This old table

It turns out that we're starting to like darker wood as far as furniture is concerned. We've had a couple of end tables for years that were in rough shape; they lived a life void of coasters or care. A decision was made to replace them. Or refinish them.
We went with the latter. A trip to the new Lowes near our house gave us the tools necessary to do this. Now all we needed was time and attention to detail (not my strong suit). Two tables needed refinishing. One for me. One for Erin.
Stripping the old stain was easy. Leave a gel on and rinse it off after an hour. However, this also necessitates sanding any lingering stain before moving to the next step. Erin got all her old junk off. I only thought I did. After staining the wood with the new dark stain mine was all blotchy. Erin's was perfect. Dammit.
She ended up refinishing mine, I added the protective varnish and put the tables back to together. The finished product is shown above. Not bad... beats buying new ones!

What the f....

Never in my wildest dreams did I actually think that I'd say the following statement:
"I think Kevin Federline should be awarded custody of those kids. He's handling this divorce with maturity."
I mean, who would put K-Fed, awarded custody, and maturity into the same sentence?
I said this to Erin a few weeks back after Britney showed off her junk to the world and before she changed from a cocktail dress into a bikini at a NYC club last week. Yip, I read the tabloids, too.
Then she took a pretty big leap towards becoming the charter member of the Anna Nicole Smith Crackpot Celebrity Fan Club.
Now I am certain that K-Fed should be given several "World's Greatest Dad" mugs.

Returning to the "scene of the crime".

Erin and I got engaged on November 20th 2004 in Napa valley. I managed to actually plan a surprise trip, tell everyone we knew about my plans, and get Erin onto an airplane without her first figuring out (or someone telling her) where we were going. It's a crowing moment for me as I suck at keeping secrets and have a tendency to give up valuable information because I get excited about it. Not that time. She does know that we're going back...
We are going back to the Vintage Inn in Yountville, CA (right in the heart of Napa Valley) where we stayed the last time.
It is a beautiful part of the country and we ran across many very kind people. These kind people, as we found out, like to help you celebrate things. When we were there for our engagement trip we were given some of the "special" wines; a celebration for our newly engaged status. We hope to use our 1st year anniversary as a springboard towards more tasty and normally off-limits wine samples. Turns out that you can use personal celebrations to get stuff normally out of reach.
We leave on Tuesday the 20th and return on Friday. Can't wait!

An introduction...

Blogs this. Blogs that.

Part of my job working for a commercial newswire service is keeping up with all of the new trends in the world of media. Blogs are certainly an emerging medium and are written by little Johnny after school, CEOs, company employees, and just about every other type of person. I always wondered how people found the time to update their blogs since many post multiple entries each day. So I decided to find out.
My wife and I live a nice life. We have great friends, take fun trips, have unique pets... we basically have all the makings for some entertaining tales. While this might never be read by anyone out there I'll at least be able to uncover the mystery of how people find the time to do this.

So who are the cast of characters in this particular blog?

Erin - The wife
Erin grew up in Springfield, MO (they actually have a Visitors and Convention Bureau there... a fact I uncovered at a public relations conference and one I thought to be particularly funny after hearing stories about the town). She was a good student and a heck of an athlete. She went on to Kansas University as did her parents and their parents (not at the same time, though). Erin's school has a much better basketball team than my college did... a fact she loves to remind me of. After school she lived in San Diego (worked at a camp for overweight youngsters) and Breckenridge, CO (lived the life that can only be experienced in a small, mountain ski town) and most recently found her way to Arizona. I met her during one of her visits to Phoenix through a friend of hers that I was working with at the time. Over the course of the next few years we dated, got engaged, moved in together, got married, and just celebrated our 1-year anniversary. Erin is a dog person. Lucky for her I had adopted a puppy several months before we began dating.

Malcolm - The husband
I was born in Canada (a point used against me by my friends on a regular basis) to a US-born mother and a UK-born father. I moved to Connecticut with my mom when I was 4 and grew up there. Singing and tennis were my favorite past times in high school. About the same time I went to Connecticut my dad took a job at Ball State University in gorgeous Muncie, IN. This meant that I knew where I was going to school from the time I was in elementary school. Erin calls is "Ballst" (yep, 1 word)) and my buddy Jeremy wonders how I ended up there when my mom went to Penn and my dad went to Oxford. Our claim to fame as a BSU alumni (last 6 years) was beating Kansas at the Maui Invitational a few years ago... a loss that was revenged at a pre-season tournament in Las Vegas this past year. I moved to Arizona the day after I graduated from college and worked in healthcare until a few years back when I "found myself" and my career working for a newswire service. I am a cat and a dog person and had 1 of each when Erin and I began dating.

Casey - The dog
Casey is a 3-year old lab. She's kinda white but has some patches of yellow. She has us well trained... Pictures will follow. She is out of her shoe-eating days and now her worst behavior is her penchant for sleeping on our ottoman (it's comfortable, it gives her lots of places to rest her head...). She loves to fetch (but often lacks the "retriever" part of "labrador retriever"), swim, go for runs, play with her friends Jackson & Brodie, chase the cat, and eat.

Emma - The cat
Emma was around long before Erin or Casey. She had another cat to play with but he was eaten by a coyote in the back alley. Emma has a seizure problem so she needs medication nightly. That's just one odd thing about her. She doesn't like to be held, won't sit on a lap, pees under Erin's desk, and reluctantly allows herself to be pet. But she always stays close to us, loves to be brushed, and loves to eat paper. I hope she turns a corner at some point and begins acting like a cat should.

We live in a resurgent area of south Scottsdale, AZ. It is winter time right now so we're loving life. Summer? Well, that's another story.

As we write more and more in this blog we hope to share stories about what we go through day to day and what the household pets do to keep us entertained.

Enjoy!