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I never claim to be the most observant person, but in my nearly 4 decades of time on this planet, yesterday was the first time that I put on two different shoes and didn’t notice.  And although I didn’t notice until I got to work…None of my co-workers noticed at all.  So this mystery may never be solved, but now I know that I can pull of weird wardrobe experiments and nobody will care.

Not that life is ever really "normal"; it is nice to have some routine and pleasantness to your day. Finally, after a string of 'unfortunate events', I think we are finally leveling off to normal days. The last few weeks we have been dealing with colds, sewer backups, broken cell phones, and breaking down vehicles.

It is nice to be finally getting back into our crazy day-to-day activities. Back to camping, scouts, and taxing the kids around. Ah, the simple pleasures.

Time to take a breath, look around, and refocus on the important things in life... Family and friends. In times like these, it is sometimes easy to forget how lucky we really are.

After months of planning, we finally had the Cub Scout Blue and Gold Banquet.  I think it went very well.  It was held in the School’s Gym.  Michelle did a great job with the decorations and the guest list.  We had a great turn out!  Over 180 people! 

Maxwell had invited the Mayor when he met him at the Mayor’s Youth Commission dinner.  To our surprise, the Mayor came.  It was very cool of him, the boys thought it was pretty neat that the Mayor came to their Blue and gold banquet.

There were some awesome skits done by the boys and almost everyone received their advancement awards.  It was a very good banquet.  Now we can focus our attention to the Pinewood Derby!

Back to 24 hours of Scouts at our house! 

After some time trying to avoid the latest internet meme, I finally have given in. This 'game' is making its way around the internet and Facebook. Here are the rules as found in Facebook:

So here are 25 random things about me:

It’s that time of year where I work on the yearly photo calendar and take some Christmas pictures of the kids. Certainly makes me NOT miss the days working in a photo studio at Christmas time. Trying to get three kids to all sit still and look towards the camera at the same time is certainly more difficult that giving a litter of cats a bath. (click on the picture to see more)

The Mayor came to Max's school today and presented the Mayor's Youth Commission Award to Max on the morning TV announcements.

Max was only a little nervous. Of course, he was on TV in front of the whole school with the Mayor and the Principle. But He did very well. We are so proud of him.
 

 

 

We were very happy and surprised to receive a letter from the Mayor's office. It seems that Max was nominated and was awarded the Mayor's Youth Commission Award. We had not even known about the nomination. It seems that his 3rd grade teacher (Miss Singer) had sent in a nomination for him.

The committee chose nine (9) winners and he was one of them. We went down to city hall and Max met the Mayor and received his award. He will also be recognized at his school later this week.

There is really nothing that gives you an appreciation for life, than to almost loose yours.

My car had a soft tire that I needed to fill up. My normal routine when adding air to a tire, is plugging in my air compressor so it starts filling the tank, then proceed to check and fill the tire. When the tire is full, I usually walk back to the compressor unplug it and hang up the hose. On this day, I happen to check all the tires. As I was walking back towards the air compressor, I thought “geez, that thing is still running…Normally it would have shut off by now.”

Listening to my spidey sense, I decided to wait until the compressor shut off before walking up to it. And it’s a good thing I did, because it never shut off… It exploded.

To me, the air compressor made a popping sound…In actuality, my wife and kids heard a loud explosion from inside the house. (This also knocked a large picture off the wall.)

I have been back at work for a week now, and have finally rested from all the Cub Scout activity. After having a very nice “4th of July” with the family, I had a week at Camp Oh-Da-Ko-Ta with thirteen (13) Cub Scouts. This year’s camp went very well; the kids did a great job of staying focused and getting to their activities. The favorite activity, like most years, was of course: BB guns, followed by the close second: lunch.

After a week of ‘day’ camp with the younger boys, we got to camp out with the older Webelos at resident camp. The program is very similar to the day camp with more advanced activities for the older boys. (Like boats and cub cars). We got some rain the first night, but the weather was not that bad the rest of the weekend. Max and his friend set up his tent all by themselves, I was very impressed. I was even more impressed that it did not leak after the rainy first night.

I had a very good time. I sure hope all the kids did too.

See some pictures here:
http://pack567.smugmug.com

Seems that all our Cub Scout camping trips are on "bad weather days." Our spring family campout was no exception.

We arrived at 8:00a to a half flooded campsite; the part that was not flooded was grassy but soggy. We set up our tents in a relatively dry area and then the rain came. It pretty much rained all day.

The weather forecast had the temp dropping in the thirties for night time so we reluctantly cried "uncle" and packed up the gear. Of course, after the car was loaded the sun came out and the sky cleared up. We had already committed to aborting so we did not stay overnight, but we did have a nice campfire before we departed.