My days had fallen into a pretty good semblance of normality recently--you know--spend all day at the office, then come home, ask the kids about their day, help with homework, put them to bed, then call Comcast and wait on hold for an hour to complain about the spotty internet service due to the faulty modem they installed last Friday. You know, normal stuff.
I kid. I have also been watching The Office, walking the dogs, finishing up the classroom portion of my job training, and getting around to baptizing Ashton. Yep. The last of the four. It was AWESOME.
Hw was baptized last Saturday, a delay of two weeks from his birthday thanks to conference. Little kids tend to hate conference anyway, so this year he was doubly irritated at having to sit on the living room floor on the 4th. Kind of unsettling to get glowering looks from an eight year old while conference is on, along with complaints like "I SHOULD BE GETTING BAPTIZED TODAY!!"
By last Saturday it was all good. A special day.
We suffered a mini-tragedy two days ago. By we I mean Ashton and by tragedy I mean awesome opportunity for dad to say "I told you so".
Ashton got a scooter for his birthday--
(oh yeah--another event we managed to skip on the blog) on Sep 29th, and I spent the first week of said scooter's life explaining to Ashton that if he kept leaving in the driveway, it was bound to be run over. And in Sienna v. RazorScooter, the good money is on the Sienna. LO and behold, CRUNCH. Yesterday Agi mangled it after a quick run to the store.Softee that I am, after my obligatory "I told you so's" and "gee what a wonderful teaching lesson this is", I decided to try and fix his scooter. Thankfully, only the stem was mangled, so I thought I could pound it back into an upright position with a mallet. Nope. Made it worse. Then I managed to at least get it taken apart, followed by a trip to Wal-mart to find a cheapie 20 dollar scooter from which I could use the stem and handlebars to replace the mangled pieces.
And this is why I hate Walmart:
I get to the store, pick out my chosen scooter due for organ donation, get home, and open it up. I find that: a) this scooter has already been beatup and returned to walmart, with stem screws that are stripped off (making its reason for existing useless to me) and b) its friggin' PINK and packed into the wrong box. Thanks Walmart. I was tempted to take back BOTH mangled scooters, drop them on the counter, and nonchalantly ask for a refund. "Why yes ma'am--it appeared to have been run over by a car when I took it out of the box". Super. Now I have TWO useless scooters.
In lighter news--I am once again packing for an international trip. I am going to Aberdeen with 4 of my classmates on Monday for an extended course in offshore survival training. While you may think this means learning how to fend off the advances of love-starved roughnecks, it actually is way cooler than that :-). I get to, among other things, practice escaping from a downed helicopter on the North Sea and jumping from a 90 foot platform into the water. I've taken great delight in freaking out Agi with graphic descriptions of every offshore rig accident of the past 30 years.
In any case--I am looking forward to this trip. I am also going to be hanging out with my brotha-in-law who is chef at a restaurant 45 miles south of Aberdeen. Hope to see all the cool sights--castles, Loch Ness, haggis factories, etc... All the cool Scottish stuff.
Bittersweet as well. I recall that my last "foreign" excursion that was any fun was to Hvar, Croatia in March, setting up a training conference for distributors in SE Europe. That was such a fun, blissful weekend, spent on a gorgeous island with two of my kids.
Seems so long ago... Ironically, that conference is this weekend. Hope it all goes well for the participants.
So here I come, Scotland! I leave Monday, and will be back a couple weeks later. I'm sure I'll have PLENTY of cool pictures to post...
Until then, I am back to my midnight laundry duties and the even more fun task of forgetting this week's twin debacles: BYU's craptacular performance last night Vs. TCU, and the snoozer of a Presidential debate from Wednesday. How the country ended up with these idiots winning their respective party nominations is beyond me. One is the barely restrained socialist wunderkint with a background and experience as barren as Paris Hilton's SAT scores, and the other is a doddering, grimacing, smirk machine who can't seem make a cogent argument on TV to save his life, even though his opponent is as wide-open a target as possible. My dream scenario is for McCain to win and then retire in February. Better that than having the Obaminator win with plans to "spread the wealth around". Yecch. I just left European socialism, only to see it on my doorstep here. Uggh. I weep for the Republic.
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