When your wife says she wants a bench to sit on, you build her a bench!

 

Vacation Bible School week

Well ... J.C. is now with his Dad for the summer and Patrick & Andrew are now with their dad (me!) for the summer. We did get one time out on the boat so I could pull J.C. and Patrick around with the new tube.

J.C. has had a great time with his dad in Washington, D.C. with the Young Marines. He has seen the Pentagon, Smithsonian, Arlington, and stayed the week at Quantico (see his bedroom on the right!).

Vickie is starting to be up and about more after re-damaging her shoulder. She is sometimes very bored and cooks so much/so good for Patrick and I that I fear this will be a summer we will have to lose weight from, yeehaw! She is also starting to work in the yard. One of the women from my work gave her some tomato plants that are really growing and starting to yield tomatoes.

Patrick, Andrew, and I spent this week in Summer Camp, then going straight to Vacation Bible School every night. We did not get home until after 9 PM each night. This was rough on the three of us, but VBS was great and we had a wonderful time. The other issue that made this so difficult was that I planned two doctor visits, two trips to the library, and a special reading adventure during this week. Whew!

Vickie and I are very much looking forward to the coming calm, summer camp, nightly reading time, nightly Bible study, maybe some trampoline jumping evenings.

Small Potatoes

The dinner that my wife cooked tonight was very good, one of those where you want to kiss her just to smell the scent of dinner on her. It so reminded me of the days of growing up. I found out during the meal that my mother had visited during the day, and brought some home grown potatoes. Now these are not JUST home grown potatoes .....

I grew up in Eastern North Carolina, where the soil is very fertile. I am talking about soil that would grow anything, was completely black, and was the envy of farmers everywhere. Years after I moved to Central North Carolina, my father visited and did not understand planting or fertilizing grass as he was accustomed to it just growing automatically from the seeds of the grass near it. Dirt that makes you want to just scoop up a handful and eat the dirt straight. God's perfect soil, everything added.

Now when I was younger, my sister (aka THE slave driver) would wake me up on the hottest day of the year, usually somewhere around the end of July June. At the end of two 100 foot rows of potato plants, she would pull up the vines, and make me dig down 12 inches or so, the full length of the garden rows. We would collect and clean every potato from the size of your pinky fingernail, to the really big "baking potatoes". This might be a fond memory now, but even as a child, I had to rest for a day or two after this digging frenzy.

The next part of the process was my mother taking an old five gallon bucket full of these spuds, washing them as she would run them around and around in the bucket to clean off the skins. Then it was off to a boiling pot with plenty of oil and flour to make a paste on everything. Good Southern cooking always involves some type of cooking grease and these potatoes were no exception.

Move ahead 15 years to a time when that same sister now has two little girls. These same potatoes were now the golden fruits of intense battles between my niece and her Uncle Dana. The power that comes with making a 7 year old cry, just by first getting her "little tators" cannot be described, but must be experienced. This same little girl has now traded places with me in the war of the baby potatoes, her opponent being my son.

I assume that most people do not have these types of memories when they are finishing their starches. For me Small Potatoes rush in so many memories that it is difficult to tell which was better, the memories or the meal.

The wonderful world of insomnia

Sometimes I believe it would be really nice if everyone had to video tape or otherwise "record" their lives. There are so many questions I have about what is normal vs. what everyone else pretends to be normal. I am speaking science here and not some weirdo wish to be a peeping tom.

Take for example the whole nose picking .... chore. This is of course, not something that is acceptable with others around, however, we have to tell our children not to do this from a young age. It must be something that everyone does when others are not around, just that we have to learn not to do it when others are around .... right?

My real curiosity is about how everyone else prepares for sleeping at night. I have struggled for so many years with insomnia that I just want to know if it is only me? Does everyone else exaggerate how much they sleep? Do I minimize how much I am sleeping and it is actually more that would be quantified if a scientific method were used? What do I do wrong that wakes me up or what could I be doing differently to catch and keep the illusive sandman?

I have gained some insight after getting married. Vickie has been struggling for about 5 days now. Since I do not really believe that my wife is strange (other than her taste in men) I have to conclude that not sleeping comes and goes like the seasons. I seem to be no help at all as I wake up as she goes to bed for the past week. I guess it is the interruption or more specifically, the change in the temperature, sounds, and body placement. Both of us seem to go until we finally fall down.

My actual conclusion from years of thought on the subject is that I have little control of my thoughts. I worry over Vickie, children, money, work, and pretty much anything else that I cannot stop thinking about. Reading before bed seems to help, however I still wake up in the middle of the night and cannot return to sleep.

I guess the recording device would actually need to be storing thoughts as well as actions for any type of analysis, so for now, I will continue to chase the Z.

First Posting on new blog site

Having now been through a marriage, the birth of two children, a divorce, dating, and now the re-marriage / merging of two households, I can honestly say, I have never been busier or happier.

It has taken over nine months for Vickie and I to get settled enough that I have taken time to update the bostic website enough to just incorporate our blogs. WOW that site needs an upgrade!

I am hoping that I will be spending more and more time writing on both my blog and hopefully something for Geekdad once in a while. I am very interested in what the blog with grow into as I hopefully spend some time updating it.