Last Minute Music

Tonight, we're going to head down to Pace, FL for a concert.  It's funny.  We were eating dinner last night at the church and talking with Joy and Hubble Sowards and Hubble was telling me we should go so I asked DeAnne and she said she was cool with it, so when we got home, I called and got us tickets and now we're going.

It's three Christian bands that all have pretty good songs out right now.  Leeland has a great song out right now called "Follow You".  Then there's The Afters, whose name I love and I'm pretty obsessed with their single, "Light Up The Sky".  Finaly, I think Sanctus Real are the headliners.  Their current single is called "Lead Me".  So it should be an awesome show.  The proceeds go to help fund WOW 90.9, the Christian station that we can pick up, so it's for a good cause too.

So that's the plan for tonight.  I would imagine that after tonight, we'll probably spend Friday night recovering and then we'll see what happens the rest of the weekend.  We haven't made any plans, but I think we're going to try and tackle trimming some bushes on Saturday morning.  

Sunday night is the annual Carolina Baptist Church Fall Festival.  If any of you who read my blog are in the area, come out and join us.  We're going to have games, music, door prizes, free food and a good time.  It starts at 4:30 and goes to 6:30.  

Have a good weekend.

--Paul

Struggling

I'm stretching for something to talk about this morning.  The weekend was good but it was fairly uneventful.  We went to the Pleasant Home game Friday night.  It was a good game and by winning, they made it to the playoffs.  Saturday, I cut the grass and then we spent the afternoon in Kinston.  Sunday was church.  In between services we went over to MeMaw's for a little while and visited with her.  So it was pretty straight forward and pretty uneventful.

One bit of excitement: We're going to be going to see Needtobreathe in Birmingham.  I ordered the tickets Friday.  I'm pretty pumped for it.  I love both their albums (The Outsiders and The Heat) and from what I've seen on the internet, they're supposed to be great live.  Garrett and Amy are going to go with us.  It should be an awesome show and a great time.

I don't really have anything else.  Emma's doing better and seems to be back to her normal self.  I don't know what got her sick but I pray it never happens again.  Speaking of prayer, pray for my mom and step-father.  They came home from vacation last week to find their house flooded from a broken refrigerator line.  All the flooring, cabinets, a foot of sheetrock and who knows what else has to be replaced.  They've been living out of a hotel room for over two weeks now counting their vacation and I know Mom's just ready to be home.

And I'm not going to talk about it, but I think I'd really rather be #2.

See you on Tuesday.

--Paul

One Sick Puppy

I came home yesterday to find that Emma had been sick all over the house.  Evidently, something's gotten hold of her stomach and it's doing a number on her.  We took her to the vet and he gave her a couple of shots and said she should be fine in a day or two.  I feel so bad for her.  You can tell she doesn't feel well and I think she's embarrassed about having an accident in the house.  I know how I hate having the stomach bug.  I'm sure it's not quite the same for dogs, but you can tell she's not happy about it.

So that was the big adventure yesterday.  It pretty much meant that I went non-stop from the time I got up yesterday morning until the time I went to bed.  By bed time, I was exhausted.

There was some excitement from Apple yesterday too.  They announced new versions of their iLife suite of Mac applications along with previewing some of the features from their next operating system release and they showed off a new Macbook Air that is pretty incredible.  They also announced that Facetime is coming to Macs so now all those people with iPhone4's and 4th generation iPod Touch's will be able to make video calls to Mac users and vice versa.  Still no new iPad.  I fully expect that in January.  I think we'll see a press event then that announces the new iPad and that the iPhone is expanding to Verizon.

I did order DeAnne's iPhone for the AT&T switch the other day.  We looked through all the phones that compared to hers and they all seemed like garbage, so she decided she wanted to just go ahead and take the plunge and get an iPhone.  I'm incredibly jealous.  The people in charge of phone decisions at work won't budge off of the Blackberry server so for the time being, we're stuck with Blackberry and not able to get an iPhone.  I'm hoping that once everybody in Andalusia starts toting an iPhone around that it'll get some of upper management wanting one and that things will change.  I'll just have to be patient though.

Yard work is on tap for this weekend.  Pleasant Home's last home game is Friday night, so we're going to go to that.  Saturday will be yard day though.  It's in dire need of some attention.  Hopefully, we're down to the last cutting of the year.  I'm ready to winter-up and be done with the yard for a little while.

Have a good weekend.

--Paul

Family

We had a pretty decent weekend.  

Friday we went over to Kinston and hung out with DeAnne's family over there.  

Saturday was the family reunion.  We had a good time.  We haven't had a family reunion for that side of my family since before DeAnne and I started dating, so she had never met the vast majority of the people there.  I haven't seen them that often myself, so I didn't even know half the people's names that were there.  I kind of hate to say that, but it's true.  We had reunions more often when I was a kid, but back then all I was worried about was playing.  By the time I was a teenager and would have been able to really start remembering who people were, the reunions had dwindled down to be so infrequent, I just never had a chance to really remember many of them.

The reunion was at a camp in Foley and it was outside under a pavilion.  The weather was perfect for it, but I think it may have done DeAnne's sinuses a number.  She woke up Sunday morning feeling pretty bad.  She went to the doctor yesterday and got some more antibiotics and she was feeling better before the day ended, but I hate to see her sick again.  She's just barely gotten over the last sinus infection.  We really need it to rain and knock some of the peanut dust and golden rod out of the air.  

Have a good Tuesday and I'll be back on Thursday.

--Paul

Once Again

Again, I find myself without a real topic to talk about.  You know the drill by now, let's see what random thoughts I can find.

I watched a little bit of the miner rescue yesterday.  It's pretty awesome that they were able to keep those guys alive and rescue all of them.  Definitely a "God thing" if there ever has been one.  Garrett showed me an article last night that talked about one of the rescue workers who is a Christian sending them music and sermons to listen to.  I didn't read the whole article, but Garrett said that some of the trapped miners got saved while they were down there.  Simply awesome.

We're going to be on the road again this weekend.  We're having a family reunion for my Dad's side down in Foley.  It's been a pretty good while since we had a reunion so it should be good to see a bunch of people I haven't seen in a while.  DeAnne's never met the vast majority of this side of my family so it'll be a lot of new names and faces for her.  Should be fun.

Other than that, there's not a lot going on.  DeAnne started me a Frontierville account last night to boost hers with so if you see a bunch of that stuff posting to my wall, just know that it's not me playing it but DeAnne.  Have a good weekend and I'll see you all back here on Tuesday.

--Paul

Titles Give Me Trouble

No topic jumps to mind so I guess I'll cover the weekend.

Friday we actually had a quiet night at home catching up on some TV watching.  It was pretty nice to just do nothing for a little while.  First time that's happened in a while.  

Saturday we drove over to Dothan only to find out that the teacher stores in both Enterprise and Dothan are closed now.  Of course, it wasn't a total loss as DeAnne wanted to do some clothes shopping also, but she was still pretty disappointed about the teacher stores.  She's got several things she was really wanting to pick up and that was the main goal for the trip.  She made up for it with shoes though.  We got a new pair of dress shoes for me and I think she came home with three pairs of shoes for herself.  A few shirts, and a couple of other things later and we headed home in time for the Auburn game.

It was nice to see Alabama finally loose.  If nothing else, their fans needed it to take some of the hot air out of them.  I know a lot of nice people that are Alabama fans, but it seems like the larger percentage of Bama fans are arrogant and rude beyond belief and it's only gotten worse as this season and last have gone by.  Maybe that nice tall glass of shut-up-juice will quiet the obnoxious fans down some.

That's about it.  See you on Thursday.

--Paul

Music Time

So without a topic really coming to mind for today, I'm going to turn to the old fall-back: music.

I've started co-teaching the high school boys Sunday School class at church and as part of that, we've started a thing where we find Christian music we think they might like and give it to them.  We're trying to get music into their hands that they can listen to and enjoy and not hear the kind of mess that most popular music includes.

Suburba by House of Heroes was the first album we did.  I would call them a pop-rock band but they have  a little bit of a punk rock flavor to them too.  They started off as just being "Christians in a band" but over the last couple of albums, their faith has been coming more to the forefront of their music.  It's a good album about being growing up in suburban life and getting in to trouble and looking for answers to all the big questions.  I really enjoyed it and from what I've heard from the boys in class, they all did too.

We just gave out the second album last Sunday.  Horseshoes and Handgrenades by Disciple is a little more on the heavy side of things than House of Heroes.  If you've heard of Skillet, then imagine them with a little more heavy metal in them.  The album is pretty incredible.  Heavy where it needs to be yet still melodic enough that it doesn't give you a headache.  These guys are great musicians.  Disciple has actually been around since 1992 and they've been nominated for six Dove Awards (Christian equivalent of a Grammy) durning that time and I feel like this album will get them a couple more nominations.

So that's two of the main albums I've been listening to lately.  Of course, if you're interested in them, click through the links I provided and pick them up.  If you do, I'd love to hear your thoughts on them.

Have a good weekend, War Eagle and I'll see you all on Tuesday.

--Paul

Just Us Men

We had a pretty good weekend.  I enjoyed it mostly because it was full of football.  We went to the Pleasant Home game against Brantley Friday night.  PHS lost, but they played really well and if not for a couple of terrible calls, the score would have been a lot closer than the 26-6 that the game ended at.  It was a good game and we had a good time cheering them on.

Saturday was interesting because Sara asked us to babysit at the last minute while she went house hunting in Florida.  Mike's getting close to being done with his classes and they've got to find a place to live in a month or so.  At the point she called though, DeAnne had already made plans to work on cleaning out her classroom.  This meant that Saturday morning, I found myself babysitting Liam all on my own.  It was fun though.  We watched football and played and napped and ate and just hung out all day.  He's a really awesome baby and only gave me trouble when I was trying to feed him dinner.  I don't think he's crazy about the green beans.  He eventually got it all down though and DeAnne got home just in time to help me give him his bath and get him ready for Sara to pick him up.  

Sunday I had planned on helping unload Memaw in between church services but they were late getting on the road and didn't make it to town until around 4:30.  I did go by yesterday and hook up her TV and computer for her.  She seemed pretty happy to be here.  Hopefully she'll be able to find some things to do to keep herself occupied.  

That's all I've got.  See you all on Thursday.

--Paul