A-Day in Auburn

Meredith and I decided to go to A-Day in Auburn today because the reality of going to many/any games with baby in tow are highly unlikely! We left B'ham at about 8:30 am to make sure we made it to our friends tailgate on time. When we arrived at the top level of the parking deck by the stadium, no tailgate was to be found! So I called Steve, and he admitted that they were running behind, and that he "dropped the ball". Meredith agreed with him wholeheartedly, and so did I. Boiling peanuts before a game is fine, as long as you start HOURS before the game, not MINUTES. After a brief tailgate with no food, we went into the game and had lots of fun. Every time I go back to Auburn I am reminded why, of all the places I have been, it is still near the top. In the car Meredith and I talked about how we missed it, but it looks very different in the 4+ years we have been gone! The A-Day game left me even more excited about our team this year, and I think the players are more excited than ever. You could just see it on the field; everybody is getting a chance to show what they can do. We drove back after the game :( and stayed home and watched some good movies. I Am Legend was good and scary; Into the Wild was phenomenal! I highly recommend that movie to anyone who has ever had the desire to set out on a journey and not know where you will end up. Got to get dressed for church now!

I wish we could have her parents declared "unfit"

For the past few days, we were blessed to babysit our dogneice, Chloe. She is such a sweet, pretty dog! She is very well behaved, and she just LOVES me and Hays. Mostly Hays, but she likes me too. She is very needy, and doesn't have any idea that she is as big as she is. She has to follow you everywhere and sit in your lap most of the time. Every time we would walk out of the door and come back inside, she would give us hugs, where she literally puts her front legs around your waist and hugs you!

Alan and Sandi came back through town yesterday and spent the night. They were taking her home today, and I am going to miss her! Here are some very sweet pictures:

She sure does love her uncle Hays! I have a sneaking suspicion that he likes her too, just a little.

Extreme Makeover: Home Edition

My mom is in the process of remodeling her bathrooms, and she is completing them one at a time. Here are some pictures of the first one, all finished. I picked out the towels and curtains (shower and window). I wish I had a "before" pic to show you, but all you have to do is picture what it would look like if someone threw up Pepto Bismol and then called it "pink tile." This is much better, and it is so pretty!




Here is a funny fact! I didn't exactly know that you had to turn the water knob in a different direction to make the water warmer, so I had a very lukewarm shower on Easter Sunday! These are facts you should tell those you love, if it so happens that your shower may be confusing.

Shower the People

Let me explain...yesterday morning when I was in the laying in bed not wanting it to be Monday, I hear Meredith struggling with the shower in the bathroom. I pop out of bed completely expecting to be able to solve the problem with a little elbow grease and some manliness, and seconds later walked away defeated and concerned. When we turned on the bath faucet and tried to turn the knob for the shower to start, all we heard was a rattling/vibrating/sputtering/knocking noise from inside the wall, and no water was coming out of the showerhead. All I could picture at that moment was a leaky pipe expelling massive amounts of water into the wall's interior (made worse by not knowing what the heck was wrong). So Meredith agreed to take a bath instead of a shower. This posed a major problem for me. Last time I took a real "bath" I don't think I was old enough to know my name. I decided instead to use the guest room shower, which turned out to have the same exact problem! I was almost to the point of walking out back and showering with the gardenhose, but there was enough of a trickle from the showerhead to clean up. Going back to the bath thing, if any man tells you he just took a "bath", you should immediately be suspicious of his character. Men were not created to desire a "bath". With that being said, it turns out the problem with the showers was that there was air in the water lines, so I turned off the mater main, ran all the faucets/showers in the house until they ran dry (also purging said air in pipes), turned the water back on, and magically, the showers returned to their previous mediocrity of water pressure. Better than a "bath", I guess! In my careful planning of this process, I turned off the water heater in the outside storage closet to alleviate the risk of burning it up if it were to run dry during the experiment. Well, guess what I didn't do yesterday? TURN IT BACK ON! So this morning Meredith had what I can only presume as a lukewarm shower at best. After she showered, I proceeded to turn it back on and let it warm up. Folks, you have never felt a shower this cold! I stuck my bare leg in expecting a hot blast of shower water and was welcomed with arctic sub-zero water. It's kind of like ordering a Coke from a fast-food place, taking that first sip and expecting Coke, and getting unsweet tea. An instantaneous shock followed by immediate disappointment. I got dressed, ran outside into the 33 degree temp, and flipped to breaker back to "ON", and enjoyed my ice shower. Oh yeah, shampoo also doesn't wash out very well at that temperature. I can only pray that my next few mornings aren't so eventful

Moral of the Story: Don't take plumbing or hot water heaters for granted, you will miss them when you are without!

Stuff White People Like

I came across this website http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com somehow and it is HILARIOUS! It is a list of stuff that white people like, and an explanation of why they like it. I guarantee that it will remind you of yourself or someone you know!
I did not watch much of the Bachelor last night, but I have it DVR'd and I will watch it tonight somehow, between American Idol and Dancing With the Stars. Don't tell me what happened!
I am hoping that Hays will post about the incident with our water pipes yesterday. The scary noises alone are worth blogging about!

How could I forget?

I forgot to mention in my previous post that we stayed at the same hotel as the 34th Annual Atheists Convention, so there were some interesting characters there. I didn't speak with any of them, but some of them were quite weird, and some of them were completely normal looking. Needless to say, mixing a bunch of conservative Southern men with a bunch of atheists was a sight to see.

Minneapolis and Back!

I just took my first trip to Minneapolis, and I have to say it seems like a pretty cool place, that is if you aren't looking at it through a conference window! My company had a 3-day training session up there, so I began my journey at 4:15 on Wednesday morning when my alarm went off. My morning didn't exactly get started off right, because when I was standing in line to put all my stuff in the grey boxes (you know, to run it through the x-ray), there was an opening at the front of the table where I could load up my stuff, so I proceeded to do so. In my tired state, I guess I was unaware that I "cut in line", because I sensed eyes burning into the back of my head. I turned around and saw one of the most hideous old men in this galaxy scowling at me, and proceeded to smile and say "How are you?". He stared at me (scowl continued) and said with every bone of seriousness in his body, "I was fine until you jumped in front of me!". For some reason, my triggered response was "WELL, EXCUUUUSSE ME!!". Then I moved my stuff and let him by, ignoring the other people I broke in front of.

Moral of the Story: At 5:15 in the morning, there is no such thing as "airport etiquette.

I had a layover in Memphis, and because of the storm system that was passing through that morning, I sat quietly in my airplane seat on both flights choking back the urge to puke due to the turbulence. Turbulence + mild claustrophobia= unpleasant trip. When we arrived in Minneapolis, needless to say, I was relieved. I will spare the boring details of the conference, but we did take a stretch limo to the Mall of America, which was slightly less grandiose than I expected. It is really just a big mall with a small amusement park in the atrium. I think I covered every square foot of the mall, and I noticed quite a few stores that had 3 to 4 locations IN THE SAME MALL. There were 2 GameStop stores and 4 Lids stores (hat store). I thought that was a nice tribute to our lazy society. We ate at Rainforest Cafe, which was fun if you enjoy eating with fake gorillas staring at you. The only other 2 notable events were as follows: at the dinner Thursday night, we were treated to some "surprise entertainment", which turned out to be a Hawaiian, ex-NFL defensive tackle named Ezra something singing karaoke for about 30 minutes. This quite possibly may have been one of the more bizarre experiences of my existence. Initially, I was thinking, "oh, this guy must be a really good singer!". Boy, was I wrong. His opener was Alicia Keys' "No One", and I have to say that "No One" else, especially male, should ever be allowed to sing that song. He then sang some Carpenters song and James Blunt's "You're Beautiful". Soon after that I think I blacked out and began bleeding out of my ears. Fortunately, the entertainment didn't last long. After the performance, someone told me that they thought he was the player who came out of the closet on 60 Minutes, and I can't say I was surprised by that information. The final highlight was the 4-6 inches of snow we got on Friday. Seeing lots of fresh snow in a big city is really beautiful as long as you can return home to a snowless environment when you please. To summarize, I recommend a weekend trip to Minneapolis when no conferences are involved and you have time to explore. I would also recommend going when it snows, because there doesn't appear to be a reason to be there in the summer!