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Two Peanut activities converged in one day and we crossed our fingers for no work emergencies, because the schedule definitely didn’t allow for it.

The schedule looked something like this:

8:30am - Church for Choir rehearsal.
9:30am - First service choir performance
9:40am - Pickup peanut and deposit in Sunday School,
10:45am - grab peanut from SS and take to Choir room
11:00am - Second service choir performance
11:10am - grab peanut,
11:10-11:20am - change clothes to Ballet leotard in church bathroom
11:30 - Drive to YMCA (20-mins)
11:50 - Eat picnic lunch in car, YMCA Parking lot
12:15 - deposit Peanut in Ballet class for her rehearsal.
1:45pm - this is when Peanuts ballet class actually rehearses.
2:30pm - then they get pictures taken
2:55pm - Wardrobe change, Leotard to Choir performance costume.
3:00pm - Drive back to church
3:30pm - Choir rehearsal.
6:00pm - Choir performance
7:30pm - Back home.

Yes, we’re tired. But Peanut most of all but she held up well. Chief also deserved a medal for putting up with it all with zero complaining (and got some homework done in the meantime). Instead of medals they settled for McDonalds Ice cream on the way home.

I have a couple of shots of bad video taken from the treo so you can get an idea of the Choir performance, more flickr photos coming soon.

video 1 (1.2MB)
video 2 (2MB)

Click on the pic below for more…

Family Pictures are done… Finally! We’ve been trying to get this done for months at Portrait Innovations, and it was probably worth it. They did a good job, gave us a cd and aside from the scheduling hassle, got it done in a very short time. Plus the prices are still very reasonable when you deviate from the packages which is a nice plus. A definite recommend.

linkage

While I’m at it and this is the end of the year, here’s an update on the latest project. It’s going very wall especially thanks to an extra job I got for blogging that seemed to fall out of the sky in October. Darn well in fact considering we sidetracked to replace the freezer and put some new tires on the main Honda.

Best case scenario, we’re paid off all debts but the house in March, worst case scenario is we have to stop right now and pay for Chief’s orthodontics, in which case we should be done by end of June I think.

The goal by the end of the year is to have the emergency fund well in hand and then in 2008 we’ll go to baby steps 4 and 5.

Which will bring us to our first quandary, what to do about the cars? Best car is a 2002 Honda Accord. It runs great and will do fine for a couple more years. 78,000 miles right now I think. It’s the last thing that’s going to get paid off in a couple of months.

The other car is a 93 accord with 130k+ miles. Runs fine, engine will never die, but it’s getting more “character”. I think it’ll last a couple of more years no problem, esp. as all it ever does is go to work and back.

Back in our debt days, we just would have sold the 93, bought a new car with a five year loan and I drive the 2002. But that’s not the plan now, no car payments. So the plan now is bank the car payment when we pay it off and hopefully in a couple years we have enough to buy another decent car cash when the 93 gives out. That’s going to be dicy but it should be doable.

Part of the 93’s current charm is a hole somewhere ahead of the catalytic converter and it’s getting noisy, no AC in the summer, and it doesn’t like to start on hot days due to a busted relay switch. But people who know me know how relentless I am with old cars, and I’m pretty sure I can get this one to 200k if I want to.

Haven’t posted in awhile, but some good things are afoot, especially having to do with pictures.

Flickr, I just discovered flickr, And I know that I’m about sixteen months behind the times, but that site is way cool and is allowing us to do some pretty cool stuff.

Like this.

Wait for it.

Bam!

Ok that might not seem too impressive to you, but when posting this, all I had to do was open the photos tab, click on a photo then click on thumbnail, and bam it was in the post. Way, way cool and brought to us courtesy of these guys, well done.

So anyway, the main gallery page is here, and I’ll put a link prominently on the sidebar, and that is built on the local site you notice, but everything is pulled from Flickr. All I had to do was configure the plugin and it did the rest. Really, really cool. You have to be a geek to appreciate it though.

Full Gallery is here. Had a lot of fun and made the rounds of both families. Stacy’s on Thursday, Smith-Stahl’s on Friday, Head back Saturday. New young’uns on both sides of the family. The youngest one on the stacy side is my only nephew’s son, making me a great uncle? Is that how it works, not sure. Anyway, I have five nieces and one nephew, so I’m glad to see he had another boy to give the family testosterone level a fighting chance. Also contributing to that same effort, my niece has their first boy on the way after four girls. Whew!

Big Brother has also kindly shared his gallery as well, more and better stuff there.

After about two weeks of rain, gray, drizzly, dreary, we finally wake up to this…

Almost makes winter worth it.

This evening the peanut had her choir concert. I have some pics in the gallery and a short video (682k). She did an excellent job and even had a part with a 3 person ensemble. But it’s over until January, unless we can convince her to sing for us at times.

Speaking of princess her reading ability is advancing rapidly, she is about ten books into the magic treehouse series at a 2nd grade level.

Last night KP and I saw the movie, The Village on FX. KP had seen it before but I hadn’t. When it came out, it looked very scary and not something I would be interested in. Last night I quickly got drawn into the story and throughly enjoyed it.

It is definitely full of suspense but not really scary. There was only one scene that me have goosebumps. KP said some people thought the ending was dumb. I rather liked it. All the clues were there but I didn’t see it coming.

Jamie and Courtney welcomed Zane Elwin today. All 9 lbs 12 oz of him. Wow!

Congratulations!

This afternoon enroute to swimming lessons, the car radio was tuned to the Christian radio station K LOVE. They did a station ID thing and sang “positive encouraging K LOVE”.

Princess pipes up from the backseat and says “Mom, there was a boy in my kindergarten class at church named K LOVE.”

Me: K LOVE? I don’t think that’s right. How about Caleb?

Princess: Maybe (sounding very unconvinced).