one ton gorilla

Well tonight we packed up to go to youth group as usual. Arrived early and it seemed to me there were more than the normal amount of youth hanging around outside. we parked unloaded and I headed into the building. It was dark. hrm, the building is never dark. I went through the door and SURPRISE! HAPPY BIRTHDAY! about 100 people had gathered in the church to surprise me. hrm, i thought, now what do i do? My defenses kicked in and I thought to myself okay, just make your way through the crowd of birthday well wishers and put your stuff down. After reality set in, I had a good time. Got to spend a some time with friends and family. There was tons of food to be had, no better way to celebrate my year of weight loss and my birthday than to pig out, the best of which was the chocolate cake with peanut butter icing. YUM. Worth every carb. So now the party is over, I need to thank everyone for showing up, I appreciated your thoughtfulness & kindness. I most of all need to thank, My Wife, My Sister, My Mother & Pam Gibble. Four women who planned, carried out and sponsored my Surprise Party. Thank you for effort. It will be a Surprise I will not forget for a long time.

I can not believe I will have to wait six more days to see what happens next. arrrrgh!

Been thinking about moving my office to my basement since we bought our house. The closest I came to accomplishing this in the past 4 years was to ask a friend what it would cost last fall. Sadly that is how far things have progressed until last week. Last week things finally worked out and I called my friend again to find out when we could get our basement done. He called on Monday to say he was gonna stop by and measure a few things. So he did and while he was there he said, "and by the way we can start tomorrow." Hello, That was a shocker. So I said, sure let's roll. And everyday this week we have had people working at our house. The coolest part of this has been Caleb. Our friend, Dan immdeiately took him under his wing and invited him to spend the day helping in the basement. Well Tuesday morning Caleb was up with the sun, staring out the front window and waiting for the men to show up. He had his work clothes on and his plastic toolbox filled with measuring devices that he got from Grandpa for his birthday. Once the men arrived Caleb spent the day in the basement with them. Watching their every move. I got the biggest kick out of going down to the basement a few times a day to see what he was up to. I was amazed at the fact that my 4 1/2 year old son could be kept busy/etertained all day. One afternoon I stopped down to check in with 'The Men' Caleb was holding a spare pack of nail gun nails, he walked up to Dan and said, "you need these." "Well soon, but not yet," Dan said. He lifted his nail gun, shot one more nail and his clip was empty. Hmmm, how did Caleb know? Funny little boy. By Friday Caleb was using the cordless drill and a hammer to build small things with scraps of wood. When afternoon came and the men started packing up, Caleb said, "why are you packing up the tools?" They explained that they were done and would not be coming back. Caleb hung his head and went upstairs and cried. I went up to comfort him, I said, "you will miss the men?" Caleb said, "yeah AND they are taking the tools. How am I gonna build my See Saw?" After the men were gone I whipped out my small stash of power tools and my little cordless drill and helped caleb finish his see saw. He was happy to have use of my tools, but he let me know that I didn't have as many tools as the men did. But somehow he made do.

If your baby doesn't like Apples or Bananas you are in trouble if you want to feed them baby food. Seems to me like 90% of all baby food is made of Apples & Carrots. The title on the label doesn't disclose this as much as ingredient list on the back. BABY FOOD RULE OF THUMB: 1) if the baby food has the word dinner in the title the main ingredient will be carrots, example: Turkey dinner: main ingredient carrots. 2) if the baby food has dessert in the title the main ingredient will be apples. example: Blueberry & Cream Dessert: main ingredient apples. So have fun feeding your child Apples & Carrots for every meal cause more than likely that is what is in their dinner & desserts .

In order to save money and time I decided to run my own electric for my office. I taught myself how to do electric when my last house needed rewired from the ground up and the bill came to $8,000. So after paying for that I decided that I needed to learn how to run wire myself. Since I am an electronic geek I figured that it shouldn't be that hard and it hasn't been. So I wired 9 outlets, 5 lights, 1 ethernet cable, 1 phone line, 1 cable-TV line and I added 5 breakers to my panel. 5 breakers? Brian are you nuts? Well, yes I am. I wanted to have a bunch of breakers for all my electronic equipment. My computers & monitors can have separate breakers and what not. Not a necessity by any means, but it made me feel all electrically powerful.

Drywall is going up tomorrow. Got notice today we would have dry wallers in the basement at 7am in the morning. So i have been finishing up wiring and moving a few things, and preparing the basement to get one step closer to being my office.

I wanna let you in on a secret, insurance companies are out to make money on you. And if you find yourself in a position where the insurance company can not make money on you, they will figure out a way to get rid of you. Went over to my mom's house today(cause our house smells of glue) she was on the phone with her prescription drug company(Express Scripts). She has one of those companies that you pay $20 a month and mail your prescription to them and they send you a month or 3 month supply. Well mom has tons of pain and is on ACTIQ a fairly expensive narcotic lollipop. She sucks on 3 of them every few hours 24/7/365. She goes through hundreds of them a month. They arrive at her house (when they arrive) in 54 cases of 30 lollipops each, this shipment costs my mom's drug company $9,000 she pays $20. Obviously this is a huge loss for Express Scripts(not recommending them). I am sure the company doesn't pay full retail of $9,000 for the lollipops but I bet they still loose a good bit of money. So how does the company deal with there loss & my mom's prescriptions. They are out to screw her over. There is not a single order that has gone through the express scripts system that they haven't messed with her. They have slowed her order down, lost her order, forgot to pre-authorize her, made her take one prescription and break it into two prescriptions, lost one of the two prescriptions. Every time they mess up they require my mother to go back to her doctor make him write a new prescription and mail it in, they then do not expedite her order, they start over from the beginning every time. They have managed to slow down her delivery, have made her run out of medication for weeks before refilling, leaving my mother in pain. I have two guesses as to why this is happening: 1) Express Scripts is incompetent, in which case they should not be in charge of filling prescriptions. 2) Express Scripts is out to stall my mother from getting her medication on time. For every day they can prolong my mother from getting her meds they save money. It is much cheaper to pay a telephone operator $6 an hour to listen to my mother complain than fill her $9,000 order. I am recommending my mother, who has been documenting all this in a journal to get a lawyer. I figure the only way she can get any satisfaction out of Express Scripts is to take them to court for false representation. This way the insurance company will have to weigh the cost of a lawsuit vs. filling my mother's prescription, this may or may not motivate them more. I wish it wouldn't come down to this, but i wonder what our other choices are.
Others complaining online about Express Scripts : Consumer Affairs

Saturday Evening when I finally sat down after a day of working around the house I noticed that my wedding ring was missing from my thumb. I had placed my ring on my right thumb cause it is my only phalange that will still hold my ring in place(due to my large thumb knuckle). My heart suddenly sunk. My wedding ring was gone! It had slid off my fingers several times in the past, but every time I had noticed immediately and picked it up. This was the first time my ring vanished from my finger without my notice. I had spent most of the day working in the basement or in the barn so where to look? My first instinct was that i would find my ring in the washer or dryer. Most of the times my ring has fallen off for me it has been doing laundry. Moving heavy wet towels from the washer to the dryer has led to my ring being slid off my finger. Well the ring was not in the washer or dryer. As the day passed my ring was not found. Late Saturday evening I was studying for our Youth Bible Study and read a bit about D. L. Moody and how he placed his faith in God to the point where he would only tell God of his needs through prayer and ask that God would answer his prayer in such a way that Moody would know the answer was from Him. So late night Saturday I prayer for my ring I asked God that he would help reunite me with my ring and that I would know that He was responsible for answering my prayer. Not sure why I did this, but I did. Well a few days passed and my ring never appeared, until today. This afternoon, Shelly called from upstairs she found it. Where was it? Sitting on our bookshelf in the hallway. Let me let you in on a secret. I NEVER, NEVER, NEVER have taken my ring off my finger for more than a moment. I never lay my ring anywhere. When I went to the hospital and laid on the operation table, I kept my ring on. They taped it to my body. I would have NEVER laid my ring on the bookshelf cause I NEVER laid my ring anywhere EVER. Are you getting the picture? If my ring had fallen off my finger, How did it end up on the bookshelf? It was God.

Ok, I have been moved by a TV commercial. No, don't pass the kleenex, there is no AT&T reach out and Hallmark someone moment for me. The commercial I am into is by Toyota and stars a tire of all things. I must admit I am not into the tire it is just the song. Did some searching on the internet and found that other people like the commercial too. Finally pinpointed the name of the song, "Beautiful Life" which is performed by a band named FISHER. So I headed over to iTUNES to find out that song isn't downloadable, actually the song doesn't exist anywhere yet. According to FISHER'S website the song will be part of their new album due out in March 2005. Ouch, a long time for me to wait. The only hope i have to listen to this song is based on the fact that Toyota has received an overwhelming amount of inquiries about the commercial that they are considering making the commercial version of the song available as a downloadable MP3 from their website. Here's hoping.