Kimi's New Job

I'll let you guys know up front I'm going to jump around topics today so bear with me. :)

This past Monday, Kimi started her new job as a Speech & Language Pathologist at a school 35 minutes away from our home. It's SUCH a long drive out there but luckily she gets paid for mileage, which helps. It's been an interesting week so far for her, some of it pretty rough. She met her new boss on Monday and thus began the whirlwind of action that hasn't stopped for her. On Monday the air conditioner didn't come on until the end of the day. That left the building in scorching heat that Kimi had to work in for 6 hours, rearranging furniture, sorting through notes on each student, doing inventory on the entire supplies of the SLP dept. She got to leave a little early that day b/c of the heat but we turned around and drove back that night to work for a couple more hours after the building had cooled off. Very long day for her (and me too). But the rest of her week has been steadily getting better and well, today is Friday and she should be leaving at noon which is nice. Just keep her in your prayers as she keeps her stamina up. She starts hearing screenings next week on a hundred kids so it could be another stressful week.

How about a lighter note? And yes, I know this technically is in the past and we should move on because Kimi had our baby already but I've got to share how funny my wife was while she was pregnant. She had major pregnancy brain, which means she had a hard time getting the right words out and sometimes forgetting obvious things. Two scenarios: 1st, one time we were at Walmart getting groceries when Kimi yelled to me across the store not to forget the "hotdog patties". One of the walmart employees looked at me inquizically and I said, "She meant hamburger patties. She's got pregnant brain." The walmart employee just laughed and walked away. 2nd, one night we were watching TV when she heard the answer to a Wheel of Fortune question and said, "Where is Publa City at?" I look up at the TV and said, "No sweetheart, that's not a place, its a word...publicity." I couldn't stop laughing for the longest time. We really had such a fun time with Kimi during her pregnancy but she was a good sport about all of it too. :)

My beautiful daughter is showing her Sooner Pride by sporting her newest OU outfit! I just had to slip this in here. :)

Yesterday was nice for us, we got to see my Aunt Kay and her husband Ricky with his two girls, my Grandma Fox and my Aunt Debbie and Uncle Paul, along with my brother, dad and Brenda for some good grilled food. Kimi and I weren't expecting so many of our family members to be there but it was truly nice. We haven't seen my Aunt Kay and Ricky for at least a couple of years because they live in VEGAS (CSI TOWN). There has been so much that has been going on with them, it's so sad that we can't be around them more. Aunt Kay called up my cousins Sam and Brittany and handed over the phone to me. After talking to them for a while, they both sure seem so grown up now... which reflects on how much older I am now but that's another story. SAM AND BRITTANY, if you are reading this, send me an email sometime WITH PICTURES!

My last subject for today has to do with something amazing yet disgusting. You've got to hear the story first. Kimi got into a cleaning frenzy last weekend and when she got to the vacuuming portion, the vacuum cleaner flat out broke. Wouldn't suck anything up anymore. We had only had this for 3 years and now it had broken. It never really worked great anyway. But to continue, we needed a new vacuum cleaner. We had heard a lot of good things about a Dyson. You know, that british guy on TV who always does the Dyson vacuum cleaner commercials claiming it's the best and never looses suction and he thinks things should work properly and blah blah blah? Yeah, that guy. Anyway, we did a lot of searching on the net for info on Dyson's and there was a lot of people who reviewed and said it was great, best they'd ever had. So we were about to go out and spend almost $600 on "the world's best vacuum cleaner" when we ran into Kimi's mom and she suggested we check out the consumer reports website. We were like Okay. So I signed up for their online report and clicked my way to their "unbiased opinion but we'll accept advertising in our magazine from the product companies" reviews of about 25 different vacuum cleaners. They had the Dyson's listed about 2/3rds the way down the list, which was very surprising. At the top, they had the Kenmore (Sears) vacuum cleaners, both the bagged and bagless versions as #1 and #2 respectively. Very interesting indeed.

So Kimi and I went for a visit to the nearest Sears to check out these Kenmore's and to put them to the test. When we got there, they looked just like any of the others but had a few more gadgets than the rest. They also had the Dyson's we were looking at so I decided to have a small competition. Go figure. The sales guy didn't know a thing about vacuum cleaners and was from a different dept so it was up to me to run the show. They had a dust bin full of dirt and fibers and pieces of shredded carpet to "test" out the units. I dumped the whole bin on the floor of the store and ground it in with my foot! The guys eyes went wide-eyed and he rushed over to grab the Dyson and started running it across the carpet over and over and over again. He got the big pieces up but there was still a lot of the little stuff left that it couldn't pick up and he was beginning to panic. I said, well let's try the Kenmore one. So we grabbed the Kenmore and literally it grabbed all of it up in one swipe. I was amazed, sold, put it in the car honey and let's go. Just incredible. My little show even sold the sales guy on getting the Kenmore too! Haha. Anyway, when I got home, I put it together and started it up as a test down our hallway. Now let me tell you, our last vacuum cleaner prior to frying would only get about an inch worth of dirt/doghair up after cleaning the whole house. We thought things were clean. Boy were we wrong! After just a few rows down the hallway, well, just look at the picture above. LOOOOK! Look how much dirt and doghair it got up! FROM JUST THE HALLWAY! WOW! I'm going to wait until this weekend to do the rest of the house but I'm afraid I'll have to empty the canister 10 times! So gross. We just thought our floors were clean... Anyway, we made the right choice by buying this vacuum cleaner and it was only $300, half the price of the Dyson! :)

Now that I've literally written a ton about not much at all, I'll go ahead and end this post. I did want to leave you guys with a cool thing I just put up on the site. On the right side of the page, you'll see a link that says "View Our Photo Slideshow?". If you click on that, it will pop open a window and start playing a slideshow of the most recent pictures from our Flickr photo page! Try it out, it's awesome!

Until the Cows come home!

Jason