OK. Who's hungry.

I went to a petting zoo on Sauvie Island with kids recently and I told the kids “Next time you’re eating chicken nuggets you can think of these cute little chickens, cuz that’s what you’re eating.” Kelly jokingly scolded me with her eyes but she laughed and said...

Along those lines, if you are a vegetarian you will NOT like this shirt (<-- click). At first you will, but then you won't.

Tough Times.

Click here to read my wife's blog and what's been on our hearts lately.

--jq

Sorry, I have been tired.

I have been just too tired to post lately. Work has also been super crazy so no time before or after work...Little League coaching started...Workin' on getting sleep...Dr's appointments...blah blah excuse...

New posts will come soon...

:-)

Who's who?

Fisher or JT?
Fisher or JT?

My Day Today.

Dress for success work attire. I love my job camo.

Time to leave...I am an early riser...not...

Drop car off at the shop...BUT they didn't have the parts...drove off...

Doctor appointment at 11am...he prescribed healthier lunches...YES SIR!

Time to go home...38 MINUTES AGO!

On my way home snack...mmm...seeds...

Top down, clear skies on the way home...who took that pic?


JT with his classic punch greeting when I get home. WACHAW!


Taco pizza. NOT Taco Bell...but veddy veddy good.

Chores...I didn't fold but I put away.

Bed.

April Fools. Don't trust the Internet.

I am not sure if this is true, because I don't trust anything I read on the Internet on April 1, but if it is...cool.

Hot Teen Trend: Hanging with Mom and Dad.

Alcoholic in Christ.

A voice beats me, it's impossible to think.
A fall's on its way, I've become bigger, starting to sink.
Only darkness is offering its help, its ringing.
I look into nothing waiting for something. Nothing.

Passionate about what comes, I long for goodness and favor.
My sin arrives again and again like the sun rises to the day.
Darkness befriends in disquise, guilt takes me further, none the wise.
The battle not prepared for grows, tempting forever, Satan knows.

The tree is there but fatigue hinders my desire.
I ache for Christ like a child for love, it consumes like fire.
A touch that warms my within, like soothing water on my skin.
I turn towards it, He's there again. He's always been.

I can't lose sight or free the night while seized by my own will.
Failure to stand so strong, Holy Spirit be with me on and on.
Shadowed light below the Cross, it falls upon without loss.
I remember now, in God's embrace, He beat death and my sin erased.

I am free.

>>Written by me (JQ) in dedication to the alcoholics in my family, and in His family, who are covered in Christ.

Ugly Beauty.

Bogie, our Ugly Beauty dog, with Riley.

Licker. Stinky Breath.

Barking mad outside our paw streaked back door.

Napping with a blankie stuffed in his mouth. Stinky blankie.

Ugly Beauty.

Shhh...play number 7.

Are your kids Hannah Montana fans? If they’re like my kids they must be. As we drive down the road we have to put in the HM CD and I hear the constant requests to play “number 1”, “number 7”, “number 9”, etc. Naturally, or unnaturally, over time I start to develop MY favorite HM songs. When they’re blurting our requests I’m thinking “Say this number or that number”, and as soon as I hear the one I want, I go to that one. Funny? Crazy? Weird? All the above. Nobody is more perplexed by this than me. Dude, I am old, and I am a dude. I listen to Kutless, Skillet, and occasionally some Metallica to keep it real. Hannah Montana?

My wife laughs and jokes about this. We were at Blockbuster Video a few months back, we split up looking for our favorite movie genres so we could regroup and try to convince each other of which movies to get. At the regroup my wife shows me three different movies and then pulls out this comment, “OH…and I picked this out for you.” I was like cool, the wife is thinkin’ about MY tastes. Then she hands me the Hannah Montana movie case. VERY FUNNY! We gut laughed for a bit before I said, “Let’s get it.” J/K! We did not get it.


I am not the only “dad” to do this. I know this first hand. My friend Eric, with 4 kids, and I work together and were on a lunch/errand trip around town recently. With the radio on we cruise around talking and ranting like most guys do. We pull up to a stop light, stop, and we both catch ourselves humming a HM song on the radio. I said, “You too huh?” He was like “Yeah”, forlorn and depressed. “It’s OK dude, it’s OK” I said with love and sincere compassion. We chuckled for a sec and then cleared our throats, stuck our chests out, and quickly changed the subject. The light turned green, we burned the tires like guys do, got to cruising speed as fast as possible, and put the whole conversation behind us.

I say oh well, what can you do? I love my kids and I want them to hear kid music. It just happens to be kinda catchy. FYI…I have NO Hannah Montana songs on my iPhone playlists…seriously…just Miley Cyrus. J

A house divided.

Mark 3:25 "If a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand." According to the Bible, we are headed for a serious fall. Somehow I don't think this is what the Bible is talking about.

Ducks vs. Beavers. Divided boys against girls. Houston, we have a problem.

Go Ducks!

JT speaks.

JT's first interview. He is going to be famous someday so I figured I would get him started speaking into a microphone now. Click the following link to listen to his interview answers. (fyi...it's a large mp3 file so it may take some time do start.)

JT Speaks.

A special thanks to Radio Dave for letting us use his studio to conduct the interview. Hey Dave, I am perfectly OK with you getting JT into radio. Maybe he can be a DJ like you!

Also, on the way home from Dave's, all the way across the street, JT beat me home and thought it would be funny to lock me out. I recorded the whole thing and it's quite funny. Take a look.


He's a stinker.

Almost 2 years ago.

I heard for so long that I didn't look healthy, I looked tired, I was gaining weight, I was forgetting things, but I just thought I was out of shape. Well I was out of shape, but not in the traditional sense of the phrase. I was just plain sick. Here is what happened nearly two years ago.

Two years ago I was diagnosed with Hashimoto's Disease or Hypothyroidism. Basically, my body was attacking my Thyroid Gland thinking it was some foreign object in my body. My body was slowly shutting down due to lack of thyroid and I was slowly dying, or at least it seemed that way. My metabolism was gone. Here is a list of symptoms associated with this disease, I had ALL of them.

1. Increased sensitivity to cold


2. Constipation (TMI...sorry)


3. Pale, dry skin


4. A puffy face


5. Hoarse voice


6. An elevated blood cholesterol level


7. Unexplained weight gain — occurring infrequently and rarely more than 10 to 20 pounds, most of which is fluid


8. Muscle aches, tenderness and stiffness, especially in your shoulders and hips


9. Pain and stiffness in your joints and swelling in your knees or the small joints in your hands and feet


10. Muscle weakness, especially in your lower extremities


11. Depression

Here is a picture of me just before diagnosis. (JT is sooo cute)

I honestly don't know how long ago that my thyroid started to die but looking back at old pictures I see big changes around the time Fisher was born. I sometimes wonder if the trauma around that event, the greatest stress I have ever known, had an adverse effect on my body. God will let me know some day. :-)

Anyways, my doctor told me that my low levels of Thyroid hormone were so low they were off the chart. I was the worst case he had seen. Thanks Doc, I already feel better. :-) But what he told me was that because it was treatable, with a simple synthetic thyroid pill for the rest of my life, that I was going to start feeling better in short order. I was going to get my life back. I started to cry in the room on the spot.

In between the time I first had blood drawn and my diagnosis of low thyroid, I was sent to get a sleep study done. I was diagnosed with Sleep Apnea . I spent the night in a hospital room hooked to a dozen wires and was basically told that I was stopping breathing an average of 60-80 times per hour. So, my body would begin to relax, fall asleep, and my airway would close and my body would twitch, to wake me up (although I didn't fully become conscious), to open the airway to get a breath. Found this cool drawing below for visual aid.

I was never conscious of the fact that my body was doing this. That's the scary part. I thought I was sleeping. Kelly had woke me many times to tell me to breath because I had stopped. I just figured I was snoring. Because my body never really went into deep sleep, REM sleep, I was getting about 10 minutes of sleep per hour, and that was cumulative throughout the hour, not even 10 minutes in a row. The doctor's made me take a sleeping machine home right away and required me to wear it moving forward, they feared if I didn't start sleeping with it right away that I could die in my sleep. It was that bad.

It took some time to catch up on sleep after not sleeping for years. My life has changed in the last two years since going to the docs and getting help. I had become nearly comatose. Sleepy during the day and not interacting with my family. I could do nothing. All my energy was used trying to maintain my job and by the time I got home I was not able to function. Not much help to a wife and three kids. So needless to say my wife, kids, and I are happy campers now.

I have to maintain my thyroid levels with medication and go to the doctor to have them checked whenever I feel more tired than usual. I haven't been able to shed all the weight since my diagnosis two years ago but I'll hang on to the weight for the "new" life I now have.

I guess I have a couple words of advice, so here goes: Never wait to go see a doctor when you think something may be wrong with you, mentally or physically. And if others are telling you they think something is wrong, you are already behind the eight ball. GO GET HELP.

Here I am with my family now.

Thank you God for developing medical treatments for folks like me. You have given me my life back.

Napping.

JT is quite a character. At Sportsman's Warehouse today I told JT it was time for a nap since he was acting up. He decided it was a good idea and headed straight into the tent with the cot. Check out the video.



One of the reasons I was saying he needed a nap is because he was using bad words. He was hiding in the store, I think in some racks of clothes, and my Dad was calling "Jaxon, where are you?", kind of playing with him. My Dad begins to chuckle about something JT said that I didn't hear. I asked Dad what it was and he said JT replied "I'm right here STUPID!" I was like, SAY WHA?


So I go to Jaxon and say "JT we don't call people stupid, EVER." To which he replies "I didn't say stupid, I said DOOFUS."

Of course I LOST it and belly laughed for a moment. Then reminded him we don't call people bad words period. Somehow I think he didn't take me seriously.

Hold On!

Fisher tries to hold on once the slide hits the end of it's road.

How often do we hang on for dear life when we hit the end of our "slide"? Maybe it would be less painful or less dangerous to just let go? Let go and let God.

Pa Joe and the glasses.

The kids had fun trying on Pa Joe's glasses. I tried to get them to come close to pose for the pics and they each nearly fell because of the prescription.

Here's Roo-Zee.

Here's Fishman.

Here's Pa Joe with the kids.

Happy 79th Birthday Pa Joe! We love you.

Kel's Revolution

In a world where she already has too much to do, Kelly, the soccer/basketball/football/swimming/coffeebar/gwpo/etc mom, the wife, the entrepreneur, the CEO of our home, embarks on a journey into blogging. Just when we thought there wasn't any more time in the day, the week, the month, she busts out some pics and some type, weblogging her "next".

It's started a revolution in our circle with Dave, our "big deal" in the hood, and myself, blogging this very second, popping out blogs within a few days/weeks of Kel's. "What Kelly Did Next" is the blog and it adorns pics and stories of family, friends, funny quotes, and most of all a little peek into Kel's deep and fascinating personality. If you haven't seen it check it out.

What Kelly Did Next

And Dave's is here: A Day in the Life of Dave

Thanks Kel for being a Pioneer, if only in the hood.

UPDATED: Coin Books *sigh*

Anyone need some really old coin books? Please...take them.

We were supposed to sell these books for Kelly's dad and now they have been taking up valuable garage space for THREE years and counting. Have you ever agreed to do something in the moment and realized shortly afterwords it was a mistake? Well, this was our mistake. We are in one of those positions where they have value to Kelly's dad so we don't want to give them away and every time we list them on Craigslist we get NOTHING. So, I say we dump them at GoodWill and call it a day. What would you do? 3 years, not sold. I can't park my car in the garage because of these books. Sorry Kelly, it's going to be unanimous...GIVE them away. Pleeaaase.

UPDATE: The books are finally gone. Thank you KELLY! Now I don't have an excuse for a dirty garage anymore. DARN!