today adam, chelsie, my mom and dad came out for the day to hang out. we decided to make a trip up to boulder to the celestial seasonings tea factory. for those of you looking for a chance to max your olfactory for free here's your shot!
as you can see we had a tea-rrific time!

last night Luna, our friend's 7/8 black lab puppy came over to hang out. let it be known that william does not appreciate luna's company and frankly i think he hates her
also, since cross season is rapidly approaching, i have decided that everyone in our house should focus on being just a little healthier. "everyone" includes dallas, me, AND william. we have decided to work on the weakest link first thus we started with the fat furball. a good place to start when working on weight loss is BMI. for those of you who don't know, BMI stands for body mass index and gives a good reference for the average person. it is measured by a simple calculation and comes down to kg/m(2). here are william's measurements:

16.5 lbs/2.2 (lbs/kg) = 7.5 kg
18" (head to base of tail): 39.37 in/m = 0.457 m
m(2) = 0.2089

william's BMI: 35.9

you might be saying.... WOW! he's a cat and he still has a bmi number! that should be good, right?

WRONG! according to the ACSM guidelines for health here is a break down of the categories:

• underweight (BMI: below 19.5)
• normal weight (BMI:18.5 - 24.9)
• overweight (BMI: 25.0 to 29.9)
• obese (BMI: 30.0 & above)

thus we have classified william as obese and in severe need of help

last night dallas taught william (peeking up from fender of jeep) about bike mechanics. too bad he doesn't have opposable thumbs!

extremely obese cat

while we were gone william decided to gain an obnoxious amount of weight. he is to the point where he doesn't like supporting his own body weight and likes to lay on ANYTHING that might support him. today i had the day off and cleaned the house. since there is nothing on the floor to lay on, he decides that my bag is the next best bet
today i left for errands with him on the bag and came back 2 hrs later to find him still here. clearly he needs some more physical activity.... and yes, wes, it's not that his body is HUGE, it's just that his head is just abnormally small :)

security dude

this may be hard for you to see, but i forgot to blog this dude the other day. when you work at roxbouro you have to stop and see their security person. brett and i had a hard time taking the security guard with high rise pants, beer belly and goofy glasses seriously. thankfully we got thru..... it was a close call! plastering at home is done! we got back tonight to find that in 4 days william had ate 1/2 of his bag of cat food. we found that pretty ridiculous, until we figured that comparably that was the same amount of cookies that my mom fed us. guess we're all going on a diet after this week

Wii!

blogging has been a disaster since i somehow volunteered to plaster 2 parts of my parent's house. this is much more time consuming than i thought it might be.

my parents totally surprised us and purchased a Wii nintendo system for themselves. who would have thought that they knew what one even was? anyway, this has become quite the entertainment activity at night, having Wii tournaments amongst each other. since my mom is currently beating us at golf (and flaunting her Wii Woods skill) she gets her picture on here. (she is bowling here, not golfing)

other great things that have happened, dallas and i go for a bike ride around the section, cows are out, and we chase them in on our bikes wearing pink lycra. i think the cows were quite entertained by this

exciting times in ludell

after it stopped raining we took lisa and lucy to ludell's latest attraction: the headless porcupine

we almost ran over this poor creature last night (dead in the middle of the road) on our way here and today had to walk down to see what one looked like close up in real life. here is my dad, the porcupine expert, giving us informational facts

here are some fun porcupine tidbits:
average lifespan: 5-7 years
in latin means "quill pig"
diet: herbivore, eating a lot of tree bark and berries
they have poor sight and are nocturnal

new american classic

this should be framed next to the real american gothic by woodtoday we did ralph lauren river rock on the wall. it wasn't the most exciting job we've ever had but brett invented his own technique called "fluffing." here is brett fluffing. we should call him fluffy in the future

off to the farm for some silage cutting!

the last few days my coach has been killing me and by the time i blog i'm too tired.... so i don't. sorry!

my mother had an excellent joke the other day:

how do you kill a circus?

go for the juggular!

ha ha!
tomorrow dallas, lisa, lucy, rudi (the dog) and i are going back to atwood so we can show lucy the farm. it's going to be awesome!

lately william has been getting excited for school and likes to lay on the medical dictionary, hoping that osmosis works.
(little does he know that he's not going this year).

also, after our little talk the other night he says that admits that he's been escaping the yard so he can look for an appropriate homecoming date. any takers?

today was our last day at the pizza joint doing a few last touchups on the mural. it is fortunate that even though lisa assigned both brett and i to paint things in the same area we are able to do our work due to extreme height differences

plumb picking

with the colder temps we decided that we should get the plumbs off the tree. we're contemplating making jelly.... (guess what yo'ure getting for Christmas this year!!) some of these plumbs are very high up in the tree and unreachable with even a ladder.... so we got:
a fruit picker from home depot!
it is like a basket with these little finger things on it that help you grab the fruit and it drops it down to a little basket. today confirmed that i am never to participate in hand/eye coordination sports or activities. this is probably why i ride bikes. after dallas tried taking charge of the plumb picker we had to make rules such as:
you cannot pick plums with the plumb picker that you could stand and get with your hands

additionally there are different levels of plumb picking difficulty:
1) you can stand on deck and pick plumbs
2) you can stand on ladder and pick plumbs while holding on with one hand
3) you are able to pick plumbs with plumb picker
4) you are able to stand on last step of ladder and pick plumbs with 2 hands
5) you are able to pick plumbs with plumb picker being extended
6) you can stand on ladder and pick plumbs with plumb picker

i'm on level 5 right now.... right under pro plumb picker! fortunately urgent care is close if anything 'fruity' happens!

today i was a weenie, decided not to race or ride in the cold and rain, and watched olympics with dallas and william. we watched a snip-it of the women's track and field. dallas told me that if i ever looked like an olympic shot put-ter he would make me eat rice cakes for meals. other than that, no pics. sorry!

we've decided that we're going to make brett into a faux finisher. he was jealous of our facial hair yesterday and grew some of his own. it looks more natural on him, eh?

this week we are working in an italian restaurant... mural and glaze. it's a really hard job snacking on pizza and having fountain drinks on tap all day long. outside the place are those little things that you put quarters in and get "cool" stuff out of. when lisa was gone today jen and i couldn't resist the sign that said, "a fun way to fool your friends!" i think we misunderstood it and possibly the person purchasing the product was the fool.

i look like mario
jen looks like a dork because she can't stop laughing
and lisa looks like she's on drugs.
who wants us to come paint their house?

my phone has been a great little phone for the past 2 years. it was great until now. the people at tmobile told me that i have 2 more months to wait until i can get a new one at a great discount price. numerous texting has allowed me to memorize where all the letters are on my phone but my fingers are extremely too fat to be texting at high speeds. it's a good thing we have a nice tmobile connection. new phone coming soon!

i'm sorry i keep blogging about our fat cat. but seriously i have to when i come home from a bike ride and find him in the bathroom sink

today was rather entertaining, even though i have no image representation of it

1) my grandpa's latest entertainment fad is giving telemarkerters the run around the bush by talking to them for up to 30 minutes, right up until the point that they get fed up with "the crazy old man" and hang up on him

2) we got the ridiculous ceiling done, including cast shadow. the best part about the whole deal was that the client came home, decided that she didn't like the cast shadow, and i had to leave from our 10:5 hr day before i started crying

3) if kitty kats had an olympics, william would definitely win the moth catching contest

4) if dallas was in the olympics, he would lose the gymnastics portion of the competition horribly, based on his unsuccessful imitation that he gave william and i in the living room

5) dallas and i are figuring out what to do with the 30 bottles of wine and 2 cases of beer that we have left over from our party (this is 6 more bottles than we started with)

whew! what a party! thank you everyone for coming.... i had a blast..... now i'm super dooper tired. and, there are no pictures of last night because i was too busy talking (does this surprise anyone? it shouldn't.) the only thing i have about today is that we have started picking plumbs off of our plumb tree!

apparently we have raspberries growing somewhere.... if i only knew what a raspberry bush looked like

everything is almost ready. for those who are coming to our par-ty, feel confident in what you are drinking. everything has been quality control checked by william

by 3:00 today we were mentally and physically exhausted. but, we did have a fantastic break! please refer to dallas' "a geek's life" blog for reference picture. there is a waitress at a mexican restaurant that we always visit that shaves her eyebrows and draws them back on. we tried imitating her on breaklisa would like you to note that her paint job would have looked better if she would have used 1076 instead of 1075. maybe next time

my entire job today was working on the greek key. here it is.

(not counting drawing it on), but just painting in on with the highlights and shadows requires 3,080 different brush strokes.
no wonder we're losing it

for the 2 of you who have voted not to come to the party, you still have 52.5 hrs from the time i post this to change your minds!
to everyone else, here is a small preview....

really now, how do you say no to peanuts, almonds, and pecans smothered in caramel topped with chocolate?

a joke from my mom....

why didn't the bicycle cross the road?

it was two tired

today was another neck strainer. here's a closer look at what we're painting. some crazy dude started this and i think
we're crazy to finish it

also, i got a pair of hedge trimmers today! this ranks as one of my top 3 yard activities.
watch out yard! last time i did my mom's there was hardly anything left

today i was cross-eyed for the majority of the time. work was literally a pain in the neckalso, i don't know if you realized, but i sure didn't.... our housewarming party is this saturday! since when did it become august? anyway.... we have some pretty fantastic desserts planned. if anyone has great suggestions for delicious but cost effective wine for a crowd let me know! if there's something you really want we'll put it on the applejacks list!

sometimes i have to ask myself.... did i actually pay money for this?

what a saturday

so dallas got in from his week long trip in north dakota last night. i thought, just in time! we can go race mountain bikes! instead, dallas decided that it would behoove him to stay home and work all day. so i went up by myself to race my little mountain bike up, and down, and up, and down..... for a very very long ways.... until right when i was about to give up some angel said that i had just crossed the finish line. since i have the worst downhill technical skills of anyone at the entire venue (including spectators) i get to race the sport category. somehow i inadvertently bought this cup for $45 .

break out

i'm not sure how fast cats age compared to humans, but i'm guessing it's about 7:1. that seems about right, as william would be about 15-16 in human years and is now considered a teenager. he has started doing teenage things like ooooh, escaping the yard not once, not twice, but three times at night. since we have found out about this, we've sat him down and talked about how his actions deserved consequences like not going outside without adult supervision. now he just runs into the covered dog door and hopes that he magically breaks thru.

we're actually very impressed with william, because who would have guessed that an overweight cat would have enough hops to jump the fence? obviously not his ignorant parents.

he decided to break out the night my parents were here. here's my mom with the escapee