Pregnancy Decision Map
The County Fair
1 min read
The girls and I went to the Gallia County Fair with my dad and step-mother last week. I have to be honest - I'm not much of a fan of county fairs but it wasn't too bad. The girls rode a bunch of rides and Shannon won an prize at a dart game. I even managed to win the big animal prize on a game - that one where you roll a ball up a small table and based on which hole it goes in your character races ahead. There were at least ten of us in the race so it was cool to win even though I almost choked after pulling out to a huge lead.
Anyway, here are some photos of the girls at the fair.
My Best Photos
1 min read
I have been trying to tidy up my online presence some lately and, in that same vein, I've decided to split out some of the photos I have in order to highlight them a little better. Normally I post all of my photos at our picasaweb location. However, in the future that online repository will be just our normal run of the mill photos of the family and our adventures. Some photos from these adventures, on the other hand, just stand out as really cool images and so I wanted to give them their own little home on the web. For that I have decided to repurpose my long idle Flickr account. So now I have a set called "My Best Shots" that is will feature these photos. As of today there are 13 images in that set. Hopefully you will think some of them are cool too.
I use two of them as wall papers on my computer - the giraffe and the aquarium images. In fact, as of this writing I am using the aquarium image.
Girls on the Move
3 min read
About a year ago we told the girls that once Joe moved out they could move to the third floor and share the huge room as their bedroom. This would give them plenty of room to play and their own bathroom. Little did we know that Joe would find a girlfriend he liked so much that he would move out! Well, last Saturday he moved out and so on Sunday we began the week long process of moving the girls up and all of the junk on the third floor out. It was amazing how much crap we had stored up on that floor!
We spent most of Sunday moving stuff out of the room and then painting. The walls are pink, the ceiling is blue, and the walls are further adorned with dark pink (Uniqua Pink) and blue polk-dots. It actually looks pretty good. Truth be told though we still aren't quite done with their room. We have some more polka dots to paint, a small area around one window to finish up, and we have some clothes to store.
We then went to work on Emily's old room and converted it into a guest room. Lisa really wanted it to be the office but there was just too much other work to do without moving all of that furniture as well so for the time being it is the guest room. And, if I do say so myself it looks pretty damn good. I rearranged the furniture some, put a nice quilt on the bed, cleared out all of the books and anything else of Emily's, and hung two paintings by my mother's dad. One of the paintings is in really bad shape but I think it looks kind of neat on the wall. Almost all of the furniture in the room is antique - the bed, dresser, and cedar chest were all Lisa's maternal grandparents. There are also two antique hospital screens on one wall and an old quilt rack holding a few extra blankets. Finally we added one of our nice blue chairs to the room along with an antique library ladder to create a small reading area. I'm really happy with how it all turned out.
The last step was to make sense of all the crap we had carried downstairs and loaded into Shannon's old room so we could create an office/scrapbooking/craft room for Lisa.
We managed to get about 99% of everything organized and in place by the end of yesterday and now her office is ready to go. All of my books from the third floor are dominating the two bookcases in the room. There are also two long utility tables setup in the room to facilitate Lisa's scrapbooking (plus room for a friend) and there is a small table setup for Shannon so she can participate as well. Needless to say I think both Lisa and Shannon are pretty excited about putting that room to use. I know I'll be happy to see them making progress on their crafts.
In these last two postings I'm trying a new method of sharing photos. Please let me know if you like this approach or if you'd prefer to just have a link off to the photos.
Swinging
2 min read
Last Saturday Joe and I spent the day assembling a new swing set for the girls. It was purchased by the girls babysitter, Patti, and was constructed in her backyard. The swingset is really nice and is made by a company called CedarWorks. Patti purchased a fairly simple system with four swings and a slide but it was still complicated enough where it took the two of us most of the day to assemble it. Part of the problem was I just didn't have all the right tools, such as a 9/16" deep socket. I also didn't have a normal depth 9/16" socket.
At one point Joe and I had to go to Lowes to get some sockets where we bought two 9/16" sockets and a 1/2" socket so that sucked up about an hour of time. Then later, we realized we would need the deep socket so then Lisa had to go to the nearest auto zone for that. We also thought we had lost a bolt so Lisa had to go to Lowes to get a replacement. About 15 minutes after she got back I found the missing bolt - it was in my pocket. Even considering our poor preparation and my deep pockets the process still went pretty smoothly and the set went up without too much difficulty.