Greetings 1.3

I thought I would give a little back story of myself as well as to say there is a method to the madness that appears in the blog. First off this is my second blog, my first blog I started sometime in early 2005 and continued until the website got bought out and the blogging service sequentially shut down :( Unfortunately I had not backed up my posts and ended up losing a over a year's worth of posts. After that because I was really focused on building on my investing knowledge and skill I decided to take a break from blogging, a long break as it turns out.

In the first week of August my sister and I spent some time with some good friends up in NY where the older siblings all contribute to a blog. Sarah thought this would be something fun for us to do and I rather reluctantly agreed to set up a blog for the both of us. I really had no intention of posting as much as I have, I had forgotten how much enjoyment I get writing my thoughts and experiences down. If you have read all the posts thus far ( I think maybe only bob has done this) then you probably have realized the thought posts out number the exciting experiences. Because my everyday experiences are less than exciting I tend to just post what happens to be on my mind at the time.

This is where the madness comes in, my brain is usually running at mach 5. When I sit down to write I typically have several thoughts all rushing around, I will just start typing and as I type an outline of the post will appear...Take my last post, I was just going to talk about how sleeping through your alarm is something that can get you in trouble. But, as I started typing I was reminded of my alter ego and how he would greatly add to my regular story of over sleeping thus sleepy Rufus made an appearance on here ;)

I am not sure how many people actually read this blog, it seems there are a lot of visitors but hardly ever any comments. I don't know if this is because my posts are just too wild for ordinary people or people just like to lurk. It does not really bother me either way, I have enjoyed posting the past couple of weeks and will continue to post if only for my own enjoyment in writing.

Sleepy Rufus

I have something to admit, I have an alter ego, sleepy Rufus.... Most people have never met sleepy Rufus mainly because he only seems to show up once I have gone to sleep, but boy does he cause trouble! If you have not already figured it out, sleepy Rufus likes to sleep, actually he lives to sleep. This is fine by me since like most people, I also like to sleep. Usually Rufus and I keep to the unwritten code we have, I am in charge when I want to be but at night when I am tired and want to hit the sack he can do his thing which is of course, sleep.

The trouble with having an alter ego is sometimes they make you do stupid things. One time I was staying in a hotel and went to sleep. Sleepy Rufus, in a rare moment of awake-ness decided he wanted to go do an experiment of some kind so he made me get out of bed, open the hotel room door and head down the hall in the middle of the night! I have no idea what kind of experiment sleepy Rufus wanted to do, but whatever it was, it was not important enough to go roaming the halls of a hotel in the middle of the night. Sleepy Rufus also sometimes steals the thoughts I am thinking when I go to sleep and uses them in his dreams, and he has very vivid dreams! This is somewhat disconcerting because sometimes in the middle of the night I will wake up and I am not sure if sleepy Rufus was dreaming something or it is actually happening. I once woke up early in the morning thinking the stock I had bought the day before had tanked overnight and I had lost the trade. I even went so far as to run over and check it on the computer. Stupid sleepy Rufus!

Most of the time, when I feel like waking up I will send sleepy Rufus to his bed in the corner of my brain and I will get up. Usually I get up when I want to without an alarm. Sleepy Rufus hates the alarm, so I only use it as a precaution on days when I have to be somewhere at a specific time. Yesterday was one of those days, I wanted to be in town by 7:45am and since I live an hour away I needed to be in the car @ 6:45, simple enough. I set my alarm for 6:15 so I would have enough time to grab something to eat and went to sleep. For some reason I woke up @ 5:30, this is not good I thought, now I will just lie here waiting for 6:15 to come around, but then sleepy Rufus showed up.

He starts reminding me how soft my pillow is and how I need these extra 45 minutes of sleep to have a good day. I should not have listened to him but I did, and I turned over and went back to sleep. At 6:15 the alarm rang, I could hear it ringing from the wonderful marshmallow cloud where sleepy Rufus and I were lying. I reached and turned it off and started to roll out of bed when all of a sudden the wonderful marshmallow cloud we were on morphed into a giant cotton candy roller coaster with gum drop cars and candy canes for rails! Sleepy Rufus said "Why get out of bed, when you could be riding on a gum drop and having fun with me?" he made a good point. Forgotten was my 7:45 appointment, nothing could compare to the opportunity to ride a gum drop on a cotton candy roller coaster!!!

I am sure you can figure out what happened next, I climbed aboard that gum drop and away sleepy Rufus and I went, it was great! That is until at 6:48 when I snapped awake with my heart pounding, knowing I had overslept. Needless to say I was not in town @ 7:45, I got there at 8:05 but it ended up working out better that way so maybe I should listen to sleepy Rufus more often.....

Interruption

This is a news bulletin from the great places to eat for cheap foundation. The Italian restaurant chain, Olive Garden has restarted their unlimited pasta, salad and bread sticks for 8.95 promotion!

No news yet on a never ending TUMS promotion to go with this....

Hawaiian shirts

The other day in a round about way I ended up being in the men's department of Sears looking for dress clothes. Being a guy I don't normally roam department stores alone in search of clothes, not because I don't like clothes, I do, in fact I have a whole theology about clothes and society but in the interest of not chasing away the few people who read this I will leave it at that. Anyway I browsed around looking for something on sale and came across Lands End dress shirts for 6.50 and right there on top was my size! Let me stop here and say, I don't think I have ever, as in never ever in my life, found my size in a dress shirt that is on sale, it just does not happen, I am a weird size. Anyway I was about as pumped as you can be about a white dress shirt :D I actually might have (unconsciously of course) had an exclamation of joy, I can't remember exactly, but the sales lady messing with the pants a few racks down looked at me a bit strange. I just grinned at her like a fool.....

After finding 4 more dress shirts @ 6.50 that were my size I was trying to figure out how I could afford to buy all 5. Ok well I could afford to buy them but even with such a great price I could not convince myself I needed 5 more shirts. I am thrifty, too thrifty sometimes according to my mother. The truth is I have no problem at all spending money, but only on something that is a necessity, if it is not a necessity I will try to find the best deal I can and if not I just won't buy the item... Everyone who knows me well has probably heard one or more of stories of the extremes I have gone to in my search for the "best" deal. Maybe I will post them sometime, but this post is already getting a bit long and we have not gotten to the reason of this post, Hawaiian shirts.

When I went to check out, there was this older guy around 60ish with a shirt on that said "grandpa" pretty ordinary looking. What was not ordinary, or at least not to me, was what he was purchasing, Hawaiian shirts! I mean not muted colors either these were pretty out there. I just thought it was rather funny to see this old dude getting shirts like that. I personally have a few Hawaiian shirts myself there is nothing wrong with looking like a sleazy car sales man once and a while but they should be worn at the beach or some other tropical place. Where we live is hours from the beach and we are nowhere near a tropical climate, so when I saw this older man buying Hawaiian shirts I just had to shake my head. Standards for the type of clothes people wear everyday sure have changed! Me in a Hawaiian shirt in the proper environment:
Notice how the shirt matches the scenery? This beach was actually where I met a very good friend of mine, Red. Even though sometimes he can be a real pain, we still seem to run into each other from time to time. He actually showed up for a visit a few weeks ago and just now left.

Pointy high heel shoes?

Seriously, what is the deal? There is no way they are comfortable and I personally don't even think they look that good on women. Maybe I am the only person who thinks that because they are enormously popular and have been for years but I still can't understand it. The reason this is even on my mind is today I brought my granddad to an appointment he had with a hearing aid sales person and while she was talking I looked down and happened to see a pair of weapons on her feet!!!

I kid you not, exactly like that! Besides their dangerous nature they also looked way too big for her feet, it was almost like she was standing on tiptoe right about where the bend is on the bottom of the shoe. It was obvious that the first three inches of the shoe was just empty space. I personally don't know why someone would wear something like that at all, let alone while working! Anyway I just felt like getting that off my chest, I am not going to pretend to know the faintest thing about woman's fashion and this is something I probably will never understand.

Oh! Before my sister comes along and adds some color commentary, I want to clarify that I have no problem with women wearing heels, I understand it makes woman feel taller and shows their legs off a bit. For that matter my boots have about a 3/4in heel. What I am lost about is high, pointy heels like the picture above.....

The flame no longer burns

The flame of life, bright and cheery has been put out in a world that is weary

darkness clouds the heart and we longer sing how great Thou art
for we have turned away, the sense of right and wrong long gone
humanism has wrapped the soul in a chain and all it feels is pain

The hope we should have in You has been misled, we live among the spiritual dead,
who can not see their preoccupation with a perfect world
has overtaken the warning cry from an imperfect heart and soul.

Only you Lord can set us free, to shine again as witness to Your glory

With this ring I thee wed

The past two Saturdays our family has attended 50th wedding anniversary celebrations. Last week's was for my great aunt on my dad's side. It was bit of a formal affair in their church, with everyone pretty well dressed up. It was a tad weird since most of the older relatives had not seen us in a long time (10+ years) and people I had never seen before kept coming up and giving me hugs telling me how they remembered when I was so and so tall and see how much I had grown. It was good though, I got to see a lot of pictures from my aunt and uncle's wedding and it funny to see how they have changed in 50 years.

The second celebration was today, the couple was a family my parents have known for I don't know how many years. Their kids are I guess around my parents age and they have grandkids around the same age as our family. Anyway this was a more toned down celebration in one of their daughter's homes. It was a lot of fun, I had not seen the grandkids around my age in over four years and it was good to see them again if only for a little while.

Even though both of these celebrations were different they both had the common trait of being a 50th wedding celebration. With nearly 50% of marriages ending in divorce today, to be married for five decades is is something to really step back and commend. I mean 50 years! That is twice my age! I pray when I get married I am blessed with a Godly wife who will be at my side after fifty years and more. To be married for 50 years, it just blows my mind, and at the same time I feel saddened.

We live in a society that almost frowns on the concept of marriage, it is one in which living together before marriage is acceptable, one in which sexual immorality is almost a given for relationships in the secular world. Morality is a dirty word. Who are you to question my lifestyle, whatever makes me happy or feel good has to be right...There is this song called "If it makes you happy" by Sheryl Crow and the chorus goes something like "If it makes you happy, it can't be that baaaaad"... There is no moral compass whatsoever in our society everyone is their own "moral master" there are no absolutes or a supreme God. There is nothing but confusion and chaos and yet the world wonders why we can't all just get along, why unspeakable evils are committed. We are lost with no compass in a sea of darkness, and that truly is something to be saddened about.

Ok sorry I got on a bit of rant there, it happens to me a lot when I think about our society :( It sometimes just seems like the world is on a train, building the tracks as it goes, with no clear direction. Unfortunately the church is still on the train, sure we will not go into some of the more evil cabins but we can't seem to just get off this long black train.

I feel like Olivia !!!!!

You may think that since I don't post, I am a ghost
Thats not true, I just have more important things to do. :) a rhyme by Will about me!!

The funniest thing happened driving home today. I was talking to Will about Utah. Rather than saying Utah, I said UHAA. Finding my mistake funny, I turned it into a battle cry, and enthusiastically threw my arms in the air and yelled UUUHAAAAA. When I mean enthusiastically, I mean feet out the window, arms stretched out hitting Will in the face, eyes closed and yelling at the top of my lungs. Ohh, and did I mention that the windows were rolled completely down?? Any way, I finish my battle cry and open my eyes to find a truck in the opposite lane about to go by us. I look at the guy driving and he is WAVING ENTHUSIASTICALLY BACK AT ME!!! What a weirdo. At that moment I felt like Olivia. :0
See I do post, I just have to have exciting things happen to me to post about .

~Sarah~

The impending storm

I love extreme changes in weather, especially summer thunder storms. The weather can be all sunny and happy and then in a flash the wind is whipping your face, the temperature drops and the sky is flooded with dark fast moving clouds. The rain starts to come down in sheets and all one can do is stare at the wonder of it all. It is exhilarating just to stand in a clearing and wait for the storm to start around you....The other afternoon was one such day, the wind actually got so bad we had a dead tree crack in the back yard.

The great unveiling!

Well after some reasoning with my DEAR sister I was able to get her permission to post our magnificent debut film clip :D I guess I could have just posted it without her knowledge since she never posts but I figured it would somehow end up biting me in the end. So here it is:

Sorry it is a bit small, trying to keep it good quality while not taking forever to load. BTW comments welcome!

A squirrel, a skunk and a chicken

I drive close to an hour, one way, coming and going to work each day. It is a bit of pain where I sit down and by that I mean my wallet and the money that flows from it in an endless stream to the gas pump :( Even though gas is now close to 2.00 more per gallon than when I first got my license, I still love to drive and the two hours I spend in the car, sometimes especially in the afternoon, is one of the highlights of my day. I roll down the windows, turn up the music and just cruise through the country side. Because of the time I spend in my car road kill is a fact of driving, I have seen everything from turtles to horses on the side of, or in the middle of the road.

This morning heading into work there seemed to be an abundance of dead animals lying around, probably because of the thunderstorm we had last night. Unfortunately for several animals I had the music pumping and was just minding my own business when they decided life was not worth living anymore. Since I was the cause of death I decided I would turn the music off and compose them a few lines as an obituary. They sounded so good in my car that I figured I would post them here.

Indecision kills and by the blood on my wheels it seems the squirrel who could not decide which way to go is now dead on the road.

The little white chicken lay dead in the road feathers all around, how did you explode? Your featherless body lays for the world to see on a back road in the country.

The carcass of a skunk mangled beyond recognition, the stench is overpowering with no inhibition, I can barely breath as my nostril flare trying in vain to find some clean air!


hmm now that I have typed them out they sound rather morbid :/

Well......

I was going to post the film but Sarah thinks it might ruin her image on the web forever :p I will see what I can do to persuade her to change her mind. until then two screen caps

Yes I made it grainy and that color on purpose, anything to make the hallway less bland:)

Filming on a lazy Sunday afternoon

Yesterday, having nothing better to do my sister and I decided we should make a film clip to some music. We had thought about doing it for a long time but it always seemed to be at 10:30 or 11 at night. :p Anyway driving home from church we decided we had most of the afternoon free and we should try filming. Our scene was to be a wild west shootout, but somehow that morphed into people with trench coats and cowboy hats using colt .45s sorta a mix of the west meets the1920's. We also decided that due to the oppressive heat we were going to film indoors which for a wild west shoot is a little out there...

Our barn would have been perfect but using it would have involved an hour or more of clean up and unless it is an absolute necessity cleaning the barn is not something you want to do at all let alone in the heat. ;) So we resorted to filming in a hallway in our house. This caused a ruckus since it was the hallway where all our younger brothers and sisters have their rooms. They of course decided to watch the filming and our youngest brother Matthew even decided he should dress up to match us. Samuel, who is a few years older than Matthew, also decided to pull out a book on wild west outlaws and inform me of all I needed to match a picture in the book... For a while it was a bit crazy as we set up but then as we started and everyone discovered how boring the filming was the younger generations decided to go watch a real movie and leave Sarah and I on our own.

Once we got rolling it was about as slow as molasseses, much of the reason for this was trying to teach Sarah how to use the camera when I had a scene. But there were also a few retakes due to us laughing or smiling at the wrong times. After about an hour and a half Sarah and I both agreed that even being inside we were getting pretty hot since we were in these trench coats and stupidly had them all buttoned up even when we were not filming. I decided we would just make due with what we had and see what it would look like once edited. Later that evening after about 30 minutes of editing, we had our masterpiece! Ok maybe not a masterpiece, after the editing and everything the total time of our clip is like 1 minute 20 seconds and we could have done a better job acting it out especially the part where we shoot guns but overall it came out pretty good.

Sunrise on the plane

Our flight back from San Antonio was @ 5 something in the morning. About halfway through the flight the plane was greeted by a pretty awesome sunrise... The Lord's creation never ceases to amaze me :)

Some Pictures from San Antonio

I was down in San Antonio this past week working, and the insect population was a tad out of control....

All those little black dots are crickets!

Some butterflies

There were several of these spiders, not sure about the kind but they were huge.

Hmmm

It has been a few days since I have been on. The reason being I have been trying to get my fall routine started before we start orchestra in September. This means getting up at 6:00 and practicing violin for two hours. The rest of the morning is helping Sam (another brother) with violin, practicing piano for an hour, another hour of violin, and helping Matthew (yet another brother, I have four :) Then I have lunch. I hope the description of my morning was not too boring. But then again, in my few days absence from the blog, William wrote an epic about how much he hates hot weather. I am getting really excited about school this year. I actually graduated from high school two years ago, but this year my mom is starting a new curriculum called Tapestry of Grace. The younger kids are going to be studying the Middle ages and Renaissance. They are also going to be focusing on church history. Since I have not really studied this time period (well not in depth) I decided to read all the books and help my mom at the Co-op that we have once a week. My mom and I will be leading the discussions regarding all the reading. I will also get to help in the nursery. :) Some of the books we have to read are more like textbooks especially the one on church history and I was afraid they would be boring. I actually enjoyed reading them.
Other than starting school, nothing much has happened around here. William and my dad were gone for half the week. William came back looking like he had a skin disease. As previously mentioned, he got sunburnt while we were in NY. When he came back from SA, he was in the peeling stage. ewwwwww!!!!

I know I said I would post exciting NY stories, just hold on, they are coming sometime soon.
~Sarah~

The sun, heat and sticky humidity

In honor of my recent skin peeling sun burn, I am going to rant a bit on the sun and heat in general. This will probably be the first of many rants from me as I tend to get things stuck in my head and until I get them out they just keep going around and around. Anyway on the subject of the sun and heat, I HATE 'EM!

Ok, well I guess I don't really hate the sun, but I hate the heat which comes from the sun so it is not without some blame. I like cold weather, I like snow, I like waking up in the morning and seeing your breath in front of you as you walk on a ice cube of a wooden floor. I don't like heat. Ok, well I actually don't mind heat if I am swimming because then I am in nice cool water - not freezing water, freezing water bugs me but still not as much as hot water which gets hot from what? Our rant topic: HEAT (Off topic for a sec, there is a film called Heat, that has a great shoot out scene in I think downtown L.A. rest of the movie is meh but the shoot out is outstanding)

Anyway I do not like heat or hot sticky humid weather, I live with it and work in it but that does not mean it does not bug me or drive me up a wall, a concrete wall that happens to be in direct sunlight and 130 degrees to the touch. When I get in my car to head home from work, I don't like having a branding iron for a steering wheel for the first 5 minutes even though I parked in the modest shade of some little tree. When it is hot outside and you are sweating there really is nothing you can do alone to cool yourself down. Sure you can go swimming but that takes water, you could stay indoors all the time but then you are relying on the air conditioning to keep you cool. This is probably the main reason why I don't like heat, I like being outdoors and when you are outside and it is 105 and the humidity is @ 60% or some other awful percentage it is just uncomfortable plain and simple.

In cold weather, while it might be chilly to just stand around outside it is only a matter of being active and you will warm yourself right up, if you are working in the cold, say chopping wood, then after a while the physical act of chopping the wood is going to keep your body at a comfortable temperature. What happens if you chop wood in 105 degree weather? You sweat more! If it is cold outside, what is the first thing you are going to do before heading out? Depending on the temperature outdoors maybe put another layer or two on, maybe some gloves or a hat and you can keep yourself nice and cozy. If it is hot outside, what do you do? Put on shorts, maybe flip-flops, if you are a guy depending on what you are doing you could go sans shirt. But after that it is not like you can take off more layers to keep cool, you are destined to a sweaty outdoor experience depending on the outdoor temp of course.

The other day there was this magazine I saw called vacation homes or something, anyway I start flipping through it and they have this huge article on how great Arizona is for a retirement or vacation home. What on earth? There is now this huge market of people who want to retire in Arizona! I think maybe these older people who want to go spend the rest of their lives in a desert have already had a little too much heat to their brains! Granted there is probably less humidity than here on the east cost but still, year after year of constant 85-100+ degree weather ugh! One last note, in a weird irony I actually like spicy and hot foods, but when it comes to the heat outdoors I can't stand it!

A word about me dancing

I have been gone for four days in San Antonio and in my absence I see my sister has added her commentary to my previous post :p For the record I want to say that I can dance, but because of my amazing skill I make everyone around me look terrible and I would never want to be the cause of someone quitting dancing because they don't think they are skilled enough. I just have natural talent, what else is there to say. :D Pictures from SA will be forthcoming tomorrow.

Departure from friends is always a sad thing

This past week Sarah and I were able to spend a few days with our friends the B's in upstate NY. Their family is probably one of our family's oldest friends that we still actively keep up with. It is sad how when you are younger it seems there are always these families who you will be friends with but then as you get older they drop away. The B's are one family that we have fortunately kept up with over the years despite their move to NY and their going off the grid for several years. Our family does not get to see them nearly as much as I would like to, but living almost a days drive is a bit of a hindrance to visiting.

Anyway I had a great time full of laughs and excitement with them. We arrived Monday afternoon played some games and talked. Tuesday we played volleyball and some more games including this crazy dice game that caused a few minor cuts on fingers. Later that afternoon we headed to this annual Christian music event Kingdom Bound, where we saw Denver, Chris Tomlin and Toby Mac. The music was loud and we sang ourselves horse and danced till we were tired then grooved some more. Sarah's edit: everyone danced but William. He wishes he could dance like me but he... well.... he can't. :(
When we made it back the the car my ears were still ringing slightly it was great. Hm.. its great if you are going deaf from the concert ????
Wednesday saw us playing more volleyball then spending the rest of the afternoon tubing on the lake down the road from their house. This is where I was stupid and completely forgot about sunscreen. I am still red as a lobster and amazingly sore 4 days later. Sarah (me) on the other hand just got a healthy tan. Although the next day I was extremely sore from bouncing around while tubing. The plan was to be there Monday through Friday but unfortunately we ended up having to leave Thursday morning. :( It was a disappointment that we could not stay for another day but Sarah and I were happy we had at least been able to spend a few days with some great friends. I totally agree!!!!
Stay tuned as we post some exciting stories about NY.

Greetings 1.2

I am Sarah's brother Will, and while I am busy and might not post everyday I will try to stay current and post a few times a week. Take everything Sarah posts with a grain of salt as it may be true but with a slight exaggeration. While I am in charge of 4-8 movie screenings a month it is far from my true love and most time I don't even stay to watch the film. I am currently sporting a magnificent blood red sunburn on my shoulders and upper arms that hurts like nothing else. My skin has been on fire for 3 days and I still can't move my arms without stabbing pain. It really is wild, you don't think about your skin actually hurting when you move but with as bad a sunburn as I have every little move of my upper body brings pain. I got the sunburn when I went out to play volleyball and then went tubing all in the heat of the day while staying at some friend's house. Yes I sometimes don't think before I act.

Greetings!

This is my first er... second try at blogging. Hopefully, this time I will actually post more than once :) I'm Sarah and if you want to know more about me just read my profile. Go on, go read it RIGHT NOW!!
William will try to post as his time allows. You know he is just so busy with his job and social life, not to mention his one true love.... being in charge of movie screenings. Well, thats enough for now, I wouldn't want anyone to get to used to long posts.