"Memories..."

...of the smiles we left behind...misty, watercoloured memories...of the way we were..."


WOW! We're not sure when this picture was taken but the consensus seems to be around 1968. Uncle Dean (top left) Dad (top right) Aunt Becky (bottom left) Aunt Susan (bottom right). I never knew how much Dad and I looked alike at that age until I saw THIS photo. Now if you didn't know we were related it might be hard to tell. Well, not that hard. We both have big noses ha ha.

We bought a Slip 'N' Slide! Now surely you know what those are. If not, here's a funny video:


Now we didn't do anything THIS dramatic, but we still had a good time. A few pix:


This one looks like Emily turned into water and then exploded!


Poetry in motion!


Faster then a speeding bullet!

So we get this e-mail at work that we can't just ask for the days around Christmas off like we have ALWAYS done; instead, we get entered in a drawing and if you get lucky you might get some of the days off you wanted as opposed to all of them. I guess I won't save my days off for December anymore since there's a good chance they won't be used. Plus we can't carry any of it over to the next year. This company has really gone down the craphole. Everyone here jokes that we won't even be open come December. At first I would laugh in their faces but now who knows really? I had this great idea about being off the same time Emily is for her Christmas vacation and now I have to wait and see. I feel like I'm on the Titanic sometimes around here. You want to get into a lifeboat, but at the same time you want to see it sink into the Atlantic...or Pacific...whichever ocean the Titanic sank in. My care level seems to be at an all-time low at work. Will something happen or change to bring it up? Only time will tell.

So I get this ticket last October for speeding in a school zone. My mistake, I admit it. I signed up to do defensive driving which had to be completed by March 22 and sent into the court. I don't even really begin it until April and finish it at the end of June. I mail everything in as a kind of court Hail-Mary and hope for the best. Well, a month later, I get a letter from them stating the ticket had been dismissed. Cari checked the mailbox and saw it and immediately shouts, "Do I wanna know what this is??" Glad to see God was looking out for me on this one. Was He? Sure feels like it. Last thing I need is a suspended license or worse, a warrant hanging over my head. I wonder what pre-requisities God has for what He does. Wouldn't this ticket turning into something worse teach me a lesson about promptness? So by the court not dismissing the ticket I would learn something and ultimately grow as a person? That would be a kind of tough-love answer, sure. So many awful things happen in this world every day but the last thing we do is blame God. We don't dare do that. Or suffer his wrath, right? No one wants that. Ever notice how we never have dreams about Heaven or Hell? At least I don't. The closest I ever came was when I was in this snowy kind of setting, but it wasn't cold. I saw a kid I went to school with, Chucky Calder. I imagine he goes by a different name now. No one wants to be called Chucky their whole life, right? He looked like he would as an adult. For some reason I knew who he was immediately. Other then that, nothing else. Just a coincidence? We'll never know.

"Pepper Time!"

Yes, during our vacation we made a little (read: 2 hour) drive to Dublin, Texas to see the very first Dr Pepper bottling plant ever! It was built in 1891 and is still operational. If you had to guess which came first, the plant opening or the day William Frawley (Fred Mertz) was born, which would you say? The answer later.

A few pix:


Tour guide: "See this sign MIKE? It says DO NOT TOUCH MIKE! Any other questions?"
Me: "So...touch it then?"
Tour guide: "I will call security AGAIN if you cannot behave MIKE!"
Me: "You mean Earl? The 80-year old cashier with the flashlight and whistle? How is he going to stop me? By telling stories about his time in the Army until I drop dead of boredom?"
Tour guide: "Exactly!"


Mmmm! I got a Dr Pepper float and Emmy got a vanilla ice cream cone. What is it with her and vanilla anyway? Ah well...


Just a nice family shot. So hard to get those these days.

As we were heading back we stopped in Granbury where they have this beach area near the lake where we swam and tried to make a sand castle but couldn't of course since we had no sand toys. Plenty of them at home, but...what can ya do sometimes.

I believe we are going to Six Flags today OR the Dallas Zoo. None of them have ever been to this zoo since we usually go to the Fort Worth Zoo so we shall see. Fun week so far!

And by the way, the answer to this week's trivia question was: William Frawley! He was born in 1887, four years before the plant opened. Quite the old cocger eh? He was 64 when the show started and wife Ethel was 39. She always complained that in real life she would never be married to someone that much older then her.

"V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N Part One..."

...has begun! We have a lot of cool things planned this week, but the real fun started Saturday night! We picked up Just Dance as an early birthday present for Emmy. If you've never played it, you basically face off against your opponent and try to dance the way the guy or girl dances. There's about 30 songs and it will WEAR YOU OUT!! Here are a few pix:




What's interesting is all of these were taken before we started playing the game.

Then Sunday we went to Six Flags followed by an ice-cream eating contest at Bruster's Ice Cream. There were 22 adults entered and I swear this one guy had to eat all of his in 15 seconds and not make it fun at all for anyone else. Why do people like that even exist other then to get beat up by people like me? Maybe that's why. Again...a few pix:


Emmy: "Dad, what flavour are they serving us? This doesn't taste like vanilla."
Me: "That's actually sour cream and mayonnaise mixed together and topped with mozzarella cheese."
Emmy: "Ohhh...now I understand."


Me: "Oh my gosh this is cold! How come no one told me this was so cold?"
Woman with camera: "Maybe you should sue them for child endangerment."
Me: "Hey, now that's a good-wait, did you just call me a child?"
Woman with camera: "Well what else do you call someone who didn't know ice cream was cold?"
Me: "Touche..."

Funny how as kids get older vacations seem to be a lot more fun. We went to Disneyworld in 2006 but Zach wasn't even a year old yet so it seemed more like taking came of him then enjoying anything else. We still had fun mind you, but...hey, what can ya do with a baby, right? Got lots more to come!

"Sixteen...Candles..."

Yes, Moriah, the cousin who was the youngest for a long time, has turned 16! We got together @ Aunt Becky's house in the middle of nowhere (Eustace) j/k and had an Italian-themed lunch! Here are a few pix:


Someone went to a LOT of trouble to find all of these pictures in the Overall/Henderson archives but the end result was that Moriah looked embarrassed/scared in most of them ha ha.


Such exquisite party favours! Little glass fishbowl-looking things filled with M&Ms and Jordan almonds. Still working on the 5 or 6 I have at my house. Drew looks happy I think just because someone wanted to take his picture. I didn't really, but he just happened to be in the mirror.


Ahh, 95 degree weather, 95% humidity and kids in sand. Could a dad obsessed with cleanliness be any happier?


Ahh, poetry in motion!


Drew: "Hey Mike, when I pose like this, do I look like Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible?"
Me: "Um, sure, you betcha..."
Caleb: "I'm SO glad Drew and I did not wear matching shirts. It would have been unforgivable!"

Work is...not so much fun right now. They are laying off all of the supervisors and most of the managers. My supervisor got laid off yesterday. She was pretty cool. She sent us an e-mail before she was walked out saying how much she liked working with us. I guess when things are going good deep down we wait for something to change. And change is coming, whether I want it to or not. Hopefully I will continue to prove my worth like The Jones boys did in The Last Crusade and kepe my job. I try to do it better then anyone else. So we shall see.

Vacation in five days!! Can't wait.

"Click Click Boom!"

Yes, to quote the title of a Saliva song, the 4th of July has come and gone for another year. But we sure had fun while it was here. We got to see fireworks not once but twice! We even made a drive out to an actual fireworks stand and picked up a few things. Then Saturday and Sunday night we lit all of them! Here are a few pix:


Zach: "Hey Dad, when I pose like this who do I remind you of?"
Me: "Um...John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever?"
Camron: "Will it hurt if I light this firecracker I put in my nose?"
Branda: "Oh who cares! I bought Slim Jims instead of fireworks by mistake! I want my $8 back!"


Cari: "*cough* what just exploded!?"
Me: "Well, it was either fireworks or my car...which one would be a bigger loss to us as a family?"
Cari: "Mmm, not sure...I really like these fireworks...a little more then your car...no offense."
Me: "None taken."


This one is just plain cool. Looks like Desert Storm, 1991. Maybe Piknik will let me add a green tint to it.

Getting ready for our vacation in 11 days!! So far we are planning:

A trip to Dublin, texas to the Dr. pepper bottling plant to see a lot of the behind the scenes stuff

A trip to the Dallas Zoo

A trip to the Palace Of Wax and Ripley's Believe It Or Not! museum

Six Flags sandwiched somewhere in between

Getting really excited. Haven't had a week off since Christmas 2009. I would say it's about time we change that! As a kid I don't remember a whole lot of the vacations we took. I know we went to the Grand Canyon and the Meteor Crater in Arizona when I was about 5 or 6. I had this cool Grand Canyon poster for the longest time. As I got older, I thought it was really dumb so I took it down and now it resides...who knows, really. I'd love to go back in time and tell myself to hang onto a few things. Sometimes I think the meaning of life is not only to make memories but to remember them either mentally or with a couple of visual aids.

"Emmy Goes To Camp"

Yes, she had her very first week-long stay-away camp last week! She had done overnight camps before but never like this. I know parents always dream about shipping their kids off for a while to have some peace and quiet, but the hard part was at night, not saying good night to her. Zach sure loved the attention he got ha ha. A couple of pix:


Emmy(in the green shirt): "Why do we have to make these hats again?"
Counselor: "So that your hair won't fall in the meals that you have to volunteer to cook!"
Emmy: "We...have to...volunteer...?"
Counselor: "You want to sleep in the woods or in your bed?"
Emmy: "Sign me up."


Girls on the left: "If you leave me now...you'll take away the biggest part of me..."
Songleader: "Take it Emily!"
Emmy: "Wooo ooo ooooh baby please don't go..."
Emmy: "Um, I didn't know Chicago wrote camp songs..."

Three day weekend babee!! We're going to six Flags tonight then Sunday night we're having a cook-out then to the Highlands for some fireworks! If you know me at all, you know how much I love fireworks. Brings back memories of when I was a kid and we would go up to the junior high and watch them with the rest of Duncanville. Small town, I know.

Lately I've come to the conclusion that we are just like any other species. We're born, we exist, we die. It really doesn't matter what we do or what we accomplish as it is only temporary. I hate to think like that, but lately I can't think about anything else. I want to be able to retire when I'm older and so far according to my 401K that seems to be attainable. I also want to be on good terms with ye olde kids as they become adults. Emmy and I went to Chick Fil A this morning and just had a good old conversation about driving, careers, and the imprtance of leaving the house cell phone at home and not taking it with you to camp, which she tried to do and I had to go and get it from her. Some lessons have to be learned the hard way. The nut (Emmy) sure doesn't fall far from the tree (me). Anything I learned as a kid was always after I had screwed up in the first place. Must be a genetic thing.