Quiz: You are a federal institution crucial to personal and business matters of most every United States citizen. You observe a holiday that no one else does. The weekend before this holiday, your PO Box customers’ boxes are filled to the limits.

Do you:

a) Schedule at least one person to work, seeing as you are near the only organization that recognizes this holiday?
b) Leave all the mail you can in your customers’ mailboxes, seeing they will be working on Monday?
c) Screw it – empty the mailboxes, stick a “box full – receive at window” message, then lock up the window and enjoy your holiday?

A few updates on an interesting week…

• On a very positive note, they finally determined that my mom’s problems were related to a heart irregularity that’s currently being controlled very well by medicine.
• Our soccer team won its first game! This has really been an enjoyable group of kids and getting a win was a nice little rush for everyone involved.
• Sunday was my first service playing guitar in (our new) church orchestra. It’s a lot of fun and fairly challenging, switching styles back and forth so rapidly. It has thoroughly taught me that my sight reading skills are in serious need and I even had to go back to my chord dictionary to find some workable inversions. Will someone please tell me why people who write worship music are so enchanted by E flat????

The lag between updates… well, basically a lot of things going on:

• Renee finished her last chemotherapy session and followed it up with having her port removed. A lot of happiness tied up in getting past what could be seen as the worst of our cancer adventure, but a good deal of pain and struggle related to finishing up this phase of it.
• Sick children – lots of high fevers and midnight vigils
• My mom is having some health problems they can’t quite diagnose and it’s been going chronic for about a month here.  Couple hospital stays involved in it too.
• We had a big ugly episode at our church with some people that are not our friends and found it more sensible for us in the long term to move on somewhere else. We haven’t landed anywhere yet, but some promising prospects.
• Emma started taking a dance class and it’s been very much the family thing to see her off into her first “big girl” thing.
• I took on 6 & 7 year old soccer coaching this season, so a bit of work getting all that up to speed.  On the plus side, I understand we’re supposed to get certified this time, so I’ll have a license to practice recreational sport coaching before its over
• With all this junk going on, I wanted a bit of goof off time, so I put the hours into finishing Ninja Gaiden on my Xbox. I bought it a couple of months ago and got stuck about halfway through, so I put the time into finishing it.

So basically I have been alternating my time between caregiving and lopping heads off. I am such a Renaissance Man…

We went to see Order of the Phoenix last night.  It wasn’t really entertaining as some of the previous ones have been.  Mind you, sets were great, effects were great, acting was decent for the kind of film it is.  It just didn’t have as much of the exuberance that some of the previous ones have had.  I guess this is somewhat necessary, as it’s a big story to tell and only two movies left to get it done. I was kind of disappointed that there was just no character development whatsoever.  Hermione, Ron and Dumbledore might as well have been cardboard cutouts.  But it was still better fare than most of the movies out there, and it’s working toward the end.

And I have to admit cheating.  I did read the bootlegged Deathly Hallows two days before release.   I’m not really big on the Potter series, but I’m very big on spoilers.

I’m very, very proud.

This week I managed to finish a very long personal research project I’ve been involved in for several years now. This is just a huge check off my personal goals list.  I’m not really ready to share it yet, but I’m very satisfied with getting it done.

Hopefully now I can move forward on some more important things in my life now.

So worth it.  Go see the show.  With pre-teen children if possible.

I updated my Action Figure gallery with some shots found on Renee’s old camera.  We found it today and it had a few pictures that never got moved over when she switched.

I have to say I was quite impressed with my little town’s 4th of July Freedom Celebration.  We had a fireworks show that was as nice as I’ve seen anywhere short of Disneyworld.  We had a great vantage point and a view that looked like it was spread out for us.  A fun time had by all.

Glad to say that the bulk of Renee’s chemo sickness appears to be behind her.  She’s still not 100%, but feeling well enough to eat occasionally and go to work.  One down, three to go…

My apologies to those who thought this was a post about our current medical situation…

Back during my time at deviantart I made friends with a few guys going to a small school in Michigan – one of them was a really talented poet and I always kept a close eye on anything he published.  He struggled for a while about where to take his musical directions, but I’m happy to say he and his band are making a go of it.

Doctor! Doctor! is experimental grindcore – a bit gory and rough edged for my tastes these days, but a challenging listen.  And anything beyond the sellouts who dominate the scene is always refreshing to me.  Give them a listen if you have a strong stomach.