It's all fun and games until somebody gets hurt...

Why I like my wife: The other day, while mowing the lawn, the wife was out and picking various items - rocks, branches, toys, whatever, up from the lawn for me. As she clearly was finishing (and in the way), I chased her with the lawn mower teasingly. This lasted a couple of times; until she became complacent. The last time, I chased her all over the yard leaving loops and whorls in my wonderful pattern.

Her response? Oh, that was to laugh, come inside, then dump water on my head from the deck.

Still not sure who got the best of who on this deal, but I have to say, no matter what happens in our household, we have fun almost every day. So, why do I like my wife? Because she allows me to have fun, has fun back, and we truly enjoy torturing each other and the children. In the end, we laugh until we cry and then do it all again. What could possibly be better than that?

Truck Trouble...

My neighbor and I are building an erosion system since every time it rains, his yard gets eroded. So, after three years, we've started making progress to stop this. To make this work, we are building a series of trenches and filling the trenches with rocks to hold them open. The trenches are designed to catch and route the rain water where we want it to go. At this point we have all of the trenches dug and last weekend we began distributing the rocks in the trenches.

Unfortunately, we didn't quite get finished to where we were supposed to...which meant leaving (literally) a ton of rock in my truck overnight. Then, it decided to rain all night and most of the day. Late in the day, with the weather choosing not to break fully, I knew I needed to get the rock out of my truck as I would need it (without the extra weight) the next day.

Instead of staying close to the house (where it was dryer) - my bright idea was to drive right down to where the rain usually funnels (where it was wetter). When I didn't like my position, I figured the extra weight would help me get traction. Ummm, no. At this point, the only thing to do was to dump the load and figure out where to go from there. So, we began dumping the rocks out of my truck and it began to downpour. By the end, I was a huge, wet, mud ball mess.

We ended up needing to call the other neighbor over to tow my truck out (much to everyones amusement). This is the same guy who pulled it out when yet another neighbor got it stuck in his yard. I got even muddier crawling under the truck to hook it up for the tow. The wife is taking pictures, the neighbors are giving me a hard time, and even the kids were picking on me. Can't say it wasn't deserved, but it is hard for me to deal with those situations where I can't even make a comment back without making the whole thing worse.

Happy Mother's Day...

For all mothers and mothers-to-be: I hope you have a wonderful day full of love and caring from your families.

This morning, my wife got to sleep in, then put up with burnt muffins and playful bickering with her family - strange, but this is how we have fun and show each other we care. All in all, it has been a good morning. Later today, we're going to go see the Braves and just try to have a relaxing day all of today.

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!!!

Big Brother

It is not 1984, but thanks to 9/11 and Bush, Big Brother is here.

Click on the title and you'll be transferred to the latest article on the NSA phone database.

Summer-itis...

The kids are beginning to suffer from this long standing disease. As the school year comes closer to an end (all of the kids are out here in the next two weeks), it is becoming more and more obvious. Last night (and this morning for various reasons), the youngest was working on a spelling assignment involving writing sentences. Here are the basic rules:

-Sentence must include the spelling word
-Sentence must also involve a basic topic (this week: People in America)

Best sentence not given to the child (using the spelling word WHEN): "We went to the fair."

And the child couldn't figure out why the sentence wouldn't work. Even worse, the first pass on the sentence was: "People in America went to the fair."

Yep, the child has tuned out for the summer - at least until I come up with sentences for the kid to write. Ahhh, good times torturing children...