Mel and Mike Visit Maine

Melanie finally brought her new husband to Maine to visit.  Turns out he’s a pretty nice guy even if he is from Rhode Island.  :-)

They drove up I95 Friday and missed the Bath exit and wound up going through Augusta and down Rt 17 to Rockland.  Strangely enough they saw Bonnie running along side the road when they hit Rockland and picked her up.  How’s that for a coincidence?

We stopped by their hotel room on Friday and visited for a bit ,then they came over Saturday morning.  We went to Augusta for lunch and a trip to the book store then came back to our house and had Moody’s take out for dinner.

Here’s Mel digging at some ice cream.  Do not get between the pregnant chick and her food!

They went back to their hotel after watching a movie then came back over on Sunday morning to visit.  Bonnie went to breakfast with them while Ro and I stayed home and built a fire.  I was showing him the finer points of table manners…

when they all showed up after breakfast. 

We sat around the fire for a few hours and visited before they had to take off back to the southlands of Rhode Island.

Bonnie got a ride down the hill in with Jake…

And Mike and Mel got a chance to relax a little before the long drive south.

Looking forward to next time guys!

Camping Out

A few weeks ago I decided to test some of my camping gear out in back of the house and Bonnie and Ro came out and sat with me until it got dark. 

First they helped me set up my shelter…

Ro telling a couple of jokes

He had to make sure my fire pit was set up right

 

Then it was on to some important business.

  
Don’t over cook it little buddy!

After dinner it was time for a little puppy love.

And man, does Bonnie love her smoors! 

I tried to find a picture of her not eating one, but I couldn’t!

Man, she’ll be furious when she sees this picture!  :-)

Punk’d

Oh I wish, I wish I’d had a camera with me last Sunday.  Bonne and I took Ro over to Mom and Dad’s for another cookout and Dad told Bonnie he’d seen an animal in a hole over by the big tent he uses for storage.  They went over and Bonnie, ever curious, was bent over looking at it when Dad reached down and grabbed a string.  He gave the string a good tug and pulled some kind of furry raccoon tail or something from the hole and Bonnie shrieked and did her “I’m freaking out” spider dance, waving her arms and running in place and screeching. 

I told him to let me know if he does something like that again because I wanted to film it.  That would have been a hit Youtube punk’d video!

Here’s a few pictures from the first cookout two weeks ago.  As you can see we all had a good time and George and Helene came over as well.

Working Out

Last night Ro and I were working out in my basement gym and I’ve got to say I really liked his form.  Check out his shoulder press technique…

Get a good grip on the bar

And up over the head!

Pretty impressive eh?  Now what does any self respecting weight lifter do after a heavy lift?  You guessed it… Looking good baby 

We were going to do a little boxing…

Bob and weave, bob and weave

But he ran into a little problem with the gear, so we decided to do it later.

Stupid wrist wraps….

All in all it was a good workout, but I don’t really trust him to spot me yet when I’m lifting heavy as he has a tendency to drift back to the mirror.  He’s a true Augustine alright; he’s never met a mirror he didn’t like.

Well hello Gorgeous…

Time to start writing here again

September 23rd!!!  Man, the time has really gone by since my last post.  Well, since then we’ve gotten comfortable in the house and things are going really well.  Rowan keeps us running all the time,but that’s to be expected with a kid his age.  He’s like me when I was a kid according to my mother… a little demon.  (My words, not hers.)

Poor Bonnie has had a couple of rough episodes in the last week.  This past Saturday I was out in the driveway with Ro and we were working on a couple of masterpiece drawings on the driveway using chalk.  He bent over and picked up a piece of chalk, then a couple of more and was cradling about five pieces in his arms when he went to pick up one more.  Well, apparently his little nervous system was maxed out because he pitched over into the little chalk bucket face first and got himself a little cut on his cheek.  He starting crying and I picked him up to comfort him and check the damages (a nice little cut on the right cheek) when Bonnie came flying out the door to see what was happening.  She took him and did that Mommy stuff and pretty soon he was smiling again.

Meanwhile, I’d started cleaning up a mess in this metal locker we have in the garage.  A big bag of rock salt from last winter had been leaking some kind of disgusting stuff into the garage through the locker and I’d gotten rid of the bag a couple of weeks ago.  It looked like something was still leaking so I pulled out my dry suit (scuba diving suit) and some other stuff and wiped out the mess that was inside.  When I went to throw my dry suit back inside I cut my thumb on one of the metal shelves.  It was a bit of a bleeder, so I grabbed it tight and walked out into the driveway where she was playing with Ro and told her I’d cut myself.

She said, “What?  How bad?”

So I showed her and she freaked out and ran in to grab the first aid kit.  She didn’t want me coming in because she didn’t want me bleeding on the floor (how’s that for compassion?) and brought the kit outside.  We were right behind my pickup and Ro was crawling around in the back.  She put the kit on the bumper and it fell off spilling bandages, antiseptic pads and all kinds of stuff all over the garage floor. 

Anyway, I managed to upstage Rowan with my injury dujour, but I have a feeling that Bonnie had better get used to playing paramedic to the two of us as he gets older.

We went out a couple of months ago and bought a huge first aid kit and consolidated the rest of the stuff we had kicking around.  I think we now have enough firstaid stuff to carry out an appendectomy if it becomes necessary. 

Catch Up

We’re in the new house!  Actually, Bonnie and I took a week off the day of the move and we had everything pretty well taken care of by the end of the week.  We worked our asses off, but it was worth it.  I’ll post some pictures of the house and area later.

Last weekend – January 9, 2010 – to be exact, Bonnie and I did the first ice climb of the season.  She hadn’t been on the ice for about a year or two, but she did great even if she was a little nervous initially. 

Is she cool or what?

It was pretty cold with temps staying in the teens and a good bit of the ice had snow cover on top of it, so when climbing I had to knock it away with my ice tool.  The ice itself was a little punky in some spots, but for the most part it was pretty good climbing.  Next time we go I’m going to check out Ever Drip, a route on the north west side of the spot where we were at.

Me climbing the icicle.

Dave Maddox showed up and his daughter and her boyfriend came out a short time later and climbed with us.  The more the merrier! 

Bonnie getting ready to climb.

Rowan?  Where was Ro all this time you wonder?  Why, he was belaying of course!  Ok, he was home with his grandmother, but don’t worry, he’ll be out there with us before too long!   Here’s a recent photo of the little guy.  He’s almost nine months old now and he’s already wearing 18 month old clothes.  We’re putting all of our extra money into food so he doesn’t starve.

Daddy’s little lady killer.

The Big Move

We’ve found the house of our dreams and are now looking forward to getting into it.  This comes at a big price of course, namely our sanity.  Saturday, December 5, 09 was to be the first foray to the new house with some of our belongings.  It isn’t our house yet, but we do have permission to move stuff into the garage, so we set out to fill it up.  When the signing happens on the 14th we want to be able to move right in.

Saturday was spent cleaning out the basement and above the garage.  Bonnie packed up tons of stuff and we moved it all out to our garage, which we’ve been using as a staging area.

Of course Sunday was the first snow storm of the season.  I got up, shoveled the truck off and loaded it up and made the first trip to the new house.  Bonnie couldn’t help move at first because someone’s got to take care of Rowan.  She did get some stuff packed up, but babies are such high demand little critters it’s hard to get anything done. 

We threw Ro in the truck on the second trip and he slept and Bonnie was able to help out this time, and man, did it go a lot faster with her helping.  I called Chey who put some of her plans on hold and she watched Ro while we made a couple of more trips.  In the end we emptied a good bit of our garage and got a lot of stuff stored over the garage at the new house.  Sweet.

Bonnie has been going crazy keeping track of all the details of the financial side.  Seems like there’s some kind of little emergency every day that has to be dealt with.  Ahh, such is the nature of buying a house.