Vacation Journal - Day 1

Saturday 6/16

My boy was up with a coughing fit Friday night/Saturday morning, so we were up with that. Then he woke up around 8:30 on Saturday feeling what seemed refreshed. I got some packing done, and went with my mother-in-law to get the van. My boy and I did some shopping, hit the library, and had some lunch (not necessarily in that order). I got a chance to bake some chocolate chip cookies, and then my wonderful wife and I loaded up the van with the majority of our stuff, and I took it over to my mother-in-laws so she could load her stuff and come and get us after Vacation Bible School. Then home I went and laid down for about an hour. Managed about a 30 minute sleep out of that hour of lying down, then it was time to get around and ready for VBS.

After VBS, we called my in-laws, and I got a shower and cleaned up by the time they got to the house. We finished loading up the van and we got off around 8:30-9:00 or so. Our first stop was the airport. My wife had to fill out some papers to be added as an additional driver to the van. I took her license earlier in the day, but without here signature, that didn’t do any good. After that, QT for some caffeine, cause I’m going to have a very long night ahead of me, and I didn’t get as much sleep Friday night as I liked or as long of a nap as I would have liked.

For the most part, I didn’t have as much trouble as I was afraid of, especially considering how tired I was feeling at only 11:30 as everyone else was starting to dose off.

Back from Vacation

We're back from vacation.

We had a really good time. I've written posts while I was away, but didn't have access to post them, so I'll be posting them each day (two posts at most).

Happy Anniversary my Love

Today is my 9th wedding anniversary, and I love my wife more today than when we were married!

I love our anniversaries. It's cool to look back. As I was telling my dearest love it's hard to believe we have been married for 9 years.

She is such a wonderful woman! I'm so blessed to have her as my wife.

wedding picture

picture taken a couple weeks ago at our daughters graduation.

Happy Anniversary my Love! I love you.

Cheap Movies

I found out that some movie theaters have specials during the summer.

The Owasso 10 is one of those theaters. For $9/person, you can get a season pass. The run the same movie every wed-fri, and there are 10 movies scheduled. If you don't want to go every week, you can buy tickets there for $2/person.
Click the link for movies and times.

The AMC 20 has a free movie, every wednesday from June 27 to August 15 (except for July 4th)
Click the link for movies and times.

To see more theaters, check out this.

YEA!

We voted today on a new pastor at church.

I'll give more details later. Just excited.

picasa flickr

100_5546.JPG
Originally uploaded by jarrard@swbell.net

Today, I found a plug-in for Picasa that lets you upload pictures to Flickr.

http://picasa2flickr.sourceforge.net/

If you like Flickr and Picasa you'll probably love this!

First day of summer break

Today was my boy's first day of summer break!

He slept late, laid around the house in his underwear, and by 11 he was "bored". hehe

More Mozilla

As many of you know, I love Firefox. I use it for about 95% of my web browsing (that other 5% is at work where they can't manage to write apps that work on anything but IE).

Anyway, I recently got Mozilla's Thunderbird for an email client at home. I have Outlook, and have the 3 email accounts I check and my wifes on it. However, every time I went to send an email, I'd forget to change from the default account (my wifes) to mine, so it always looked like she was emailing people.

So, to reduce confusion (mainly for the people that never understood why my wife was emailing them), I downloaded Thunderbird. And so far I like it.

While looking at add-on's and the like tonight, I saw reference to 2 other projects. The SeaMonkey Project and Calendar Project.

The SeaMonkey Project is "Web-browser, advanced e-mail and newsgroup client, IRC chat client, and HTML editing made simple -- all your Internet needs in one application."

The Calendar Project is broken into two, Sunbird and Lightning
Sunbird is a stand alone calendar program while Lightning embeds the calendar into Thunderbird.

I installed Lightning tonight, and linked it to my Google Calendars with a add-on I found called Provider.

It appears that all will run on Windows, Linux, and Mac.

So, don't have (or want) Microsoft Outlook, you might want to give one of these a try.

Flag Ceremony

The Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and Brownies were all invited to help take down and fold the Service men's flags at Floral Haven. This is a yearly event.

My boy and I went with about 5 other boys from our pack (and their parents) to help.

We got there, got signed in, and had the event explained to us. We lined up, and had a parade to the center. (on the route there, I found my grandpa's flag) Once we reached the center, Taps was played. Then the flags in the circle around the main large flag were lowered and folded. While this occurred, I took my boy back to see my grandpa's flag. Which he was very interested to see.

After the main flag was lowered, all the scouts were released to start lowering and folding the flags.

Here are some pictures.

Grandpa's Flag

Graduation!!!

First off,

WOO HOO!

Ok, now that that is out of my system...

I am so proud of my daughter. She made it to graduation. I wasn't always sure she was going to make it, but she did. There was much blood, sweat and tears leading up to this day.

She was so nervous tonight it was funny. It was a good thing she didn't have to give a speech or she might have died!

We had a really good time. My wife and I made much noise as they called her name and she walked across the stage!

It took me forever to find her after graduation, but I finally did thanks to my wife who called me and lead me to them.

We came home for some homemade salsa, guacamole, and the like. We also had some cake which my mom made and decorated. It was really good.

1 down, 1 to go (in 11 years).

Some Senior Pictures

Ok, here are a couple of senior pictures that I thought I would go ahead and post. I was waiting for my second batch to come in, but figured in my cousin complained in my last post that there wasn't any pictures, I'd go ahead and show you two.

(Click for larger images)

Happy Mother's Day

I wanted to wish all the mothers that read this a Happy Mother's Day.

And for those of you who aren't mothers, go make your mothers Mother's Day happy :)

Senior Pictures

Yesterday, we got my daughters Senior pictures taken.

I'm not sure there is anything more difficult than narrowing down pictures to get.

You'll see some soon.

USS Batfish

Saturday, the Cub Scouts went the USS Batfish Volunteer day. To help clean and get the Batfish ready for a reunion of the crew that had served on the Batfish during WWII.

The Batfish was a WWII Diesel Submarine. We were lucky enough to get a tour of it from one of the men that had served on the Batfish. The cub scouts really had a good time. We got there late because of a soccer game (which was pretty good), but we made it for lunch and the tours. And afterward, most people were headed home, but I made sure we got some work so my boy could work.

This was not only a Batfish memorial, but also a war memorial as they had other items there.

If you have never been, I'd urge you to go. I went once as a kid/teenager (don't remember how old I was), and this was my second time there.

Garden

I did some more work in my garden the past 2 weekends.

Last weekend, I re-planted tomatoes, bell peppers, and jalapeño peppers that the late freeze we had killed.

This weekend, I was able to plant my corn. In a couple more weeks, I'll plant my pole beans and squash. Later this week, I hope to plant some cucumbers.

Yesterday and today, I picked 2 strawberries. But unfortunately, the birds and/or bugs got to enjoy the them, instead of me.

And finally, I noticed that my blackberry bush had blooms on it tonight. They weren't there yesterday when I mowed.

Beam us up Scotty

What kind of nerd fan would I be if I didn't bring this up.

Today, (Saturday), some of actor James Doohan's (Scotty from Star Trek) ashes will be launched into space.

You can ready more about it here.

Raingutter Regatta

Tonight was my son's Raingutter Regatta at the Pack meeting.

Instead of doing the normal boat, we got creative and made a catamaran. My boy helped design it, sand it, and paint it. Though I did the cutting on the boat.

So, at tonights race, well, let's just say he kicked some booty. :)

He ended up in 1st place of the Tiger Cubs!!!

He was so happy.

Here is his Pirate Catamaran!

Here is his boat along with some of the other boats.

He was racing another Catamaran. I thought he was going to get beat. And I would have been upset since I told his den master what

2007 RainGutter Regatta

First Place Tigers
(BTW, those are cannons on the side)

Tonight, he also got his Bobcat and Tiger badges along with a slew of belt-loops

Church Web Page.

Wow, I've been gone a while huh?

I've been busy doing all sorts of things.

At the top, I've set up a web page for my church. You can see it at www.tricountyskiatook.org You may, or may not, be surprised at how hard it is to find a domain name.

I think it looks pretty good. I've got some help to keep it updated. So, we'll see how it goes.

Prom 2007

Well, today is prom. Not just prom, but this year, it's senior prom! After much drama and to-do. They finally got off. I ended up taking some pictures at Woodward Park. In fact, there were several of us taking pictures.

This is the four girls. Mine is in the pink poofy dress.

My daughter and her friend.

My two kids. He was having fun, but that was the best picture of him I got.

My daughter and her date!

Senior Tea

Today, was Senior Tea day. Best I can tell, it's a day where mother and daughter get to dress up and have a tea party. My wife took several pictures. It was interesting to see pictures of these girls that I've know since they were 9 or so, and how grown up they look.

Here are a couple pictures of my wife and daughter.