Opening Night!

After many weeks of late nights Annette hit the stage on Friday for the opening night of "It's a wonderful life the musical." Her parents came down for the dress rehearsal on Wednesday and I flew in for opening night on Friday. Annette was wonderful as usual. She has such an excitement on stage that makes her very fun to watch. She nailed her featured dancing segments and sang her heart out. I'm proud of you Nettie!!

Pie Month 2009

In an attempt to get into the Thanksgiving spirit more and give more thanks to others, I have declared November... The First Annual Pie Month - 2009.

Two questions:
1. What brings out the joy of Thanksgiving more than pies?
2. Who doesn't love pie?! (Answers below)

So, the goal is simple, 30 pies in 30 days and giving the finished products to the wonderful people we've come to know and love here in Kalamazoo. The month has started fairly bland with 6 pumpkin and 4 apple, but a pie-a-thon is scheduled for this saturday with other pie lovers in the area which promises to produce such delectable pies as banana cream, chocolate mousse and some sort of berry creation.

We had the Elders over on Monday to rejoice in the celebration.

See, pie really does bring joy!

Hopefully, more updates to come.




Answers:
1. Nothing
2. Nobody

Chipmunks and Guster.

Over the last couple years, Annette has had off and on pain from her wisdom teeth. She kept waiting to be more settled and get some dental insurance before taking the plunge. Despite some anxiety over telling her director that she was going to miss a couple rehearsals (seriously, she was scared to death), she scheduled the appointment to have them removed after getting the go ahead from a regular dentist.

Her only option was IV sedation for the procedure, so she missed out on the crunching, drilling and smoke that many of us remember from the experience. She didn't miss out on much else though. After waking up from the surgery, she was out of it for much of the rest of the day. Her mom came down to take care of her since I had a scout camp out that night. The next day the swelling was starting to show and we had our very own chipmunk in the house. A gorgeous chipmunk at that.

Using large doses of vicodin and motrin she was able to keep the pain at bay and is now starting to show some signs of improvement. As you can imagine, she wasn't very happy with the diet she was restricted to, but with 6 different flavors of applesauce and a myriad of jellos to choose from, she made it through the first few days and is now back to regular foods. She has a follow up appointment with the dentist tomorrow and is praying she won't have the dreaded dry socket. Wish her luck.

The night before the extractions, we wanted to celebrate, so we drove out to Cleveland to see the band, Guster. They were playing one of my favorite albums of all time "Lost and Gone Forever" in it's entirety to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the album's release. With the nearly freezing temperature and blowing winds, we took the option of eating at the House of Blues Restaurant in order to "pass the line" (which ended up just meaning you got to wait in a different line inside). The food was good and the show was even better. They played two full sets, spending nearly three hours on stage. It was awesome.

OT...only cool in football

With applications really picking up at work we started over time last week. Sounded ok at first, a little extra cash around the holidays, great. But WOW 10.5 hours at the same desk, looking at 2 computer screens, doing basically data entry is pretty brutal. Lucky for me I have the greatest husband in the world who brought me this BEAUTIFUL ORCHID just because :)

Boo - Yah!

So normally a deadly heart condition most commonly found in children is not something to boo yah, but this is a special situation. So, growing up we would shampoo our carpets twice a year and whenever we did my parents made us wait outside while they did it because of "kawasaki" disease. They explained it as "little mites that come up from the carpet when you agitate it and then eat away at the hearts of asian children." That always made perfect sense to me, so much so that when we needed to go to the bathroom while they were cleaning (and with 6 kids someone ALWAYS had to) we'd either hold our breath and pee really really fast or use a neighbor's bathroom.

So I get to college and all of this just happens to come up during a late night conversation and as I'm telling them about this very serious and deadly condition they all start laughing at me, saying "why would the mites eat asain hearts and not white people hearts" blah blah blah. Well folks, feast your eyes on this...my parents description may have been a little off, but...straight from the highly reliable Wikipedia website:

"[s]ome studies have found associations between the occurrence of Kawasaki disease and recent exposure to carpet cleaning..." An additional factor that suggests genetic susceptibility is the fact that regardless of where they are living, Japanese children are more likely than other children to contract the disease."

And.....BOO - YAH!

Eighty eight!!!!!!

There's a running joke in my family that when something is a really close call, you say "eighty-eight!" This comes from my little brother Joseph's childhood when he would play with micro machines and pretend he was in the movie Back to the Future. He would hold two cars very close to his face with one car driving in slow motion toward the other. Just before they were about to collide he would say "88!" (sometimes even saying it in slow motion as well) as if the car simply needed to reach the designated speed in order to disappear into a different time and be saved from the collision (which of course it always did, accompanied by a cool time travel sound effect).

We had our own 88 experience the other day on our way home from Grand Rapids at 1am. Officer Benson saw my wife's reckless driving and decided to pull her over...



Here's the pic. The white rectangle just left of the cross walk is the 40mph speed limit sign just ahead. Fortunately, the good officer saw that we were "decent people" and let us off with a warning. Phew!! The first time that's happened for Annette! EIGHTY EIGHT!!