Confusable

So it's that time. They announced the winners of the "Team Champion of the month." Therefore, I've been preparing to put them in the next newsletter. I received the pictures today, and I must say that July's winner for the heart of the house has a somewhat inappropriate picture. Before I go on, I should mention that her nomination and winning were confusing to everyone, as they announced her name as "Maria... I can't pronounce the last name..." Which led over half of our housekeeping staff to believe that they had indeed won the award. Amongst the hysteria they were able to identify which Maria was the best Maria. The "really short" one. Half of the girls already excited jumped about ecstatically while the others sat down. (It should be noted that this entire episode has been completely fictional, and that I concocted it based around the idea of how funny it was that a "Maria" of many Marias had won the team champion award. However, it does not take away from the fact that her picture is inappropriate.) Maria Campos, the winner of the award is incredibly small. So much so that they had to enter her nomination on an index card as opposed to the normal 8.5"x 11" form.

In her picture, which is taken by a human resources employee hiding in a niche in the hallway to the cafeteria, who springs out on the day that you've dressed your worst, and have had the least amount of time to put into doing your hair, who snaps your picture and runs... we see that she has not only been caught on a bad day, but apparently on a day she wasn't even working. She is completely out of uniform, and not necessarily "appropriately" dressed for a company picture. The second reason the photo is inappropriate actually serves a purpose for our humble blog. It demonstrates just HOW small she is. Here is her picture with her faithful cat, Esmerelda, as you can see below.

10 hours of bliss.

Well, this has been an interesting week. I worked Monday thru Saturday last week. 60 hour weeks stink, and even more confusing, I had to work Monday of this week, so I had Sunday and Tuesday off. This has completely thrown me for a loop, as it has felt like Monday three days this week.

On the good side, my boss Peter has been in, so it's not all on my head all the time. Another bonus is that several of my favourite guests are in house, thus enabling me to use their names without working at it and making me seem more like the concierge/hotel manager guy from "Pretty Woman". (Who is my current hero. The dude is so smooth, it's not even funny.)

I've been working on my class lately. Trying more and more to be elegant. Refined. Upscale. I know that I work for a hotel that wants to be the same things and I want to be a good representation of that. Sarah an determining now whether it is possible, and whether we are willing to move into a rented house, as opposed to our apartment. We currently have a very nice deal where we are, but it is feeling awful small, especially when someone comes to visit, so we are looking.

Kiah has been really developing alot lately, and has started laughing.

Well, I need to get back to work. My break is over. Peace.

Toys.

Now most of you may not know this, but the average church nursery, or any nursery mind you (with the exception of plant nurseries...) is a life and death struggle between the babies inhabiting said nursery. A gladiator pit of sorts, the babies do what they can to kill eachother.

Watch a group of infants and toddlers in the pit (as we will be calling it) for any amount of time, and you will see attempts to shove others into sharp objects, the throwing of blocks, and most prominently, the gouging of eyes. This is especially popular in the toddler set. Place them near an infant, and watch their fingers go straight for the eyes.

In it's infinite wisdom, our generation has taken away the only true defense that children have had up until this point. That's right. Toys.

When I was little, I was given a set of weapons with which to defend myself. Hard plastic. Sharp edges. Pointy noses on dolls... All for my own safety. To protect me from the three year old with the metal jack in the box that at a whopping 9 ounces made a decent bludgeoning weapon.

But not today. Today, all the toys are soft and mushy. Rubber coated. Wimpy. They can't take an eye out! They can't gouge! The only legitimate violent use for most of these toys is suffocation, and that takes time! Before you know it the pit lord, er, nursery attendant is going to see you, and stop you. Because, no matter how dangerous your toy, you probably can't stop her.

Well. My parents, being the loving grandparents that they are, sent us a box with some of my old clothes and toys. Among which, was my weapon of choice... namely, the "Fisher Price Deathmonger Babybasher 5000."


Ha ha. My son is going to RULE!!!

Yes. This monster of a rattle sports hard plastic petals, and a terrifying google-y eyed face to strike fear in the heart of your oponent and a bright red throttling ball at the base which is just the right size to fit down a baby's throat or eye socket. Coincidence? I think not. Here is the Deathmonger Babybasher 5000 pictured below with Kiah, so that you can see its approximate size. This thing is the biggest rattle possible. A weaker baby wouldn't even be able to lift it. This is like those celtic broadswords of Ireland and Scotland that terrified enemy armies. This is epic. It even has a mirror mounted on the back with which to mock your enemies with their pitiful appearance after you've made them pee themselves. If they hadn't already... but that's beside the point.


So if you've seen a nursery lately, and wondered about Kiah's safety... fear not. The boy is well equipped, and prepared to be the terror of the pit! Hmmm. We'll need a gladiator name for him. Perhaps "Helmet."

Mawwaige... Mawwaige is what bwings us togevva today...

So our good friends Daniel and Lara got married today...
I'll post pictures soon.

But that got me thinking about my friend Kristen from Starbucks back in Illinois, and how she got married to this nice bloke named Roy a ways back, so I looked up her myspace and found this picture which is just beautiful, and I needed to post it.

Love ya Kristen! Glad to see you found your rainbow connection.

So things were bad there for a couple minutes...

I got home from work the other day, to find this...

Needless to say, I was bothered. The computer would begin startup, but stalled on the "Starting OSX" screen. (Which, by the way, is one of the silliest screens in the operating system, as it now just a hoax. In the past, when macs were starting up, they would give you a progress bar of your start up. Well, now they've improved the speed of startup so dramatically, that the progress bar is unneeded. However, people would apparently freak without it, or feel that their computer was taking too long to start up, or something... so Apple kept the progress bar at startup, but get this, IT'S JUST AN ANIMATED GIF! Nothing more. It just makes you think that it's kicking butt. That's all.) Anyway, it froze at that screen.

I couldn't boot in safe mode, but I was able to boot from the install disc (By holding down on the C key with the install cd in the drive, for the mac users out there) and run disk utility. No luck. It let me know that there was an error on my hard drive, but couldn't fix it. Well, I remembered that a long time ago, I heard about a way to repair your hd even if you didn't have the install disk, but I couldn't remember the name of the mode that you had to boot into, or the way to do it. So I humbled myself, and did some research online. Unfortunately, I had to do the research at work. On a PC of all things. It was so humiliating. It looked something like this.

Well, the mode is called "Single user mode" and you get there by holding the command and s keys while booting. It comes up with a black screen white type that looks a little like dos, but it's just the unix underpinnings of OSX. Anyway, I ran a script that looked like: /sbin/fsck -fy.

It came up with some "errors" and I ran a script to correct them, and it came back clean!

It wouldn't work right away, so archived and installed the OS, and it booted back like a charm! I was so happy. It's really disconcerting when I think about how much music, how many photos and other things I have that are not backed up. But everything worked out, and it's as good as new again.

Woot.

Well then...

Ok, so the family was out here for the larger part of last week and into this week. Sarah's grandma Marge, her parents Jeff & Linda, and her sisters Kaitlin and Jessica. Here are some pictures from Glen Eyrie, the castle outside of town.







It's just been a very busy past few weeks. Thanks to everyone for your patience, and for even coming back to check the site. We'll get things going again, now that they've quieted down.

Kiah is smiling alot now, and mimicking our voices. He's 14 lbs. now... The nurse giving him his vacines the other day couldn't hold his little legs down without help. I'm so proud.

We had Kiah dedicated to the Lord at church last Sunday. Dedications are a vow to raise him in a way that's pleasing to God. I was dedicated in Sarasota, Florida at a little church called Grace Fellowship, and Sarah was dedicated at Moraine Valley Church in Palos Heights, IL. We've been waiting till Sarah's family was out before we had it done.

This next week, I am not at the front desk, but back in the Reservations department. It will be alot of fun, and hopefully a great learning experience. Yesterday, I was in there for 8 hours, and it was well spent.

Sarah's back to tutoring and Halie has been playing alot of catch up on work that's been missed due to the olympics.

My good friend Jim V. (the guy that always keeps me in check here on the blog) and his wife Paula have been going through some terrible medical struggles over the last few months. Please join Sarah and I in praying for a swift and complete recovery for Paula, and peace for Jim as he holds her hand through this season.