Charleston Indoor Games

David's newest additions to his collection of medals: he competed in Charleston this weekend and won 2nd place overall, with a first, second and third (left to right) in his three events. He received excellent comments from his judges.

The Studio: Our 100th Post!

"What's this?", wonders Mom. On any given day, our dining room may be a classroom, a game room, a computer lab, a music studio, an art studio, and now, even a recording studio complete with "green screen". And every once in a while, we actually eat in there.

This is our 100th post, which is a big deal in the blogging world.

Valentine's Day

In celebration of Valentine's Day, the Professor and I had a quiet, romantic dinner at home in the "servant's quarters". It's our tradition to have heart-shaped food, and this year I made little heart-shaped Swedish meatballs. They mostly lost their heartness in baking, but the Professor got the idea. We also enjoyed sweet corn (for his sweetness), sugar snap peas, sliced tomatoes, and red berries. After dinner we exchanged cards and candy.

Meanwhile, Greta and David entertained their friends in the dining room with a fondue dinner, planned and prepared by the girls. Greta made everyone dress up in fancy clothes, much to the annoyance of her brother. But it did give him the opportunity to try out his new (to him) real sport coat. He was quite dashing.

A Busy Weekend

This past weekend was quite busy at our house.

On Friday, Heather and Luke came down for a short visit (Jared had to work). The ladies at our church gave Heather a baby shower on Saturday. It was a lovely luncheon shower with about 20 ladies in attendance. All the ladies enjoyed holding Luke and cooing over him. There was a lot of cooing over the gifts too!Saturday evening we celebrated David's birthday. While I prepared the dinner at home on Saturday afternoon, Greta went off to a friend's birthday party. Once she arrived home again, we celebrated David's birthday, but by then Heather and Luke had to leave for home.

How old are you, David?

Here David models the representation of his new kilt-on-order. We expect it to arrive sometime in May.

Sunday was our 29th anniversary and we celebrated with a restaurant meal ALONE. Meantime, Greta and her friend Christine had hatched a scheme to lure David to Christine's house, where a group of his friends had gathered for a surprise birthday party. He was, in fact, surprised. No one gave it away!

Video Test

This is a test. I might have eaten up all the storage space on the blog with this.

Luke's word of the month is "uh-GEE" or "uhn-GEE". You can hear a version of it at the beginning of the clip.

Happy Birthday, Papa!

With Projects Like This, Who'd Want to be an Art Major?

I dragged Mom and David to a scrap yard downtown today. I was looking for 1/8" steel for my welding class. I was expecting tidy heaps of metal, separated by their composition. Or maybe, here is the pipe, here is the plate, here is the sheet, and here are the odd pieces.Instead, we drove in a potholed driveway, through high barbed wire fences. The yard was a mountain range of orange metal, buttressed by the odd train car or truck chassis. After explaining what I was looking for to an employee, I was told to wander around and pick up whatever I wanted. The pavement had rotted away in some areas, leaving huge sink holes filled with weeds and last night's rain. Up behind an old industrial air conditioning unit, I found my first rusted sheet. David and I tried to scale one mountain, where tires, wood pallets, and rubber hoses crossed guard rails, computers, metal cabinets, and small scraps.We eventually found the rest of the sheets I needed in a small dumpster, at the bottom, of course. It took 5 employees and a forklift to pull them out.

At a metal distributor, my metal, with delivery to the school, would have been about $200. At the scrap yard, for about 100 pounds of steel, I paid forty-four dollars and an interesting day.