I love my mom

We went over to my mom's yesterday, ate dinner, spent time in her hammock and chatted. It was a nice evening. The conversation turned to the age when children are most enjoyable. My sister-in-law Karla claims that she is done with children when they turn six. My mom said that her favorite age for children was whatever age we were. She said it was kind of strange, but if you had asked her at any time when we were growing up, she would have said the ages that Toby and I were. When she said that, it made a lot of sense, because that was the way that she acted. That's just one of the many things that made my mom so great! I hope that I can come somewhere close when I have my own kids. This picture is one of many happy memories with my mom...the two of us on the beach in Florida.

Don't See This Everyday

What is that? If you said a pickup truck full of prosthetic legs, you are correct. When we drove up after lunch, this truck was sitting there.

Notice the toes at the bottom of the picture. Also, one of them has a sock on it.

Finally making progress...sort of

We have finally gotten the due diligence in full swing. It's been kind of crazy. Chris Elam's expression shows how some of us have felt today. On the bright side, Smithee is actually working, instead of just lying about working.

I on the other hand am waiting for a file to download to my computer, so I'm making good use of my time, by posting some fun pics to my blog. :)

More Due Diligence Fun

So we went to lunch at Ted's, here's some beautiful pics of that affair. Notice that while Aaron and Chris are smiling, Smithee is mouthing off to me.

Zach is paying a moderate amount of attention to me, while Ryan is ignoring me.

Ok, a little blurry, but Karla is smiling on the far right.

After returning from lunch, we perused David Melton's display shelf. You will see here a lovely authographed picture of Celine Dion.

And here is one of his judo pictures.

Now, we are still waiting for disks to come so we can get to work. May be posting again soon if they don't arrive soon.

UPDATE: It has been brought to my attention that David M. may not participate in judo, others believe that it may be Aikido or Jujitsu. I amend the above comment to say, "one of David Melton's martial arts pictures."

Due Diligence Fun

I'm at work and we are doing a big Due Diligence project. About 20 of us were called to the office this morning for it, but now we are waiting around to get started. Here are some pics I took on my iphone while we wait. Karla having fun on her iphone while waiting.

Smithee claims that he is working, but you look at the web page and see what you think.

Eric making important phone calls in his purple shirt.

I love my job!

Finally...the Vikings win one!

After two awful defeats this season, the Vikings finally won Sunday's game. We finally made the change from Tarvaris at quarterback, and even though Gus Ferotte is far from a savior with the help of some good runningbacks in Peterson and Taylor and a defense that can do a little scoring of their own - if you saw the game on Sunday, you saw Winfield's awesome sack, fumble caused and touchdown return, maybe we might win half our games. Ok, that's a little optimistic, but I only said, "maybe." On the bright side, we have been on TV every week so far, and we are scheduled to be on for the next two weeks, so atleast, I don't have to go to a su-par sports bar to watch the Vikings. Oh, the joys of being a Vikings fan! Brent tried to warn me before I married him, but I didn't listen.

Relaxing Afternoon at the Myriad Gardens

As those of you who live in Oklahoma City know, today was absolutely beautiful...the kind of day that doesn't come around to0 often in this state that seems to jump from hot to cold, skipping over the "just right." So after going to church and then watching a depressing Vikings game (they are not doing well this year, but that's for another blog entry), I decided to take my book, my journals, my Bible, a bottle of water and blanket down to the Myriad Gardens. It was perfect, this was my view: But the view doesn't capture the perfect sun shining and the breeze blowing. I read, I rested, I wrote, I soaked it up. It was great!

The Office

I can't wait for the next season of the Office. It's my favorite show. We just got last season's DVD, which has been making me laugh, especially some of the deleted scenes, which I can't believe got cut. Here's the Olympic commercial that made me laugh so hard, for your entertainment. Enjoy!

Thunder Season Ticket Holders...Yippee!!!

We were some of the lucky ones that got to get season tickets to the Oklahoma City Thunder yesterday. We were hoping to get 8 together...my dad, Toby & Karla, Brent & I and Eric, my stepbrother. For those of you who don't know how the process worked, after they announced that the team was coming to OKC, they gave a number that you could call in to get your name on the list for season tickets. The response was overwhelming, they had over 16,000 people put their name on the list. Of those people, they randomly assigned times to come in a pick out seats. We all put our names on the list, and Toby got the earliest appointment...yesterday at 7:00pm. We all went, but unfortunately they would only let us get 6 tickets. Luckily, Eric knew some others with times today and volunteered to wait, so he got separate tickets today. We are lucky, because it looks like they will be selling out shortly, and a number of the people that called in will not be able to get tickets. :( Here I am sitting in our seats: Just kidding. Apparently, those front row courtside seats, which they call "Hollywood" seats sell for a little over $100,000. Yikes! Our actual seats are shown here. They are lower-level corner seats. They are actually a really good view, we sat in them and tested them out, and a little more reasonable.

I can't wait for October 29th...the season opener. Go Thunder!

DonorsChoose.org

Brent heard about DonorsChoose.org a little over a year ago on the local news. It's a really cool site where teachers from across the country can post things that they would like to have in their classroom and people can go on and choose to fund these projects. It's really neat, you can search by amount or by school or a keyword in the project description. You can also just fund part of a project if it is too expensive to fund the whole. We have been funding some projects up in north Idaho where Brent went to school 8th-12th grade. They don't do the best job of funding education up there. In fact, a few years ago, his school district voted not to pass the Maintenance and Operations Levy. This was to fund basic things to keep the school running, pay the bills, clean the toilets, etc... The school district had to go to a 4-day school week to try to save money. I'm not kidding...they don't go to school on Friday. Well, anyway, this has encouraged us to fund some projects in north Idaho. We've found some in Sandpoint, a town about 30 miles from where Brent lived. After we funded a project to get some rockets for an elementary Talented and Gifted program class to launch, they sent us a thank you envelope with pictures and notes from the kids. Here's one of the pictures of some of the kids outside with their rockets to launch.

And this was one of the cute thank you notes from one of the kids in the class. If you are interested in looking at DonorsChoose.org, here's a link: http://www.donorschoose.org/homepage/main.html

Also, if you want to fund one in North Idaho, the counties to look for are Bonner County and Boundary County.

Oklahoma City Thunder

Oklahoma City announced the team name and logo of our new NBA team yesterday. I wouldn't say Thunder is my first choice or that the logo is amazing, but I know that I will warm up to both of them. Brent and I are elated to have an NBA team in OKC. We were able to go to a number of Hornets games with my brother through Chesapeake when they were here, and we were hooked. In fact, here's a pic of Toby and Brent at one of the games.We go next week to pick out our season tickets for the Thunder. Yippee!!!

Finally...we closed on our land

We were finally able to close on our land yesterday. It was starting to feel like the day would never come. The builder is supposed to have a dozer out on Monday to start moving dirt. I'm so excited! I'll definately be posting pictures as the process progresses, but they are saying 10-11 months to complete. We are looking more for a year. Still, we are so excited to get started!

Toby and Traci train for the Olympics

Yesterday, I spent a good portion of the day in my dad's pool. It was great! I love the water, and I'm exciting that we are going to be putting in a pool at our new house. These pictures were Brent's attempt to capture the swimming competitions that took place between my brother and I. I would first like to say that while both of us are fully able to keep from drowning in the water, we have never had a single swim lesson. While both of our spouses have had professional training (if summer swim lessons at the Glasgow public pool and/or YMCA count as professional training), neither of them were willing to participate in these competitions. Toby and I, however, did participate in competitions of all four swimming strokes. (Though claims could be made that neither of us actually did the butterfly, despite significant efforts made.)

If in these pictures, it appears that our efforts to preform these swim strokes brought us perhaps closer to drowning rather than further away, you are actually getting an accurate flavor for the competition.

Looking again at these pictures, they may convey more about the pasty white condition of skin than the swim strokes that I attempted, and in some cases did quite well. (The breaststroke was my best, while Toby excelled in the freestyle, but come on, anyone can do the freestyle...except maybe, me. LOL)

In the end, my dad could not even stay out of the competion, and jumped in to attempt one freestyle lap. Much to Toby and I's embarassment, he beat both of our times. However, Brent was the timekeeper...we did not have Omega touchpads, so I'm not sure about the accuracy.

Despite my standing as dead last in all strokes...I had a lot of fun!