Enough whining...

So after my day of lamenting the house falling apart, I've decided to look on the brighter side of life. That being the fact that there is now less than a month until Husker Football kicks off! August 30th I'll be at my house with friends, wearing my #38 Dan Alexander jersey watching the Huskers play some football.

I love this time of year...I spent like 15 minutes today watching videos on YouTube of old Tunnel Walk videos and Husker highlights...clearly none of the highlights were from the past couple years with the Callahan disaster...but I digress.

Here's a sweet video I found of the Tunnel Walk from the Red/White Game this past spring. It's not the actual video feed, it's a guy down on the field with a video camera, so you can see the whole atmosphere...crazy stuff...we were in Europe at the time, otherwise we would've been some of the crazy people that actually sold out a Spring Game with 81,000 people...ahhh, football in Nebraska.

The Joys of Home Ownership

So since we've been back from our glorious European Vacation, our house has decided that it hates us and stuff keeps breaking...I thought I'd vent a little bit and run down the list of stuff we've had to fix or are in the process of getting fixed...our fridge broke down yet again and we decided we're tired of spending money on our crappy fridge, so we bought a new one (hooray for clearance sales!!)...with all the massive storms we got in the spring, we discovered that when they installed the deck on our house, they did it wrong and it was allowing water to seep in behind the siding and it started leaking into the basement...we got the seeping problem fixed, but now we have to probably replace some trim work in the basement because it got water damage and is molding a little bit...also due to the storms and the seeping, we got water damage on some of the siding on our house and replaced some of it with the same type of siding, and are getting some stonework put on to replace some of the other siding...the first massive storm of the year gave us roof damage and we had to replace the roof; but at least in the process of doing that, we got a couple sweet-o skylights for the upstairs bathrooms and better ventilation in the attic...our new bit of excitement was that a couple days ago we discovered that the floor drain in the utility room was stopped up, and the utility room was flooding, which then sent water into the basement, messing up the carpet and trimwork on the baseboard, so now we have to replace that...

The positive of all the rain is that we've hardly had to run the sprinklers this year, so that's nice...also, at least we're not in California where they're having all the wildfires. Speaking of which, pray for Joyful's parents. Yosemite is having some pretty heavy duty wild fires and the town where they live is on fire. They have evacuated to Ed's house in San Jose, so they're safe, but their house is in the zone that the fires are currently, so their house is in pretty good danger of being burned up.

So I guess what I'm saying is that while it sucks that we've having problems with water damage on our house this year, at least we have a house to have problems with...

So close I can taste it...

Only 35 more days until the glorious start of Nebraska Football!!! They have announced that the first 3 games will all be on pay per view, which is annoying that they're not just on t.v., but at least I can watch them. I think we're gonna pay for at least one of them and invite people over with the reasoning that the $30 we spend on getting the game is just as much or less than we'd spend going to BW3's to watch the game, eat some wings and have a couple drinks. So for those of you who live in Lincoln...the game against Western Michigan is August 30th with a 6pm start. We'll pay to get the game, you bring over food and the beverage of your choice (but enough for us, too) Let us know if you're coming...Go Big Red!!!!

Christmas in July

Sunny day, high of 95 degrees, what do Joyful and I do?  Wrap Christmas presents.  That's right, Christmas presents.  Joyful's parents are coming out here in September and we're sending her family's presents back to California with them, so we got them pretty much all wrapped.  The beauty of us going to Disney to do the marathon in January and Europe in April is that we're pretty much done with Christmas shopping and it's still July!  I was reminded, though, of how little I enjoy wrapping presents.  It was fun to see what we've gotten people and think about how much they'll (hopefully) enjoy getting what we got them, but I get so frustrated wrapping the things...inevitably I cut the paper too small and end up with a gap or some other frustrating thing.

 

On a happy note, I FINALLY have some really promising leads for my business, See Spot Run.  It was becoming extremely discouraging that I wasn't really getting any response from anybody who wanted to pay me money to run their dogs.  People would always tell me what a neat idea it was and they know people who it'd be great for, but I couldn't get anyone to actually contact me wanting to set something up.  This past week I got 2, count 'em 2, really positive leads.  Please be praying for me the next couple weeks about this.  I'm meeting with one person this week and a family next week.  I would love to have some clients who aren't already my friends (though I'm extremely grateful for the Kirks and Donna).

 

We're having some fix it work done to the house today...our front porch was starting to sink so we're getting that fixed and we've got water seeping into our basement because when they built our deck they apparently did it wrong, so water can get trapped and work its way through the walls...sucky.  It's good to know people, though...I called Steve Kolb with Kolb Remodeling who used to live across the street for us and now he's turned into a full blown general contractor so he can help us with all our fixing needs...hooray for that.

 

So this got longer than I thought it would be...

16.5 Pounds of Fun

So we are FINALLY getting the last of our Europe pictures tomorrow. It took Winkflash just over a month to get our pictures printed and sent out...granted, there are over 2,000 pictures but over a month seemed a little excessive. On the UPS tracking site it says that our box of pictures weighs 16.5 pounds...crazy. That is so many pictures! It'll be fun to flip through them. I love our digital camera and it's cool to watch the pictures on the TV, but it's so much neater to me to flip through actual, physical pictures.

By the by...if anyone's looking for a house and wants to live next door to us, there's a house for sale. It's been for sale for a while, probably because they're asking for more money than people are going to pay with the housing market such as it is, but it seems like a nice house.

Also, random side note...my sister and her husband live in Owasso, Oklahoma, which apparently is also where Garth Brooks lives, and he sat behind them at Red Robin the other night...how crazy is that? The coolest celebrity encounter I have is either having Tom Osborne come in to Macaroni Grill a few times when I worked there or the time Larry the Cable Guy came in...he's got a Sky Box for Husker games, so come football season he's in town a lot...he was super funny and he tipped his server $150, so hooray for him. What's your coolest celebrity encounter?

Boy I tell you what...

The things they can do with computers these days...I found this cool site by way of the KC Marathon's site called RealBuzz...It's a site about "Healthy Active Living".  They've got a bunch of cool stuff on there for runners...training advice, nutrition, apparel, all that kind of stuff.  They've also got this thing called "Map Your Passion".  It uses Google Earth and it makes it so you can map out your running routes and see other people's running routes in your area.  That way you can see exactly how far you're going...pretty neat stuff.  If one were high tech enough to have a GPS device or have it on their phone, you could upload your routes to your device and have it with you.

 

Speaking of running...today for the first time I did "hill repeats"...if you don't know what those are, it's code for "torture".  Basically it's running up a steep hill over and over again...but the KC Marathon is a hilly one, and doing HRs is good for that and for building leg muscles...plus my training plan called for them today, so I had to.  I did wuss out though...I was supposed to do a 50 min. workout and I only did like a 35 min one...but hey, it's better than nothing I suppose...

 

 

6 Years Ago Today...

On July 6th, 2002, a balmy, rainy day in Lincoln, Nebraska, I became the luckiest guy alive because I got to marry my best friend.  How the time flies.  It's been a wonderul 6 years, we've shared laughter and tears, we've travelled the world together.  God has blessed us so much in 6 short years...I can't wait to see what He's got in store for the rest of our lives.

109 Days and Counting

I'm all signed up to do the KC Marathon in October! My hope was to do Chicago this year, but I procrastinated in my signing up and it's full already (which is INSANE since it's also in October and it's limit was like 40,000 people). But as it turns out, this is probably a better choice. It's a cheaper marathon to enter, the hotel is waaaay cheaper...to stay at a downtown Chicago hotel the weekend of the marathon would've been like $250 a night...we're staying at the Crown Center Hyatt (which is the host hotel) for $99 a night, plus what with gas prices and all, a 3 hour drive is better than an 8 hour drive. Plus Kansas City's a nice city to visit. Joyful and I went there for our 1st anniversary and it was a lot of fun.

The race is on Saturday the 18th, so we're gonna check-in on Friday and out on Sunday and make a little weekend of it.

I'm doing this one by myself...Joyful's still working on putting the miles back on after her ankle problems. So if anyone knows of anything good to do in KC at 7 in the morning, let us know. The race starts at Washington Square Park right next to the Crown Center (hence staying at the Hyatt), so I suppose she could roam the park some assuming it's nice weather that day. Of course, she could always go back to the hotel and sleep for a couple more hours while I run.

I'm excited about training for another marathon...I like having the goal to look forward to, I like running the big miles and having time with just me and God to chit chat. The sense of accomplishment is so big...I remember crossing the finish line at Disney World and almost crying.

Let the fun begin...