Tag Archives: family

Blog Voyeur

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Blogs are interesting little windows into other’s lives. My wife posted a slew of blog links on our family page. Friends, church members, strangers… all with their own links to other blogs. It’s an endless network of life online. Sometimes the information is very general, but sometimes it’s very personal. I wonder how many people read blogs and experience a degree of vicarious enjoyment. I suppose I’m guilty to a degree.

 There’s no blog I read religiously (except for mine of course- yeah, I go back a reread my blog every day… gives me a rush, you know?), but it’s fun to see what other people are up to. So and so built a new house, the whose its had a baby and the what’s their heads switched jobs. Who doesn’t get some twinge of pleasure from reading a blog? Sure, there are blogs so boring that that the voyeur blog rush (VBR) is not present, but they are pretty few and far between. You just need to make inappropriate comments on those blogs to spice things up.

 And then there’s the pleasure derived from sharing information gleaned from a person’s website with that very same person. “How on earth could you know that?” they wonder. Somehow the fact that they posted it on the Internet where it is accessible to the entire 6 billion inhabitants of earth just doesn’t cross their mind.

Still, technology has made the world a very small place in some ways. The amount of available information is overwhelming. One can consume only so many blogs, myspace pages, facebook something or others and social networking doodads a day. As a blog voyeur you have to be a little picky.

“Where have you been?” Yeah, yeah…

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I’m finally getting caught up from last year, in regard to work. It’s been a great year for the business. However “great year” translates into “lots of work.” Two weeks into January and we’re finally settling back into our normal routine… whatever that is. Lots of good things coming up- I’ll be posting more about those in the near future.

This past week proved to be both heart wrenching and stressful. Most of the info is available on our Family Blog, but I will summarize a little here. On Jan 6th I arrived at church around 11:15. As I pulled into the parking I saw people running out of the church building. I realized that they were running toward someone on the ground. My first thought was that the person has slipped. However, getting closer I could feel the tension in the air, see the blood on the ground, and the tears in the eyes of onlookers.  I went inside to find Francoise, knowing she would be worried. We soon learned that Kristy Ragsdale has been shot and killed by her estranged husband, Dave. Church was cancelled and we went home confused and shaken. I couldn’t help but wonder if I could have done something if I’d been five minutes earlier (I probably would have been shot). One of the bullets from the shooting entered our car thought the radiator and did some damage. Hopefully we’ll have our car back soon sans the bullet.  A memory blog has been set up for Kristy here.

Other stuff: Mike had a birthday on Dec 3rd. He’s four now! My personal memory really kicked in around four. I imagine he’ll remember stuff from here on out… I’ll have to start being nice to him. Christmas was good. We kept it pretty low key this year.  New Year’s was fun. The Sabins posted about it over on their blog (have a look at the “Going Greek” entry). We purchased Rock Band and have been playing it steadily since (Everyone is welcome anytime to play- invite yourself right over!).  It’s 4:30 in the morning right now, so I’d better get back to work!

A Gingerbread House and a Fireplace

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Ah December… the best and worst month of the entire year. Time is sparse enough that I’ve had to neglect my blog (and family and health….).  December is the one thing I really regret about being in retail. Ah well…

We still managed to find time to make a gingerbread house this year.  Sure, it was a kit. And yes, it only took an hour, but it’s still a big deal for us. The last time we successfully made a gingerbread house was 2004. We’ve got almost half our tree decorated too. Another major triumph.

In other news, we’re gearing up for our New Year’s Eve party. We’ve got our game room heated this year (last year we used a space heater… and it was painfully inadequate… so cold…so cold…) and we’re in the process of having  fireplace put into the family room downstairs as well. Works like a champ! Hopefully it will be done in time for the party. Otherwise we’ll have to put the guests to work.

Francoise updated our family blog too, so be sure to have a peek. And that’s about it for now- back to work. I need to get that drummer guy from Ben Hur: “Ramming Speed!”

Grass and Halloween

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This is a post that should have gone up last week, but I just haven’t had the time. Usually I rob myself of sleep and sacrifice exercise and time with my family to do this stuff, but I did all that and there still wasn’t a free moment. Talk about a rough week.

Anyhoo… each October the Sabins throw a wicked Halloween party. This year was particularly exciting because it was in their house and they did an incredible job of decorating.  Fran was a Kangaroo with a miniroo (Gabe) tucked into a pocket. Claire was a lady bug and Michael was Raphael (not the painter- the turtle). If you want pictures of them you need to visit the other blog. I was feeling lazy so I just dressed my thumb up. The scar from my cut made a great mouth. It’s really too bad that I already had the stitches out.

Before the party I had been at Andrew’s house helping out with sod. I put a picture of some grass above to fill in space. It’s not Andrew’s. It’s not mine. I have no idea who’s it is. You can see Andrew’s real lawn here.  

The Blogging Begins…

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So here it is- my first blog post. We have Andrew and Greg to thank for making this happen. Andrew came by my place to instruct me in the ways of WordPress. Greg designed the very odd graphic that adorns the website (if someone could rip something out of my mind, it would look very similar). Andrew may wonder why the first post has taken me so long. To answer this question I will post two pictures of a work-related mishap (after the pictures I will expound).
 

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While tweaking a knife something went terribly wrong. One minute I was holding the knife and the next it was on the ground and I was spraying blood everywhere (yes, you can spray blood from your thumb). Luckily one of my guys was there to drive me to the hospital. They stitched me up (as seen above). I probably won’t have any feeling in my thumb for a long time, but somehow I managed to miss my tendon. There’s always a silver lining. Needless to say this impairment makes typing difficult.
More to come later!
-Cam

PS- Both Greg and I are having a terrible time trying to format things with the WP software. Even the “Code” option is proving quite useless as WP inserts its own “magic tags” into every nook and cranny. It may be a template problem though… not cool.