Category Archives: Friends & Family

A friend of ours from Alabama is deathly ill, and another friend is undergoing chemo after a dual radical mastectomy. Arlene had been planning a visit for a while, but friend #1’s health was deteriorating quickly, so we decided she should go sooner rather than later. With David’s birthday coming up on Tuesday, “sooner” meant “0530 Saturday morning”. She packed Friday night, got up early and drove to the airport Saturday morning, and was in Huntsville by 0945. In the meantime, I was here with three small, noisy, active boys. Here’s what we did.
0715: Matt got up, so I brought him back to my bed for some cuddle time.
0745: Tom got up; the first words out of his mouth were “Where’s Mom?” followed closely by “Can you scramble some eggs for breakfast?”
0810: woke up David.
0820: Dad called to invite us to McDonald’s for breakfast. Too late; the eggs were already in the skillet. We plan to meet at 0900 to go see some model trains at a local hardware store.
0840: Cycle all three boys and myself through the two showers. This happens in a surprisingly orderly manner. Everyone ends up bathed and dressed in about 25 minutes.
0910: Pick up Dad and Tim and drive to the train place.
0940: Observe expressions of stupefaction and wonder on faces of all three boys. This lasts until one of the hardware store guys comes over and actually turns on one of the trains, at which point Matt starts to cry.
0942-1015: Try to convince Matt that he likes trains, at which I fail miserably. Dad compensates by giving him some circus peanuts.
1020: I buy some spacers for the kitchen and we set off for the barbershop.

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I fear that I will soon lose all my readers to my more erudite (and, graphically speaking, much more talented) sister.

I found several courtesy of this link. Some of them are better than others; regrettably, all of them have better artwork than mine (well, except for this one).

David’s very sensitive to girl-y things and tries hard to avoid them. I wonder if this might change his mind? After all, she’s a) armed and b) in uniform. (Note to self: find out why none of the Amys I know resemble this).

Last night we got about 3.5″ of snow in our yard. It’s beautiful, or it was until the boys and I went outside and started tromping around in it. Now it looks like a herd of buffalo materialized in our yard (well, there aren’t any buffalo chips; other than that, there’s no difference.)

I added some pictures from Arlene’s stash to the wedding photo album.

I can only use one word to describe the ceremony: beautiful. (That’s because I can’t fill in all the details, like what kind of lace was on Debbie’s dress or what sort of shoes the bridesmaids wore. Too bad.)
The sun was lowering over some picturesque hills as we arrived at the winery. We parked in a dusty crushed-stone parking lot, and I was a little worried that this was a bad sign. We quickly ended up on a covered walkway that wound past the (functioning) waterwheel; the walkway carried us through some nicely landscaped bushes to what I can only describe as a peninsula– and it was gorgeous. Wedding guests were seated on a patch of emerald-green grass (clearly, ChemLawn had been there recently), with a sort of moat in front of them, maybe 2.5′ deep. On the other side of the moat was a poured-concrete platform, where the wedding party stood; the moat joined with a scenic pond, complete with some geese and swans.
The ceremony was quite moving. Everything went smoothly (yay!), and their pastor did an outstanding job while still maintaining a sense of humor. We were favored with a scripture reading from Chris’ sister and a song from a cousin of the bride, followed by a brief outdoor reception with hors d’oeuvres and wine (this being, after all, a winery). We got to visit with the Larsen family and with various and sundry other guests, then it was time to head in for dinner and the big reception.

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David brought home his first published story this week, written with his pal John in the computer lab at his school.

John and David were 18 when this happened. We were dating vampire women. At first they fooled us both, but at the dance they still fooled David but John was not fooled. David got bitten by one of them and John socked him in the face.

Wow. A real chip off the old block. I wonder if I can incorporate vampire women and fisticuffs in my next book.

So, I arrived at the Sacramento airport to meet Arlene’s flight. I got there about two hours early; my intent was to find a quiet place to work, eat lunch, finish a chapter, and send it to my editors before she got there. Mistake #1: there aren’t anyquiet places at SMF, which appears to be a major Southwest operation. I mean, no one expects airports to be as quiet as libraries, but these folks were noisy. Mistake #2: there’s no food on the terminal side at the airport– all of the restaurants are past the security checkpoint. Mistake #3: there’s no good way to connect to the Internet at the whole airport. No wireless, no LAN ports, few working pay phone data ports– not my favorite.
I did manage to finish the chapter, and when Arlene’s flight arrived (about 1:20, 20min late, thankyouverymuch) we went to get her bags. Unfortunately, only one arrived– it seems the fine folks in Toledo forgot to load it, and it had been routed Toledo-Cincinnati-Salt Lake City-Sacramento. It was slated to arrive at the airport at 4pm, and we were supposed to be at the wedding rehearsal at 4:30– two hours away. We hopped in our rental Fedmobile and set out for Murphys (named after two brothers who struck it rich selling supplies to gold-seekers).

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or, how Paul and Arlene went to a bunch of new places, met interesting people, and ate good food.
So, my bud Chris finally decided to get married. (Well, all right; “finally” has some unfairly loaded implications, so strike that from the record). Fortunately for us, his wedding was the Saturday after MEC, and I was already going to be in the neighborhood. Accordingly, I planned to fly from Anaheim to Sacramento, and we arranged for Arlene to meet me there on Friday afternoon.
First, I had to get there. I arrived at the John Wayne International Airport (great name, huh?) and checked in for my United (motto: “At least we’re not Northwest!”) flight.
The last time I flew United was during their infamous “Summer of Hell“, and so I wasn’t looking forward to the flight delay I fully expected.

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0705: wake up to the sound of Matt talking into his baby monitor. Too bad he was speaking Ukranian.
0730: head over to Mom & Dad’s with the baby and my laptop. Upgrade the firewall firmware so I can VPN to my mail server.
0815: breakfast with David, Matthew, and Arlene. Atypically, Tom was still asleep.
0845: start cleaning the garage. Today’s mission: clean up enough so that the cars can be parked inside.

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Last night, we marked the one-week anniversary of our move-in by having our first homecooked meal in the new house. That was courtesy of our new stove, which finally arrived yesterday morning. Roast, rice and gravy, corn, and French bread– good stuff.
Almost everything is unpacked. My office area now has electricity, thanks to the efforts of my dad and brother. The radon mitigation system is installed, all of the phone jacks work, there’s wireless upstairs, and the kitchen is mostly functional. We ordered the new countertops; David’s had his first soccer practice, and we’ve met most of our nearby neighbors.
The only major fly in the ointment is the roof. It leaks, which we knew. It doesn’t have any felt under the shingles, though, which we didn’t know. Somehow the seller kinda forgot to tell us. The lack of felt isn’t causing the leaks, but if felt were present it would be helping to stop them. In Perrysburg, if you don’t have felt under the shingles, your roof doesn’t meet the building code. We’re pursuing our options with the seller to find out whether we can get him to pay, or whether we’ll have to (yuck) get a lawyer.

It’s been a busy, busy week. The trucks are unloaded; we’ve been to our first official church meetings as members of the Perrysburg ward, and our house is slowly but surely taking on the character of a home. Today I’m trying to catch up on email and blog entries (I’ll backdate them, so be sure to look over the last few days of August). I’ve also promised to hang a new shower door in the master bath, and Tim and I are going to install some upstairs ceiling fans in the bedrooms. Tomorrow, it’s back to my normal writing schedule.

I was going to write a (hopefully) funny post about how Arlene & I celebrated the day yesterday, but I’m too tired. We spent all day Friday packing and loading trailer #1, with much help from friends from church. We got about 2/3 of the trailer loaded that first day, including the refrigerator, the piano, Arlene’s heavy credenza and china cabinet, the sofa, and my Monster Steel Desk ™. We ended up rejiggering a bunch of the load on Saturday, with yet more help from church friends (including some of the same folks who came and sweated with us on Friday).
Now, the trucks are both loaded, and we close tomorrow on this house. This afternoon I met Chris and Lisa, the buyers, at our house to do a quick walkthrough and to let them get their cats out of their cat crates. Since it’s going to be their house in 18 hours or so, I didn’t see the harm in letting them do so. They seem like a great family, and their kids are obviously excited about the new house, new neighborhood, etc. We had a nice visit, then Tom & I left to go visit the Crosbys and the Chandlers. By the time we came back here, we were both dead tired. Tom, in fact, was so sleepy he didn’t want anything to eat; he just zonked out in the van on the way back. Now he’s asleep, and I will be shortly.
Tomorrow at 0930 we close, then I have to go to the bank, get a dog leash, get the dog from the kennel, and get up to Ohio. Somewhere in there, I have to meet the ABF drivers at our house so they can ship our stuff, then it’s off to the great white north.

Busy last couple of days. I finished another book chapter; the modem in our TiVo died, and our moving preparations are picking up speed. The big truck will be here tomorrow about noon, and we have several shifts of friends from church coming to help us load and pack.
Arlene and I both have talks to give at church on Sunday, plus I have my regular Sunday-school class to teach. Right after church, she’ll leave to drive up to Perrysburg with David and Matt. Thomas and I will stay here for the closing on Monday, then drive up. Our stuff will leave on Monday and arrive sometime later in the week. Of course, the idiot sellers still haven’t told us which of the inspection defects they’re going to fix, and their realtor isn’t even returning our agent’s phone calls– not a good sign. It would really stink if we had to put our stuff in storage to await our closing date, but we may yet have to.