On Saturday morning, I had to get up early since I was going to make a quick trip to Colorado to see my grandparents.  As I was laying in bed, trying to convince myself that I could get up at 5:30 on a weekend, my phone rang.  Thanks to the awesome ringtone, I knew that it was Holly calling me on her way home from work.  She had just finished up a 12 hour graveyard shift at the hospital and figured that since I should be up anyways,...

For some reason, Holly thought that it would be a good idea to teach Alex how to play chess.  Apparently she taught him too well because he ended up winning.  Not bad for a kid of six. I was at work at the time so I wasn’t able to see Holly and Alex play their game of chess, but I imagine that the conversation that took place as he was winning went something like this: Holly: You can move that piece there or that one there. Alex:...

I have always enjoyed doing puzzles.  This is something that has been passed on to Hannah who will sit down at a puzzle, it doesn’t matter the level of difficulty, and start trying to put it together.  In fact, Hannah will choose to do a puzzle over playing video games or just about anything else that her brother and sister want to do with her. Sometime within the last year or so, Holly has also decided that puzzles are fun. ...

A few months ago, Holly had decided that we needed to go on a camping trip over the 24th of July weekend.  I had Friday the 23rd off and she didn’t work at all that weekend so she thought it would be the perfect opportunity to get away.  For reasons that I can’t seem to remember at the moment, the camping trip for the 24th got moved up a few weeks leaving us with a three-day weekend full of nothing to do.  Sure, there are...

I hate to buy cars more than anything in the world.  I can think of any number of things that I would rather do than buy a new car.  This is mostly because of some bad experiences that we’ve had.  A few years ago, we bought a Kia that was a complete lemon.  Then there was the Auction Direct incident that ended up costing us a large sum of money thanks to some fraudulent business practices.  Buying cars is just not something that...