Patrick Says

So, I wanted to take a moment here to shill for my friends at The Wife’s church, Valley View Baptist Church. I’m know I’m not much for religion, but these are good folks. When our family was going through all the crap that we’ve been through the last couple years, Valley View was there helping in ways I can’t begin to go into.

The last six months have been rough for them. Again, not my place to go into great depth, but they are currently in a rebuilding phase. They have a sign out by the road that has not been lit up for awhile due to finances. So, they are looking for donations to help turn it back on.

I’m pretty broke, but I thought maybe I would put this out there to my awesome readers (all three of you). You can sponsor in $5 increments. I’ve added a link below to contribute to me. I will take the total collected (if any) and turn it directly over to them. They even have little paper light bulbs you can have your name on if you sponsor.

Take that money you were just going to blow on metal step stools or whatever and help out a good cause.

Well, it’s that time of year again for The Oldest’s Cub Scout pack. It’s time for the Pinewood Derby. Last year was my (and his) first year and it was…an experience. I know more about food allergy testing Austin than I know about the Pinewood Derby. I had no idea what I was doing and didn’t figure out until a couple nights before that I was severely underweight. For those of you not in the know, a Pinewood Derby car can be up to, but not over five ounces. So, I had to drill about ten screws into the car to get it up to weight. And wow-zer, did it make the car ugly.

This year was going to be different.

We got a body picked out and our neighbor/den leader cut it out. The Oldest sanded it and put the weights on. I’m currently still painting, but I expect we’ll be ready to go by this Saturday. If you follow me on Facebook, you can see a bunch of pictures of the car as we complete it. The idea this year was to model it after the R-9 refueler trucks I drove in the Air Force (see picture).

Obviously, I can’t make it as detailed as the actual vehicle. It’s more of an inspiration, but I think it will be cool. Hopefully, we’ll do okay.

Last year was rough for The Oldest. He doesn’t take losing well. It’s something he hasn’t learned well and it’s hard to teach. He got pretty teared up last year. I’ve tried to prep him more this year as last year caught me off guard.

We’ll see how it goes this Saturday.

I very nearly gave this up. Blogging, that is.

I’d had a particularly bad night the other night and I was in the mood to destroy something. It’s what I do. I destroy my own things. Why would I do this? I suppose it’s a lot of things. Part of it is that I’m tired of pretending that everything is hunky dory all the time. That I’m dealing well with this life I lead. I didn’t want to have to put a fake-ass happy face on and write posts about Katy Perry or dick jokes.

Since that time, I’ve reconsidered. Posts may be infrequent here for a bit. Or they just may be dark.

I’m not sure how it’s going to go. Just between you and me, I considered taking on a pseudonym and creating a blog out there somewhere to just tell it like I feel it, but with my luck, someone would stumble onto it and figure out it’s me. Maybe I still will…

We’re up again after the strike. Looks like we beat SOPA and PIPA back. For now. They will be back. You can bank on that.

Just an FYI that this site will be particiapting in the SOPA Strike tomorrow (if I installed the plugin correctly). This site will be down to protest SOPA and PIPA, the government’s over-reaching and censoring of the Internet. Call your Congress peeps and urge them to oppose these pieces of garbage legislation.