Jen and the kids went up to see the progress that had been made on the house this week and saw that the foundation had been poured. Then today we went up for another visit and they have started the framing process and I have to say it’s coming along pretty well. It looks like the majority of the first floor has been completed and they a good portion of the second floor has also been done.
 Front of the house from left side. |
 Front of the house from the right side. |
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 Back of the House. |
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I was catching on my comics reading today and this was todays Zits. How appropriate considering today is Alex’s birthday.
It’s hard to believe just how fast time flies. Here he was just the other day eight years ago coming home from the hospital. (Man, I’m starting to feel like my parents.)
We met with the builder last Thursday and they are ready to get going on the house. When we drove by the yesterday they had the foundation framed out, the underground plumbing done, and are ready to pour the foundation.
It’s fun to see progress being made.
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Today Alex had two lacrosse games and he scored during both games!
The first game was one of his regularly scheduled ones where he plays on his white squad and the second game was a bonus where he was playing with the black squad. They have a pretty large team where half the kids play on the white team and the other half play on the black team. The black team needed a couple of extra players today and the coach invited him to come play in that game as well. (He was really tired after playing two games in a row.)
He was way excited about his first goal. After he shot it and it bounced in he turned around and jumped in the air and was pumping his fist, Coach even came out and gave him a high five.
I managed to get video of his first goal though I wasn’t quite prepared so it’s kind of jerky and then after he scored I was so excited I hit the off button and missed his celebration. If I can figure out how to transfer it to the computer I’ll see if I can post it to the blog.
On the first day of spring this year we woke up to a couple of inches of snow. Alex took out the ruler and measured it in the backyard and I think it found that it was about five inches deep. It was really good packing snow so we all went outside and had a big snowball fight in the backyard. Well, it didn’t start off as a snowball fight but it quickly turned into one. I took a couple of pictures since it’s not often that we get snow in Texas and it’s even more rare that we get that much snow. Plus it was Caroline’s first time to play in the snow, I couldn’t pass up taking pictures of that.
Yesterday we officially finished up with the house and got all our stuff out and handed it over to the new owners. We actually closed the day before yesterday but we were allowed to the weekend to finish the moving process. A couple of weeks before we moved we took Caroline’s first set of yearly pictures. It was nice to be able to get at least one set of her in the backyard since she is young enough that she isn’t going to remember the place but it looks like we are going to need to find a park to take the boys pictures this year as we won’t be in the new place yet. (I’m sure that is going to go over just great.)
Last week Alex had open house at school right before spring break. They do this as part of the regular parent/teacher conferences except that instead of us sitting down with the teacher in a one on one session going over results and test scores this one is student driven. He has an outline of the things he’s going to show us and there is even some math work for us to do so he can show us some of the strategies they have been learning.
On on way into the classroom there was a woman greeting parents as they came in but she obviously knew all the students but she was unfamiliar to me. We walk up and she introduces herself, “Hi, I’m so and so.” and she adds after I kept staring at her, “I’m the student teacher, today’s my last day.” Of course, the student teacher!
When we got home I asked Alex, “So how long have you had a student teacher?”
“Um, I don’t know. She really just watched us at first but she has been our real teacher for the last couple of weeks.”
“That sounds exciting, when did she start?”
“I don’t know, maybe in January.” He said this more like a question then a statement like I would know the answer.
“So, every night when we sit down to dinner and ask ‘How was school today’ and you just can’t think of absolutely anything except PE, music, art, and what you did at recess, telling us about the new student teacher didn’t cross your mind?”
“Umm, no.”
Ahhhhhhh. Every day we ask about school and not once in the last three months, if that’s really how long she’s been there because I’m sure we’ll never find out, has this has never come up.
I’ve been updating this blog more or less on or off since July of 2004 and since that time I’ve been using Google’s Blogger platform to manage and publish it to mceachernfamily.com. At the beginning of the year Google sent me an email saying that they are no longer going to support the technology to publish to my own website.
So I’ve taken the oppertunity to move the entire blogging platfrom from Blogger to my own hosted WordPress solution. I don’t have the bugs 100% worked out yet but I’ve tried to keep everything in the same place as it was before but just expect things to be a little bumpy here for a while.
For those of you that subscribe to the rss or atom feed in a program like Google Reader, you will need to update your settings.
rss: http://www.mceachernfamily.com/blog/feed
atom: http://www.mceachernfamily.com/blog/feed/atom
Spring outdoor soccer has started and Andrew has a had about three or four games. I took some pictures at one the other weekend. Alex is playing soccer as well but so far I don’t think he’s made any games since he has had conflicts with Lacrosse and this weekend they were rained out.
During this process I’ve come across things that I vaguely remember knowing about things but not knowing exactly where they were or even if we still had them. Tonight I was up in the attic bringing stuff down and I found a picture album with this picture that Jen took in 1997 while we were on our honeymoon to San Francisco. 
It was taken during our tour of Alcatraz and is me with Leon “Whitey” Thompson, who was an inmate there for four years. I did a google search for him and it turns out that he passed away in 2005.
According to the obituary in the SF Gate:
“Mr. Thompson had only a sixth-grade education, and writing did not come easily. He wrote and rewrote the book by hand nine times. No one would publish it, and the Thompsons could not find an agent. So they borrowed $3,200 and published the book themselves, took 500 copies back to Alcatraz, by then part of a national park, and set up shop in the bookstore.
They sold all 500 copies in a week. The book “Last Train to Alcatraz,” later retitled “Rock Hard”, sold 85,000 copies”
We purchased a copy of “Last Train to Alcatraz” and Leon signed it right before this picture was taken. I have no idea if we have one of the first 500 copies but we have a copy.
Here’s a picture of us taken at the Muir Woods. Good Lord, how did they ever let two kids like us get married 🙂
