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Archive for January, 2009

Here a geek, there a geek, everywhere a geek geek

Friday, January 30th, 2009

I’m a geek. I have a geeky degree and a geeky job. SweetGuy is a geek. He has a Masters in Geeky degree, and is Director of Geek at his place of employment. Bud is a geek. He is currently pursuing his degree in geekness.

Now, DustMeister is living with us. He delights in geekdom. He salivates over computers. I’ve never seen a guy so happy as when his laptop, and eventually PC, arrived via UPS. He has set his PC up in our lookout tower, which he has now dubbed the Tower of Power.

And then there’s Magoo.

The site of this existing on our kitchen table makes her gag:

A LAN Party!!! Meaning, a bunch of geeks hook their computers together and play video games. SO MUCH FUN!

Next time Magoo does something to make one of us mad, I think we all should sit around making binary jokes*, playing Risk, and discuss the benefits of IP version 6 over IP version 4. All, while never looking up from our computer screens.

He he.

I think she secretly loves geek. Da Kaff has some geekness in him too as evidenced by the fact a computer screen instantly catches him in its tractor beam.

Oh, and the LAN party was her idea!

Give into the force, Magoo. Geeks rule the world.

*There are 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary, and those who don’t.

Posted in Techie | 4 Comments »

Ice Camp 2009

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

Magoo keeps complaining I haven’t posted lately. I’ve been a bit busy.

We took the youth group (59 kids, 8 chaperones) to Miracle Camp in Michigan this weekend for Ice Camp 2009 – an incredibly jam packed 48 hours of activity that is so frenetic I’m generally unable to function or speak coherently for a month following. It is an incredible mixture of pure fun, getting to know new people, and intense spiritual introspection. It is way cool, both literally and figuratively.

We had a high of about 15 degrees this year, which was a great improvement over the past two years.

Here are my personal highlights of the weekend. As always, since I can’t be forced to think too much, they are not necessarily in any order:

It’s Magoo’s Senior year. She has an awesome close-knit group of senior friends – a dozen or so guys and gals. Nearly every one of them made it to Ice Camp. It’s so neat to see the natural easy-going relationship they all have.

DustMeister is part of that group. But, because of the small problem of living in Singapore the last couple of years, he hasn’t been able to attend Ice Camp. He is back home, and it was SO EXCELLENT to have him there. Even though he failed to capture the gross banana consumption contest:

I was in a cabin with eight girls. Six of them I had already known pretty well. Two I had maybe only met once. These two, Ali and Amanda, were hilarious, for real. Amanda is non stop funny and incredibly sweet and competitive and inclusive. And she says “for real” or “for real?” all the time. I liked it so much I am going to start using it myself all the time, for real. Ali is so much fun, so introspective, and so sweet. And these best friends play off each other perfectly. They added SO much to the weekend. I plan on stalking them and making them be my friends forever, because I like them so much. The cabin was full of girls with a wide variety of interests, activities, and friends, yet by the way they acted and got along, you’d have thought they’d all been rooming together for years.

Now that Emmy lives in our area, she got to go to Miracle Camp! You’d think a girl that was at a new school, and attending a function she’s never attended before would kind of hang back and tag along with her cousin and good friends. Not Emmy. She met new people, did all kinds of activities, and became famous as the single girl on the epic broomball team. It helped that she got kicked in the face, jumped up, and said “I’m fine.” Guys totally respect that. And, really, many women pay big bucks to get nice full lips. One kick in the face and Emmy got that for free. You’re welcome.

An excellent band named Hello Industry. Check them out. They were PERFECT! Bud and Magoo make fun of me because I usually barely play my music loud enough to even make out what is playing. But for whatever reason the louder the better at Ice Camp. Hello Industry delivered. Oh, and they spent endless amounts of time with the students, which was pretty awesome of them. DustMeister even learned a few new bass techniques from them. (Sorry, I didn’t get a picture of the band.)
Deep spiritual discussions. What’s wrong. What can we fix. How can we do better. These are the kids talking. Teenagers. Unbelievably impressive teenagers.

Our cabin was connected to another cabin, much like a hotel room has a locked door to an adjoining room. Only the locked door in this case was half inch thick plywood witha vent in it. It wasn’t such a good sound insulator. Nor was the massive heating vent system that crossed through both rooms creating a nice megaphone sound amplifier between the two rooms. The other room contained unseen, but not unheard, girls from a group unknown to us. Instead of getting irked at the sound generated by the other cabin, our girls took advantage of it. A completely impromptu round of VBS songs broke out between the two cabins one afternoon. The other cabin sang “Jesus loves the little children”. We sang “This little light of mine”. They sang “B-I-B-L-E” and we sang “Zaccheus”. Before it was over we’d moved onto Disney songs and the big finale of “So Long, Farewell” from the Sound of Music. I can’t tell you how much fun that was. We never saw or spoke to those girls. But, we had a blast singing with them.
Watching two of our girls and one of our youth leaders beat an all guys team in 3 on 3 b-ball.

One of our leaders taking our broomball team through an entire comical practice before their game. It included drills and straight out of Braveheart speeches to the participants. His final rallying call before their friendly church camp broomball game, you ask? “Let’s never forget this MEN, and woman, WINNING IS EVERYTHING!! Oh, and making money too.” They lost.

Standing outside on a 15 degree snowy day in the middle of a massive field of white, watching at least 100 teenagers oblivious to the cold, sans iPods & cell phones & mind altering substances, have the time of their life throwing snowballs, burying each other in the snow, playing broomball, tackling each other and smiling non-stop for hours on end.

A speaker and worship session on Saturday night and renewed commitments to the Lord that make every second of work it takes to prepare for this weekend worth it a thousand times over.
Watching Da Kaff make snow angels in his shorts and t-shirt after playing basketball. Magoo accused me of being evil because I goaded him into it by suggesting he was a wuss if he didn’t do it. I suppose she has a point. Nevertheless, he did prove his lack of wuss-ness, that’s for SURE:

Smiles, smiles, and a few more smiles. You can check out the whole gallery by clicking HERE.

What a weekend. Thanks to the Lord. Thanks to those who prayed. Thanks to the Miracle Camp staff, speaker, and band. Thanks to the chaperones. And thanks to the most awesomest group of high school students ever, for REAL!

Posted in Wonderful, Youth Group | 4 Comments »

Magoo, the guest blogger

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

Magoo is unhappy that I’ve had a life and have neglected to post for several days.

So, she who complains gets punished. She wants a blog post, she can do it herself. Here she is, Magoo the guest blogger:

Hi everybody!!

Golly Gee this is so much fun.

So I was just thinking about how incredibly thankful I am to be female. I mean seriously, guys have the short end of the stick here. They’re not allowed to show emotion to their guy friends, they have to act tough all the time, they have to be good at sports, and they’re looked at a little funny if they suddenly burst out in a giggle fit because of something stupid someone said. They only have conversations that consist of grunting and snorting, and no guy is allowed to order a double chocolate chip latte nonfat frappuccino with extra caramel and whip cream. This is the truly sad part, because we all know that’s the best drink of the menu.

So now that my little tangent over, back to my original topic: I love being a girl. Just tonight I made an impromtu decision to head to a girls’ Bible Study after getting out of band practice earlier than I thought it was going to be. I show up and there are six or seven of the nicest girls you will ever meet sitting around a kitchen table eating chocolate. I’m not kidding you, there was a half eaten box of chocolates, oreos, and this amazing caramel and chocolate covered apple just sitting on the table for everyone to dive into. I kinda like chocolate. Just a little. And it basically made my night. But the best part was, there wasn’t a single girl there who judged me for the amount of chocolate I consumed. Because just for that moment, we weren’t worried about the fat or the calories. We were just girls in our natural habitat.

From there the group headed downstairs to snuggle under a blanked on the biggest, squishiest couch you have ever seen. And what did we do from there you ask? Silly question… We talked about boys of course!! Well, sort of. We watched a Nooma video called “Fire” which was about love and the different kinds of it. Of course, we never stopped talking throughout the movie, but that just added to it. And then we sat on the couch for the next hour or so and just chatted about anything and everything under the sun… from the musical to colleges. I cannot even tell you how refreshing it is to stop thinking about your to-do list, school, and the problems of the world for just one hour. That was a couch of love and understanding, and I’m fully confident that every girl there understood that completely.

I know that at the beginning, I called this little get-together a Bible Study… but it really wasn’t. To me, it was almost more helpful than that. I truly do spend large chunks of my time studying God’s word and trying to perfect myself. But at this kind lady’s house, we actually get to live it. It is somewhere that you can be who you really are, eat whatever you want to eat, and talk about whatever is on your mind. I really do think that this is a little bit of what God’s kingdom looks like. I think that everybody needs a place like that where they can go and be filled with God’s love through other people. There are few things that are better in this world.

And that, in short, is why I like being a girl. I can’t imagine guys could have this much fun and feel this loved from some grunts and snorts.

And yes, I do understand that I’m being very stereotypical about guys. I personally know quite a few guys who aren’t like this. It helps me get my point across, so just leave me alone, OK?

Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments »

Another dog for us?

Thursday, January 15th, 2009

We received a frantic call from Magoo on her way back from taking Da Kaff home Sunday evening, “Mom, there’s a sweet puppy in the road, he’s shivering and limping and has no collar, what do I do?”

Lots of thoughts raced through my mind, but being the epic wimp that I am, my solution was to force SweetGuy to be the bad guy. I quickly told Magoo to ask her father, and handed the phone to him. He gets a bit tired of our animals, so I thought he’d at least entertain telling her to leave the dog. To my surprise, he put the phone up to his ear and without another word to Magoo immediately said “Bring the dog home.”

I guess it wasn’t a good idea to ask someone named SweetGuy to be the bad guy.

She put the little dog in her lap and started home. Before she’d even reached her destination, she had named him Enoch. We had youth group just a few hours prior and Magoo recalled the story of Enoch from the Bible, a dude who managed to bypass the whole death thing and go straight to heaven. (He’s one of two that did that, can you name the other one?) Magoo felt she was giving this puppy a new life and thus declared him Enoch.

Enoch was scared and in bad shape. All his paws were bloody from his mysterious trek and he seemed especially grateful to be given shelter and love. Enoch was treated like a king in our home. He was washed and fed and cuddled endlessly.

One of our friends had a pretty good idea where Enoch came from. She suspected he was part of a group of Beagles that were not particularly well cared for by a distant neighbor of hers. We called the suspected owners and Magoo went by their house, but we never made contact with them, and they never returned our call.

Days later we were in a quandary. Do we continue to pursue these not so good owners? Do we keep the dog ourselves? Enoch had his incredibly cute moments, but he also had issues. He kind of had the cute face/ ugly body syndrome. He was aroma challenged. He refused to poop for days, to the great dismay and amazement of us all. Isn’t there some sort of law of physics that says what goes in must come out? And, after his initial sweetness to our dogs, he began to voice his anger at them. Oh, and his “maleness” was a little disturbing. You’ll just have to trust me on this one. But, ahem, if we were to keep him, he’d have to go to the vet to be fixed ASAP.

On the off chance the dog didn’t belong to who we thought it did, Magoo & Emmy & DustMeister posted “FOUND” flyers and took Enoch to the local vet. Lo and behold, the vet knew of a woman who had lost four beagles within a few miles of where Magoo picked up Enoch. (How do you lose four beagles? An accidental open gate it seems will do the trick.)

And, just like that, the tides had turned and every one’s dilemma was solved. We’d found his rightful owners, and they were thrilled to have him back.

It turns out the smelly, ugly, grumpy, cowering, constipated little guy was a TWO THOUSAND DOLLAR stud dog! His owners were big time breeders, and had travelled all the way to Georgia to pick up this homely little guy and he was their “prime male”.

Wow, and to think we were contemplating having him fixed… or taking him to the no kill shelter. I’m glad we put up a flyer.

And, no matter his shocking financial value, whether he was a mutt or a stud dog, I am very proud of Magoo. He was lost on a very cold, snowy night on a rural road. I do suspect she might just have saved Enoch from death.

Posted in Animals | 2 Comments »

On this day 17 years ago…

Wednesday, January 14th, 2009

I was kind of irritated.

I had plans.

You see, it was my birthday. I was turning 28 (and yes, I totally just had to pull up the calculator to help me figure that equation out), and I had been so consumed with the duties of a mom of a 3 year old and seven month old. I was a stay at home Mom, which I considered a huge privelege and blessing, but well, I needed a moment to myself. And, what better time than my birthday?

I’d spent nary a moment away from the kids since Magoo’s birth. And, for my birthday my awesome mother had agreed to watch Magoo, and Bud was headed to a friends house, for the Whole Day! I could not have asked for a more self-indulgent gift: a day to myself.

But, it was not to be.

On that fateful day, I received a call early in the morning from my awesome Mom. It seems my sister, Singing Sally, had the audacity to go into labor with her third child. My birthday was ruined. Mom felt a stronger pull to be with the ONE IN LABOR vs. the ONE WHO REALLY WANTED TO TAKE A NAP. Messed up priorities if I ever saw them.

OK, so I was disappointed. Could this baby have not waited one more day, and let me have a nap? The nerve.

She came nonetheless. And, guess what?

With time (like a day or two) came a little perspective.

I am SO INCREDIBLY HAPPY to have a birthday buddy for the rest of my days. And what a birthday buddy it is. Emmy. I love her like no other. We all do.

I’m amazed at her maturity, her perspective, her unselfishness. She is one incredible young woman. And she is 17 today. And hey, as a society, we are supposed to concentrate on inner beauty, right? But, excuse me, I can’t help but point out that the girl is beautiful on the outside too. Shoot me.

Dear Birthday Buddy,

Thank you for having the insight to crash my party 17 years ago. On the day of your birth, I was looking at the short term and was selfishly unpleased. You, however, were looking at the big picture and realized that all my subsequent birthdays would be made better by sharing it with you. And. they have been. And, they will be.

It is true to your nature that you have never voiced, or I’m guessing thought, of displeasure about having to share a birthday with ME. It is the way you are. Others first, always.

Enjoy being 17 Emmy. Carpe Diem.

Love,

Your Birthday Buddy

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Now, this is going to be so much fun

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009

I’m ready to move into a condo. Last week we had frozen, busted pipes. This week, the joy escalates:

We have raccoons in the attic of the barn. And, the cute little guys aren’t just up there playing Wii, sipping root beer, and minding their own business.

They are trampling the insulation, which cuts down on its efficiency.

They are leaving lovely little disease infested reminders of their presence.

And, here’s my personal favorite: They have shredded through all the flexible duct work for over half the barns heating vents. This is going to be HARD and expensive and necessary to fix. I can’t call them stupid, though; they managed to locate a lovely, dry, soft home and create a heat source for it by re-routing the barn’s heat to the attic. Smart, yes. Cute, my arse.

Oh, and we have to get rid of the suckers too so they don’t do it again. We have some plans. SweetGuy is picking up a live trap tonight. Once we catch them, I’m considering re-locating them directly above a body of water, under a busy highway overpass, or next to my soon-to-be-ex-brother-in-law’s garbage cans.

Posted in Animals | 4 Comments »

Retraction

Monday, January 12th, 2009

Today is the anniversary of the day my (OLDER!) brother, FavoriteChild, was born. The day my parents met their obnoxious precious baby boy. I was thinking just maaaybeee today I should retract a few of the negative things I’ve said about FavoriteChild on this blog, on the ever so slight chance someone might find these things offensive. Here are a few things I’ve said that are (only today) not true:

I don’t like him… or his horse.
He is not technically savvy.
He is a goofball.

I can’t believe how I’ve gotten so out of hand with my criticism of him. He is so clearly not a goofball:

My brother, is actually not a goofball in any way, ever. He is understated and always serious… the kind of person who has never really figured out to have fun.

Let me turn my serious, honest switch on for just a moment here. Don’t look away or you’ll miss it. FavoriteChild is one of the most giving, unselfish, thoughtful, smart, understanding, and helpful people I’ve ever met. I am SO thankful for his presence in my life. I wish him a wonderful birthday. And, as his birthday gift, I promise to not even retract this statement.

But, I do withold the right to print pictures of his bald spot anytime, anywhere.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

My favorite 2008 (people) pictures, The Finale

Friday, January 9th, 2009

Just a few more. Cross my heart.

That’s Bud above shooting off a homemade potato cannon. The reason this picture pleases me so much is that it represents the great changes in Bud’s life in 2008. And, knowing Bud, and his love for pyromania, I’d venture a guess that the moment above captured in stop motion forever might have been the absolute pinnacle of his year. Look at his face, can’t you see the excitement? Bud has always been a little understated. Just like his sister.

This is a dude from youth group who was part of a group of guys who created a jump pit out of cushions in the barn. Then they leapt (Is that a word? Should it be leaped?) and dove and flipped into the pit. I had trouble getting a clear picture, but I think this captures the moment pretty well. What touches me about this is just the idea of young people we care about creating memorable life moments that we have had the privilege to be a part of. We first launched the barn as a youth hangout some six or so years ago. And I have pictures of young guys back then doing the exact same thing as this guy above was doing a few months ago. Bud was among the group six years ago, but he had trouble clearing the couch… maybe because he was like 97 feet shorter than he is now.

That there lovely gal in the middle is her Gracefulness. It’s quite a nice picture I think, but why does it land amongst my favorites? It’s because of what that there girl represents to me and our family. Magoo has been good friends with Grace since, what, like 6th grade or so. Thus, by proxy, the whole family has been friends with Grace. But, in this past year, that friendship has stepped up a notch. This usually stable young woman had a brain glitch and asked me to be her mentor. I am unworthy, yet I’m thrilled she asked. I’m certainly better for it. And, Grace? Well, with me as her mentor, and Magoo as one of her best friends, and her increased exposure to the oddities of my family this year – poor girl, we’re sorry, but you’re stuck with us now. Seriously, though, SHE is one of the best things that has happened to US in 2008.

And, for the final finale favorite picture of 2008. This proud papa and his little girl kinda like each other. That is when they are not sacking each other’s chins and she’s not tattle-tailing on his late night snacking. She has bionic ears. It is annoying.

Posted in Family, Youth Group | 1 Comment »

My favorite (people) pics, Part II

Friday, January 9th, 2009

It appears I can’t just insert a few of these people pictures and declare the post good enough. It’s important to me to write WHY these pictures matter. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but some pictures aren’t anywhere near as worthy without a story behind them. So here’s a few more of my favorites of 2008:

I’ve got a beautiful Mom, don’t I? No, no question necessary. I do have a BEAUTIFUL Mom. It was a year ago yesterday that she and Dad were living a nightmare of cancer diagnoses (what is the plural of diagnosis?) for both of them. He put up an incredibly inspiring fight, but in the end, it was his time. She wouldn’t agree with this, but I’ve got to say that the battle she has waged has been equally inspiring. She took care of him with absolute unwavering love and devotion, while her body was being ravaged in its own right. Yes, inspirational she is.

Oh. My. I’m not even sure I want to attempt to explain this one. But, here goes. AUBS! and her friends do this odd thing that I don’t understand called “Sackage to the Chin”. It involves forming a fist with your hand and pushing up on someone else’s chin. Try it! It guarantees irritation on the receiver’s part. Money. In the scene depicted above, a few weeks ago at Singing Sally’s annoyingly festive house, we tried to take a few pictures as a family, and you can see the mature result. Thanks a lot, AUBS! Sackage to you!!

This scene? In it is Da Kaff, Bud, Magoo (where is The White Rose?), DustMeister, AUBS!, and Emmy. I don’t have a deep complex explanation about why I like this one. I like it because I adore the people in it. I like it because it is SUMMER, and right now winter is sucking the life out of me. I like it because it represents many similarly fabulous nights at Mom’s this past summer (and I sure hope it represents future nights too!).

It’s kinda purty too.

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

My favorite (people) pics of 2008, Part Uno

Tuesday, January 6th, 2009

The reason these are my favorite pictures may make sense to only me. I went through all of my 2008 pictures really quickly. I am sure I have A.D.D. and, on top of that, it hurts my brain to agonize over decisions, so I scanned through the pictures at 100 MPH and tried to pick out just a few that struck me. I didn’t want to analyze whether everyone I loved was included in one of the pictures. I didn’t want to analyze why they struck me. I just picked them out. No over-analysis required. So here you go:

It was around noon on Father’s Day. Bud and Magoo had not yet gotten a gift for their most amazing dad. So they cleaned up, and we did a little photo shoot in the backyard. Next, we uploaded the pictures to Walgreen’s. The kids then drove down, picked up a frame and the pictures, and presented their dad with (what appeared to be) a planned far in advance, thoughtful gift. Score.

During the photo shoot, we snapped a few mess-around pictures. That’s one of them to the left. Bud was holding Magoo, and then promptly pretended to drop her. Double score.

I love the pictures. But even more than that, they make me smile because this whole picture taking scheme was not only done at the last minute, but SweetGuy was HOME the entire time this was happening. The kids were doing their hair, getting dressed up, and going out back to get many, many pictures taken. He never noticed, or suspected a thing.

SweetGuy has many lovely traits. Acute observation is not one of them.

One day last fall, a friend of the family took some pictures of Emmy and Magoo in their prom dresses out in the back of our land. I will show you some others of those pics sometime because they were pretty cool. And weird. Like the one where they both had apples in their mouths.

Anyhoo, I know this is very braggy and all but I just love this picture. I think Magoo looks incredibly gorgeous.

Also, I’m digging my Photoshop skills. Because, for some reason there was part of Emmy’s leg behind Magoo in this picture. I edited it out. Bet you couldn’t tell, could you?

And, did I mention that Magoo is gorgeous?

Magoo, Emily and her Mom, Singing Sally, were able to take a long weekend to visit with Dad a few months before he died. As we were making the decisions of whether to try to get the grand-kids down to Florida to visit him or not, we were pretty torn. We all had conflicting thoughts about what was the best thing to do. On the one hand, we didn’t want to play out some sort of death parade thing where we marched each kid in front of him one by one to say goodbye. That’s not the way any of us roll (particularly Dad!), and besides, Dad wasn’t ready to give up the fight. And if he wasn’t done fighting, then we sure weren’t going to be done either. But, on the flip-side, we certainly knew the situation was dire, and we wanted the kids to be able to see him again, and of course, vice verse.

So, with great hesitation, we tried to get each one of the grandchildren down there if possible. Hence, Emmy and Magoo’s visit. And, that death march thingy? Their visit was most certainly not about death. It was about life. You can read a bit of what Emmy and Magoo wrote HERE. The picture above makes me laugh and laugh and laugh. And it is so apropos. Making light and fun out of an oxygen tube, and a guy whose very life is dependent on said tube. And, best of all, instead of contemplating death, Dad was living and loving and laughing. This is my favorite picture of all of 2008.

Part II tomorrow. Or the next day. Or sometime.

Posted in Family, Photography | No Comments »