Boom

We go pick Abby up tomorrow. I'm anxious to hear about her week at camp. Last year she hated it. I really hope it's a different story this time.

Happy Birthday Vince.

Peace-
Matt

Paper Chain

Angie & Madeline made a paper chain today, counting the 45 days left until we leave for England. We're getting excited.

Peace-
Matt

(PS - Angie's passport arrived. What a relief)

Happy Camper

We'll move Angie's home office back down into the basement today. She will be much happier there. I put carpet down there yesterday.

Abby heads to Catholic Youth Camp today, for the week. She's excited to go. We're excited to have her there. We all need a break from each other.

Peace-
Matt

Midsummer

Long time no blog. Sorry for leaving you all wondering. The flooding in our basement never got worse that what's shown. Thank God for that. Here are some photos of the flooded fields. I'm hearing that the corn crop in Iowa has sustained many billions of dollars damage. Some are calling it "Corntrina" in reference to Katrina. Silly.

If you look at my 2/10/08 post "40 days", you'll see the same concrete columns that I've shown in the photo above. Comparing the two posts, you can see how high the river is now. It's amazing.

Summer has been very busy. Alex has her permit and has been driving all over. We need to find her a car soon. We're both sick of taking her everywhere. She needs a job too. Her social life is expensive.

Abby and Madeline stay home most days and get pretty bored at times. When they're bored they bug their mother, who is supposed to be working during the day. When they bug her she gets frustrated. When she's frustrated, we're all frustrated. Summer has been LONG for her. When the basement flooded, I moved her office upstairs. I need to get her back down in the basement before she loses her mind.

We're counting the days to our England trip. I hope Angie's passport comes soon, it's the last piece.

Peace-
Matt

Ark

We've had a crapload of rain the last few days. Our basement has been getting water since early Friday morning. This is the first time we've ever had water in our basement. It's pouring into the sump pit from the drain tile. The sump pump has been running every 45 seconds or so. The drain tile has never had one drop come from it since we've lived here. It's got us on edge. If the power goes out, or the pump fails, or whatever, we'll have a foot of water in no time. We've put everything up. Angie is down there wet vaccing as I type.

We thank God it's not worse for us though. There are plenty of folks in town that have it much worse. Cambridge is flooded. This is the worse it's ever been according to some very old locals we've spoken with.

Time to build an ark I guess.

Peace-
Matt

Scrappy

Madeline is a heck of a ballplayer. She watches every move the ball makes and chases it down. Most of the girls on her team are typical tee ballers, their minds are somewhere else and they'd rather play in the dirt. Not Madeline, she's serious. She told me her coach called her "scrappy".

Peace-
Matt

School's Out

Tomorrow is the last day of school. My grocery bill will now double.

Beach

I joined thirty-five five year olds at the beach today. The weather was perfect, the kids were all well behaved and very fun. It was nice to be five for a day. I wish I had their energy and care free attitude every day.

Field Trip

First, here is an important article for you to read. Why is the truth so elusive?

Lettuce, spinach, and peas shown above. The lettuce is ready to eat. We've planted our peppers, tomatoes, cukes, and pumpkins. We tried some sweet corn this year too. The weeds are growing twice as fast as anything else. I always forget how much weeding there is to do.

Our new priest (came to us July 07) has been reassigned already. He'll be leaving in July. We were just getting use to each other too. We don't know who we'll get to replace him.

Our parish is working on a new directory. It'll have photos of most of the parish families, and names, etc. I've been shooting a bunch of odds & ends photos for it, like parish councils, events, and activities. I've included our priest in a bunch of the photos. He'll be gone before it's even published.

I'm taking the day off tomorrow to go with Madeline and her class on a field trip to Big Creek park. We're going to play in the sand I guess. Beats the hell out of working.

Peace-
Matt

Broken

Soldering copper water piping is a crappy job. It takes a long time, especially when you don’t do it very often like me. Sure, it’s kind of fun for a little while, but then it becomes work; too much work. When I put the new bathroom in the house, I changed all of our existing galvanized water pipes to copper. It was a lot of soldering.

Recently, I picked up a water softener from a friend. Our water is hard I guess. I never noticed it until we got that stupid dishwasher. It just doesn’t do a good job, and still bugs the hell out of me. I decided to try something different for piping the softener. There is a product called Propress, and it is a dream. It’s copper pipe & fittings, just like the regular stuff, but these fittings have o-rings in them. You slide them on the pipe, use a special tool (which I borrowed from work), and clamp the fittings to the pipe. It takes a minute. No cleaning, fluxing, heating, soldering; none of that shit. It can even have water running through it when you do it. No way you could solder with water running; that’s impossible. What would have taken me at least 12 hours to do with the solder method, took less than 3 hours with the Propress stuff, and that’s because I took my sweet time. Good stuff.

When I was working on the water lines, I pulled something in my shoulder. A serious pop and then pain. This morning while shaving, I pulled something in my lower back again; just like I did while brushing my teeth a few months ago. Between this stuff and my knee problems, I think there’s something wrong with me. It can’t be just age. I have a serious problem. I’m broken.

Peace-
Matt

Sprouts

My peas are looking good. I'm ready to plant the rest of the stuff. Is it too early?

Dust

A few shots from about 10 minutes in the garage. Haven't had much time to photograph lately. Spring sports have us running 6 days a week.

We got our passports in the mail yesterday. When we get our stimulus money from uncle sam, we'll be ready to go for our England trip in August.

Matt