My sister is Getting Married!!!!!!

Sarah & Michael
2009

Yesterday!!

I have some very good news!! First, I finished drivers ed!!!!:) YAY!!



Second, M. has been found and is on the way back to the orphanage! For more details you can go to Mrs. Mestas blog.

Yesterday, we drove to Cary to visit some of our really good friends! First we stopped by the Montgomery's house. They were our next door neighbors when we lived in Cary! It was really wried seeing were we use to live! It seemed so much smaller! We had a really nice visit with the Montgomery's. It's really strange to think at one time we lived right next door and would see them every day! It brought back some really good memories !!

At the Montgomery's!

Back row L-R : Molly, Anna, John, Nick, James, Ann.

Front row L-R: Matt and Sam.

After our visit with the Montgomery's we headed to the Barton's house. Mrs. Barton had a baby last week! He is SO cute!!

Katherine and James

We brought them dinner and visited for about a couple hours. I had a lot of fun talking to Amy and Katherine. It was also, really good to see them! After that we headed home.

So that was my day yesterday. Right now we are in the middle of cleaning the house, so I have to go.

Today is Earth day....

And in celebration of such a glorious day as well as Arbor day this Friday I present the following picture from the "Sarah and William crazy picture archive"

Note, our faces are turned away from the camera so it would not appear like this was a publicity stunt. Today and Friday are days in which we should be celebrating nature and we wanted our true feelings for both Earth and Arbor day to be conveyed through the power of the photography without a distraction which might arise from seeing our smiling visages.....

Ok enough of that gobbledygook! (yes it's a real word) Since it seems spring is upon us, how about some helpful advice on avoiding potentially painful experiences which can arise between now and the fall.

So it is getting warmer, the sun is shinning, the flowers are starting to bloom, bees are flying from flower to said flower, though none of them are mine since my hives died, the pollen is turning my car a nasty yellowish green, and people are starting to wear shorts. If you happen to not believe in wearing shorts, let me be the first of the season to tell you that you are a smart person, though probably a very hot one as the weather continues to heat up. Why are you a very smart person for not wearing shorts? For the simple reason that by wearing shorts you present the lower half of your legs to serious injury.

Case in point:

As you can see, exposed legs seem to attract hard pointy objects as well as possess a strange, almost magnetic pull towards any hard surface, especially that of concrete. Yes shorts are MUCH cooler in warm weather, but are they worth it? I leave it up to the readership to decide for themselves.

Something even worse and much more serious than injuries to the lower extremities comes from our always shining source of light, the sun. I am talking about sunburn! Now maybe some people don't have this problem, count yourself blessed if you don't, but the sun really likes shining it's bright rays onto my skin and toasting it a nice shade of reddish orange. Maybe toast is too light a word, fry would probably be more like it. The times I have had to deal with skin peeling off in quarter sized pieces is sadly too numerous to count.

Fortunately there is a solution to both injuries to your legs and sunburn, stay indoors! :D (This is not a very feasible option however) A better approach is to wear sunblock to prevent sunburn, yes, it is a slight pain to put on but you are saving your skin. As to bloody injuies on your knees and legs, if you can't wear long pants, at least always have band-aids handy to keep the blood at bay and maybe Neosporin to prevent infection.....Oh and avoid mulch piles in the dark ;)

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!