Happy Anniversary, Mike and Robyn!

We went up to Kansas City yesterday to attend a surprise backyard bbq party thrown by my cousin, Jackie, for her parents' 30th anniversary. She did a fabulous job planning the entire event. We were able to come over with my grandma and a friend of hers a couple of hours early to help Jackie set up. Several of her local friends helped, too. We met many cousins from my dad's side of the family who I didn't even know existed, and everyone had a great time. Mike and Robyn (the honored guests) were quite surprised by the whole thing. Here are a few pictures from the event (a perfect opportunity for Jeff to try out his new camera), and the rest of the pictures can be seen here.

Jackie had this banner made to commemorate the occasion, pretty cool, huh?

Jackie waits (in great excitement) for her parents to arrive

Uncle Mike and Aunt Robyn arrive at the party

Dad and daughter hugging (awww)

Uncle Mike and Aunt Robyn cut the cake
(with the knife from their wedding cake!)

The happy couple share a smooch

Uncle Mike and Reese (another cutie-pup member of our family)

Jeff takes a break from being the photographer

Michelle is caught by the photographer

Oooooh - an arty torchiere shot!

The end of the evening... everyone gathers to watch a special DVD that Jackie made featuring pictures of her parents' 30 years together.

Christmas in (almost) July

Jeff's new toy started to arrive today...





We're still waiting on a couple more pieces (like the right lens for indoor shots), but they'll be here soon!

Really?

I'm amazed and amused by this:

Click here

For these reasons:

A) Someone invented a sport called extreme ironing.
B) Someone made a webpage featuring the sport of extreme ironing.
C) It has a worldwide following.
D) These people lug ironing boards along with them on vacation. That soooo will not be happening in my life.

Long overdue projects

I have no real news to write about, so I'll just fill everyone in on some projects I've been working on lately in an effort to spur myself on towards finishing them.

Colorado Scrapbook
We took a vacation to Colorado in September of 2006. I started working on the scrapbook shortly after we got home, and continue working on it to this day. I think the main issue with finishing it is that we took about a bazillion pictures, and it's just too hard to cut back on what I want put in the scrapbook, so it's a bit overwhelming. I'm not a really detailed, fancy, elaborate page sort of scrapbooker, I'm a slap everything at right angles to each other, maximize use of the page scrapper. I fill in empty spots with ticket stubs and themed stickers. It's really not that difficult. Yet I've only managed to complete about 60% of this one. I can't start on our latest trip (which I'm planning to do entirely digitally) until I finish this one. I fear we'll have more trips backing up before too long.

Pile-o-Colorado

One of my simple, yet space effective pages

Another maximum use of space page (yes, it's very engineery)

I did manage to crank out our Seattle trip from August 2007 in the middle of doing Colorado, though, so that's a positive. It was all digital, and done in about a week. These are easy.

The cover

My favorite picture from this trip is on the right side

Bedroom Curtains
Shortly after we moved into our new house in October 2004, I purchased fabric to make custom curtains for our master bedroom. We hung up some old curtains on an old, undersized curtain rod for "temporary" privacy. My new fabric sat in a closet for the next 3.5 years. Earlier this year, we went out and bought some coordinating fabric for a stripe across the middle, and some liner fabric for increased darkness. About a month ago, we ordered a curtain rod. We hung the curtain rod in the bedroom, and I finally started working on the new curtains last weekend. Perhaps, by this time next year, they will be proudly showcased in our bedroom. Here's a couple shots of this work in progress:

The new rod hangs above the old rod and curtains
(yes, it's slightly bowed, and yes, it's supposed to be that way right now)

The backside of a new panel in progress

In other curtain tales, I still need to hem some curtains in one of our guest bedrooms so they don't look like this anymore:

What a disaster. I apologize, guests of this bedroom.

That One Disastrous Area of the Yard
This is one part of our landscaping that is just a mess. Unfortunately, it's located directly outside our best guest bedroom window. I don't ever have to look at it, but our guests do. We plan to tear out all the columbines, which seem to migrate to a new location every year, rip out the non-vinca half of the ground cover, and add a spirea and some iris bulbs in their place. We also need to replace all our washed out mulch (this area got the emergency sump runoff a couple of weeks ago). The boxwood, hostas, day-lilies and grass plants can stay. They're orderly. I yearn for orderly.

How in the world did that columbine get behind the boxwood?

Errol's trapped and Fang does hot laps

This is a game that Mr. Cutie Pup (Fang) and Mr. Cutie Pup (Errol) play about once a week. It starts with fighting over a toy, then somehow Errol gets stuck down in the foyer, Fang does hot laps through the living room, pausing each time around to tease Errol, and eventually Errol escapes. It's pretty funny.

Gym update and other activities

First thought: How exactly does a person do cardio four to five times a week for two months in a row and not lose an ounce of weight? I know I'm not eating more than I used to, so I'm just telling myself that my fat is all converting to muscle, and therefore I'm losing fat, but the added muscle is keeping my weight the same. Jeff hasn't lost any, either, so I'm not too sad or anything. We're going to keep it up.

Second thought: Jeff got to add weight training into his workout about two weeks ago, and I got to add it in this week. Our trainers seem to think that we should be at the gym for approximately two hours five days a week in order to get all our prescribed cardio and weights done, which we think is just ludicrous. We'll keep to our 4 days a week for about 1 to 1.5 hour schedule, with puppy walks on the off days, thank you very much. It makes us feel like we're neglecting the dogs when we're gone from home that much. As Jeff so appropriately said the other night, "The gym is interfering with my lounging around time." LOL Again, we're going to keep going, but it seems a bit silly to expect normal, full time working people with other activities to spend that much time at the gym.

Third thought: We had another summer intern night with people from work last night. This time we spent the evening at All Star Sports, which is a mini-golf, batting cages, go-karts, driving range, arcade and fair ride type place. We got bbq sandwiches provided for dinner, then we joined another couple and their newborn (3 weeks old) baby for a round of mini-golf. We opted for the flooded course (yes, it continues to rain here), in order to better emulate true golf conditions (and to avoid the very long line for the other course). That was fun, and afterwards the other couple took off to rescue their other kids from the sitter. Jeff and I wandered over to the go-karts, where we stood in line for about five minutes before deciding that we really didn't want to wait a couple of hours to ride the go-karts. So, we went over to the driving range and hit a couple buckets of balls for the first time in about five years. That was also fun, be we both managed to injure ourselves slightly by pulling muscles we didn't know existed. It was a fun night, and it was free, which was fabulous.

Fourth thought: The gutter extensions we put on seem to be working. In our continuing tale of rain every day, not once has the sump pump had to work more than once every five minutes or so, so it seems that the water is staying away from the foundation. We're still having some issues with the system itself, so we're going to have a plumber come out to check it out soon. We think it may be vapor locked somewhere, but we're not sure. Either way, the current set-up is working well, and we're not worried about the basement flooding anytime soon. Now if we could only get the stupid storms to come during the day, and not in the middle of the night so we can get a full night of sleep without having to turn on the television to check for tornadoes...

Sump pump wars

Remember how I mentioned that we had been having a LOT of rain this year? Well, we had another storm on Thursday night which dumped about 3 inches on us in a short amount of time. We started the evening with an hour in the basement because our tornado sirens were going off. Nothing happened, and we got the all clear on that and went back upstairs.

Shortly thereafter, at about 10 pm, Jeff noticed that our sump pump was running nearly continuously, and so he went down to the basement to check on it. There was water pouring in through the drain pipe at a furious rate, and it was gaining on the pump. We grabbed a couple of large containers to start bailing water out of the sump and into the floor drain that runs into the city sewer system, which is conveniently located right next to our sump. We were able to keep up with the flow, but there was no sign of it stopping anytime soon. I was using a 12 cup container to bail, and it took about two seconds to fill from the drain pipe. It was pretty unbelievable how much water there was pouring in!

Sometime in the middle of bailing, Jeff bumped into the pipes coming up out of the sump hard enough to disconnect the backflow valve where two pipes connect. All of a sudden, we had water spraying everywhere! There was water spraying out of the pipe where the pump was still pumping, and there was water spraying back into the house from the other end of the pipe where water had already been pumped, but didn't make it all the way out. It was actually quite impressive - both streams of water met in the middle and then fanned out all over our utility room (and all over Jeff). Jeff kept a level head and got the valve and the two pipes reattached quickly, and I dried off the room with some towel. We had a good laugh about that later.

Our sump pump system pumps water up to ground level, then out the side of the house into a pipe that then turns back underground and runs all the way out to the back corner of our yard, the lowest part of our property, where it pops up out of the ground. When the system is working properly, you can see the water bubble up out of the ground at the end of the line. Well, the storm had dumped so much rain on our already waterlogged ground that that whole area of the yard was flooded with water about four inches deep. So the water coming out of the sump line didn't stand much of a chance of making it out under the weight of the rest of the standing water, and the poor sump pump couldn't overcome it. We discovered this when Jeff took a quick break from bailing water.

We needed a solution fast or the basement was going to flood if the water kept coming, so we popped the pressure relief valve located just outside the house before the pipes go back underground. Water started shooting out of that, and this let the sump pump catch up and keep up with all the water that was being dumped into it. So now we had a continuous fountain of water that was just dumping out right next to the foundation, and with more rain on the way, there was no hope of getting the flow of water into the sump to slow down if we just kept recycling the same water. So, Jeff started digging trenches to try and direct some of the flow away from the foundation. That didn't really work.

Jeff called a couple of neighbors to see if anyone had any extra PVC pipe or anything else laying around that we could use to direct the water. One of them, Randy, the guy who built our house, said he'd start raiding his job sites around the neighborhood to see if there was anything. About this time, our next door neighbor, Jerry, noticed us running around with our shovel and flashlight, and came over to help. He calmed us down a bit and offered to go look for equipment, too. Eventually, Randy drove up. He hadn't found anything at any of his job sites. Jerry took off to go to a friend's house who he thought might have something. At about the same time, Randy noticed that another job site right across the street from us had the garage door open, and as he was friends with that builder, he went on over to see if they had anything. Lo and behold, they had a ton of PVC pipe and a bunch of different joints sitting there in the garage. He liberated a bunch of stuff and we rigged up a pipe system that ran from the relief valve over into another part of the yard. Yes, there was lots of duct tape involved. Jerry came back and we all went back to our respective homes.

It was about midnight by this time, and after making sure that the sump pump was able to keep up with all the water, we called it a night. We replaced our borrowed PVC with new purchased PVC on Friday night and returned the borrowed ones to the builder across the street. He didn't mind that we borrowed his stuff during our emergency, which was nice. Another neighbor brought over a new backflow valve to replace the one we knocked loose in the basement, so we installed that, too.

Today we got up and spent the morning cleaning up the landscaping we destroyed while furiously trenching. We also hooked all the sump pump pipes back into their original configuration. Unfortunately, there still seems to be a problem with the system. Water still flows out, but not as fast as it should, and our pump has to work harder to push it through than when we let the water flow out of the relief valve that we hooked up yesterday. We think there might be something trapped in the line between the side of the house and the back corner of the yard. We're going to try and snake it out sometime soon to see if we find anything in there. If we can't, I guess we'll be calling a plumber. For the time being, we went back to our duct taped PVC system which seems to be working well.

We also hooked up several gutter extensions around the house to try and direct water farther away from our foundation. We have clay soil here, and for the first couple of years, had absolutely no drainage into the sump. In the last year or so, I think that water has finally worked little paths through the clay, maybe along tree roots and maybe just through erosion and it's easily reaching the sump. Hopefully the gutter extensions we put on today will slow it down a bit. Isn't home ownership fun!

Here are some pictures. You deserve them if you made it through the whole story!

There were pretty clouds before the storm arrived.

The flooding of the yard commences. The sump drain is located between the white well cap and the grass plants in the back corner of the yard.

This is where the sump water exits the house. It's supposed to go down. Now it goes up and over.

Our new drain pipe. Aren't you impressed? Isn't it lovely? :)

Little paws

I love it when Errol sits like this. I think it's just too cute that all four of his paws fit in such a little space.

Blah blah blah

We don't have much to report on this week, so I'll bore you with tales of day to day life at our house.

Jeff met with his personal trainer for the second time early this week (while I got a haircut and a relaxing scalp massage, heh heh) and received instructions on how to add upper body weights and ab exercises to his existing cardio routine. There was some more "I wanna quit the gym" for about a day, but I offered to start doing the ab exercises with him, and we now suffer through them together on our off gym days at home. Fang and Errol seem to think that whenever Jeff and I are laying on the floor doing crunches is prime time to romp all over us and attack each other under where our feet go, which makes us bust into laughter, effectively increasing our ab exercising past the necessary. When we laid down to do our ab stuff this afternoon, Errol very supportively laid down between us and flopped over on his back with his feet up in the air. It was a picture perfect moment, but as we were all on the floor in the office, and the camera was in the kitchen, out of Fang's short reach, we weren't able to capture a shot...

We spent this evening at our annual church comedy concert and ice cream social. Somehow, we managed to book Tim Hawkins for the show. It was great. That guy is incredibly funny. Most of the jokes were geared towards the adults, which was fine by me, but he did all these goofy noises and actions that the kids just loved. The first hour was spent doing stand up, and then he spent the second hour singing parody songs. He had the entire audience rolling most of the time. Be sure to check him out if he's ever in your area (or perhaps on YouTube).

The only other thing to report around here is that we are having some crazy spring weather this year. I really love a good thunderstorm, and we've been having them several days a week for the last three or four weeks. This is cool by me, except for the fact that about half of our day lilies, which happen to be planted around downspouts, have drowned. Yes, drowned. In Kansas. Hmm. We did witness a really neat-o rainbow (that rhymed) on our way home from church tonight. The sun was just above the horizon and below the thunderstorm clouds in the west, and was shooting a beam of light over to the thunderstorm clouds in the east. There was a double rainbow with small dark clouds floating across in front of it. It was awesome. Too bad the camera was in the kitchen...

Dinner with the fam

As I mentioned in a previous post, we met up with a bunch of Michelle's family for dinner in Salina last Saturday night. We took a few pictures of the crowd, none particularly good, but for those of you who are interested in seeing what everyone looks like nowadays, here we are. We had fun catching up and teasing Dan about everything (cause he's the littlest, of course).

Becky, Ashley, Nathan, Dan, Bill and Doris

Ashley, Nathan and Dan

Matthew, Bill and Joella

Don and Becky