Farewell April!

The month of April has come and the month of April has gone. I like April because it's better than March. Don't even get me started on January and February! I like April, but not nearly as much as May. HELLO, MAY! Tomorrow is May 1st and the smell of summer is already in the air. May means State Testing (the OAA) at school is complete. May means the official summer countdown has begun. May means lots of outdoor activities at school. Field Day and cookouts, anyone? May means Memorial Day and then it's time for a vacation! For those who think teachers get THREE MONTHS OFF in the summer... I would like to kindly and respectfully remind you of this. My last day of school is June 8th and starts again August 15th. I will go back to school August 1st to begin preparing my classroom and lesson plans. That's about 7 weeks. A far cry from three months. Most teachers take CE (continuing education) classes or workshops in the summer. This is required to keep a valid teaching license. Also, most teachers work at least a part time job in the summer. I will have one myself this year. Please understand I am not complaining. Not in the slightest. I've got a great job and a great schedule, but three months off is not exactly accurate. Anyway, May is here and then comes summer. It's a good time of year for me.

How do you spell elephant?

We got a surprise call from Jessi tonight and we got to meet the Mortons for dinner. What a great way to wind up the weekend! We had a good time talking with and playing with Sveta. Her English gets better each time we see her. While waiting for our food we were playing with a toy. You push a button, a wheel spins and then stops- displaying the name of an animal. Kind of like a mini slot machine. Each time Sveta would spell out the name of the animal. T-I-G-E-R. B-E-A-R. H-I-P-P-O. and so on... At one point, Sveta spelled L-I-O-N and the then said, "Lion!". We were amazed that she had actually read the word. We decided to try again. This time she read F-R-O-G and said, "Elephant!". We're still not sure if she actually matched the letters in the word lion to the corresponding sounds or if she just got plain lucky. There's only one thing I know for certain. F-R-O-G spells elephant because Sveta said so!

Supporting Mom and Pop

Tami and I like to support Mom and Pop establishments whenever possible. If we can avoid spending our money at the Wal-Marts, Targets and Home Depots of the world, we do. Today we visited the local garden center, Casey's Outdoor Solutions. Casey is a young guy (late 20's or early 30's maybe?). He attended the local high school and lives here in the neighborhood. He has a gorgeous place where he sells trees, shrubs, flowers, mulch, decorative rock and gravel, gardening supplies and anything else you may need in landscaping your yard. He also runs a landscaping business for those wealthy folks who can afford a professional landscaping job. We like to go and look around even if we're not in the market to buy anything. Today was customer appreciation day. He had selected items on sale, an inflatable moonwalk for the kids to bounce in and free food. And not just any free food... free pork barbecue with slaw, beans, dessert and drinks. The BBQ was provided by a another local guy. He runs a local BBQ joint called Hogwild. He has one of those smokers that can be towed behind a truck. He has been designated a pit master. I'm not really sure what that means other than this guy is really good at making smoked pork BBQ. If you know me, two of my favorite words are "Free Food". You would also know my love for all things BBQ. So today was a good day. We got to visit one of our favorite local stores and got a delicious free lunch. The only bummer was the weather. It rained cats and dogs and was downright cold. I'm really glad the free lunch was served inside :-)

Spring Spruce Up

Here's another reason I love spring and the subsequent summer season. In addition to more outdoor clean up (I just can't get enough of working in my yard and trying to make it look better and better), we are also doing some stuff indoors. You saw the newly (and boldly) painted living room. Tami is now doing some neat craft projects and updating the decor. It's going to look really cool when she's done. Instead of ordinary framed photos on the wall, she is mounting 11x14 photos on canvas for a different look. It won't be long before they're up on the wall. She's done some stenciling and is also looking into making new curtains (out of tablecloths, no less!). It's always fun to fix the house up a little bit. It's nothing too fancy or expensive, but it looks great anyway :-)

Who hit the fast forward button?

One of my favorite movies is "The Shawshank Redemption". It's a prison movie set in the first half of the 20th century. One of the main characters, Brooks Hatlen, has been incarcerated his entire adult life and is finally paroled when he's in his 70's. Marveling at how much things have changed in 50 years, he sends a postcard to his buddies back in prison and it contains this line, "The world went and got itself in a big d*** hurry!". I'm starting to feel this way myself. I haven't been in jail and I haven't been out of touch with the world for five decades. However, I am witnessing a world that was already moving really fast, speeding up to near warp speed. When I was kid, you actually had to walk over to the TV and turn a dial to change the channel. There were 4 channels to choose from... ABC, CBS, NBC and a local UHF channel. Kids shows were limited to Saturday mornings. If you missed your show, you had to wait a whole week to see it again. Now there are literally hundreds of channels beamed to my home via satellite. If you miss your show, it can be digitally recorded and viewed at your convenience. When I was in high school computers started appearing. They didn't do much and what they did do was activated by inserting a disk into a drive. We certainly didn'y carry computers around in our pockets. Now we have laptops and smart phones that allow us to access the internet instantly from anywhere in the world. I read yesterday that 900 million people use FaceBook. I heard somebody say that's 15% of the entire planet. I refuse to use FaceBook for reasons that would not interest you. Suffice it to say I will not be adding to FaceBook's totals in my lifetime. Now we have Twitter, Instant Messaging, Texting, and tons of other social media that I don't even know exist! The world is moving at breakneck speed and I have abandoned any thoughts of trying to keep up. The world has passed me by and all I can do is stand back and watch. I suppose this is the same way generations past felt when the telegraph, telephone, radio and television came along. I am looking forward to the day when I can tell my grandchildren that I am older than cell phones, iPods and the internet. I will have fun telling them of the days when I listened to music on something called a radio and played vinyl records on a turntable. I will tell them of the long forgotten item called a telephone book. Tell them of the days when everybody's phone number was in a book the size of a Christmas ham! Tell how the book was so big, short people could sit on it to see over their car's dashboard. It will be at that point a small child will disengage from his/her digital music device and smart phone for a moment and say, "Grandpa tell us about the good old days back in the 80's". Just call me Brooks. The world went and got itself in a big d*** hurry!

The Windy City- Revisited

Here we go again! 40 MPH wind gusts. I'm tellin' ya folks, I can't remember having so many windy days! This is all related to the massive storm slamming the northeast. This nor'easter (as we seasoned sailors like to call these storms) is dumping 8"-16" of snow in parts of Pennsylvania and New York. Just when those folks thought they'd escaped the clutches of winter... WHAMMO! Blizzard! Imagine all that wet, heavy snow falling on trees that have their leaves. I predict massive power outages. Things could always be worse I guess.

A BOLD new look

This post may bore you to tears, but here's the redecorating project in photos: Here's the master at work-

Midway through the project- Lookin' good so far!

Almost finished-

Here's the finished project. The only thing missing are the pictures on the wall. Those will go up soon.

The painting has begun

The painting has begun! Two out of three horizontal stripes have their first coat. When they dry, the second coat will be applied. Tomorrow the third stripe will go on. It's a bold look and I LIKE IT! For an ultra-conservative guy, it's probably unusual to like something that's this far out of the box. I'm getting older... why not be bold and live a little? You can't have beige walls forever.

And they're off! (Way off!)

My beloved Cincinnati Reds were supposed to be big time contenders this year. So far all they've done is stumble out of the starting gate with a 5-8 record. A good friend of mine used to say, "That ain't gonna get it done". I know it's a long season and thirteen games is in no way an accurate measuring stick. But 5 wins in the first 13? YIKES! C'mon boys, give me a reason to drop a few bucks at the ball park this year. If something doesn't change, I'll be listening to the games on the radio.

Time is funny... and it's fleeting

Every adult reading this will know what I'm talking about. Time is a funny thing and it is fleeting. When I was a child it seemed like an anticipated event took forever to arrive. Christmas, birthday, summer vacation. It felt like adults had all the fun. They got to eat whatever they wanted, stay up as late as they wanted, drive cars and tell kids what to do. All I wanted to do was hurry up and grow up. It didn't quite work out that way. Time moved so slowly. Now that I'm an adult the opposite is true. I don't want my birthday to come (but it always comes faster than it used to). I can eat whatever I want, but it makes me fat. I can stay up as late as I want, but my recliner works against me and I always fall asleep sooner than I want to. I can drive, but traffic stresses me out. Things sure have changed! Now I'm pushing 50 and my eldest child, Jessi is married (and I have a new granddaughter to boot). Michael will be graduating from high school in about 6 weeks. He is growing into a very fine young man. Abby will be a sophomore next year and is growing up sooooooooo fast! My children have grown up before my very eyes and I have no idea how it happened. How can you witness something every day and have no clue what happened? Time is fleeting and I realize more and more how precious every moment with my children is. I don't see Jessi, Barry and Sveta nearly as much as I'd like. Therefore I cherish every minute with them. Michael will be in college soon and he is rarely home anymore. I miss him already and he's not even gone yet. I'm going to blink and Abby will be off to college. That's when you'll see me standing in the middle of my quiet house wondering where everybody went. I know this is not new. Everybody with children has experienced this or will at some point. If nothing else, I've learned one thing through all this. God's plan is perfect. I often joke about being an empty nester in training. But that's exactly what's happening. I see less and less of my children all the time. Jessi lives an hour away. Michael has blossomed into a social butterfly and is always going somewhere. Abby is a typical teenager and spends as little time with mom and dad as possible. God is preparing me for a time when they will be gone and out on their own. I don't like it, but I know this is how God intended life to be. Who am I to question the plan of my omniscient, omnipotent, gracious, perfect God? Nobody, that's who.