Adventures in Shopping

Last Friday Andrea and Leann left the kids, (with a babysitter) took my truck up to Chicago, hooked a big strap around IKEA and hauled the whole mess back home. Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration. They were only able to get half the store onto the truck. Leann was shopping for stuff for their new house and Andrea had a long list of items to re-arrange the boy's room in preparation for little boy three. And also for our room in preparation for new built-in cabinets which her husband hasn't started yet. And something for the entry downstairs. And an office chair for the desk ... You get the picture.



Anyway, here's the result, proudly packed and piled into every available space and on top of a barely visible Yakima rack. And in spite of a crowd of highly skeptical IKEA loading dock 'experts' whose very imagnative solution to fitting six carts of boxes into a pickup was to "rent a bigger truck."

Say, doesn't that pile look like it's sagging a bit in the middle?

Yep.

I later figured that the girls had well over 500 lbs of shelves and beds and dressers on top of my bike rack bars. The bars fought bravely, but couldn't hold up to the strain. Oh well, I'm pretty pleased that everything else seems to be intact. I think I can bend the bars back, and now I know how much weight I can put up there. Five hundred pounds is a lot of bikes.

One of those boxes was a new bunk bed for the boys. Kenrick was a big help putting that together. And the boys have much enjoyed their cozy new setup.
I'll keep you posted as we get more of the stack unpacked and assembled.

Another One Bites the (Peanut) Dust

Last Sunday we bravely ventured forth in search of the elusive perfect steak and happened upon the newest joint in town, Logan's Roadhouse on Conference Center by the new hotel in East Peoria. We're still looking for the perfect steak. On a scale from Lone Star to Alexander's, Logan's rates somewhere below the other Roadhouse across the street. It's decor and atmosphere are typical peanut-shell-on-the-floor, country music, yee-haw style, but set in kind of a warehouse-looking interior. The music isn't as loud as Texas Roadhouse, but the food isn't as loud either. The meals we got were kind of tasteless. Bread was good, peanuts okay, salad so-so, veggies were good but few, ribs and steaks ... nothing to write home about. I think the smoke outside had more flavor than my sirloin.

Moving Day for D & K

This weekend we helped Doug and Karena move into their new pad. This has been a long time coming and is was fun to help them make the short hop from old to new. I'm sure Karena will post pictures of the move itself, but I got a few of the end result before we left on Saturday.

One big U-Haul, a couple of pickups, and a trailer or two, lots of strong backs, willing hands, and quick wits (one dim-wit), and by noon the moving was done. Now where do we put all this stuff?

The boys quickly claimed the downstairs for their own.
Congratulations Doug and Karena, welcome home.

Bedroom Remodel Update

Well it wasn't really a remodel, more like a repair/reorganize/repaint, but it looks better up there anyway. Here's the before.

Here's the after.


Notice the subtle new paint scheme, the new fixtures and the new sitting area. Nice, huh?

What you don't see is the old dressers that will be replaced by a new set of built-in dressers along the left side of the above photo and the piles of books and other items that we pulled out of the bedroom in the first place that also don't yet have a home. I've still got some work to do.

Exuberance

This weekend we were visited by the King and Queen of Pandemonium. Aunty Sally and Uncle Matt flew out on Friday night and left this afternoon, leaving behind a wave of silliness, lots of pictures, and two little boys who will remember the fun they had for a long, long time.



First, some music.


Then, a short hike in the woods on a beautiful fall day.


Watching for falling leaves (lots), critters of any kind (nada), or superheros (one or two).


Andrea took the scenic route and got some nice foliage pics.



The boys picked up some foliage of their own. Take a look at the size of the leaf in Anthony's hand!


Next, yard work. The leaves aren't really off the trees yet, but it was too nice of a day to pass up the opportunity to pile a few up and jump in them. Or have Uncle Matt toss you in.


Or to just sit in the middle with a big smile on your face.


Next, soccer. Lots of soccer. Matt has Kenrick convinced that he's the best soccer player ever. Thanks Matt.


Then football. Anthony is the all-time kicker, running back, center, and safety who doesn't know the meaning of 'touch' football. Sometimes he runs the right direction with the ball.


Finally, pumpkins to carve! Sally and Matt advise, the boys dig in.


Kenrick wouldn't do this last year.


Come on Auntie Sally, who taught you how to work a pair of scissors?


Concentration. First you poke holes through the pattern...


And here's what you get after mom is done cutting it out. Very impressive.


Thanks for the visit Matt and Sally, hope you made it home safe and sound.

Triple Toothless

We yanked Kenrick's third wiggler the other morning. He really looks different with a top tooth missing.

Signs of Fall

I thought the contrast of this tree against the sky looked kind of cool. My phone camera doesn't really do the scene justice. The colors are really starting to pop now, we'll try to get a couple of decent pix out before it's all over.

Another sign of fall is the appearance of large overflow piles of corn next to the grain elevators. This one is just down the road from us and we've watched it grow over the last week. The shape in the background, just to the left of the pile is a semi-truck, dumping another load onto the conveyor.

A New Hawkeye

Congratulations to Luke and Tammia on the birth of a new baby boy, Jarris James, on Saturday. Mom, dad, big sister, and little Hawkeye doing fine.

Cooling Down in a Cloud of Dust

So the weather has turned the corner into fall, finally, and the project upstairs is starting to look serious. I generated a massive cloud of dust this evening sanding the first coat of drywall mud and a couple piles of sawdust 'adjusting' the window frames to lay flush with the walls. Those of you who have seen our bedroom know about the low ceiling and the prominent skull-cracking protrusion at the corner of the hall. We always wondered what the pea-brain who remodeled the upstairs was thinking when he framed that particular feature. We still don't know, but I finally lopped that sucker off and blended the corner together like it should have been in the first place. Even if nothing else turns out the way Andrea envisions it (unlikely), this whole effort will be worth it just to be able to round the corner at night without ducking for fear of puncturing my noggin'.



I got the garden tilled on Saturday. Very proud of that.



And Iowa beat Illinois. Go Hawks! Actually, I kind of had mixed feeling going into that game (don't tell Luke), Iowa's been struggling and needed a win - and I am a Hawk fan after all - but it's been kind of fun to watch Illinois finally get on a win streak after going something like 2-30 in the last couple of years. It was a good game though, and I was glad to see Iowa get the win. Illinois plays Michigan next. Go Illini!

Isn't She Cute?

The title says it all. Finally, the promised belly picture. Only two and a half months to go.

Kenrick took advantage of the warm weather to practice his backyard acrobatics.

Adventures in Traveling

If you are thinking about flying out of Atlanta sometime soon, take my advice. Don't. This is an airport that takes the two-hour early arrival seriously. Beautiful terminal. Efficient self-service check in. Mind-boggling wait to get though security. I took this picture from about the halfway point - these folks are in one of four lines through the atrium - then made my way to the end to do the 50-minute shuffle. The line moved along okay, and there were probably twenty gates open at the security checkpoint, but what a crowd! Then, if you are leaving from one of the far terminals you have ride down the loooong escalator to get on the train that starts and stops with a jerk and then back up top and way out to the 35th gate just as the attendant is calling your name to assign you a seat. Anyway, I made it. I'm glad I got there early. I took a picture of the entrance to the Cat facility just before I left on Friday. Nice setting, compact little factory. If you squint you can see some finished log skidders in the far background. Or maybe not.

Georgia Kudzu

I said earlier that there were lots of pine trees in this area, but I didn't mention that most of the trees are covered in Kudzu vines.

This is along the side of the road across from the hotel. The vines drape over the trees, bushes, houses, slow-moving pedestrians, and everything else under the sun. Amazing.

Cajun Duck

This evening we sampled the local cuisine. Well, I don't think we're technically in Cajun country, but close enough that I don't know the difference. Our waiter had the classic southern manners to go with his classic southern drawl and the menu had a fine selection of blackened entrees. I had roast duck and andoulle sausage over cajun mashed potatos ("the meat jus' falls rhat ahf the boe'n") and chocolate "pee'kaun" pie for dessert. Very good. The vegetables were collards and fried okry. We didn't try those.



One of the people that I'm working with down here is from Costa Rica. Our waiter said to her, "Ah jus' luv youah aeycceynt, ma'am!"



Speaking of accents, I just found a translator for the language what's spoke here in Jawjuh. (I'd like to say something witty here, but I caint come up with nuthin'. Just click on the link)

Georgia, Finally

Besides the requisite 45 minute delay in Peoria, the flight to Atlanta went okay. As we landed in the fading light I was able to see the outline of lots of lakes and the deep green of what appeared to be heavily forested hills. The airport is on the edge of Atlanta, so we passed over scattered developments mixed into the forests and what seemed to be a semi-random network of roads that twisted and turned through the countryside.





The dirt, where exposed by new construction, is a light reddish-brown. I found out today that the ground is quite sandy, but tends to be severely depleted because of generations of cotton farming. Now there's miles and miles of pine forest, which is one reason Cat manufactures it's Forest Products here.





After I got off the plane, two things happened to me that have got to be some kind of a record. First, I waited for almost two hours for my suitcases to make their way from the plane to the luggage carousel. They weren't lost or anything, it just took them that long to get there. It only took us an hour and a half to fly from Peoria to Atlanta! Second, I got lost twice in one night in the rental car. I was pretty disoriented when I finally left the rental yard, having rode the shuttle bus to the lot from the airport and not really knowing which way was which despite the directions from Cat Travel and the rental company map I'd grabbed on my way out the gate. Turns out the directions were pretty worthless and the map difficult to make out in the dark while driving down the road and to make a long story short I got headed east down the freeway towards Atlanta when I should have been heading west to hook up with I85 South. After getting that squared away and checking my directions to the hotel carefully during the forty minute drive, I found myself in the middle of nowhere looking at a grove of pine trees where the Holiday Inn should have been. The directions from Cat Travel were worse than worthless, they were just plain wrong. Fortunately I had a Google road map and a vague recollection of the description that my contact here had given me about how to get to the factory from the hotel, so I backtracked a bit a found what I was looking for. All's well that ends well, I guess, but it was sure hard to get out of bed this morning.