Busy

 Holy Dinah - life has been very busy. I feel like I've done nothing but work and then come home to sleep for a couple of hours and then back to work again. Last Saturday for the first time since November I finally had a day where I could get something done but then I had to go into work for a couple of hours. I decided to go in at 6:00 AM so as to not interfere with my days plans but when I got to work the experiment I had done was a failure so I couldn't do what I'd planned to do and decided instead to repeat the run. That took me until about 1:30 so there went half my day. I looked at the long "to-do" list that has been building since before Thanksgiving and decided to do the brakes on the van. Now the front brakes are easy to do because they're disk brakes and fortunately those are the ones that usually wear out. I've avoided doing the back brakes because they're drum brakes and while I did them once back in High School I remember them being a bit more tricky. Well, decided "how hard can it be?" and dove right in.

Three hours later I was really wishing I'd just taken the car in and paid someone to do it. Holy Smokes, what a night mare. As I was staring at my partially dismantled brakes the neighbor drove up and made some comment on me working on my brakes. Big mistake for him, I asked him a question and he spent the rest of the day helping me out. I was really lucky to have him. They are new neighbors and we'd introduced ourselves but we hadn't really gotten to know each other very well. We know each other now. He's from Vietnam and his wife is from Singapore. Very nice guy and I owe him big time. Now that it is all over I guess it was probably worth it because I think it costs about $300 to have your rear brakes done so that works out to about $100/hour and that's not so bad.

When I finally came in the house Lisa gasped and said, "don't move, I've GOT to take a picture". After all of that Lisa wanted to finally finish getting the Christmas ornaments put away so that took until well after midnight at which point I had to finish preparing my lesson for church the next day. It was a very late night. After church we had the Moores over for dinner and that was a lot of fun and then in the evening Peter & Maron came over for a visit and we watched "Temple Grandin" on a DVD. What a good movie and to top it off it was a true story. I like good movies that are true stories.

All semester long Sarah has been struggling with Algebra and has been working very hard to keep her grades up. Monday she found out that she did well enough on her final that she ended the semester with a solid B. She was so thrilled (as were we) that we decided she deserved a treat so we took her to the Spaghetti Factory to celebrate. In case you don't know Sarah she LOVES spaghetti. Last night we went out for dinner with Richard and Karyn Alsup who are in town. We went to a cool Thai restaurant that is very good. So I know much of my very busy schedule is playing and I've really enjoyed the visits but it still feels like I've scarcely had a chance to breath. I'll try and post another blog before another two weeks go by.

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In 19th century Japan and China, "talks too much" was one of seven reasons for which a man could divorce his wife.

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