Out of the Wild Blue!

Ok, everyone knows my sob story about how awful my slooooow dial-up internet is. Verizon has decided to stop it's DSL lines at my friends house and she only lives 1.7 miles down the road from me. They cannot give any time frame for coming further so "out of the blue" the other night, I was surfing around and came across the website for Wild Blue, a satellite internet service much like Hughes Net. After reading all about the company, I talked to Briggs and we decided to go ahead and sign up. I found out you have to have a two year contract with verizon if you sign up for DSL anyway and so this sounded pretty good. They claim to have a more up to date system than Hughes Net and also 24 hour technical help that is not outsourced to another country, if you know what I mean. They are now offering a leasing agreement for 149.00 for equipment. I will cancel my second phone line that I pay 30.00 a month for and MSN which is 22.00 and it should be just about enough to cover the monthly fee. We are hoping it will work well way out here in the country with all the trees and hills. It should-as we have Direct TV and it works really well.

"A clear view of the Southern sky" is all we need to be online at a speed that we have been waiting for. I am soooo looking forward to having a lot more fun on the internet and saving loads of time that I can use in other ways. I am almost ashamed to tell you that I offered up a little prayer once in a while, that we would soon get faster internet. Well, I guess the answer to my prayer came "out of the blue" the Wild Blue!

Sunday Dinner

I guess that "Sunday Dinner" has been a traditional activity for a lot of families throughout the years. Our family has not been the exception. Although we serve our meal in a casual way and the kids are starving when the get home from church, we do have the tradition of having a pretty nice meal on Sunday afternoon. This week I was reminded of this as I set the meal out on the counter Sunday after church. I was thinking how lucky my kids were to be having a full course meal instead of sandwiches. I usually get up on Sunday morning and put something good into the crock pot so it is done by the time we get home. I almost always make a cake or brownies for desert. I think that is a pretty lucky thing that my kids have to look forward to when they are so hungry after church. It reminded me of Grandma Gilliam.
She loved to cook of course, and when she was with us we always had a big meal right after church. She and I shared in the responsibility of preparing it. Her special thing was that she wanted the missionaries to eat with us on Sunday. Very, very often they did. I hope that each of my older kids and the younger ones now will recall those good meals and the family sharing that went on every Sunday afternoon because of the tradition of "Sunday Dinner."

Frantic Saturday Morning

This morning I got up and had plans in my mind to make a scrapbook display of Chloe's swim team pics for her talent display at the church activity tonight, clean house, help Lindsay make a baked spaghetti casserole for the church cook off tonight, mow the lawn, paint the bench outside and maybe a few small other tasks. Well, I did not keep in mind that we have a little resident at our house that takes almost minute by minute supervision to keep him out of anything and everything around the house. This little boy is on the move! As my day started so did he. I no sooner got him his breakfast and he was on the prowl for whatever he could find to get into. I started on the scrapbook pages ( My first mistake was to procrastinate this job until this morning). It seemed that nothing went just right with my creative powers today. I ran into one problem after another with what I was trying to do. I finally settled on digital pages to speed the process. As I was working on the computer with that, Briggs was boiling up bushels of apples to make applesauce with. Between us both our little resident, who by the way is called Gatlin, was busy climbing on top of the counter, getting into the printer, pulling out pots and pans, crumbling bread on the floor and a whole lot more. I was beginning to have an anxiety attack because we wanted to leave at 1:30 so we could attend Ian's football game and then Lindsay's swim practice and on to the church talent show at 5:00. If everything was going right with my project, things would not have been so tense, but it seemed that today was not my day for creating something with smooth going. I finally had to let Adam know we were going to have to catch Ian's game another weekend. That helped to ease the tension all the while little Gatlin was still moving into anything he could see or do to occupy his curious little brain. Around 12:30 Briggs said he would take him into the bedroom and try to get him to sleep for a nap. Yippee! In a few minutes he was asleep as sound as can be. We were able to finish the applesauce, help Lindsay with her casserole for the cook off and get Chloe's Swim Talent posters finished. The house is not cleaned, the bench not painted or lawn mowed, but we survived another busy Saturday. But....you can't help love the face on this little fellow. You know? I think I like Mondays best.