You have to let it all go, Neo. Fear, doubt, and disbelief. Free your mind.
Nov 29th
I haven’t updated this in a while so I’ll try and just sum up the big stuff that’s gone on in the last week or so.
Last Thursday, Thanksgiving of all days, Andrew got a little rough with me and tried to steal my glasses. He’s done this about a million times before but this time when I picked them up I saw they were missing an arm. Great. It was a clean break right where the arm attaches to the glasses so there is no way that I’m going to be able to repair them. Of course I haven’t been to the eye doctor in just over three years so before I could get a new pair of glasses ordered I needed to go to the eye doctor. On Friday morning while the rest of world was out for post Thanksgiving day shopping Jen and I went to the eye doctor and ordered a new pair of glasses.
The glasses haven’t come in yet so for the past week I’ve been wearing the broken pair which is being held up by only one arm. From the right angle it looks like I’m sporting a Morpheus look.
The other item of note is that we have a squirrel stuck somewhere in our chimney which must have happened this afternoon or early this evening. We have a stainless steel chimney and right now he is frantically trying to escape from wherever he’s stuck which is making a huge racket. I can see all the way from the our fireplace to the top of the chimney and he’s not here so I think he’s stuck somewhere between the chimney casing and the actual stove pipe. All I know is that this racket is going to end up keeping us up tonight since the chimney backs right onto our room.
Crepes, Grapes.
Nov 14th
The other night we were trying to decide what to eat for dinner and I suggested crepes. Alex just looked at me and said “Huh, what’s that?”
“You know, crepes. They’re like thin pancakes. You usually put syrup on them.”
“Grapes?”
“No, crepes, it’s French and anyway you don’t put syrup on grapes.”
“Oh”
To complicate matters Andrew was sitting at the kitchen table eating a bowl full of grapes which I think lead to the confusion in the first place. Alex was going to help me make them and I started getting out the ingredients and when I discovered we didn’t have an flour which brought the crepe making to a quick end. Alex was really disappointed.
“But I wanted crepes.”, translation “But I really wanted to eat something with syrup.”
“I’m sorry son but we don’t have any flour we can’t make any crepes.”
Alex then walked over to me holding a bowl of grapes and said “Can I have syrup on these?”
“No, you have syrup on crepes not grapes.”
“Why?” Oi. We ended up settling on tomato soup with crackers, not syrup.
Halloween Pictures Posted
Nov 3rd
Busy Busy Busy and School Pictures
Oct 29th
I would like to say that things have been really really busy around here the last couple of weeks and that’s why I haven’t been making regular updates but now that I’m sitting here I can’t actually come up wit what I’ve been so busy with. (Well we have been busy with lots of Halloween activities over the last couple of weeks.)
When we were in New Orleans a couple of weeks back I chipped the edge of one of my crowns and when we got back I went to the dentist to get it looked. He said that everything looked in one piece and got out the drill to grind down the chipped edge so it wouldn’t keep grinding my tongue on it and when the drill hit the tooth I thought I was going to die. They took an xray and then referred me to a specialist for a root canal. I had that done on Thursday and to be honest it didn’t hurt quite as bad as I thought it was going to. I think I set myself up that this was going to be one of the worst experiences ever so it turned out not to be quite that bad.
We’ve taken a bunch of pictures lately and I’m working on getting those pulled together but we did get the boys school pictures this week. They both turned out pretty good and Alex has a great smile. I wish I could get him to smile like that for my pictures.
![]() |
Project Runway – Season Finale
Oct 18th
So that’s it, tonight was the season finale of Project Runway. A while back I blogged about my nemesis judge from the show “Nina Garcia” and how Heidi used to introduce her. While watching tonights show I’ve finally come to the conclusion that Heidi’s voice is annoying and gets on my nerves. Not nails on a chalkboard annoying but slightly less so.
Now it’s finally over I figured I was going to get my Wednesday nights back but it looks like Season Two of Top Chef is taking over the Project Runway time slot.
It really sounds like I spend hours in front of the tv watching reality tv but honestly, I don’t, It’s only one night a week. I swear..
New Orleans Pictures
Oct 14th
Corporate Olympics
Oct 13th
Every time I make a new post Jen gives me a hard time, “Still no mention of the Corporate Olympics,” “I see you still haven’t said anything about Corporate Olympics yet.” So here it is, TI got it handed to them by the Richardson School District.
They changed the format of the meet this year and all the events were all done as two person relays. A 2×50 Free, Back, and Breast relay for men and women, and then a 4×50 (2 men – 2 women) free relay to wrap the meet up. On the women’s side RISD won every one of their relays. Jen was on the free and breast relay. On the men’s side we managed to beat the RISD team in all the relays but the difference came down to the fact that Nortel fielded a stronger them then they have in previous years. We ended up placing second in the free relay and breast relay and only winning the back relay. To make matters worse we only lost the free relay by a hundredth of a second.
It came down to the combined relay at the end of meet to determine the winner. I was the lead swimmer on the TI relay and Jen was the lead swimmer on the RISD team. Nothing like a little healthy family competition. RISD beat us in the relay and we finished in a close second place so they won the meet.
That makes it two years in row we’ve lost to RISD. Just wait until next year, we’ll have our revenge!!
New Orleans Trip
Oct 11th
We are safely back from our trip to New Orleans over the (Canadian Thanksgiving) weekend. We all had a great time and managed to cram in loads of fun stuff for the kids and even some fun stuff for us.
On the first day we leisurely got out of bed and went down to the French Quarter to have the breakfast of champions of beignets at Cafe du Monde. From there we walked down to the Aquarium where we spent some time watching the fish were Alex was most interested in the sharks. At the hands on exhibit I tried to convince him to pet the Nurse shark but he still doesn’t want anything to do with that. After we were done at the Aquarium we walked up the street to the Louisiana Children’s museum where the kids had all kinds fun playing on the stuff there. To top the day off we took a trolley car ride which was very exciting for Alex.
On Saturday we all went to the zoo since Andrew is really into animals right now. He particularly likes any types of birds, elephants, and giraffes.
Sunday afternoon Jen and I went to the Saints game where they played the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. It was a close game and the Saints were trailing with five minutes to go when rookie Reggie Bush returned a punt 65 yards for the go ahead touchdown. It was a sold out game and when he crossed into the end zone the place just went crazy.
Once I have some more time I’ll get some pictures posted from the trip.
Oh The Humanity…
Oct 2nd
Andrew is a big fan of birds, actually he’s a big fan of just about any type of wildlife but birds are the easiest thing to attract to the backyard. A couple of months ago we bought a second bird feeder for the back yard and Andrew and I make it a weekly ritual to fill them up. If the squirrels don’t get to the food it typically takes about a week for the birds to go through both bird feeders.
![]() |
![]() |
This weekend as I was looking out our back door inspecting the level the bird food I noticed there was more left then normal. The feeder farthest from the house is empty and the one right out the back door is still about 3/4 full. The far one usually empties out first since the birds don’t like hanging out so close to the house unless they really have to. I also thought it was kind of odd that I hadn’t seen any birds in flying around the backyard in the last couple of days and I haven’t seen any at the feeders either.
Today we unexpectedly found out why we haven’t seen any birds in the last couple of days. While going to get the news paper this morning Jen noticed there was a large collection of feathers under the tree in our front yard. At first she thought that the next door neighbor’s cat had got into a heated battle with a bird but then out of the corner of her eye she saw something moving in the tree. Perched in the tree still munching on his breakfast was a rather sizable hawk. It looks like this bird of prey has been using our little backyard sanctuary as a free meal ticket.
So I guess for the next couple of days we are going to be on the lookout for our hawk since we haven’t seen him since this morning. We’ll have to watch and see if any of the birds return or if there are any birds left to return.
![]() Feathers littering the front yard. |
![]() A fresh still red bone eaten clean. |
Mr. I’m Going To Do This Myself
Oct 1st
Andrew is at the stage where he wants to be Mr. Independent and feed himself. As you can see the results aren’t always the neatest.




