Seek The Substantial

Jenson and Grace make me laugh. Jenson turns two on Thursday, and we had his party on Sunday. The food was good, but there’s two funny parts. The first funny part is when we all sing “Happy Birthday” to Jenson, he gets embarassed and hides his face, and tries to act like no one can see him.

Marilea, who’s expecting within the week, Blake, Miranda, Ryan and Dad.

This is Jenson blowing out his two candles, with Uncle Ryan looking on.

So this is the other funny part. Grace is obsessed with opening presents. She loves to “help” Jenson open his as he is not as agressive as Grace is in looking at each present. As you can see by the picture below, Saralyn literally had to hold Grace to let Jenson open his presents. As an aside, I think Jenson received approximately 20 trucks and one wicked motorcycle that had a sweet guitar sound effect which I am sure that Saralyn and Darius have had their share.

Miranda and I.

I am making every attempt to give all of the dogs baths each week. We have fleas and every little bit helps. Needless to say, because Blue has very thick fur, she’s always the first one to get a bath. So I struggle to keep her next to me because she seems to hate the water, despite the fact that she loves the rain. We get done and the first thing that she does is she runs and rolls around in the dirt. The picture below is all of the dirt really ground into her hair. At this point I’m angry and I pick her up and rinse her off again, this time making sure that I have a towel near me so that I can dry her off before she gets away.

I dry her off and this is where she lays. Good times.

She’s so damn defiant.

Zoey and me.

Duk always has kind words. Thank you Duk. By the way, I hope you start feeling better. This past weekend I started looking in some of my old emails. With your permission, I’d like to post this choice prose, perhaps when I have absolutely nothing to post about.

Caption to Photo: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it.” (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off)

If I had to define validation, I would probably say it is the accomplishment of something that someone appreciates. I don’t what got me started thinking about this, but I honestly can’t remember the last time I felt like I was appreciated or validated for something that I did. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not about the “thank you” because that’s not what I’m really talking about, what I’m talking about is the validation that you get for a job well done. I love my job, it is very tiring, and it is very stressful, and every action that I take has the potential to be a life-changing decision, especially if it leads to malpractice. So, with all of these factors, I hardly have the time or the effort to truly feel like my work is validated. If I had to guess, I would imagine that none of us really feel validated for the jobs we do. I think what this all comes down to is that we all do things without really being recognized, and I think that we’ve all accepted that. In retrospect (all of five minutes), I’m not a good writer and I don’t get my point across very well.

Ashley T. asked me why I changed my calendar and I have had more problems with calendars than with anything else with this blog. Kiko had a nice interface and was very simple to use, but when I updated my calendar with a new event it didn’t translate to my blog. Thus you see the new calendar, 30boxes. I like this calendar better, it recognizes birthdays and repeats them ad naseum, as well as anniversaries. The biggest thing that you should be asking yourselves is why do I care so much about a calendar. My job with this little project is to make it as neat and read-able as possible. I want people to have no issues interacting with any of the little widgets I have on either side of this page. Simplicity.

I have other pictures of the Oklahoma City Memorial posted on Flickr that you should check out, if you enjoyed the other pictures.

Future plans for Puppy Dog Blue: Taking one of the 43 places I want to go and exploring them a little further. I think they’re being ignored.

Finally, with the NBA Finals coming up, please read Maverick Moneyball. It’s a really good website with lots of Maverick articles linked all nice and neat.

My cousin Tim and his fiance of a very long time (I think they’ve been seeing each other since Marilea’s wedding) finally got married. The ceremony was small and really nice. The food was excellent. In attendance was Uncle Charlie and two of his five, Charlie and Melissa, Gene and Ann, along with their son Matthew, my former college roommate, along with Tim’s parents, Fred and Wendy along with their other four children, Nick, Marc, Greg and Katie.

Julie, walking down with her dad.

My Mom and Miranda.

Julie and Tim.

Dad and Charlie.

This is a statue outside the memorial, there is a granite inscription at Jesus’ feet which reads “And Jesus Wept.”

Each chair represents one of those who died.

The west end of the memorial.

The inscription of names of those who died. The granite was originally in the Murrah Building.

The reflection pool.

My parents and my wife and I went to Oklahoma City for the weekend for my cousin Tim’s wedding. More on the wedding later, but I knew that if we were going to go to Oklahoma City that we should really try and visit the Oklahoma City National Memorial, which is where the following took place:

On the morning of April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh parked a rented Ryder truck with explosives in front of the complex and, at 9:02am, a massive explosion occurred which sheared the entire north side of the building, killing 168 people.

I hate taking credit for wanting to go see a memorial, but it was really special, and I think that everyone could really appreciate what this meant.

To be quite honest, it was a moving experience and I’m really glad that we all went.


This is looking down from the north east steps at the reflection pool.

I put a blue filter on my camera to give the scene a different effect. This is the west side of the memorial where the top reads 9:03.

Once again, this is the west side of the memorial.

This is the Survivor Tree, the one tree that survived the blast.

This is the front of the Memorial, the time behind this reads 9:01. It’s strange, this picture was not altered, and I can’t explain why there’s so much white light behind the beginning of the memorial. Quite honestly, I think it looks amazing.

We celebrated Ashley T.’s birthday Kaufman-style with a fish fry and intended swimming. I say intended swimming because we all intended to swim, but the weather really didn’t cooperate. It was cloudy for most of the day. Never the less, we celebrated. There were the ingredients for a good time: beer, hot-tub and bikinis. All of which I did not participate in because I’m no fun.

My beautiful wife.

Stephen, Ryan, Matt (sitting) and Jim.

Dan, Tony, J.D., Wendy, (Leslie) and Miranda.

What could be better, Brandon, with fried zuchinni, deviled egg, and A bean. Classic.

The Birthday Girl.

By the way, I’m feeling more and more pressure to keep this thing up. I seem to find people truly disappointed if I’m not updating regularly or if there aren’t enough pictures. I also hate being “that guy” who makes people pose. It’s studid (EDIT: it’s stupid to spell stupid “studid”), but I hate interrupting people’s lives. When I’m old and gray, in my jumpsuit and still blogging, I will hopefully look back and reflect on the on these times.

After gorging ourselves on fish, we watched the Mavs win game 3 and it was delicious. Every game makes me incredibly nervous and it’s very difficult to watch. I can’t fall asleep until I’ve seen what Barkley has had to say and the post game interviews on ESPNews. Never has a sport determined my mood for the next day.

Miranda
Originally uploaded by Puppy Dog Blue.

I don’t know if this is going to show up on the blog, but Flickr has done something interesting in that anyone can add a comment on a photo like I’ve done here. So, with any photo you can add a comment, almost like dialogue for that person.