When it rains it pours...

Several weeks ago our study on Wednesday night youth class was on the book of Job. The lesson focused on just a few verses but after reading those verses I found myself almost reading the entire book. It's good stuff, Satan went after Job over and over and over again and through it all Job kept his faith in God and never gave in. I found it amazing the faith that Job kept and going through all that with his wife and friends turning on him I wonder if I was put in that same situation how I would react. That was the day before the Aviator gave us fits. While I am in no way comparing our situation to the one of Job's, he went through way worse stuff than we did, we have definitely had our share of troubles at times these past few weeks. During those times when I want to say, "Why God, why us?", I find myself thinking back to Job and his faith and it gives me much encouragement. Some might think of our problems as trivial but even the trivial things mount. First we had the Aviator issue which I've blogged on numerous times, then Malachi continues to have health issues which we now to go to a specialist in Kansas City this week to see, then the drama with our air conditioner on our vacation which led to a 15.5 hour marathon driving session with 3 adults and 2 kids, then I found out today I have a bad viral eye infection which I'll tell you more about in a bit, finally today when I was leaving the eye doctor the car wouldn't start! All it needed was a new battery but still one thing after another and believe me the $$'s are starting to add up for all of this. We now have the next three days with nothing to do except for church on Sunday so we are locking ourselves up at home and going to try to avoid any more trouble!

About the eye infection, I was/am an abuser of my contacts. Even after going to the doctor every year and getting the same lecture after lecture about how I would pay for this some day I continued to ignore the eye doctor. She would say over and over that if you abuse your eyes they will abuse you. I abused my eyes, the contacts I wore were for 30 day usage, meaning I could wear them 30 days straight without taking them out and after 30 days I put in a new pair. I would literally go months without taking them out. Last year I only got a sixth month refill and I still have some left. Today though was the day of reckoning for my eyes and I hope they don't win. About three weeks ago I started noticing redness in one eye. Whenever I would take out my contact and put in eye drops the redness went away and everything appeared ok. Then about two weeks ago I started getting red in both eyes and the redness would go from eye to eye and sometimes both and sometimes it would go away. It got much worse while we were on vacation so I decided I would go in for my annual exam and also get the infection taken care of. I woke up this morning at 8:40, after getting home around 1:30, and immediately called. They said if I was there by 9:20 they would see me. I made it and got in quickly. Got my regular exam taken care of then I got the low down on my infection. I have a viral infection of the cornea. The cornea is the clear dome over the colored part of your eye. There are not antibodies in the cornea so if you get an infection there it's very hard to fight on your own. On top of that when you have a viral infection medicine can't treat it so it makes it even worse. The antibodies on the white part of the eye move over to the cornea on a temporary basis to fight the infection. When you wear contacts those antibodies get very angry and swell up on the white part trying to get to the cornea. That's what causes the redness and also what casues the redness to go away when a person takes out their contacts. If you push this infection long enough the antibodies get all messed up, forget where they live, and you can also cause permanent scarring on the cornea, which basically means you have permanet scratches on your line of vision. She does not think that mine is to that point but mine is bad enough that we have to be extremely careful. She forbid me to put contacts in for 2 weeks and suggested longer. If you put the contact on and the infection isn't gone you have to go back to square one, which would mean another extended time without contacts. I am going to schedule follow ups every two weeks until I am cleared to put in contacts again. It's possible, not highly likely, but not highly unlikely either, that I have become a carrier of the virus which would make wearing contacts again very hard. I pray that this is not the case and that in two weeks I'm cleared up. Until then I'll be wearing glasses. Warning to all of you contact wearers though, I thought I was too tough to have any problems with not following the doctors orders but I was wrong. Take care of your eyes.

Sold and Heading Home Soon

The Aviator is sold! To the dear friend who helped with it and reads this blog, thank you. Words can't say how much I appreciate your help. There are few people in life who you know will help you out whenever they can. This person is one of those people. This person would be willing to help no question asked and I would return the favor with no questions asked. The Aviator experience has taught us a lot of lessons, the primary one realizing how much bondage there is in debt. We are ready to stop being in debt and God willing we will never have a car payment again. We are almost done paying off the red SUV and after that we are going to try and pay cash for all purchases. At my conference today we had a very interesting speaker on the state of the economy. The basic point from all speakers was times are changing and spending patterns are going to have to change. My generation is used to what we want when we want it. If our parents have it we think we should have it, no matter how long or hard our parents worked. I look back at all my ridiculous purchases with a pay later attitude and realize how foolish those purchases were. Why I'm still paying for those choices, literally, I hope that going forward I do a better job of where I spend my money. Easy credit isn't going to be available. The speaker even said that going forward people are going to, gasp, have to have 20% for a down payment, or a least a reasonable amount. Having 20% for a down payment is unheard of for my generation.

We head back from Destin tomorrow. The air conditioning in our van has really caused problems. It's altered our plans every day and unfortunately they are not able to fix it. Supposedly the part is in Minn. and will take several days to get here. I do NOT understand that. Have they ever heard of Fed Ex? I offered, well I offered on behalf of my company, to basically pay any amount to get it here by tomorrow morning but they refused. To be honest driving home 13 hours with no air conditioning in the dead of summer sucks. There's no other word for it. Part of me wants to blame someone or find someone who did something wrong, but it's truly a freak accident. They say a rock flew up and put three little holes in the condensor. Even though I don't understand that, two independent mechanics have said that is what happened so I believe them. But, as I said to someone earlier today if all I have to worry about is driving 13 hours with no a/c I've got it pretty good. There are much bigger fish to worry about. We are leaving here around 10:00 tomorrow morning and are going to TRY and drive straight through with a few quick stops built in. Hopefully we'll be home around midnight or one and can sleep in our nice a/c at our house. Pray for us that we make it!

Destination: Destin

We made it to Destin today around 5:00. Not without some bumps along the way though. Well just one actually. We decided to drive since the whole family was going and at the end my sister decided to join us so it worked out best that we decided to drive. My work provides company vehicles for driving and they are usually nice. We had a 2009 Chrysler Town and Country that is very well equipped. All was fine until about 30 minutes the other side of Jonesboro, Arkansas when we noticed the air conditioning wasn't working. It soon started blowing hot air! We made it to Jackson, Mississippi that night, roughly 4 and 1/2 hours in the heat. It was hot! We got to Jackson around midnight because we spent some time trying to see what was wrong, I even changed the fuse just hoping it was that. We left Jackson around 10:00 this morning. Passed through Hattiesburg (sp?) around 11:30 and thought we would see if a car repair place, specifically Firestone, was open. I needed to know Firestone's hours earlier this week so I knew they were open on Sunday. We found one and they were nice enough to check it out and found out we had a hole in the condensor. They could fix it, but, after market parts aren't available yet on this model and you can only get that through a Chrysler dealership, which isn't open on Sundays so we were without airconditioning. Three and a 1/2 hours later we made it to Destin. To be honest it was nasty. Driving 30 minutes or an hour without air conditioning isn't the end of the world, a 13 hour trip though is a completely different thing. The thermometer read 104 degrees much of today. We were dripping wet and the seats have sweat stains and all in all it was just nasty. We really hope to get it fixed before we head back. To be simple about it heading back sounds absolutely miserable if we can't fix it. Pray we fix it!

The kids did great though considering the cirumstances. With air the trip would have actually been just fine. Oh well we are looking forward to having a great vacation. We have an ocean side room with a separate kids room so it is nice. I'll try and blog and finish out the month strong...

What have we been up to...

First off we had a great weekend. It was the first time that I can remember in a long time that Sarah wasn't working or we didn't have anything planned. It was truly a day for us to do what we wanted. We kept busy running errands and doing stuff around the house. Saturday evening we had some new friends come over. It was a couple that we know them from our work places. I work with the husband and the couple both get their hair done at Sarah's salon. They came over and we had dinner and talked until 12:30 that night. It was hard to get up to go to church. We also found out that three doors down is a co worker who I work with and am actually working on a big project with. What a small world.

Sunday was a great Fathers day. We went to church, ate Mexican (my choice) and then took a four hour nap. The kids slept most of that and Sarah let me sleep until it was time to go to church. It was wonderful. That was our weekend.

This week is crazy busy as next week I am going to a work conference in Destin Florida and the family is tagging along. We are leaving Saturday early afternoon and hopefully get eight to nine hours in that day. Then heading to Destin Sunday morning and staying in Destin until Wednesday afternoon. We'll drive back Wednesday/Thursday unless we just see something we have to do and then we'll take an extra day. We are looking forward to some relaxing time at the beach.

In the mean time though it's hard to get away from work and the house for a week. I've got a ton going on at work which makes it even harder to get away and we have a lot going on at church that we need to get ironed out this week before we head out. The weekend we get back is our last service in our current santuary at church and the next weekend we move into our new sanctuary. Exciting times!

My H20 only challenge is slowly making progress. I'm down to no more than 2 diet cokes a day which is a huge improvement. I've also picked up my exercising. In the last 24 hours I have played full court basketball for 1.5 hours, ran three miles, and played a softball game. Not bad if I don't say so myself. Tonight was my debut as short stop and probably my last time as well. I was 3-3 tonight with 2 RBI's, made a couple of plays in the field, no errors in the field, and all in all played a decent game in a 7-3 win.

Later!

Annoying People At Wal Mart

Anyone have those people at Wal Mart that just really annoy them? Like the people who use the electric shopping carts for "health" reasons and they act like they own the aisles? Part of me wants to ram my cart into their electric cart and the other part wants to scream at them that if they would walk the grocery store they wouldn't have these "health" issues and wouldn't need a cart. Or the people that insist on using the express lane when they clearly are above and beyond the limit? I'm not extremely picky here, if you have 15 of one item and 15 of another you can clearly use the express but you can't have 50 different items. If I'm in an extremely foul mood at that time I like to pretend I'm counting them as they are being rang up. It's quite funny when they "catch" me doing that. They try and apologize and tell me how much of a hurry they are in. I like to reply back I've got all day and that it was by pure accident I found myself in the express lane. The lady today at Wal Mart was the worse incident I have ever scene though. The lady had a HUGE cart which was almost completely rang up when I got to to the register. She did have to repeatedly ask the lady to give her her total, never mind the fact that it keeps track of it on that handy credit card payment device. She kept saying she was glad she wasn't going over her limit. Then she gets to to the end and pays for her groceries with food stamps. I have no problem up to this point. Then she finds out that $1.47 of her total is not covered by food stamps. She turns to her oldest daughter, which was holding the cart full of bags and says can you go to the car and get the wallet. One might assume the daughter would hustle and get out the door fast and just leave the cart, but NO she takes the cart full of bags, lolly gags her way out the door, then loads the bags in the car, then comes back in with her moms wallet like 10 minutes later. Part of me wanted to just give the lady the $1.47 and had she been nicer I might have. If she had even remotely apologized to me for putting me out 10 minutes I would have said oh do you just owe $1.47, let me cover that. But that lady refused to apologize to anyone, she must have all the time in the world. Oh well, my anger is over, almost...

Eat This, Not That

Just a note, I'm not doing good at all on my post a day in June but I am trying and it is better than once a month as I was doing. Thanks to everyone for their emails on my quest to drink only H20. Your encouragement and helpful hints were all appreciated. Part of me fears that I took on too big of a challenge, but I'm going to give it a good attempt. If nothing else I will be off of all diet sodas by August 1st. Those are really what is dragging me down right now.


I ordered a couple of interesting books off of Amazon and they came in today. They are part of the Eat This, Not That plan designed by Mens Health. It basically looks at every meal you eat, every resturant you would visit, and every type of menu you would face and advises you on what types of food to eat. As with every new diet fad there are great testimonies of people out there who have lost a lot of weight and look great and feel great. I am curious though if there is something there. This plan doesn't call for you to go out and buy a bunch of food or diet pills or anything it just gives you guidance on which foods make better choices than others. It's quite amazing. One example is at McDonalds they actually reccomend a quarter pounder over the deluxe grilled chicken sandwich. That sounds crazy at first but if you look at the nutritional facts it pans out. To clarify it does NOT encourage you to eat quarter pounds but just says if you must eat at McDonalds what the better choice is. By the way the average Subway customer consumes 350 MORE calories than a customer to McDonalds. The book calls this the Healthy Halo syndrome. People think they are eating healthier so they eat more. Interesting concept.

I'm not committing to this plan at this point in time but we are looking through the books. I say this as we at Dominos pizza tonight. Malachi ate FIVE pieces of thin crust pizza. More than Leah! I will start the H20 only plan after vacation which is the week after next. Maybe if it still sounds like a good idea we'll start the Eat This, Not That plan. Anyone tried it yet? You can visit the website here.

H2O Only

I've decided to try and wean myself from all beverages except water. I know this will be EXTRMELY hard. I've been of the mindset the past three years after reading the South Beach diet book that you should try and eat foods as close to the original state as possible. Switch to whole grain breads, fruits in their original states with skin when applicable, no processed sugars, etc. In looking at beverages I guess water is the only thing close to the original state. I have no idea how I will go about doing this but I'm giving myself until August 1st to complete this task. I have huge headaches if I don't have aspertame in the mornings. I can drink either Diet Coke or Crystal Light and be fine either way. It's not so much caffine as it is the aspertame I've decided. Anyway I have no idea how successful I will be but hold me accountable. I will have some major headaches to overcome the next few weeks...