A Lesson...

What happens when you own a phone for 20 months and use that phone daily? Well, you take photos, you receive e-mails, you text, you make calls...... and... well.... ummmm... apparently you think the memory of said phone is limitless. So you never delete a single solitary thing. 20 months of call logs, text messages, and emails....You never transfer any of the photos or contacts information to the PC. You just wait. And wait. And wait. Until the phone is so full that it locks up. So full that it doesn't even have enough memory space to TURN ON. But no worries. Your wife will happily run all over town seeking repairs. Buying memory cards. Reading FAQ forums and user manuals. And she will save all of the photos. And she will save all of your contacts. And she will get the phone to work again.... as long as you have your can of WD-40 and a spare headset adaptor available so the audio works. No problem...... I don't even know when half these photos were taken. I've never seen them before. But I did save them. I am a hero.

Young Love?

One of These Things

Sing along with me....

One of these things is not like the other.
One of these things just doesn't belong.
Can you guess which thing is not like the other?
Before I finish my song.....

And for the Winners? They shall feast on Cake!

So, when Alek's Cub Scout Pack announced it's annual cake decorating contest and silent auction, my initial reaction was...... well, silence. Then we read over the categories, and along with the subjective ones like "most creative" and "most original," were some cut and dry objective ones like "longest," and.... "tallest." So we discussed how many layers exactly we needed. I said six. Alek said ten. We compromised at eight. Eight layers. And then, rereading the categories and seeing "most patriotic," we got inspired. We'd go for two trophies with one cake. We were brilliant. Eight layers of white cake. A ridiculous amount of homemade buttercream icing, some fondant, and a lot of candy later, we had our cake. Alek had made most of the layers, had helped make the icing, had assembled with me, iced with me, and decorated almost solo. We used a couple of dowel rods for structural support. Yeah.... well.... That icing is heavy. It started to buckle. Lean. We were desperate. Alek and I devised the very elegant structural support you see here. We stabilized it. We entered the cake in the contest. We were informed by David that maybe going for two prizes wasn't in the spirit of the cub scout creed. Hmph.

Well, we won tallest at least!!!! And Alek was PROUD!

The Biker

I love this little clip. It's short and sweet. Walt is on the brink of boyhood. He's saying amazing things and beginning to play with his brother and sister rather than just watch or follow along. And while his forte is still the bigwheel, he's starting to ride this bike more and more. It was Alek's, of course. Here we were at the park one afternoon. He didn't ride much, but he pushed it around quite a bit.