Family Dinner

Not long ago I published an entry “Well we are still thankful” Which tells what happened on Thanksgiving Day.  Because of this disaster we rescheduled Thanksgiving for December 6.  Thankfully nothing went wrong.  My mom came down to pick up my oldest son and Amy and I rode up in our truck.  Everything ran well, we had to put a little air in the tires for the trip home but when you run on temporary sealant that is normal.  I documented the day with photos and as asked by my loving wife..I included the photos of my interesting ninja act.

Dinner…cooked by my mom and sister

Here is my mom showing off her nice turkey

My sister showing off her contributions of the veggies

Amy educating the boys on the correct way to make a redneck head out of food.  In this work of art is a brussel sprout, with some squash for eyes and nose, mashed potato for a beard and a carefully sculpted black olive to make a ball cap.  The kids would have attempted to make their own work of art but neither one would touch a brussel sprout.

After dinner, those who choose to pollute their lungs with cigarettes gather their winter gear to go outside to smoke.  Well I don’t have a jacket so I borrowed my sons.  Evidently one of my kids thought I was trying out for the Ninja squad

I’ll leave you to decide if I was really stuck in the neck of an oddly designed hoodie…or did I momentarily forget I was in an audience of my family and got caught in Ninja clothes.

Here is our 2009 family photo.  From the left is my oldest son Donnie, Me, Amy and my youngest son Josh

Here is me with my mom and sister…the ones who cooked up the awesome meal.

Mom with the Boys

And finally our sons year 2009

It turned out to be an awesome day!  Thanks Mom and Carrie!

Holiday Toy Run 2009

Amy and I took part in the Holiday Run for Helping hands.  She didn’t get the day off as we had hoped but the run was set to start at 1 PM and she didn’t need to be into work till 2 PM so we hoped we could do the run and get her back in time to go to work.  We have only missed one Helping Hands run and that was the year I didn’t have a wheelchair or a scooter and was seriously limited in mobility  I am able to get around now and we sure didn’t want to miss one that helps children who have been abused or neglected.

Here are a few pics from that run:

Here is the article from the local newspaper

Annual Toy Run at Helping Hands makes children’s Christmas brighter

As the bikes rode in and the children began to see the toys and teddy bears attached to the bikes, their eyes lit up with joy. The sight of hundreds of bikes, while overwhelming, brought such excitement.

As each biker parked their bike, they gathered their gifts and made a steady stream into Helping Hands, leaving their gifts on a table. Each wore a smile knowing they were making a child’s holiday a little brighter.

“It is really great to see so many people show up even when things are really hard,” said Director of Helping Hands Carmen Landy. “It is really awesome. We are blessed to see them over and over; they don’t stop coming no matter how tough things get with the economy. Today is a remarkable turnout, and everybody’s spirits are so high.”

Landy thanked everyone who has supported Helping Hands over the past year and invites anybody who is interested in adopting a child for Christmas to give her a call at 648-3456.

“We get new children all the way up until Christmas Day,” said Landy.

Helping Hands is a United Way agency that provides 24-hour residential care to child victims of abuse, abandonment or neglect. Residents’ ages range from birth to 21 years old.

For more information about Dixie Thunder of Aiken ABATE, visit www.dixiethunderaiken.com.

Contact Rachel Johnson at rjohnson@aikenstandard.com.

Original Article is here–>>http://www.aikenstandard.com/results/1206Toy

Headed off to my Sis’s house for our late Thanksgiving early Xmas dinner.

Wow awesome turnout for the helping hands holiday toy run. excellent parade

Off to meet up with Dixie Thunder to give our donations for the helping hands shelter kids

Seafood soup, fresh coffee and a nice warm fire in the kerosene heater…does life get any better?

Watching the Senate heath reform debate

Have a freshly slimed tire on the truck now, matches perfectly with the other slimed tire. Better’n nuthin though

Well we are still thankful

Well at the last minute (Last Night) my mom called to say my sister just got in from Charlotte where she has been away on business. Finding out that Amy was actually going to be home this year for Thanksgiving My sister didn’t want to just cancel and reschedule thanksgiving like we had planned. She decided she wanted to drive down here and take us out to a buffet dinner for the holiday since it’s rare that Amy is home on a holiday….so we made the plan to go out, everyone got in to bed a bit early. My son wakes me up saying he was sick to stomach. Because he has some serious social anxiety problems and rarely leaves the house we considered nerves, gave him some belly stuff and waited a bit…still sick and had evidence to prove it. So..we arranged for someone to be here with him and Amy and I would go out to dinner with everyone. Don’t worry…I wasn’t leaving a young child.  My oldest son is a handicapped adult and with another adult nearby to help out he’s perfectly okay to be left with a minor ailment…just didn’t want anyone reading this to think I was leaving a sick little one at home.

We knew we needed some slime/fix-a-flat because Amy came home from work saying the tire was bad.  ThenI told her that sucks because my sister was coming down to take us out to dinner.  So in the middle of the night we call my sis who was going to bring us some slime tire sealant when she came down.  Amy goes out the truck to get something before taking her shower and the tire was flat, flat…on the rim and you can’t use slime that way cuz there is no way to pump the tire. 

 

So…we consider popping off the tire, having my sis come down, we will slime the tire, pump it up at Amy’s gas station, bring it back pop it on the truck, check on the kid, if he can’t go we will go on to dinner. 

Well….. 

All we had was an old bottle jack for a car we used to have and a scissor jack that goes to the lumina that isn’t running anymore…no clue what is wrong with the Lumina this time.  Anyhow we tried the bottle jack and had to put it so far under the truck to hit a flat point that we had to use my crutch to jack it up…it wouldn’t go high enough!  Crutch however worked quite well as an emergency jacking tool.

We tried the scissor jack and the truck fell off the jack twice because of the angle we had to get the jack because in this case the jack was too big to fit under the only area that would work as this jack has a lip that is suppose to go into a slot on the Lumina.  The truck has no such slot so we had to find a piece of solid looking metal where the lip would overshoot and not leave an unlevel jacking surface.

So since the scissor is too tall


 

We Get Amy and the Neighbor kid (my youngest son is with my mom and sister 2 hours away) to each use a jack. We will raise the truck high enough with the bottle jack to get the scissor in a better position and hopefully finally jack the truck up. 

Almost there…bottle jack raises the truck, scissor goes in, cranking it up…the side support we used isn’t strong enough it bends and drops the truck, gotta bottle jack it up to get the scissor jack unstuck and out of there 

DEFEAT! We don’t have a truck jack because the truck didn’t come with one and we haven’t been able to afford a replacement jack.  The truck is grounded till we can find someone with a truck jack to come up here and get the !@#$% Tire off….so we ate oatmeal for thanksgiving dinner cuz yeah we are at the end of the month and out of food and we were thankful that nobody got their head crushed under the truck when it dropped that last time. 

Joey…my sons friend learned a valuable lesson in how NOT to jack up a truck. Of course we knew this was dangerous, but when you rarely have the right equipment for a job you do what you gotta do and you hope to come out of it with life and limb intact.  Nothing new for us but hell I felt like venting today cuz I really wanted something better than oatmeal!

So now THIS tire which is not the previously slimed tire that blew back in September while hauling floor repair lumber, no this will be my newest tire running on slime hoping to make it till income tax time so we can buy 4 used tires. 

How as your thanksgiving??

Truck fell twice now to try a combo of a bottle and scissor