Bitten by a horseshoe

Camping last weekend was a ton of fun, even though Ms. Fiance couldn't make it. We were up at a resort on Mille Lacs Lake. Unlike the majority of the people we saw who stayed in cabins or RV's, we brought tents. Cooper and I shared my tent, which was quite spacious for just two people.

The four of us played horseshoes, croquet, 2 on 2 sand volleyball, went swimming, and went biking on the Soo Line bike trail. The bike trail was not my favorite thing. It used to be an actual rail line that was removed and converted to a combination bike and ATV trail, so it is perfectly flat and perfectly straight. There also wasn't a lot to see around us, but hey, it was exercise and we had fun biking on it as  a group.

The horseshoes, on the other hand, were fun. We played countless games, sometimes while watching the sun go down over the lake. The problem is that horseshoes are dangerous. Very dangerous. I had my camera along and was taking pictures of everything, including the games of horseshoes. I decided after awhile that I'd like to get a good action shot, so I squatted behind the horseshoe pit with the wooden  wall in front of me, and took a picture when Cooper was throwing a horseshoe towards the pit I was behind. I said to the friend next to me to tell me if I needed to get out of the way so I didn't get hit, but Cooper's horseshoe was clearly landing in the sand pit about 6 feet in front of me. I looked down at my camera, while still squating, to see that I had gotten the horseshoe in mid-flight. Sweet!

BAM!

PAIN!

Cooper's horseshoe had hit the sand in front of me, and then instead of settling in the sand, it bounced up, over the the wooden barrier, and hit me directly on the knee cap. Remember, he had just thrown this horseshoe about 40 feet, so it had a lot of momentum on it and is made out of solid metal. MOMMY!!!!!

I survived, but my knee was really sore the rest of the day. I couldn't really bike because it hurt to push down on the petals, so we moved biking to the next day. It even hurt when I was just sitting down. Luckily, my knee felt much better by the next morning, so we could continue with our biking plans a day late.

I dominated at croquet, to the point that we decided to change the rules a bit on how many extra shots you could accumulate by hitting other people's balls. Of course we were playing croquet out in an open field in the middle of the day after playing sand volleyball and swimming, so at this point we realized that we were getting crispy. Oh yeah, we kind of forgot to put on that sunscreen I had brought with me...

We did an awesome job with our food. The highlight of the weekend's cuisine was Saturday night. We built up a big fire and then cooked corn on the cob and a special potato, carrot, and cream of chicken concoction by wrapping everything up in tin foil and sticking it directly in the fire. It took awhile to cook, but boy was it good! We also cooked some pork loins on my gas stove, so in the end, it was quite an extravagant meal.

We played a little poker Saturday night as well, inside the screened-in part of my tent. Everyone lasted quite awhile, but as the night wore on, it was getting really cold. I was in the final two, so I decided to just bet everything on one hand, and ended up losing by a hair. Oh well, great fun!

Our last camping adventure took place on our way home Sunday. We stopped by Grand Casino initially just for lunch. It was my first time in a casino, and Cooper's as well. I watched everyone lose a couple dollars at the nickel poker machines, too odds-inclined to actually play a game myself. Total lost between my 3 companions: $9. Total time spent playing games: An hour? Not too shabby.

I, however, won the big one. There was a 2 cent poker machine behind where the others were playing and I saw that it said there was half a credit available. Someone had apparently left and decided cashing out a penny wasn't worth the effort. I thought otherwise, especially since it gave me a story to tell about my first casino trip. I went over to the machine (no one had been there in the 15 to 20 minutes we'd been in that area) and hit the cash-out button. A paper slip was printed saying I had a $0.01 credit. Sweet! I had Cooper take a picture of my glorious winnings, and later went to the automatic cash-out machine to claim my winnings (I didn't want to waste an actual human's time at the counter). I then took another picture outside showing my new-found riches with the casino in the background. 

So yeah, if you need some good luck, ask for me. I'm the guy that wins money at the casino without actually playing a game!

DotD: Buffet lunch at Grand Casino - $9.99 - Great food and plenty of it. And then free pop while you walk around afterwards.  And then for me, free money at the casino!

Used gallbladder for sale

Ms. Fiance just went into surgery a little bit ago to have her gallbladder removed. She had a lot of pain late last week, but because it got better after a few hours, she was able to wait to do the surgery today. I'm sitting in the lounge at the hospital right now, and expect that she will be all sewed up within the next hour. Please keep her in your prayers, that everything will go swimmingly well, both now and over the next couple of recovery days.

Because of the pending surgery, Ms. Fiance wasn't able to go on the camping trip this weekend that we had planned with some friends since early summer (more on that in another post). She was really bummed about missing out, so I brought camping to her last night. After getting home from the weekend camping trip, I immediately put the tent back up again, this time in my backyard (Ms. Fiance was waiting at my house after helping little sis move this weekend). I surprised her with a little camping adventure, including the tent, a small campfire, smores, and croquet.

It was all well and good until the storm went through last night. Wow! Ms. Fiance abandoned her air mattress and blankets at 11:00 to retreat into my house because the wind was so violent that it was keeping her awake, and she wanted to be fully rested for surgery. I stayed in the test, bunkered down with my air mattress and sleeping bag. 

Around 1:00 am, it started to sprinkle. I woke up to the rain, closed all of the windows and doors in the tent, and tried to go back to sleep. Then the rain changed from a sprinkle to a wicked downpour. It was pretty loud in the tent, and the wind was still whipping the tent around. And then the lightning and thunder started. Lights were flashing everywhere and constantly for about an hour, with incredible booms and rolls of thunder. I also started hearing louder plops on the roof of the tent that I assume was small hail mixed with the rain. At this point, I was pretty much stuck where I was, a bit afraid that I should not be outside in the storm, but also thinking it was not a good time to walk outside the tent. 

The storm finally finished passing through about 2:30 am, and I raced inside in case there was more to come. 

Ms. Fiance slept through the entire thing.

DotD: Gallbladder removal surgery - $15,000? - Insurance is a good thing...

KKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK

The great and powerful families have finally met. This past weekend Ms. Fiance's parents met my parents for the first time. It went swimmingly well. Not that we were worried or anything, but it's nice to have that past us.

We did a little steak and corn-on-the-cob grilling on Saturday, and then played a few games of cards. No, Cooper, not THOSE cards. ;-)

On Sunday, Ms. Fiance and I were on worship team at church, and we sang a duet during offering. It went really well. We had some issues getting to that point, however. The first plan was to sing along to an instrument-only CD track, but the range was too high in a couple spots, and if I dropped down an octive, it was too low in a couple spots. Basically, the worst possible range for me. The other option was to have someone play the piano (actually keyboard), but then Ms. Fiance had some trouble with the harmony since it was in a different key. In the end we slowly worked out the harmony and sang with the keyboard, guitar, and drums from the worship band backing us up. It was really cool that both of our sets of parents were there for our duet debut.

After church, we headed down to the Metrodome to see the Twins play. Wow, what a game! This was the Johan Santana performance you may have heard about, where he struck out 17 people in 8 innings. Think about that. He had to get 24 outs, and 17 were strikeouts. Crazy! And only Sammy Sosa caused it to not be a no-hitter, as he had both hits that the Twins allowed.

And you thought all it did was rain this weekend!

DotD: Refurbished iPhone - $399 or $499 - For a hundred bucks less than a brand new phone, you can have a just-like-new, factory-refurbished iPhone, in either the 4 GB or 8 GB version. Yes, it is still expensive, but it's an iPhone! Why aren't you running yet? Oh...yeah...it's on the internet... Why aren't you clicking yet?

You can sleep when you're dead

So, yeah, I'm the church treasurer.

This glamourous job has lots of perks. You know, like total control (at least on paper) over the finances of a large organization. Keys to rooms in the church that other people can't get into. Combinations for the safes. Passwords and admin access on the computers. Oh yeah, and the responsibility to keep things running smoothly and error free.

That error free thing can be a pain sometimes.

I just spent last night down in the basement of the church re-reconciling the main church checking account back to January of this year. If you think that would take awhile with your checkbook, think of how long it takes for an entire church, including payroll, bills, mission checks, donations, etc. I started about 9:00 pm after worship team practice, and finally left around 5:45 am this morning. And yes, I did have to get up for work this morning. Two hours of sleep, color me rested!

All because somewhere along the line a couple entries were put in wrong (I'm innocent!), but in such a way that they didn't rear their ugly heads until we were preparing mid-year giving reports. And in QuickBooks, if you change a transaction that has already been reconcilied, you can't just fix it without undoing all of the later reconciliations and then doing them all from scratch again.

Now technically, I could have left the transactions the way they were. I could have manually corrected the reports and added an adjustment in the current month. But that pains me greatly. If you haven't noticed, I have a little flair of perfectionism flowing in my veins. I bit the bullet and spent the entire night at the church in the treasurer's office.

Again.

By my count, that's three times this year. 

Next time, I'll invite you to join me. You just might want to be treasurer too!

DotD: Sudoku toilet paper - $7.16 - In honor of Greg's sudoku post. Sorry, Greg, it isn't binary.

How long have you been in Fertile?

Just got back from a trip to Iowa for a friend's wedding for which I was one of the scripture readers (Psalm 121, baby!). During the rehearsal dinner, I was catching up with another good friend who is just finishing up his internship for seminary. He's in a small town in Minnesota called Fertile for two more weeks. I wanted to know how long his internship was (a couple weeks, the whole summer, a year, etc), so I asked:

"So, Ryan, how long have you been in Fertile?"

Immediately, Ms. Fiance burst out laughing. It was at this point that I actually realized what I had said and how it sounded. He took it quite well, and was laughing along with everyone else at our table.

Another interesting note from the weekend: When I was first asked to be one of the scripture readers, I asked the my friend (the groom) if he wanted me to read from a particular translation. He said probably the same one they used in their church, which was NRSV. I hunted around my house to found my first bible, given to me in 2nd grade, which was NRSV. I brought it with me to the rehearsal, and all three of the scripture readers used it since there was no bible up in the pulpit. After the practice, the pastor came up to me and asked me which translation the bible was. I replied, "The one the groom requested." As I was saying this, he grabbed the bible (which was in my hand), and read the spine himself to make sure it was the right one, and then said "Good." I thought it was a bit strange. I guess just hearing us all read our versus moments earlier wasn't enough reassurance that we weren't using the Hawaiian Pidgin bible or something.

Regardless, the whole wedding went very well and the reception and dance were great. The reception was at the Iowa Arboretum, so some of us took a little time to walk around outside and take some pictures. Ms. Fiance and I did a lot of dancing, so much so that I think I lost about 50 pounds through sweat alone. We made sure to do enough Swing dancing to be ready for the next time we see Janet. And since there were no polkas played, my parents started to polka to one of the songs on their own, so Ms. Fiance and I joined in. After a bit, I switched to go polka a little bit with my Mom (which let Ms. Fiance polka with my Dad), followed shortly thereafter to dancing the polka with my Dad. My parents are awesome dancers. They were teaching a couple of the little kids how to do the twist, and pretty soon one little girl kept hanging around my Dad to dance with him. It was really cute.

DotD: Da Jesus Book (Hawaiian Pidgin New Testament) - $10.41 - "Da peopo dat know Jesus, if dey goin do good job fo help odda peopo find out bout Jesus, an teach, dey gotta use peopo's language, so dose peopo can know him fo real too."

High Society

It's time for me to hang up my blogging cleats.

Oh sure, I've had a good run these past couple of months. Okay, actually I've bored you to tears in the process, but that's not why I'm moving on. Blogging just doesn't fit into my new lifestyle. You know, the rich and famous.

In a short period of time, my place in society has risen from the dung heap to my rightful place among the stars. I am speaking, of course, about being invited over to Bob's house for a cookout. That's right, not begging to be invited, not sleeping on the doorstep hoping to be invited in, but actual "won't you please come over" invited.

My hubris has attained new heights!

Ms. Fiance, Little sis, and I joined the famous Bob for some delicious grilled meat, fresh fruit, and skinny cows. Bob was good and didn't eat the skinny cows, but I have no such control. It was a ton of fun, reliving our memories from TEC 68 and just chatting into the night. I also found out important information such as the number of M&M's consumed by Bob during the last TEC. I'd tell you, but then I'd have to kill you. Or at least tickle you.

Bob and I even managed to talk computer geekiness for about ten minutes before Ms. Fiance and Little sis started to poke themselves in the eyeballs and bang their heads on the table in boredom and disgust.

All in all, a great relaxing and fun evening.

A word to the wise: If you ever find yourself in high society as I did, don't use the front door. It's forbidden. Those who wish to not perish by Chinese water torture should use the side door instead. I was the only person to make this grievous mistake last night.

Oh, and I was kidding about the end of the blog thing. I'll keep blogging. But I'm not the one that's going to suffer!

DotD: An empty gas tank for the grill - $19.99 - Someone went to the gas station to get a new tank of gas, since hers was empty. The station attendant was busy with customers, so he told her to take whichever one she wanted. She picked one out and brought it home to use at a particularly high-society cookout. Mac Man saved the day by both pointing out that the new tank was awfully light, and by driving back to the gas station to retrive a full tank. Understanding that this could be quite embarrasing if anyone ever found out, he has chosen not to divulge the name of the individual who made this hilarious mistake. ;-)

Where to start?

Since I've been MIA the last week, let's get a recap on the life  of the Mac Man.

This past weekend was all about paint. Lots of paint. More than the amount of paint you're thinking of. Yep, more than you're even thinking of right now. A little bit more. Perfect!

My parents came up this weekend to help paint the main floor and upper floor of my house. This was partly because Ms. Fiance was not as enamored with the multiple colors everywhere as I was. Actually, it's probably because I was too lazy to finally start the project, unlike her. The painting in my bedroom had bothered me since the day I moved in, but it took over 2 years for me to do anything about it. Life as a single guy, I guess...

So, with the help of the parental units and Ms. Fiance, we painted the entry way, kitchen, dining room, living room, hallway, master bedroom, spare bedroom, bathroom, and every single ceiling for all of those areas as well. Quite the undertaking. Even worse, the old paint that was on the walls was quite dry and seemingly oil-based, so we had to put 2 coats of primer on the walls in the entry way, part of the dining room, and the living room. On top of that, we also had to put 2 coats of paint on the accent wall in the living room. 

We started when I got home from work on Friday, painted until about 11:00 pm, then went to bed. We got up the next morning and painted all day until about 10:00 pm. On Sunday, we went to church, came home, and painted until evening. We really didn't take any breaks except to eat and sleep, but we got all of the painting done (well, except a few closets).

The end result looks pretty nice. My parents are the expert painters, so we learned quite a few tricks of the trade from them. The taught me the proper way to hold a brush while trimming, and with a little bit of practice, I was out-trimming them. I was really sceptical when they said they didn't use any of that painter's tape that you can put down to keep from getting paint on the ceiling, windows, doors, etc. We did the whole house without tape, and it looks really good. You can get closer to the trim without the tape, and you don't have the problem of the new paint (that's on top of the tape) peeling off along with the tape.

I also replaced a bunch of receptacles and switches in the house at the same time, which was the first time I've done that. The old ones were covered in paint from the previous residents, and not just the color paint that was on the walls before we painted. I replaced 17 outlet covers, about 12 receptacles, 3 light switch covers, and about 8 light switches. It looks much better now.

I also played electrician and added a new GFCI outlet (the kind with the test and reset buttons) to the bathroom and fixed the wiring on the existing one. For some reason, the person that put in that outlet had it wired up so that if the breaker on the GFCI outlet tripped, it would cause the lights to go out in the bedroom downstairs. That's kind of annoying, so I finally got around to fixing that as long as I was playing around in there anyway.

I also had more car trouble on Tuesday night. When I was coming back from Home Depot with all of my new receptacles, switches, and covers, I smelled something unusual in the car. When I got home, there was a big puddle of gas forming near the back of my car. It slowed to a small leak, but when I turned the engine on again, it started pouring out really fast again. The wet spot from the gas was about 8 feet long and 8 inches wide, so we're talking about a pretty big leak here.

I didn't want to drive the car to the shop like that, so I figured I would probably have to have it towed. I let it sit there until the next day, when it was light out. I crawled under the car to have a look, and nothing looked cracked or loose (not that I'm an expert). I tried to tighten the couplings along the fuel lines, but nothing really seemed to be very loose. The car hadn't leaked overnight, and still didn't leak when I turned the engine on. I decided to make a run for the shop, and experienced no leaks along the way. They had it for about 5 hours, but didn't find a thing wrong with it.

So, no expensive repairs this time, but I'm a little afraid that something is going to happen again. After all, the gas was just pouring out of there the night before. I must have just tightened something enough while under the car, but who knows how long that will last.

Finally, we had our last co-ed softball game last night. I lead off, walked, got to second base, and then tradgedy struck. While running to third base to try to beat the third baseman to the bag (a grounder was hit to him), my foot landed a bit awkwardly in the sand, and I felt this strange sensation in my hip as my hip slipped partially out of socket. It popped back in right away, but it hurt pretty bad. It hurt a bit to walk on it, but I could still run pretty well. I was able to finish the game (even hitting an inside-the-park homerun after my injury), and ended up a triple short of hitting for the cycle. I also had a few nice defensive plays. In the end, we won for just the 2nd time this year. It was easily our best game of the year. The hip still hurt, but that pain got much worse after sitting still in the car on the way home. Today I am limping badly, and it's hard to bend over to put on socks, tie my shoes, or even get into and out of the car. Hopefully it's short-lived, however, because I start fall softball in just 2 weeks!

So, that was my week in a nutshell. If you've made it this far without your eyes glossing over, congrats! 

DotD: Two of the As Seen on TV products that I consider to be the most useless ever are now on sale! Help your arthritic dog with the Doggy Step for only $19.99, and while you're at it, cook some pasta for yourself with the Pasta Express for only $6.99. While I can't say that I've tried the Doggy Step, I have tried the Pasta Express. Ms. Fiance's parents got me one for Christmas as a joke, and we tried it out as a joke. It was even worse than we thought. It took longer than the normal way of cooking pasta since you still have to have hot water to pour in there, and once you do, you can't keep it heated like you would over the stove. The pasta was quite starchy even after waiting what seemed like forever. But it's on sale!