Apparent Contradictions...

This means I get my life, my wife, and my kid back (or at least get to see them again). This week is going to be like I played a country song in reverse!

I can't believe it, we had 6" of snow yesterday. At the beginning of March, nothing like this really happens in South Carolina.

Erin, Veronica, and I all spent a lot of time just playing around and making a mess of ourselves in the snow today. Our English Bulldogs even got in the act for a little while.

I took a walk around the neighborhood for about an hour early in the morning just so that I would have an excuse to take some pictures and so that I could beat the rush of everyone getting out in the snow.

I took tons of pictures, and I will be posting them on the blog and mostly on my flickr link as time permits, but I just thought I would let you all know and to share a quick preview with you all.

Erin and I have been as sick as dogs with a nasty bug that took about three weeks to fully kick. I am just finishing 20 days of antibiotics and there are more to come.

We thought for about a week that we were going to have another child enter our family, but God did not will for this to happen for us yet.

Veronica has been really sick the last week. Crazy high fevers, numerous doctors visits, antibiotic changes, and some general quietness that is just uncommon for our house.

Finally, work has been really challenging and disheartening at times, because I have some projects that I just couldn't get the necessary participants to get on board so we could close them out, some projects have been close to finished only to have last minute setbacks that plague the possibility of keeping established deadlines, and some things that have been working are just dying because of damage to the hardware layer. All this work has come at the detriment of my family, health, rest, and in some ways sanity. A 15 hour day has been all too common during this time.

I know the next two weeks are going to be really tough at work as we still have some major initiatives that have hard deadlines to meet, but I should be more frequent in my posting and I still have several things to catch up on.

As one of the voices in man's head commented, "It was a great weekend. Saturday, I spent the whole day working on building a Hackintosh out of my Asus EEE PC. Later that evening, my family and a friend of mine from work went and had a nice dinner at Moe's and saw the local magician that performs there on Saturdays. After that, I went and saw the incredibly crappy remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still with three of my friends from work. We all had a good time and enjoyed trying to comment on the ways they had screwed up the 1951 version of the film."

"Sunday is when things really started to seem weird. I slept in a little bit late which was really nice after the long days this past week and had a great late breakfast made by my wife. We made plans to celebrate Veronica's all A's on her report card and then we watched a movie together. That is when I fell asleep on the couch and I was there until I was interviewed for this story."

Our story now continues with what appears to be a third personality inside the man's head (which this reporter surely has a psuedo-mullet), "Man it was awesome! We went to Applebee's for this big dinner (it was Veronica's pick) and I had their great Brewtus burger on the foccacia bread. I am not normally a burger dude, steak and potatoes are normally the fat guy's thing, but this was awesome. We kicked back and had a chocolate chip cookie sundae for dessert. I ate my ice cream with some of Applebee's maple butter sauce. It rocked my face off! We then went home and played two hours of our new Wii game (Carnival Games). It was all awesome, as I am a natural "carnie". We put Veronica in bed and I thought the night was going to end great, but then when we came downstairs that "dad" dude insisted on coming out and paying bills, and then one thing led to another and he started thinking about what he needed to do at work next week and before you know it the awesome weekend lay dead on the couch next to him."

All that is left now is this post and the sound of the man's wife playing a game that she and his daughter discovered on Webkinz World today under the auspices of "try to earn more money for V's online pet".

All very tragic.

Now in sports...

The first moment came about an hour after Veronica had finished opening her Christmas presents and she came downstairs after an hour or so of playing with her new toys and had a very troubled look on her face. I asked her what was wrong and she said she didn't know what to do and I told her that is was okay if she wanted to spend some more in her play room with her new toys that it was okay with her mother and I. It was then that she said, "Daddy, I have so much new stuff that I just can't decide what to play with next." What a great day to be overwhelmed with too much blessing.

The second moment came when Erin and I were sitting in the living room during our "Office" marathon and we were starting to have a junk food craving that would have made a heroin addict jealous. As we awaited the end of the episode, Erin looked at me and asked me "Would you like to share your Reese's Peanut Butter Christmas Tree with me?" What made me laugh so hard is that it was one of the stocking stuffer candies that she had given me in my Christmas stocking and we were both pretty sure that if I had said no that she was still going to eat it and not really share any of it with me anyway. I need to find more gifts that I can give like that.