Wow, such a long time between posts! My apologies, friends. Work has had me absolutely hopping crazy lately. Additionally, taking care of two kids is more than twice as much work as one child, I've come to learn. How people cope with more than that, I just don't know. You just surrender a significant portion of your non-child aspects of life and keep going.

As I said, work has been wall-to-wall for a while now, but vacation is next week, Yay! I'll be seeing SAW down in Nashville, so it should be splendid. We'll be hitting HatchShowPrint while we're there and many of the other tourist staples of Nashville and possibly Memphis.

What else has been keeping me busy, you ask? Well, we got one of those above-ground pools with the inflatable ring that holds it all together. I had to bust a hump to get that thing set up. The first time, we thought we'd take a shot at just putting it on the ground, even though there's a slight slope to our backyard. The fact that the next day, about a foot of what had been a wall became a floor, we realized it wasn't the answer.

So I dug and dug and dumped over 30 bags of paving sand in the backyard to get it semi-level. I got close. but still a bit off, but not enough for it to topple. We just decided that since our dog passed away, we didn't really do anything with it. The sun in the afternoon is so intense it burnt the grass up regularly, so we thought that we wanted to do something with it so the kids would have fun. So we got a 13' x 39" and it's just right. Not too deep for my son, but deep enough that when we get in to play, we can be up to our shoulders if we get on our knees. And if my son's friends come over to swim, they have enough room to play without constantly being all over each other. Our little girl loves it, too. She's going to be the fish of the two. The boy was terrified of the water at first, the girl hasn't been able to get enough of it from the beginning. But the boy is getting better and is having fun swimming underwater, something he has been extremely afraid of because of ear problems.

But anyway, there have been those things, but I'll admit it, I got a Wii for Father's Day and have been captivated by it. We have the Wii sports that comes with it, but we also got Carnival Games, Disney-Pixar Cars, Pinbusters and...the truly greatest time-blowing game ever - Speed Racer. I have so much fun playing Speed Racer! All the car-fu combat during the races - hehe! too much fun. The tail-flip and torpedo maneuver is especially fun to watch. I like that's it challenging enough to keep you interested, but not so hard that you end up in last place all the time.

So anyway, aside from sleep, an occasional dinner out with Mrs. Dave, that's been my life. I'm really looking forward to vacation, so keep your eyes open here for anything interesting that develops.

Dave