Weekly Report

I know I’ve already posted one blog this week, but below is my weekly report lead in.  I hope you enjoy.
Afternoon ladies!  I hope you enjoyed your weekend.  I enjoyed my weekend, but it was a busy one.  Let me drop some knowledge on you about this guy named Cas that sends you a report once a week.  I’m not a guy that has ever been around the childrens much, never really even been that big of a fan of the childrens.  I’ve lived 32 glorious years without the childrens, and plan on living a few more sans the childrens.  But this last weekend, my beautiful and loving bride, volunteered me to help her babysit two childrens for some friends of ours so they could go off and enjoy their anniversary.  Seeing how I’ve never really been around the childrens before, I had no idea how much work they are!  Sweet Baby Jesus, Toy Story, and Harry Potter 15, these childrens never stop!  I thought little kids liked to take naps and go to bed early!?  Apparently, not so much… Wow, I gained so much respect for parents, because “Mr. Cas”, as I was called all weekend, is way too selfish and lazy to be having the childrens right now.  One of the main reasons I agreed to this “adventures in babysitting” was because our friends have a pool, and “I’ve got to get me one of these!”.  So in my head I envisioned me sitting in or around the pool for 2 solid days.  Well it rained for two straight days, so Mr. Cas was stuck inside playing Wii games while trying to remind myself that they’re just kids take it easy on them.  Do you have any idea how hard it is to sit at the finish line of Mario Cart and wait while the other drivers aren’t even half way through with the first lap?  All jokes aside, I had a great time with the childrens this weekend.  It was definitely an eye opener for me though.  I’ve got my work cut out for me when it’s my bride and I’s turn to have the childrens. 
That was my weekly report, if you read this post as being negative please note that it was written for comedic value, even if I failed horribly at being funny.  Having childrens is a challenge that I’m totally looking forward too.  The more time I spend with my bride, and around these childrens, the more I realize I’m ready for some childrens of my own, as long as the childrens is singular and a girl. 

Here is a picture of me with the childrens

*sidenote, I try to drop at least one random Will Smith movie or quote into each report...

Product Review

I almost feel like a real blogger posting a product review!  This is probably going to be a surprise when you guys read what I’m reviewing.  I’m reviewing our cookware that we got as a wedding gift.  We got Calphalon’s Contemporary 12 piece set.

I’ve been a stainless steal cookware person my entire life so I didn’t know how I felt about this black hard-anodized set.  Most of my reserve was based solely on the look of the cookware.  To me pots and pans should be stainless.  That’s how I picture chefs cooking, that’s how I pictured myself cooking.  I quickly got over this when I had to wash the pots.  When they say non-stick, they mean non-stick!  It’s amazing how everything just falls right off these pots.  The pots aren't dishwasher safe, but that’s ok, I don’t like taking up valuable space in the dishwasher with huge pots, bowls, or other large items anyway. 
We’ve added some other pieces to our set, another 1.5 qt and 3 qt sauce pan, a 13 in covered skillet, and a square grill pan.  I love the square grill pan.  It’s awesome for quickly “grilling” chicken and pork, it even puts the grill lines on the meat!
The one major downside to this cookware is the lids.  The handles on the lids get super hot and can’t really be removed with the bare hand.  It gets a little annoying always having to reach for a hand towel or oven mitt to remove the lid to stir. 
So I’ve gotten over the lack of shine on my pots and really embraced the non-stick aspect of this set.  We still hope to add some more pieces, we’d love the double boiler, and the Panini press, but we really don’t have to have them right now.  And to be honest, I’d really like to add some of the stainless pieces from this line so I can still have a little bling.

Where have I been?

I'm sure no one has wondered where I've been, but too bad, I'm going to tell you anyway.  I've been working away, doing nothing too spectacular.  But part of my job is to do a weekly report.  At the start of the report I've started writing little lead ins that I try to make humorous.  Apparently since I've started doing that I've been neglecting my blog.  I've posted a few of my lead ins into my blog just so I'd have something posted, but no one knew that's what I was doing.  But now that the cat is out of the bag I figured I'd post another one.  This is my lead in from my report sent on July 5th.

Welcome back from the long holiday weekend everyone.  I hope everyone enjoyed their 4^th of July and are back at work typing with all your fingers.  I can just picture how much fun the first 4^th of July was.  George Washington, Abe Lincoln, Ben Franklin, Davey Crockett,  and Paul Giamatti hanging out around the pool, knocking back some brews, grilling some meat Davey C rocket had killed that morning, and telling stories about their wild and crazy youth.  Those founding fathers of ours were having such a great time that they decided to declare every Fourth of July Independence from work day, which was later shortened to Independence Day to better fit on the calendar then shortened even further to ID4 to fit on the cover of the moving picture history book of the greatest Fourth of July ever when Will Smith stopped the Alien invasion.  Those Brave men had the foresight to know that all future generations would enjoy a day off of work in the middle of summer to drink adult beverages, fire up the grills and hang out in and around bodies of water.  George Washington, being the prankster that he was, thought it would be funny to light some explosives in the air to scare the other guys.  While he did scare them, the sight and sound of the explosion was such a beautiful ending to a beautiful day it was decided right then and there that every fourth of July be ended with a bang, thus creating our tradition of the fireworks spectacular. Thinking like this is what has made our country the greatest country in the history of countries.  Ask yourself, does Rome have a 4^th of July?  What about France?  I would bet my paycheck that if you looked at the calendar of any other country they skip straight from the 3^rd of July to the 5^th of July because only America is great enough to have a 4^th day in July.  So God Bless our founding fathers, God Bless America, and God Bless, *company that this report is for*

Beach Vacation

Welcome back everyone, oh wait, you guys didn’t go anywhere.  I on the other hand, had a nice vacation in Destin FL.  It’s hard to beat sitting on a beach taking in some sun rays and reading a book.  That is, of course, until you get out of the shower, look in the mirror and notice the nice nerd tan that you have.  Nerd Tan – a tan line created by the sun being blocked off of one’s stomach and chest by the shadow created from holding a book while sitting in the sun.  Since everyone is trying to picture this, I do have an oddly shaped white spot on my stomach that was caused by the book I was reading while on the beach and sitting by the pool.  You can laugh, it’s ok, it’ll only hurt me for a few years.
Other than reading I also really enjoyed snorkeling.  It is kind of scary when you snorkel and see all of the shark’s teeth that are washing up close to the beach.  We probably found 25 to 30 sharks teeth near the beach.  I’d have to say the snorkeling find of the week would have to go to the unopened bottle of Smirnoff Blueberry Lemonade.  Not because we planned on drinking it, but because we like to keep our oceans clean.

I guess I should go back and tell everyone of how my bride and I scored this awesome almost free beach vacation.  My bride and I had talked about taking us a weekend beach trip, we were both excited as we LOVE the beach.  Well then April 27th happened.  It wasn’t even a question, our beach money was spent in the recovery efforts.  I took off some days and we headed up to North Alabama to help.  While up in North Alabama I was talking to a guy and he was asking me some questions about why I was helping and just general questions.  Well I said that we were talking about going to the beach for a vacation, but then this came up so we decided we’d spend or beach trip volunteering.  As soon as I said that the guy I was talking too told me we’d be rewarded 10 fold and that we would get a beach trip this summer.  You hear things like this from people and you think they’re just being nice.  Well let me tell you, we were rewarded 10 fold.  Our two to three day weekend beach trip that we were planning turned into a seven day almost free.99 beach trip.  We were only asked to chip in some money for food, and we were on our own to get there.  Can you believe that?  God is good… 

You know you had a good vacation when you realize you forgot to take pictures.  So other than the artist rendering of the nerd tan, we don’t have much for pictures from this awesome vacation.

Post Rapture Blog

Well hello my fellow Rapture survivors.  Hopefully none of yous guys maxed out your credit cards, or stopped paying your rent or mortgage due to the pending rapture that was supposed to take place this past Saturday.  I’m real interested on what Harold Camping spoke about Sunday morning to his congregation.  I have a feeling it might have gone a little something like this, “See, what.had.happened.was, Jesus was going to come back yesterday, but then…  uh…  his car wouldn’t start, then his dog ate his bus pass, he blew out a flip flop and stepped on a pop top?”  I’m sure Harold Camping lost some friends on Facebook after this major bust.  This might even be a bigger false prophecy then Al Gore’s Global Warming, or since the globe isn’t warming they now call it global climate change.  But he’s still super super cereal about man-bear-pig.  *I hope I’m not the only Soutpark watcher out there. 
One good thing about the world not ending, I created a K-Ci and JoJo channel on Pandora today.  Only down side to how awesome my K-Ci channel is, is that it’s very hard for me to fight the urge to bust out singing.  If you heard my singing you’d be praying for the rapture.  I think I might be the last person to get in on the Pandora thing.  But the box has now been opened, I think my iPhone is starting to get jealous of all the love Pandora is getting lately though.

North Alabama

My Bride and I went up to North Alabama this past weekend to help the Tornado survivors.  We went to a small rural area around Moulton Alabama.  We really had no idea what we’d be doing, but we were ready to work.  My Bride worked her booty off before we went to gather donations, get trucks, and round up volunteers.  We turned our church into a drop off site, and we were overwhelmed with the support our church and community gave us.  It was so awesome to see how giving of a community we have.  We loaded up my truck and hitched a trailer to it and took as much as we could, and we still had another two truckloads left at the church. It felt so good to roll up to Kierra’s Hope and unload all these supplies. 
That was the easy part, the rest of this I just don’t know if I can put it into words…  I have such a renewed belief in the spirit of people now.  I honestly don’t know where to go with my words right now, so many thoughts, so many things to tell, but where to start?  How can I describe with words the things I’ve seen with my eyes and felt with my heart?  We got there a week after the storm came through.  The people of North Alabama had all pulled together and cleaned a lot of the trees up.  We took the supplies that we brought to Kierra’s Way and loaded up in a truck and open trailer and went down the roads handing out cold waters, cold Gatorades, and juice boxes for the kids.  We had several people make us peanut butter sandwiches so we had those to hand out.  We were also donated hotdogs so we grilled them and handed them out.  If someone needed anything on our runs we’d take orders from and run supplies back to them.
Tents were donated, and I really hoped that since it had been a week since the storms came through we wouldn’t need to give out any tents, but I was wrong.  People still didn’t have anywhere to sleep, and were very grateful to be given a tent.
We met some amazing people.  We met a family that lost pretty much everything, but invited us to their child’s first birthday party that was being thrown for them by a local church’s youth group.  We went to the party and they made us play on the inflatables and slide down the slide.  This family said that after they made it through the storm they came outside to take pictures of their house and email to family.  One family member called balling his eyes out after getting the pictures and asked if they had looked at them.  When they looked at them they could see an angel over the corner of the house that everyone was in as the storm when by and ripped the roof off the house, almost sucking some of the people out of the house.  Another family member was in a trailer that got picked up by the tornado and rolled several times, moving almost 400 yards from where it stated, before coming to a rest in a pile of debris.  There were three people in the trailer, and all made out it out with only one of them having just as much as some cuts.  The trailer?  If you saw it you wouldn’t even know it started out as a trailer.  How anyone survived in that I’ll never know.
We stayed with a family who’s house was in the direct line of the tornado.  They put their faith in God, read Psalms 91, prayed and watched the tornado go by without as much as breaking a window in their house.  Their neighbors that lived behind them were killed.  The house completely destroyed.  The man we stayed with found two of his neighbors bodies laying out in a field.  A father and son killed.  The mom wasn’t at the house when the storm went through.
We met a lady who had set up a tent on the slab of what used to be her mother’s house as she was waiting on the insurance people to arrive.  Her mother was in the house when it was taken away.  She was found a few days later in a pond wearing nothing but her bath robe and still holding her Bible.  What do you say to someone that has just returned back to the slab where her mom used to have a house just a few hours after burying her?  I’m not equipped to handle a situation like this.  Saying, “We have cold water, Gatorade, and some sandwiches” just doesn’t seem to be what this family needs right now.
These same people that lost so much, pulled together and started picking up the pieces of their lives, but not only their lives, they went to neighbors houses and helped them remove trees, find belongs, and start the rebuilding processes.  Am I a strong enough man to lose my Bride, and not only start picking up what is left of my life, but help a neighbor start picking up their pieces as well?  Could I stand in my living room staring down a raging tornado, put all my faith in God that I will not be harmed, read scripture and just pray?  I don’t know if I could, but I am strong enough of a man to donate what little money I have, and some vacation days to go and help these hurting people. 
Please remember that this is going to be a long process, if you can donate anything, these people will need it.  They no longer have a kitchen to go get a snack out of.  They no longer have a car to get into to drive to get groceries, or a hot meal.  What is left of some of their entire lives now fit in a Rubbermaid container that was given to them by someone that donated it.  I know not everyone can do the things my bride and I were able to do, but at the very least, please say a pray for everyone that has been affected by this storm.  I’ve taken some pictures, but I have uploaded to them to my computer.  I’m still debating on posting them or not.  They are just pictures to us, but to someone they mean a lot more and are so much more personal.

Don't worry, I got this

I jokingly put “Don’t worry, I got this” as the caption for a picture of my Buddy Christ bobble head on Facebook.  I was subtlety implying that it did mean that what he “got” was our salvation, but it was in a fun, light hearted manner.  Friday night we went to our Good Friday service, and as our praise group was singing it donned on me just how right I was.  When they sang “Jesus paid it all”, a light went on in my head, “He’s got my debt”.  I’ve tried to keep my blog from being too religious.  I don’t honestly don’t feel I have any right to try and preach to anyone, I know I have my bucket of sin so I don’t want anyone thinking I’m something that I’m not.  I just couldn’t help but share the revelation I had Friday night though.

Don't worry, I got this...

I know this is a little out of order, but I thought I'd give the important stuff first.  Our youth stuffed all our eggs for our Easter Egg hunt Tuesday night.  I took my Buddy Christ to the egg stuffing event and it turns out he was a hit.  So below are two pictures we took just having fun with Jesus.

And yes, my truck did come with a tape player, how jealous are all of you!?