Where Has The Time Gone?

Really?! It’s been three days since a posting was done!!! I feel like there should be some grand excuse that has prevented a posting from completion and publishing. Oh yea, there are these little plaid dressed gnomes that are loose in the house. The run around and sing and dance, but shout somewhat offensive (PG-13) remarks between songs. Normally they are easy to ignore, but they have gotten really difficult to deal with the last couple of days; and the time that is normally devoted to writing a post has been consumed by chasing them around.  

I just got home from work – completing my first full tour (3 days) back. During the second night, we had a call at 3am – which I would have thought would have been easier to deal with since that is about when Ezra wakes up every night, but for some reason still held the same difficulty as before. I suppose that it could have been the fact that I only went to bed at midnight, but that would be too easy to blame it on. 

That morning (Friday), I went straight from work to meet up with Dad. Hunter is also in town visiting (before the IAFC conference next week) and he came along on a ‘morning at the office’ of sorts. I hadn’t had the opportunity to visit his new office yet, so he invited Hunter and me along to hang out with him during the morning. We had the chance to attend some meetings on a current project and to meet some people that he deals with daily. It was a lot of fun, and extremely educational on many different levels. That evening, Ahna, Ezra and I went down to my parent’s house to have dinner and watch the opening ceremonies of the Olympic games. 

Admitingly, the ceremonies were very impressive to watch – and actually held my attention, unlike the previous couple of Olympics. The choreography was extraordinary and the technology was really cool to watch. On the same token, I still have a really difficult time with all of the “I Love China” talk that went into the dialogue and commentary during the ceremony. While we can understand that most of the blame for all of the atrocities in that country can rest with the government, it was still hard to watch it and not have them mention the fact that an entire province’s power was diverted to ensure that there were no problems during the ceremony. The duplicity behind the harmony kanji and the peace dove did not rest well with me, but were apparently completely overlooked by NBC. This really wasn’t a situation where you would have to look for faults to bring up the truths, the faults are always in play and the truths are on the surface…we just seem to be afraid to talk about them (evidence Bush’s speech the day before arriving in China). I suppose that might be partially due to the fact that they own our national debt…oh, and they are funding the war efforts right now.

Enough politics for now, back to the Ezra stuff. While I was at work yesterday, the ladder truck was sent down to participate in the annual Douglas County Fair and Parade. It’s the only parade each year in Castle Rock, and as such it’s highly attended. I know that there were several thousand people there – lining the streets for the two mile route 5 and 6 deep. The best part was seeing Ahna and Ezra standing on the corner near the downtown fire station and being able to have him see me in the truck. Hopefully someone got some pictures that I can find. 

Ezra’s personality continues to develop each day…and his latest thing is TV. We are struggling to keep him away from it, but he is really attracted to the light and movement. When he is sitting with us in the living room and finds the screen, we are now turning it off or turning him around…there will be plenty of TV time for him in the future. But it’s hard for us….the Olympics are on. 

I think that pretty much brings us back up to date. Here are a couple of photos of Pike’s Peak…taken from Castle Rock at sunrise on Friday morning. I happened to look south as I was on my way to meet up with Dad and saw the cool looking clouds. In both pictures (better with the one with Pike’s Peak on the left), you can see our townhouse complex on the bottom right.