Information (part two)

S.O.S pads. Where did they come from? Well, hold on to your butts, because I'm about to tell you.It starts back in 1917 with a travelling door-to-door pot salesman named Edwin Cox. Yes, I said pot. But, he was selling pots to cook in, not marijuana. Now some of the pots that he sold may still be around today being used to cook meth in, but that's another story.As the story goes, Mr. Cox was a terrible salesman. For whatever reason, he just couldn't sell pots like the other pot salesmen who were making a great living. So, he decided that he needed a gimmick.Looking back at the very short complaint list that he had he realized that the most-popular...

Read More

High School Reunion

Next summer is the summer of my ten-year high school reunion. I can and can't believe that it has been ten years. It's like there is really two parts of me. One heard that it had been ten years and dropped his jaw like Wile E. Coyote after seeing the Roadrunner run right through the rock with a picture of a tunnel painted on it. The other one just shrugged his shoulders and said, "yup." After all, a lot has happened to me since I was a young pup. First, I've grown wiser. Not to say, I'm wise, but I can definitely say that I WAS stupid and I'm not as stupid as I was. We all were, though. And, yet, I remember being smarter than the whole...

Read More

Christmas Monkey

I've never worked at a company that have had one of those Christmas parties that you hear about where employees get drunk, lose their inhibitions, and wind up giving their bosses a wedgie or something. Instead, I work for SRC who has had such terrible outcomes to their outings that they purposefully set out to find the most "family-friendly" environments. This year's party was at the Family YMCA. They rented out the whole thing which was great for Jacob, but a little boring for Jodi and I. I'm too smart to get all energetic around my co-workers. If my boss sees me running around he'll know that I can physically work harder than I do and...

Read More

Mall shoppin'

I'm afraid that it happened. I was walking through the Battlefield Mall today carrying a shopping bag. It was a very small shopping bag, but a shopping bag nonetheless. Jodi and I went there today to get a couple things. One of the things to obtain was this year's Christmas ornament. Jodi decided to start this tradition three years ago and purchase a neat new Christmas ornament every year. We would make this purchase together and we'd mark it someway with the year in which we got it. This year we got a very appropriately themed ornament. Pictured above, you'll see that this year's theme is home improvement. We just put in our first ever...

Read More

3rd Yeariversary!

Yesterday was mine and Jodi's third yeariversary! We're really excited about it even though the day would've come and gone without our notice if it hadn't been for Jodi's sudden epiphany last night right before we went to sleep. But, either way it's still a momentous milestone in our lives.You know, it just dawned on me that maybe you don't know what a yeariversary is. It's the anniversary to the day we met. We would call it our Anniversary, but then people would get confused as to when we were married. And, saying, "It's our third anniversary to the day in which we met" is cumbersome and takes too long. Then, people ask who we met? You...

Read More

Time to wake up...

I have a story from a long time ago that I thought I'd share with you. It all started with the transition from morning person to night owl. As a child I was always a morning person. I awoke before my whole family. I remember the mornings watching paid programming while I waited for the cartoons to start at 6:00 a.m.As a seventeen-year-old who had liberated himself from the restrictions of a parental monarchy (in other words: I moved out), I would stay up until I just couldn't stay up any longer. My friends were the same way. We would scoff at those who went to sleep as if sleeping were some obvious sign of weakness. Sleepers were a new...

Read More