A Beginning and an End

After church we went on a road trip to make two important visits.

The first was to the hospital in Holland to visit our new niece, Anne Hope Meyering. She was born yesterday and is just the most precious little thing. Amy's brother, Kevin, and his wife, Katie, now have a boy and a girl. From what I've been told, he didn't seem all that interested when he saw her in the hospital but is really cute when he says, "baby Anne Hope."

The second was to a Funeral Home in Gobles to attend the wake of my grandmother's brother Charles. It was not so much a sad time but a celebration of his life. Uncle Charles wanted to enjoy life and those around him couldn't help but enjoy it too. He would have turned 95 in April.

2 Time Suckers

Yesterday I spent a good deal of time just looking at pictures on Flickr. There are some amazing photos there and I kept looking at more and more and more... I created my own Flickr account and uploaded some of my own.

I also have an affinity to recommender sites. I found a new one for music that I really like - it's called Pandora. It has the coolest interface of any recommender site that I've ever played with.

Scuba Photos

The underwater pictures on this website are impressive. I have always thought it would be fun to go scuba diving but have never had the opportunity or the resources to do it.

Undersea Photography

Olympic Thoughts

I haven't been able to watch much of the Olympics but I have seen enough to make a few observations.

• Apparently to be an Olympic athlete you need to have your teeth whitened. Some of these athletes look like their teeth glow in the dark.
• I really don't like the subjectiveness of judged events, I prefer the concreteness of a clock or a goal or a target or a distance.
• The ice skating events feel like a reality show - after they finish their routine I expect a 1-800 number to show up on the bottom of the screen in case I want to vote for them.
• I can't tell the difference between a "double axel triple toe loop" and a "2.5 rotation sow cow"
  

Basic Maintenance

One thing about owning a house is having to fix things and there are more things to fix when you have an older house. It's been kinda fun discovering that I can fix toilets and make screens for my windows. Today I did the simple task of replacing a few electrical outlets. When you tried to plug stuff into them the cord would just fall out because it fit so loosely. I looked at the outlets and the wiring and it had obviously been a while since they had been replaced, I even wondered if they had ever been replaced. I also wondered how long previous owners put up with the annoyance of loose plugs but never did anything about it. It takes very little money and very little effort to replace them but you just have to take the time to do it. It was so exciting to plug something in and have it stay.

There are just so many things that we just deal with instead of taking care of them which, if we would do that, would make things easier because we wouldn't have to deal with them anymore. A little bit of maintenance goes a long way. Amy has been running herself ragged trying to accomplish too many things and meeting expectations she has for herself that are so much higher than what others have asked of her. She has been so focused on making others happy that she doesn't take the time for herself and occasionally it gets to be too much. She needs to take the time to do some self maintenance and we're still working on what that looks like. With my job I have learned the importance of taking care of myself and thought I was doing pretty well at it but in helping Amy deal with this issue I realized I needed to make a few modifications myself. I tend to focus so much on personal leisure that I put off dealing with other responsiblilites like replacing electrical outlets. Not only does my house need regular maintenance, so do I.

What Santa Does With His Free Time

I have been looking at this every day for the last couple months and finally got around to taking a picture of it. While standing in my kitchen at the sink I get a great view of the back of my neighbor's house. She placed a large Santa Claus figurine outside her slider door which, from my perspective, appears to be peeing on her house. Perhaps she thinks it is cute to have him looking through her windows but I find the concept of a voyeristic jolly old elf disturbing. Maybe Santa's real name is Peeping Tom.

Winter Returns

Sorry for the light posting of late...you've got to have time to update a blog, and neither of us have a lot of that!

We had a little snowstorm Friday night into Saturday. When we woke up Saturday morning, everything was quiet and beautiful. Pete threw on some shoes and a sweatshirt and ran outside to capture the following shots.

Pete then spent the balance of the day working on the entryway. We discovered paneling underneath the wallpaper out there, so instead of taking off the wallpaper, we decided to dig out the "grooves" in the paneling (which had been filled in by whoever decided to wallpaper) and then paint, so it will look like we've simply painted over paneling. Hopefully anyway. We're now ready to prime, which I hope happens this weekend. :) I hope to post some "in progress" pictures soon.

Here are a few shots from our Christmas Eve with the Meyerings and Christmas Day with the Andersons:

Pete and Katie enjoying putting together a puzzle.

Gavin helping Pete open a present.

Gavin opening his Little People Discovery Airport from Uncle Pete and Aunt Amy. Unfortunately, he wasn't feeling very well by the end of the evening - can you tell by his (very cute) rosy cheeks? But for feeling as yucky as he did, he did great!

Christmas Day, we hosted the Anderson clan at our home - our first official holiday hosting. The day was fun and went well (thank goodness for Honeybaked Ham!)

The Anderson men: (L-R) Dad Anderson, Pete (in the Santa suit), Henry, Phil (Henry's dad) and Paul

With the kids (they belong to Phil): Annie, Kitty, Tori and Henry

And the star of the day, Santa, hands out presents. Isn't he a hottie? :)

More is coming...

I've finally found the time to sit down and post - all to say that more pictures and posts from Christmas are coming soon. The holidays were a happy whirlwind and now it's back to the real world. Look for pictures of our upcoming house projects too - front entryway, here we come!

The Meyering Christmas Gathering

This gets me caught up to the present time. Tonight we had the Meyering get-together. Rachel was plugging her blog and, incidently, inspired us to get going on ours. Once again, Gavin managed to steal the show.