The Storm

It's the monsoon season here. That means that every so often a crazy huge storm dumps the equivalent of a small lake on us over a few hours time. There haven't been any storms at our house this season, and I was beginning to wonder if it was ever going to rain. Well, the storm hit on Monday last week.

It was about 2:45 and I was getting ready to leave to pick up the kids. They get out of school at 3:00 and walk over to our meeting spot by 3:10. I noticed that the sky suddenly got a lot darker and then, boom, the lake started falling. I got into the jeep and headed over a bit early so I arrived at 2:58. I could barely see. The roads were flooded and the wind was blowing like you see on TV when a hurricane hits. Some poor kids were trying to walk or bike home, but they were soaked and the wind was blowing them around.


I got to the parking lot and looked around for the kids. I wasn't really expecting to see them, because I thought that maybe the teachers would hold the kids inside for a few minutes to see if the storm would blow over.

Then I saw them. They came running from behind a building trying to make their way to the jeep through the storm. They made it to me, soaked through and through and climbed into the car. I really wish I would have had a camera, because they looked like they'd just climbed out of a pool with their clothes, backpacks, and instrument cases. It turns out that the teachers let all the kids out 10 minutes early, so the teachers could go help manage traffic. My kids were out huddling behind a building for 10 minutes in a huge thunderstorm. Hmmm. I find it interesting that the school didn't have a plan to deal with a rainstorm at the end of the day. This is a very likely occurrence, and they didn't even consider it. It makes me wonder if they have a plan for things like armed gunmen at the school, or fighting at recess ;)

When we got home, our neighbor's tree had blown over, fortunately into her yard, not mine.

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The Man Cold

I'm sick. I think it may be a man cold. I'm a poor little bunny!

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The latest project

I don't really like doing home improvement projects. I think that it's because I'm worried that I'll mess it up. But sometimes you've just got to do it.

Summer is coming to an end here in AZ, and it's going to start cooling off (yes it cools off here!). I'd like to be able to remove the hard-top from my jeep so I can enjoy the wonderful winter with the breeze running her fingers through my hair. The photo shows the desired result. To accomplish this, I ordered a winch/hoist system so I can get the hard-top off whenever I want.

The project started, as they usually do, with me thinking it will be easy.


The first step was to move all of the shelving and storage from one side of the garage to the other. Why can't they just have basements in AZ? Anyway, that took three hours last Saturday.

The rest of the project (in my mind) was supposed to go as follows: drill 4 or 5 holes and plug in the winch- done! Wrong. First I had to assemble the frame that holds the hardtop. It wasn't too hard, but it took some time, mostly because the instructions they mailed me were wrong.

Then I had to attach the anchor eye-bolts to the ceiling. Hoping that there was a nice strong 2x6 right in the spot where I wanted to screw it in, I peeked up into my attic space. No dice. Where I wanted to attach was between two joists, and of course the joists were the wrong direction. The instructions warned that if you pull on the lag bolt sideways (transverse to the direction of the joist) it could rip out through the side of the 2x4. Is that true? I dunno, but it sounds bad. I also didn't have a lot of room to change the lift location, my garage is pretty tight. It would have probably been OK to attach the hoist the way it was, but I figured better safe than sorry.

So I decided to put a cross member between the joints in the right location and attach to that. I bought a 2x4 and some joist hangars to attach between the joists. There was an access panel for the attic space in the garage, and I thought I could just crawl up in there and work. Then I tried it- no go, too small. So I had to cut a new access panel over in the work area. That ended up being really hard and messy. When I pulled out the piece of drywall, I discovered that it was two sheets thick, no wonder it was so hard to cut. I climbed up in there and nailed in the hangars and cross-member. If this seems wrong to any of you experienced builder-types, please let me know! Then I climbed down and drilled the holes for the lag-bolts, and screwed them in.

The next task was to attach the winch to the wall. It was simple, but the instructions were funny- they told me to 'get a strong friend to hold the winch while tightening the bolts.' Well- I don't need a strong friend! I only almost dropped the winch once!


After that it was pretty easy. I just had to attach the pulleys and run the cable through. Then I hooked the frame to the pulley.

The last steps were to back in the jeep, remove the bolts that hold the top to the jeep, attach the frame to the top, and hoist away! It works great! Here is the final result.

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Braces Suck!

Dad was wrong, it hurt a lot. Poor 11yo! Anyone have words of advice or encouragement for a sad boy who wants to die?

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It won't hurt very much

The 11yo is getting braces today. We were discussing the process at breakfast.

"Is it going to hurt, dad?", He asked.

"Not very much", I replied, "It's not pain free, but there are things in life that hurt a lot more."

The 9yo jumped in, "Like getting married?"
(9yolds don't think much of girls or marriage)

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The next chapter...

I received a job offer from Intel today. It will be doing simulation and process improvement work similar to what I did at Daifuku. It looks like a great job. I'll start sometime in September. Thanks to all of you who were concerned for us and prayed for us.

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The Faces of Terror

Here are a couple of shots from our February trip to Disneyland. They're a bit late, I admit, but they're still funny. Enjoy!



This one is funny because of the personalities. The 9yo was terrified of losing his glases, so he had to keep hold of them. The 11yo actually is scared, despite his fake-scared face. The 6yo was terrified, even though he only looks mildly concerned. This was one of his first "grown-up" rides.






This is the true gem. You can't deny the terror on everyone's face. This is clearly the scarier of the two rides.

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Who is that masked man?

So I'm trying out a new look.













I don't know why, but every few years I'm tempted to grow a beard. Usually it gets itchy right away and I give up. This year I've been growing it for 9 days, which is a record. One new thing this time is the vast amount of whiteness. More evidence that I'm not in my 20s any more.

I've been trying to avoid putting photographs of me on the blog, but I need your help. I'm not sure what to do- should the hair stay or should it go? I've put a poll over on the left. Let me know what you think.

I asked the sunbeams and the vote was 5 to 2 against the hair.

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First Day of School 2008

School starts early here in the heat.

The 11yo is starting 6th grade and he was SO nervous. All the teachers and different classrooms is all very intimidating. Despite the nerves, after the first day was all over he said that it was SO boring- the teachers just went over rules. They apparently have a lot of rules. None of his friends are in his classes- except one boy in band. More about band later.

The 9yo is in 4th grade and he claimed to not be nervous. He got the teacher that Connor had, so that's OK. The real tragedy is that none of his friends are in his class :(

The 6yo is in first 1st grade! He's so excited to stay at school all day and eat school lunch. It's fun when they like things that they'll hate later.

The first day went great and everyone came home happy.

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What is this?

There has been a lot of noise outside recently.

You know the noise your bike makes when you stick a playing card into the spokes? The sound around here is like thousands of children are biking around with cards in the spokes. I thought maybe it was crickets, but the sound was wrong. I was in the back yard the other day and noticed that I could distinguish a location of one of the sounds- it was in a big bush. So I noodled around until I found the culprit. Ugly, isn't he? I grabbed the camera and fearfully snuck my thumb up next to him. I kept imagining the bug leaping onto my thumb and biting, stinging, planting eggs or whatever ugly bugs do. However, he was harmless. There must be thousands of these around in the trees and bushes to make that much noise.

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