Pitch & Green

Seriously, there were a few parents decked out in HP garb. The lady that dressed as Professor Trelawney was very good. She won the costume contest...we arrived too late for it, but the boys got alot of thumbs-ups for the "Weasley's Wizarding Wheezes" shirts they had on. "Mischief Managed" won out for the back of the shirt wording...everybody kept bringing people over to read their shirts and their bags of "Puking Pastels" and "Canary Creams" they had around their necks. We got the book at 12:27AM. We finished it on Tuesday the 19th. Very good! Probably the best one yet in our opinion.

Saturday, I stopped at a cemetary near the funeral home and took the kids to a gravesite of a boy I went to school with and played soccer with growing up. He was killed when he was playing with his dad's gun back in 1983. His name was Mark McKnight. I told the kids the story and used it as an explanation about why I never let them point a gun at anyone or anything they don't intend to shoot, and why every gun is always to be thought of as loaded. I won't go into the details but it seemed to make a bit of an impression on them. The boys could relate because I told them that I'd been friends with him since I was Will's age and to imagine someone they know right now being that boy that was buried there in front of them.

We left the memorial service in Shreveport and went to Deadwood Texas for the burial. For those that don't know(which is most of you, with maybe the exception of Christin and Aaron, Deadwood is about an hour West/Southwest of Shreveport, LA. It's not too far from Carthage, TX. My grandmother was raised there, as was my dad, for the most part. I was amazed how I didn't need a single direction to get there...we'd been out there so many times, it was like going home. We used to all go out there for New Year's, Easter, Mayday, Memorial Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day, July 4th, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. There would be 50 or 60 people in that little 3 bedroom 2 bath house. The food, the family, the fun...the memories....just going to the old church and the cemetary brought it all back. We drove past the old storesite(they bulldozed it down years ago) and I told the kids about sitting on the porch watching the log trucks and oil trucks drive by. When it was too hot, we'd all be inside the old store in front of the BIG FAN that Pawpaw had gotten out of a cotton gin. We'd play checkers and chase mice in the back, see who could kill the most flies with the flyswatters. Mawmaw would give us some candy occasionally(okay, she gave it to us everytime, but mom and dad didn't know that). I told the kids about walking to the fishing holes and camping out and shooting blackbirds along the fencerows and killing snakes whenever we could find some that were poisonous. We watched very little television out there, but we were never, ever bored. It was a shame it took my grandmother dying to get all of us together again. My cousin and I have taken it upon ourselves to plan and execute regular family get-togethers out there again. It truly was like nothing else...all of us being together. My daughterwent back with her aunt and uncle to Tennessee and we yearned for her the moment they drove away.

Well, when we got back from that, we went to church on Sunday, relaxed on Sunday afternoon, and the boys and I went swimming in our lake. Monday was a workday, Tuesday was a remodeling day at one of my customer's homes and packing for the trip, then mowing the remaining yards I had waiting on me before we left.

We went to Tennessee to see my brother and sister in law on Wednesday. They just moved into a new house they had built in Clarksville, TN. It is VERY NICE! We stopped in Birmingham on the way up and visited the Lusks. We miss them alot. We got in, figured out sleeping arrangements and then stayed up talking until 1:30 in the morning. I do wish they lived closer to us. My brother's wife is probably my wife's closest friend and it's just very easy to be around them. My brother is getting ready to go back to Iraq and he is working from early in the morning til late at night getting ready, so we only got to see him...well, late at night. Thursday, my sister-in-law and I clean out the garage and then the ladies went to grocery shop and I commenced to mowing the yard...I immediately missed my Gravely...whew! The little ones were napping and conveniently woke up when the mower stopped. So we're all sitting down watching "Cheaper by the Dozen" when my sister-in-law calls and tells me somebody is coming to do something to the house and to let them in. Fine, I think. 5 minutes later the phone guy shows up to bury the phone cable. Well, that was easy right? Wrong. He wasn't the guy in question. The guy in question is the floor guy. Apparently, he didn't do something right when he sealed their floor and it has bubbles on the wood(hardwood floor). He is from Alabama and he says right then is the only time he can do this as he doesn't live her. So the decision is reached by my sister-in-law and I to move all of the furniture off of the wood floor, into the kitchen and to have him redo the floor. They sleep upstairs that night and nobody goes on the floor for 24 hours and the furniture can't be put back on for a week...but who cares, because the floor is going to be perfect, right? Wrong. There were still blemishes, missed spots, and yes, bubbles. And floor man was seen by us in the neighborhood on Friday and Saturday. An image of Marvin the Martian with his Q38 space modulator entered my mind as an appropriate answer to the situation but I resisted my inner child and settled for playing golf with my kids on Saturday morning and my brother on Saturday afternoon. It was the first time we had played golf together in about 2 or 3 years. Very nice...just two brothers hanging out and enjoying one another's company. We came home on Sunday and I gotta say, we could have stayed another week. Family is really something that is taken for granted...too much so.

Whew! I don't remember typing that much useless information in a very long time.

And there you go.