Photo-less Friday

January 6, 2012 Tim

Some days nothing works.

This was such a day. I upgraded our version of WordPress to 3.something at Kathy’s insistence, but in doing so, I pretty much killed our web host. We keep running out of memory for the simplest tasks, and every time I get the server up, my spam software stops working.

Anyway, I can’t seem to upload photos to the blog under the new setup, just yet. Maybe tomorrow.

Still, we had a lovely game night, and (although I lost a lot) I had a good time. I ate WAY too much, and (to add insult to injury) forgot to go to AnyTime Fitness after everyone had left. Now it is too late (yes, I know, AnyTime is open … ANY time) — I just can’t bring myself to leave the house now, when it is so late.

Lets hope that tomorrow brings me great success in all my various goals.

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Daffodils and DVDs

A Visit with Timothy

Three Weeks of Bloglessness

Musings

Kitchen Patrol

January 5, 2012 Tim 5 Comments

When I was a kid, I wasn’t allowed to wash the dishes. Apparently, I was too slow, and my brother resented spending his entire evening, waiting for each dish to be lovingly cleaned and placed in the drying rack. He appealed to my Mom, who sentenced me to a lifetime of drying.

Drying dishes has to be about the stupidest thing in the world. If you leave ‘em, they’ll dry by themselves, and you can put them away much more quickly; but my Mom always insisted that the dishes had to be dried. I retaliated by taking so long to dry them, that they air-dried anyway. I really showed her!

We recently spent a week in the Duckabush with my extended family — we often dined together as a group, some twenty strong. Somehow the women-folk got the idea that, since they were doing most of the cooking, we men-folk should manage the clean-up. And so, my brother and I turned the clock back some 40 years, and washed the dishes together.

Fun with dishes
At least this time I didn’t have to dry — but I was relegated to ‘rinsing’ since I still couldn’t be trusted to actually wash.

Well aware that the reward for a job well-done is often another job, we determined to wash the dishes in such a way that we would not be asked again. We shouted and threw dishes and sprayed water at each other, and generally carried on as though we were pillaging the kitchen, much to the amusement of our sons and brother-in-law. And yet, we failed — our plan backfired. Everyone had such fun watching our horseplay, that they called for us to wash dishes the next day as well.

Clearly we needed a better strategy. How do you avoid doing the dishes, gentle reader? Chime in with a comment.

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Aslan's Country

Travels with Faramir

House Dressing

Family, Rachel

Sweet Sixteen

January 4, 2012 tje

I know, this blog post is supposed to be about today, or at least, the photo is supposed to be taken on or near this day, otherwise, what is the point of a Project 365 blog?

Rules, or at least the following of them, have never been my forte.

This picture was taken near Rachel’s 16th birthday, back in December. Some dear friends loaned us their cool bus (pictured below) and Rachel took a group (gaggle?) of girls up to Bellevue Square to window shop. We decorated the bus, stocked it with goodies, but we still needed a driver.

Fearless Driver
The birthday girl and her driver

“There’s no way I’m going,” I bluffed, trying to look like I was really digging in my heels. “Shopping with a dozen girls, in Bellevue? That’s not really my scene.” I was weakening, and Rachel knew it. She gave me her ‘please, may I have a kitten?’ look, which she has been practicing for years.

I began to panic. Six or eight hours driving and shopping didn’t sound like much fun to me. “Wait, what about Michelle?” I blurted. (There’s nothing like a good panic to get the ‘ole brain cells firing.) “She loves to drive, and she’s a girl, so she probably doesn’t mind shopping!”

A few text messages later, Michelle was on the hook to drive the bus. What a great friend. Thanks, Michelle! And a special thank-you to our dear friends, who loaned us their bus, and didn’t even fuss when we blew out a fuse with our hot-water pot!

A gaggle o' girls
Rachel has a nice group of friends.

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Twelve Things I Love About Rachel

Love languages: by Rachel

A Pocket Full of Posie

Family, Silliness

A Face Only A Brother Could Love

January 3, 2012 Tim 7 Comments

The best gift (OK, the only gift) that I gave my brother for Christmas was to grow a beard.

Purportedly, I grew it to amuse my wife, and to honor her family’s Thanksgiving-to-Christmas beard-growing tradition. I thought that this year, the first since Kathy’s father died, would be a good time for me to make my first-ever beard attempt.

Kathy was away for Thanksgiving, so I got an 8-day start, carefully nursing my sparse beard into life like an arctic explorer using his last match to ignite a fire. She laughed when she saw it, and so I’ve put off shaving it for some weeks, now.

But the big payoff was for my brother, who spent Christmas with us at the Refuge, as we celebrated my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. Mark couldn’t seem to keep his hands off my scruffy face, probably overcome with jealousy and awe at my hirsute manliness (or perhaps manly hirsuteness?). He mocked and sneered, but everyone could tell that he wished he could have a beard just like mine.

Envy can be ugly, sometimes
As always, I bore his impertinence with quiet dignity.