Joy's Wedding

I was able to put up some of the photos from Joy's Wedding on 12/7/08.
Here is the link to that post:

Christmas Day at Joy and CJ's

We had a really nice time at Joy and CJ's new home. They prepared a huge meal, we got lots of good presents, I got to watch basketball with CJ, and we got to spend time with family. CJ's son Charlie came down from Chino to eat dinner with us.

And yes. I did get a Star Trek Pez dispenser set :)

Oh, and we made it in just over 9 hours to Redding. We're here with my family now. Jenetta is educating my family on the joys of getting free stuff from CVS.

Merry Christmas to our friends and family!

We are spending Christmas day with Joy and CJ and Amie and CJ's son Charlie. We are going over there in a bit. Tomorrow morning, we drive up to Redding to spend the holiday with our family up there. Our wish is that all of you have meaningful and wonderful times with friends and family this year!

Magazine Photo Shoot

Jenetta was interviewed for an article in Redbook magazine. The focus of the article is how families are dealing with the recession. They were interested in our decision to stop spending on our house unless we had cash in hand as well as Jenetta's strategy of starting a website to help people save money and live more frugally. The photo shoot that happened yesterday was centered mainly on the house idea. The photographers, Dave and Dave, loaded in a lot of my tools and we pulled out the carpet scraps to make it look even more unfinished.

The article runs in the March edition.

It was a fun but tiring experience. It is hard to think about your facial expressions and body positions for over four hours. Mostly, I wanted to fall asleep on the couch and watch football.

Another bonus was that the original hair and makeup person couldn't make it, so Jenetta got to put in a word for her friend Suzette Kerr. Redbook hired her to groom us :)

Here are some cell phone photos from yesterday. If they send us the real ones, I'll post those later (obviously, they look a lot better than these!)

Christmas Party

We had an awesome Christmas party with our home group last night.

We did our annual Christmas sing-along. Everyone had a instrument.
What a beautiful racket! :)

The gift exchange was completely silly.
I haven't laughed that hard in a really long time.

We are truly blessed!

Latest job update

My supervisor just informed me that the current plan is to continue my employment here until the end of March. That may change at some point, but it is what they are hoping to do for me. Since not a lot of hiring happens in the end of December, that is encouraging. It gives me more time to look.

Skating my cares away...

Last night, we were invited by Cris and Alana to go skating down at Horton Plaza with some of their friends. It was chilly and there was some drizzle, so it seemed like a good afternoon to do winter-y things. It was actually kind of therapeutic for me.

On Friday, before I left work, I was informed by my supervisor that the people in Tokyo that we work for will probably not keep us for the length of our contracts. When pressed for further details, we were only told to start looking for something else. To be fair, my supervisor said he would be very happy to recommend me highly for any position at Sony or at another company. But basically, there is this major uncertainty over our heads. I could go into work tomorrow and be told that it will be my last day. Or I could work for several more months. We just don't know.

Then on Saturday morning, we went to the second of our three 6-hr classes on attachment parenting. These classes are really awesome, and the techniques and skills we are learning will be very useful if the adoption thing ever happens for us. But it is tough to go through for a number of reasons.

So it was good for us to get away and just have a good time. Jenetta tried her best, but she didn't really enjoy the skating. But I had a lot of fun. I remember not being a very good skater as a kid. I could never get the laces tight enough to prevent floppy ankles. These skates were basically like ski boots with a blade on the bottom. They held my ankles firmly, and I really enjoyed myself.


Being worried and upset won't help me in any way to keep my job for one second longer. I have to keep telling myself that. Anyway. Here is some video from the ice rink.

This one is probably the best. Especially the very end! :)

Good news

We had a pipe leak under the concrete slab on the older part of the house. We've been dealing with it since before Thanksgiving. Basically, we would only turn on the water to the house when we needed it. This process was annoying, but not too terrible. (It was chilly going outside after a shower to turn it back off!!!) Well, I forgot to turn the water off on Saturday when we went to our adoption class. That evening, when we returned, we did some laundry and ran the dishwasher. It had been on all day by this point. The flower beds by our front door started to flood that night. This was also the time we were working to get the rest of the wedding decorations finished, so it was probably the low point for us emotionally. I was tired and cranky, and I felt like our house was going to float away or something.

We had gotten two bids for two different approaches to the repair. Both were in the $5000-$7000 range. We were able to get a ballpark number down to around $4000 if all the cleanup work was done by me. (Drywall repair, replacing the wall mirror, etc.) It might as well have been $4 million because we just don't have anything extra right now.

Here's where the good news part comes in. We met someone at Joy's wedding who had dealt with the same problem a few weeks ago. She highly recommended her plumber Tony. So we called him and he came out yesterday morning. By the time I got home, the repair had been completed! He used a stethoscope and found the exact point of the leak and was able to diagnose that the only leak was to the guest bathroom. He ran new pipes in the attic for that bathroom only. His opinion is that this is all that is necessary. The bill was $700 - still a lot, but we can probably manage that. So this was very encouraging for us.

Another item of good news is that Jenetta and I have been chosen to be one of the three families featured in a story in Redbook magazine. The article is about how different people are handling the economic downturn. There will be photos of us and our interview in the magazine. The people at the magazine thought that Jenetta would connect with their readers. We will have more info on this as it comes together, but this is a pretty neat opportunity for us.

And one more "good news" thing. Well, not really good news, but enjoying simple things...
I put the lights on the front of our house last night. They make me happy.

Joy's wedding

Joy is now Mrs. Swan! Joy and CJ were married yesterday afternoon in a lovely back yard in San Marcos with their friends and family.

Our friend David photographed the wedding, and when we get the pictures processed, we will put a few up on the blog.

We haven't seen Joy that happy for a really long time. It was very special.

Christmas Tree

Jenetta and I got the decorations down from the attic and set up the tree. We listened to all 5 Sufjan Stevens Christmas albums as we were decorating. What an evening!

Saying Goodbye to Arizona

We had a nice trip over Thanksgiving. We went to Phoenix to visit Jenetta's Dad and his family there. A nice plus on this trip was that we were able to spend time re-connecting with friends from Peoria H.S. Some of these people I hadn't seen for ten-fifteen years or more. We had a really great time and we hope very much to be able to rekindle these friendships.

I should have taken photographs of all of them to show you, but I was so much into the visiting, I just didn't think about about it. Hopefully we will see them all again soon.

One fun highlight - Jenetta's dad bought tickets to this show in Scottsdale. It was basically an improved comedy show centered around a nun and her class of students. Thanks to some pointing of fingers, Pat and I got volunteered to go on stage for the nativity. I was one of the wise men, and he was Joseph. Everyone had a good laugh at our expense :)

So now we head back home to reality and work and dealing with the water pipe leak under our guest bathroom... It was very nice to have a break from all that!

I did it!!!

I completed my first 10 mile race this morning. I had never run this far before. Seriously - the farthest I've ever run was 7 miles. I was worried I wouldn't even be able to compete because I twisted my ankle two weeks ago and it is still very sore. But it held up. I experienced some intense pain around mile 7, but I was able to get through it.

The weather was perfect. The sun came out for the start and it was sunny for the first two miles. Then it was overcast until the finish. For those of you that know the area, it started at the Peoria sports complex. We ran south down 83rd Ave and ran along Skunk Creek to just past 59th Ave. Then we doubled back and finished on the other side of the ballfield. There were more hills than I anticipated because of the path that runs along that floodplain. It goes up and down the riverbanks several times.

Basically, my goal was to just finish without stopping to walk. I was able to do that and even pick up the pace a bit for the last mile. I met some nice people before and after the race. I'm glad I did it. It was a lot of fun. Now I plan to eat. A lot...

An appropriate number for me in Peoria, I think...

It was at the sports complex. The Padres do their spring training here. It's a great place to host a race. It has plenty of restrooms and places to spread out.

Me after running 10 miles. Still smiling!

Friendsgiving

We had a friend-filled fun weekend! On Saturday, we went to Old Poway Park to attend a wedding reception for Andrew and Amy. It was a beautiful afternoon and it was great to hang out with everyone.

Then that evening, we attended "Friends-giving" - an early Thanksgiving meal hosted by Nikki and Robbie. They put so much work into making it the real thing! I think we are discovering as a group that the all-or-nothing attitude doesn't work. We are just scheduling things and whoever can attend is who will be there. It will be great time with whoever can make it. So, about half our home group got together for a great feast. I probably should have taken out my camera phone earlier in the evening when the table was decorated and both Abby and Isaiah were playing together. But, here is a short video of us hanging out and talking after the meal. (Abby was in bed by this point). The video isn't really all that interesting (probably more interesting to David & Courtney), but it lets you know who was there.

Plus, David's look at 1:05 is priceless. I think he is going to beat me up. :) Scary, man!

On Sunday, we hosted a get-together at our place to watch the Chargers lose again. It was a lot of fun to hang out together with Robbie, David, Courtney and Isaiah, Jason and Latisha, Jason's friend, Geoff, and Blake. The game was exciting until the very end. Then it was just sad.

Sometimes we get bummed out because of the apparent failure of our business and the never-ending wait for adoption. One thing we can always be thankful for and so happy with is how blessed we are to have so many close friends. These are people who we know we could call with any concern and know without a doubt that they would respond with love and compassion. That's pretty cool.

How I feel at work

I feel like this a lot of time at work...

TV Photos

Here are two photos of the TV and the new entertainment center. Jenetta found a used dining buffet on craigslist that we modified to work as a entertainment cabinet. It is a bit taller than we would like, but it works nicely and it goes with our other stuff well.

I got the HDMI cable today so I hooked up the Blu-Ray player. WOW!

We ordered Wall-E on Blu-Ray, and I've heard that animated shows look incredible on Blu-Ray. I will take photos in the light this weekend so you can see the buffet more clearly.

So, now we need to clean up our old entertainment center, TV, and DVD player to sell on craigslist.