Crouch's Conundrums

Whew!

This past fortnight has been crazy, and since a few of you have been riding me pretty hard about getting another post up here, I thought I'd take this Sunday night to fill you in on what's going on around here.

First, I'll oblige Aunt LoLo.  She wanted to know the table story, so here it is.  Our great-grandmother Roxie Crouch had a dining room table in her little house when she was still alive.  She'd had it quite a while, and Dad even remembered playing underneath it as a kid.  After she passed away, Uncle Jerry sold it at a yard sale.  It was bough at that yard sale by Deanie Anderson, Carrie Beth's 'Little Nanny'.  Little Nanny gave Carrie Beth the table when she moved to Louisville to furnish her new apartment.  Then, Carrie Beth and I started dating, got married, and used that very same table as our kitchen table in our first house.  Kind of a neat story, huh?  (BTW, Carrie Beth just sold that table at her yard sale this past weekend.  I doubt that it's coming back again, but if it does, I'll be sure to let everyone know.)

Anyway, moving on.  Oh yeah, the past two weeks.  Well, if you take a look in the pictures, you'll see that we've been a little busy.  Remember those little games you played as a kid where you had to slide numbered tiles around to get them in numerical order, and the plate that you were sliding them on had only one empty 'spot' so you were constantly moving tiles that you had already moved?  Well, we played a similar game last weekend, but instead of numbered tiles, we did it with rooms in our house.  A few years ago we set Carrie Beth up a scrapbooking room in the basement, so our first move was taking it completely down.  We deispersed her scrapbooking to multiple places in the unfinished basement, and mostly it's just sitting around being unused.  From there, we moved the bedroom in the basement to that scrapbooking room.  That room is nearer the bathroom that we are about to have finished, so it just seemed to make sense to have the spare bedroom there.  Then, we moved the office we had setup upstairs to the room in the basement that was previously a bedroom.  Once that feat was accomplished, we sabbathed.  We were tired.

This past week and this weekend consisted of setting up the new office area to our liking, adding some shelving in a closet for storage, and then painting what was previously the office upstairs.  The reason why?  Because Cooper's moving to a 'big boy' room!  CB picked out a color for the walls, and I agreed to it, but once I got the room painted with it, we just really didn't like it.  My friend Ed came over so we asked him to look at it, and he said "It's baby blue."  His son Nathan said "It's baby blue."  I'd been talling Carrie all weekend that it was baby blue.  She kept insisting that it was 'gray with a hint of blue.'  I DID NOT want baby blue for Cooper's new room, so we had to drop five and punt.  I sent Carrie to Lowes with our extra gallon of 'baby blue' paint, and lo and behold, they were able to fix it to exactly what we were trying for.  So, yesterday I painted the room again, and it turned out just right. 

Today, while we were at church, I got a phone call from a local furniture store that we bouht Cooper's new bedroom furniture from.  They were at our house waiting for us.  Nice.  Carrie had to leave in the middle of service and go let them in.  They had called yesterday to let us konw that they'd be here sometime after noon today, and this was about 10:30.  They were running 'ahead of schedule.'  I didn't even know that delivery people could do that.  Anyway, they brought in the furniture, assembled it, set it up, and cleaned up their mess, and left, all while we were finishing lunch.   Pretty nice.

After they left, Carrie got busy studying for her LAST CLASS!  Yep, only a few more weeks of summer school and she'll be officially gradgiated.  While she was studying, I was installing Carrie's new pantry.  We knew when we moved into this house that it was a little shy in terms of kitchen storage space, but just ahdn't really decided what we wanted to do about it.  We finally got serious about it a few weeks ago and after a lot of legwork I found a cabinet pantry that matches nearly identically to the cabinets that came with the house.  They delivered it last weekend, but with all of the other things we had going on, I didn't get a chance to actually set it properly until today.  It looks good, and after the costly trip to Wal-Mart this afternoon, she's almost got it full.  I really think she's going to enjoy it.

Speaking of Carrie graduating - she 'walked' in her graduation ceremony this past Monday.  We dropped Cooper off at Aunt Karen and Uncle Denny's house, and went to her school.  Get this - the graduation ceremony was outside, in an ampitheater.  As we were walking to the ceremony location, we started noticing the crow around us.  The attire was everything from business formal to jeans and t-shirts, and people were carrying lawn chairs, picnic baskets, and coolers.  Once we got to the ampitheater, the only seating available was on the grass.  Even after the ceremony started, there were people coming, people going, kids running around and screaming, and even a guy walking around selling flower bouquets.  (The police finally escorted him out of the area.)  It was the weirdest graduation ceremony I've ever been to.  It was like an outside music concert or something, where everyone was just relaxed and kicked back having a good time.  Although I thought it was odd, I definitely think it's the way to do it.  Anything has to be better than sitting in a crowded, hot auditorium for two hours while someone reads a list of 1000 people's names.

Also, if you haven't been there lately or ever, got check out Shane Yancey's blog here.  He and his wife had a BIG baby boy this past weekend, and there are plenty of pictures to prove it.  In addition, if you want to scroll back through this past week's post of his, they'll be sure to provoke, entertain, and stir your blood a little.  It all started with this post, and pretty much ended with this one, but in between is some good stuff, I promise.  Be sure to check out the comments.  There sure are a lot of angry people in this world....and most of them visit Shane's website it seems.

So, Jarrod and Bridget, there you have it.  That's why you haven't seen anything from me in a few weeks.  There's still a little more to do to get the rooms in the house how we want them, but for the most part they are done.  As I mentioned before, Carrie had a small yard sale this weekend and sold quite a bit of our junk that we had accumulated over the past decade or so, and Jason is taking a bed off of our hands that we never ever needed but just couldn't bare to throw away, and that's cleaned up our basement quite a bit. 

Next step - completely finishing the entire basement.  OOOhhhh - project!

Balloon Glow...

...and other fun things to talk about.

This past Friday night Carrie and I hosted the Sunday School class at a tailgate of the local hot air balloon glow.  We had a really great turnout, and Lori and Clay even graced us with their presence.  I'd say our group made up about 25 or 30 of the 89,000 that were said to be in attendance that night.  The weather was perfect, the balloons were great, and we got plenty of pictures to prove it all.  Check to the right.  (If they aren't there yet, don't send me an e-mail or anything, just check back later tonight, CB is in charge of that portion of the blogging.)

Other things newsworthy -

Well, it seems that a big congratulations should go out to my cousin Brandon and his wife Chantelle.  They've got a little tricycle motor due to be born in about six months, and I know they are ecstatic about it.  Good work guys!

CB has gradually been filling our unfinished basement with various household products and appurtenances that we no longer use.  She mentioned something about a yard sale.  That's pretty serious for a pack rat such as her, and I think she might actually mean it.  If you think that we have anything of yours that we are no longer using and you'd like to have it back, you'd better let us know now, because I don't think it's going to be around much longer.  (Of course, some things sold at yard sales DO actually come back, but you have to make a pretty big commitment in order to get them...ask me about our first dining room table sometime, it's a pretty neat story.)

Speaking of Carrie...she finished this semester's classes last week!  Yay!  We've got a week or two before she has to get back to the grindstone, and we're both enjoying it immensely.  So is Cooper.  I don't know what we're going to do once she's done for good, we might explode.

If you've tried to call us lately and couldn't get through, try again.  Our phone system is still having some problems, but we think we actually have it licked this time.  It's worked for an entire day straight now, so needless to say we're pretty excited.  It's odd how much we really didn't miss it not working though.  I had all the calls going to our home number rolled over to my cell phone, and even at that, it didn't ring that much.  I don't think we're very popular people, so no one calls us, and the telemarketers have learned that we DON'T BUY NOTHIN'!  (Yes, grammar freaks, I know that's a double-negative, it's called 'creative license'.)

Mom went and got herself one of them there fancy 'MP3 Player' thingies, and she's pretty excited about it.  She says that she's put 'walking music' on it.  Now, I don't really know what that is, but if it's anything like walking pneumonia, I don't want any, she can keep it.  Either way, if you see a short little lady walking the streets of Mayfield with wires coming out of her ears, please don't run her over.  She may look funny, but she's our funny.  We still claim her.

Two nights ago we were all eating at the kitchen table, and all was pretty quiet.  Out of the blue, Cooper started pointing at the hieroglyphic alphabet letters around the perimeter of his 'kiddie plate', and making very understandable sounds.  "...fife, sis, zebben, ate, dine, ten."  In that order.  Carrie and I almost dropped our forks.  I looked at Cooper and said "One..." to which he responded, "...too-oo, free, foor, fife, sis, zebben, ate, dine, ten."  At that point, we actually DID drop our forks.  I don't really think that he knows what he's saying, but he sure got all his numbers in order.  If we had been working with him on numbers I don't think either of us would have been surprised, but we haven't.  And we didn't think that they had been teaching them that at daycare either, so we're not sure where he picked it up. 

One more Cooper-ism.  The other night, at dinner again, he put his fork down, put both of his hands on the arms of his booster seat, pushed himself up a little, raised his right leg up as high as he could get it, and let loose with a flatulation that would have made his Uncle Ricky really proud.  I've told Carrie that he was going to start picking up on her little idiosyncrasies sooner or later, but she just doesn't listen to me.  She's so uncouth.  At least he said "scuse me" - thankfully he's picking up some of my finer points to offset his mother's barnyard antics.