Car Rides...

So I’m pretty sure that I could be a stay at home Dad. I had yesterday off and spent the day with A Bird. We didn’t really do anything exciting but we got a lot done. We went down and got my Jeep inspected and an oil change, then headed over to Lowe’s for a few things I needed to finish up some projects and then back home. Although we didn’t do anything special, it was a special day because we were together. I could easily get used to staying home and having days like that. Yep, let me win the lottery or L Bird get a big promotion and that’s it I’m gone. I’ll stay home do the laundry and dishes, put A Bird on the bus, then go play a round of golf or putter around the garden until she get home. Yeah that sounds pretty good to me. Well, it’s like they say “A dollar and a dream” right?

But anyway, one of the things I noticed was how much we both seemed to enjoy the car ride. It used to be I would strap her into her seat and turn on the radio and she would be completely quiet and fall asleep. But these days, she is asking me to play her favorite songs on CD’s and turn up the radio and she is singing along with most of the words correct. It just hit me like a ton of bricks at how old and how mature she seems.

She’ll tell me to turn down the radio, and then she’ll make a profound statement that always seems to hit me in the gut. It’s stuff like:

“Dad, you know JW is my boyfriend and when I get older I’m going to marry him”

“Dad when I grow up I’m going to buy a motorcycle and JW can ride on the back”

“When I’m older I’m going to be a cowgirl!” (Or singer or dancer or doctor, it depends on the day)

Or she’ll hit me with questions:

“Dad, look at those clouds, is that where GOD lives?”

“Dad, what do deer eat?”

“Dad, I want something cold to eat, which way is the ice cream store?”

I guess the point is, that she is having many more conversations with me. She is turning into such a little person. I can converse with her and enjoy our time together. I don’t know I guess it just really hit me yesterday and I’m still in awe at how she has become her individual. I just keep talking and listening to her, so hopefully I can lay the groundwork for more car ride discussions as she gets older. That’s all you can hope for, right?

I hope so.

Wordless Wednesday....

Wordless Wednesday...

What home is …

We tend to get a ton of magazines at my house. I get Mother Earth News, Grit and All About Beer quite frequently. However I read through them all very fast and quickly run out of things to read. So occasionally I’ll pick up one of L Bird’s  magazines and flip through it. Yesterday I was out of my magazines so I picked up L Bird’s Real Simple and then Better Homes & Garden. As I sat there flipping through the pages, I saw a ton of beautiful homes and immaculate rooms. They all had bunches of trendy tricks to spruce up rooms and decorate with little trinkets. But as I saw pages and pages of these pictures they started to look really sterile to me. Everything was just too perfect and you could immediately tell that anyone who lived in these houses didn’t have pets or children. They just reminded me of fancy doctor’s offices and had that very detached clinical feel to them. They just didn’t feel like home to me.

Nope, that definitely isn’t home. Home is coming home to laughter and toys scattered everywhere. It is being greeted by two wet noses and wagging tails. Home is the kitchen table being cluttered with paints and markers because you want your daughter to be able to express herself (plus I normally get a cool drawing autographed by the artist). Home is the lawn being a little longer than the rest of the neighborhood because you would rather spend time playing “pirate ship” and “jail” than be sitting on the mower and wasting precious moments of their lives. Home is taking the clean linens and dining room chairs and making forts to hide in and have lunch under. Home is trying not to stumble on the cat as you’re making your way to the bathroom in the middle of the night or it is trying to navigate your way from the kitchen to the dining room with a hot cup of coffee over two dogs and a 4 year old riding her tricycle in circles.

That is what home is to me. Yes, I do routinely get frustrated with the organized chaos my house can become from pets and a crafty 4 year old, and yes I get caught up in the whole “keepin’ up with The Jones’” syndrome where I get envious of other people’s homes and how perfect they seem. But I wouldn’t trade it. Yes, sometimes it’s crazy in  my house but it will be the memories we make today that will remind A Bird of “Home” when she’s older and has a family of her own.

That’s what home is…

Summer is flying by…

So I’m freaking out a little! I really can’t believe that next week will be August. Where has this summer gone? I started out the summer with so many projects and guess what? I still have so many projects.

At the start of the summer I knew that had 4, possibly 5 big projects that I wanted to get done this summer.

#1: FIX THE ROOF:

I needed to fix the roof over the laundry room so it would quit leaking. For those of you who actually read the drivel that I post, you all know well my horror stories of the roof leaking every time it rains, when the snow melts, when I break wind next to it, just whenever it feels like it… you get the picture.

Well, this project is DONE!!! With the help of great friends and family, we ripped off all of the shingles on the entire back roof, replaced old/rotten plywood, insulated, laid water/ice shield and re-shingled the roof in the correct way. You can see that post here.

#2 LAUNDRY ROOM DISASTER RELIEF PROJECT

Since the roof over the laundry room leaked, all of the drywall needs to be replaced on the ceiling. Also this year we discovered that we had a hot water leak in the line from the hot water heater to the rest of the house. To find the leak we had to pull up some laminate flooring, cut a hole through the plywood before we could even attempt to fix the leak. In that process we found that the water shut offs were conveniently hidden behind the drywall, so more drywall came out and we saw the shoddy wiring to the panel box and marveled at why house wouldn’t do me a big favor and burn down. On top of that, there is no insulation in that wall. If you want to relive that nightmare, you can check out that post here.

Now that the roof is repaired correctly and we have no more leaking issues on that side of the house, my project is to pull out drywall, insulate that one wall, have my Pop come over and install a new panel box that will be correctly wired, fix the hole in the floor and put down new laminate. I think that this project is the one that is bothering me the most. I think because it seems like a big undertaking it is bothering me that I haven’t made any headway or even started it yet.

#3 FIX THE FRONT CORNER ROOF

In my house of 1000 leaks, I also have a leak in the front corner of house. This past winter and our really, really wet spring didn’t help matters. The leak ran down the corner of two walls and pretty much destroyed them. While working on the laundry room roof Cpt. Insano took a wander over to the front to scout out the leak. Well it didn’t take long, he pulled at the shingles on the corner of the house to find that there were no nails holding them down. Why, you ask, why would there be no nails? Well that would be because the jackass “contractor” that flipped my house decided that he didn’t want to put down plywood. Yeah, that’s right you heard it right he didn’t put down plywood. He just laid the shingles down and glued them together. So the water would pool on the corner and leak straight into the house. Awesome.

This project is tentatively scheduled for the weekend of Aug. 13^th. The Cpt., and more than likely his father Diamond Dave and possibly Butters and Dinker will be over to help me fix the roof.

#4 FIX SPARE BEDROOM

Once the front roof is fixed, then I can begin turning the spare room back into a bedroom. I will have to pull two walls out, one plaster and lath and the other drywall. Then depending on how bad it looks I may reinsulated and hang new drywall and install a new baseboard heater.

So I have a lot to do and I feel like the summer is quickly getting away from me. I really need to buckle down and get these projects done and buttoned up before winter. Well, no time like the present to get started. Wish me luck!!

My Daughter, A Bird The Fish

Well, my baby isn’t a baby anymore, nope she is actually a little fish, a Pike to be exact. We signed up A Bird for swim lessons at the YMCA a little before her birthday in May. The first class was basically just getting kids used to the water and there were little tiny babies like 4 months old up to 3 years olds and parents got in the water with the kids. There were three instructors and they would instruct parents as a group as to what to do to get the kids used to the water, then they would break the class into free time and then meet with each parent and child individually. It took A Bird about 3 classes before she was a completely different child in the water.


She had swam in my Dad’s pool last year, so it wasn’t like she had never been in the water, but in previous years she had clung to me or L Bird like bulldog on a pork chop. In just three classes, the transformation was huge. She was swimming by herself, with a floatie of course, but swimming out in the pool a few feet from L Bird, she was sticking her face underwater, and with some assistance from the instructor swimming under water. It became pretty obvious that her confidence in the water was progressing, she holds her breath and routinely jumps off the dive blocks into the deep end. She goes underwater, then pops up and wipes the water and hair from her eyes while she is swimming towards the side to get out and do it again. That course came to the end and the instructor gave a swim test to all of the older kids to see if they were ready to graduate up to the next class. A Bird was one of three kids to move up into the next class. She is officially a pike.

As a Pike, it is her, four other kids and a lifeguard instructor in the pool. She listens to directions and swims on her own with the other kids in one lane of the pool. It is amazing to see how big she has grown and just all that she can and keeps accomplishing.

We have been in the middle of a heat wave, like most of the country. Yesterday the official temperature was 99°F, but I saw temperatures on the bank clocks of 100-101°F. The heat was just oppressive, so we went out to my Dad’s house for dinner and a dip in the pool. So this is A Bird jumping in the pool and swimming. She is also putting her face in the water and stretching her body out to swim stroke her way through the pool. It is just awesome.

P.S. - She thought it was hysterical that everyone was grossed out by her eating that boogie.

Exercise? What am I thinking?

Well, it looks like I’m going to give this whole exercise thing another shot. When I was younger I used to workout like crazy. I was a skinny, scrawny bean pole. I would come home from class and grab a deck of cards. Then with the cards I would use them to guide my workout, flip one card and that’s how many push ups or sit ups I  would do, flip the next card and that’s how many seconds I had to rest before the next set. That crazy routine, didn’t do anything for me bulk wise, but I was ripped. I graduated college at a whopping 135 lbs, with 4% body fat and a kicking set of six  pack abs.

Fast forward a few years and I was living in G Town and still hitting the YMCA. I had settled down and with the good food from a great woman, I put on some weight and bulked up. I went from 135 to 185 lbs and was still pretty fit and muscular. My six pack was fading, but still barely visible. Then everyday life caught up with me. I got a new job that was on days, not evenings, we bought a house and moved to a town that had no YMCA, we had A Bird and I let working out fall to the background.

I have tried to start getting fit a few times before but never had the commitment to stick with it, so here I am again. I’m the heaviest I have ever been and pretty unhappy with the size of my gut. So I’m going to give it another shot. I am not an “exercise program” guy per se, I like to do my own thing and target certain muscle groups which is probably why I never stick to doing it, I lose track of what I am doing or just get bored with the same old routine. But this time I am going to give a certain program a try that is a good program and has a nutrition portion with it. I had seen the infomercials for it and was always like “Yeah right, those are all paid actors or personal trainers. There is no way they looked like me and  now look like this.” Then my buddy Billy bought the program and gave it his all and I was amazed. Billy used to look a little better than me, now he looks much much better than me. He is trimmed out and getting more and more cut, so that sold me. Someone I know has actually seen results.

I’m still a little hesitant about actually saying what I’m doing, because of my history of quitting. I don’t want people to give me a bunch of crap about it being too tough or I should’ve done this or that. So we’ll see how it goes, if I stick to it, I’ll tell you. If not, oh well.

Well, it’s off to workout #2. Wish me luck, I’m going to need it !