Preparing for Katie's Bridal Shower

Hi everyone. It's Shannon. I guess I'm supposed to begin blogs introducing myself since it links to Robert's Facebook page. He doesn't want people wondering why he is throwing a bridal shower :) And yes, I am still boycotting Facebook. We'll see how long that lasts, but it just seems like too much work.

Anyways, this is blog, as always, is a bit outdated. Katie's Bridal Shower was last Sunday, and I'm just now talking about preparing for it.

Since I'm a teacher I have my summers off and need things to keep

me entertained... so I had lots of fun preparing for the bridal shower.

The other bridesmaids and I decided to have a wine themed dinner

party. I decided to take old wine bottles and spray paint them ivory

and then and then add black and red decoration. After inserting red

flowers and ivy, they looked very classy. You can't see the wine bottle

in this picture, but you get the idea.

I also made wine charms as party favors. Each party favor was tied to a glass wineglass. Guests were able to choose a glass based on which wine charm they liked and then put the wine charm on their wine glass.

Of course I also had to hand paint glasses for the bride, mother of the bride, and the 3 bridesmaids. Unfortunately, I had a mishap with the bride's glass. She was supposed to have silver wedding rings painted on her glass, but I ran out of the correct paint. The one that I tried to use rubbed right off, so Katie's glass ended up having red hearts on it also. Oh well...

The one food item that I didn't make was the cake. But it turned out so cute that I had to include a picture. Christine did a wonderful job. I did. however, make the rest of the food. For appetizers we had tiropitas, spinach artichoke dip, bruschetta, and sausage bites. Dinner was a salad and homemade spaghetti and meatballs (with the marinara sauce and the meatballs made from scratch. It's sooooo much yummier that way!) There was supposed to be Parmesan twists also, but there was a minor catastrophe and they had to be scratched last minute. I just hate when things go wrong on spot.

All in all, it was a successful party. Now I can plan the Bachelorette Party!!!!

Fourth of July

Well it was a pretty nice fourth of July weekend. On the third I got some more yard work done and did a little napping before we headed out with some of our friends to the Frog's Breath cheese shop in Orange circle. We did a beer and cheese sampling string that consisted of about eight different cheeses and four or five beers.

Two of the beers I have had before and didn't really enjoy very much, but a new white ale and an amber I hadn't tasted were pret

ty interesting. Shannon and I did find a cheese that we both really liked called Tintern. It is a creamy cheddar cheese with some chives and shallots. We bought some for our fourth of July party the next day at Shannon's parents momentarily forgetting that her father is allergic to onions, and that her brother doesn't really enjoy them either. Oh well....$7 well spent.

The outing included the usual suspects, starting on the left and working around: My beautiful wife, Ben and Carrie, myself, Meredith and Dan (who are getting married soon) and Chris.

It was quite a pleasant afternoon. I can't say I regret moving out of Orange, but I do miss hanging out in the circle.

Yesterday Carrie came down and she and Shannon went to Lake Mission Viejo. There's nothing like getting a call when you are at work from your wife telling you, "Carrie and I are laying out at the lake right now, and I love you for moving us to Mission Viejo, but now I am never going to want to live more than a hop, skip and a jump from the lake."

On the fourth we spent the day with Shannon's

family hanging out by the pool drinking mango

pina coladas (really just pina coladas made using Malibu mango rum instead of light rum). Her brother Sean has a new puppy and he is a blast to play with. He is not quite used to the water yet, but has plenty of energy on land.

In the evening we had a few people down and watched fireworks from our driveway. One more benefit of living near the lake.

That's the update for now. As usual life is great and we couldn't be more fortunate than to have loving family and friends to hang out with.

Rob and Shannon

As usual...

Well as usual it has been a really long time since our last post.

I woke up at around 5 AM this morning to a couple of rambunctious cats. Not remembering whether I had fed them last night, and still in kind of a haze I stumbled down the hall and pored some of their diet food into their bowl.

Suddenly I knew I was up, and as usual there was no way I was getting back to sleep. If I even tried I would more than likely just toss and turn and keep Shannon awake. So I checked my email. Glancing at my chat section I noticed the following people showing as online: Rob Heaton, Susan Mack and Richard Lagrand. Hmmmm, I wonder which side of the family my early morning genes come from...

So at any rate, I got up and worked some more on the side yard, trying to get an area cleared out to plant our Orange tree.

Monday was my brother Jeff's birthday and we all went to Lucille's to celebrate. As usual the nephews were very cute. Here's a couple of pictures from a different night at a restaurant:

Life has really been pretty great recently. So far we have managed to be relatively unaffected by the downturn in the economy. We had feared for a while that Shannon's school might go under and she would be out of work, but she just found out she will be signing her contract for next year on Wednesday which is definitely a relief.

As far as my work goes, I love it. I really enjoy everything about the job from the work I do, to the people I work with. I have a good mix of projects; some fairly mindless like proof reading, and some more exciting that keep me busy all day long.

I've started to lose interest in one of my favorite

games recently, which I am sure my cats and wife will be grateful for. They are making a fundamental change to the game that kind of bugs me, but also I just don't enjoy it as much anymore.

I am sure some people will think, "He's finally grown out of it" which is a mentality that really irks me. I have had two conversations in the past week along those lines. One with my co-worker Sarah, and one with my mother in law.

Sandee (my mother in law) mentioned how she can't understand how someone could sit playing a video game for more than an hour, and how she felt video games were for kids; a mentality that prevails amongst the pre-atari generations. After some chatting she did admit that this was likely a bias because she had not grown up with games, and since she had only ever really seen kids play them, she labels them "childish." Keep in mind 90 year olds still love gathering around a Scrabble board or playing a rousing game of hearts. "But that's different, there is a social aspect to those games" you might cry. If you do, you clearly don't understand modern "video games."

With Sarah the conversation centered more around various forms of recreation. In the end I pointed out that essentially some of the most intelligent people I know use video games as an escape device similar to how many people use books. We talked about how most people would perceive someone who reads books in their spare time--as opposed to playing video games-- would likely be considered intelligent. To me, that conclusion is ridiculous. Reading a grocery store romance novel seems no better an indicator of intelligence than matching gems in bejeweled. But the reality is, most people don't distinguish one video game from another. They are simply all "video games." To me this is like lumping Shakespeare in with Stephenie Meyer. At any rate, it was actually a really good conversation with a lot of good points made on both sides.

Side note: One of the points I made was that if you spend 3 hours fishing and don't catch anything, it is looked upon far more favorably than if you spend 3 hours chatting with 24 people from other parts of the world while playing a video game. Another co-worker mentioned an old saying; "Fishing is the only activity where you can spend hours trying to outsmart the dumbest animal in the world, and consistently lose." And yes, I love fishing too.

So needless to say I will not be done with games any time soon.

Last night we started to really lay out the Haunted House for this year, and as soon as we get the side yard done, I need to get to work on it. It is really going to be something this year, so if you can make it out I really encourage it. We plan on hosting it once again to benefit the Orange County Food Bank by asking visitors to bring canned food.

That's all for now, hopefully not another long stretch before I post again. Happy Fourth of July!

Callback

So I FINALLY got a call back from the Dr. doing the Keratoconus study. They have been approved to start screening patients and want me to forward my documentation which I will do in the next couple of days here.

I guess they review the documentation and then call me in if I have been approved as a candidate.

At any rate, exciting :)

And...we're back.

So we had a little hiatus from posting there as the holidays got busy and we both got sick. I had Bronchitis just before Christmas which cleared up pretty quickly, but Shannon and I are both fighting a cold right now. 

I have never really had this traditional cold where your head feels like a baloon and you are stuffed up and have kind of a dry cough. The good news is that it broke last night and today I feel a lot better. Shannon however may be in for a long night as yesterday was my worst day and she is about a day behind me.

I think we probably caught it camping at San Clemente for New Year's. I know some people think being cold has nothing to do with catching a cold, but it is too convenient that we were camping in freezing weather and both got sick. 

The San Clemente campsites are really something. They are WAY better than San Onofre.

Shannon and I have some New Year's resolutions we are really going to try to keep. We have 3 goals each and then 3 family goals.

Shannon's Goals:

Grade all papers within 4 days except for major assignments.

Exercise 1 hour 3 days a week.

Pack lunches for Mon, Wed, Fri.

Robert's Goals:

Practice Piano 30 minutes a day at least 3 days a week.

Exercise 1 hour 3 days a week.

Pack lunches for Tue. and Thur.

Family Goals:

Buy a house or save $10,000 towards a down payment.

Attend church at least twice a month.

Each clean 20 minutes/day

I am sure to many they will not sound terribly ambitious, but if we did these things I think we would get on track for some bigger things in 2010.

Less Than a Week to Halloween

So it is officially 4 days to Halloween. Yeah!!!! Unfortunately, we still have quite a bit to do. I have today off of work (festival clean-up day, so the whole school is out) and Robert has Friday off. This works out well because today I am cleaning the house and finishing a few things that I still had to do to be ready for Halloween. On Friday, Rob is going to do the final set-up, etc. Hopefully, there won't be much to do on Friday.
So here is what we have done so far. Graveyard: Most of the tombstones are painted, but a few need final touches. Rob practiced the light show over the weekend and it looks awesome! I can't wait!!! Doll Room: I think it still needs a lot of work. The room is tarped and wallpapered, but that is it. Vampire Lair: Our 3 coffin doorways look very cool. One of the coffins has hanging black tarp in it so that you can't see through to the other side. The other 2 coffins still need this. Luckily, it is a very easy job that I can do tonight while watching T.V. The rest of the room still needs to be tarped, but Robert is doing that on Friday. Cornfield: I'm taking a break from painting scarecrow faces, but will finish after typing. Torture Chamber: Anthony and Granddad did an amazing job on the electric chair. It looks very realistic and has lots of noise and smoke to go along with the show. Spider Room: Anthony is still working on a pulley system (or something?) to make our HUGE spider go up and down. This room also has lots of other spiders of all sizes, spider eggs, and two skeletons wrapped up in spiderwebs. It is looking really good so far. Village: The village is done. This is still special since it was Rob's and my first Halloween project together. I really like how it looks this year and am going to have to con Robert into finding a way to store it.
Though I am excited that Halloween is almost here, I can't think what Robert and I are going to do with our time afterwards. We might have to become couch potatoes until next August, when we start getting ready again.

The Way I see it.

So today congress had their first chance to sit down with an executive of a failed financial institution and lambast him with their accusations of misappropriation of funds and lying to investors. KPCC which is the local NPR station said that if anyone had comments they could post on the KPCC blog. I got to thinking, I think I should post my comments, but in a forum someone might actually read them and respond.

The way I see it, at the root of the financial crisis is one major disease that caused three major symptoms.

The effects of greed have been advised of since ancient times. The bible warned in Luke 12:15, "Then he said to them, "Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions." I think this ancient wisdom can be seen in a different light in today's environment.

So who was greedy? Who was the one who caused this all? Well despite Democrats efforts to pin this on the Bush administration, or Congress' efforts to pin it on the compensation for executives, the answer is that practically everybody is to blame for the financial crisis. How you might ask? Well let's look at the groups one by one:

Mortage Investors - In the lending industry large packages of loans are assembled and sold off in packages to various investors. Fannie Mae is one of the investors who purchases these loans in bulk and resells in even larger packages with insurance should the loans default. The interest that could accumulate on these large packages of loans is the vehicle for the greed of the mortgage investors.

Mortgage Lenders - One of the key elements in the equation for any mortage investor is risk vs. return. Fannie Mae long ago set the industry standard that essentially a mortgage payment should be no more than 38% of the gross household income, and that total household debt obligations should not exceed 45%. These ratios are still fairly standard for Fannie Mae mortgages. Because this standard is so honored in the industry very few Mortgage Investors would agree to any change in the ratios without serious rate increases. In a bid to get a larger piece of the pie Lenders sold investors on a "Lite-Doc" option in which homeowners without verifiable income could essential state their income. The lenders decision to allow this practice and the investors failure to keep it under control is another major cause of the decline. Borrowers could now essentially lie about their income to get a larger house that they would likely not be able to afford.

Borrowers - Borrowers took on large debt obligations that they were unable to afford. This is the same problem we see with credit cards. Personal responsibility for using credit irresponsibly always falls on the consumer. However, because the consumer votes, blame will always appear to fall elsewhere. The bottom line is that borrowers signed loan documents for a house they could not afford and in most cases, lied about their income to do so.

Brokers - Mortgage Brokers are charged with the responsibility of providing access to money. They do not, as some people believe, represent their borrower's best interest. They do however make a commission based on the borrower's decisions. If I told you I was going to sell you a car from a dealership, handle the paperwork and take a percentage of the sales price of the car as well as charge a bunch of fees you would say no way. This is exactly what most brokers did. Their motivation (greed) was not to get the best loan for the borrower, but to get the loan that made the most money for them. I should note that not all brokers were guilty here as with the other categories as well.

The disease of greed caused Deceit of investors and consumers, Inflated housing prices, Uncalculated Risk taking. Hence the crisis we are in today.

My sympathy doesn't go out to the borrowers losing their home because they thought they could afford a million dollar home on $50,000 of income, or who failed to educate themselves about the mortgage process. Nor does it go out to the banks who willfully took a greater risk to get a greater return. Or to the brokers who are now broke because they spent all the money they earned decieving borrowers. My heart goes out to the homeowners who purchased a home they could afford only to see the housing prices crash the following year.

These people are what I would call the silent victims of the crisis. Why are they silent? Because they bought homes they could AFFORD and even with the dip in housing prices they can still afford to make their payments. So they sit and wait watching the value of their investment go ever lower, praying that the greed of others will not drag the world market into such a recession that their job and therefore home might also be in jeopardy.

At any rate, those are my thoughts on the crisis. Perhaps not very eloquently conveyed, but my lunch hour is ending so it will have t do.