Tornadoes and Testosterone

How about a more upbeat post? I went back and read my last two and I'm worried I might scare you all away. Boy was I have a weeks worth of pity parties!!!

Thanks to everyone that has emailed/commented checking on us! As anyone who has watched the news would know, we had a few tornadoes the past 24 hours. Talk about scary! Last night a tornado blew through downtown Atlanta. Damage was done to the Omni hotel, the Georgia Dome, Phillips Arena, Centennial Olympic Park and a lot, lot more. It was so sad to see. I work downtown very close to some of the damage but so far there have been no reports of damage to any of our buildings. As if that wasn't enough, another came through this afternoon but I haven't heard of any horrible damage. The poor clean-up crews had to quit and brace for more damage. Click here to read about the damage and see pictures.

Up in our neck of the woods we had a really bad thunderstorm that lasted about 10 mins. Keith and I were sitting in the kitchen and heard this horrible noise. I looked out the window and saw the wind and hail coming down. My poor dogs were on the porch (it's covered) but they were petrified. Poor Skipper was the worst - he has a fear of loud noises since, as a puppy, his previous owners tied him on a 2 foot rope to a tree in the middle of a thunderstorm. The poor 120 pound baby was trying to barrel our door down to get in. The picture below shows some of the hail next to a quarter, nickel and dime. Nice, huh?

Keith and I have earned our Parent of the Year nominations back. Alex had his first ever weight lifting competition this morning. Talk about heaven for teenage boys!! Lots of grunting, sweating and yelling. Alex did well, not as well as he wanted but he sets the bar very high for himself. As you can see in the pictures, he was doing some heavy lifting! He power cleaned 210 benched 175 and squatted 315. He typically squats around 340 but he went straight to 350 and couldn't put it up. You should have seen this kids. Someone benched somewhere in the 400's, they were squatting 450 - 500 pds. CRAZY.

I told Keith I finally realized why guys cheer women on while giving birth! (Not that I know first hand, but in all the movies they do!) All of the "you can do it", "come on", "push! push!" must come from years of being in sports and weight lifting or something. If someone was trying to put up more weight, dozens of kids would gather around real close, get in the kids face and yell "DO IT! PUT IT UP! LET'S GO" at the top of their lungs. Us women just don't work under pressure like that.

Alex went to his sisters for the night so Keith and I have had some nice relaxation time. I'm trying to figure out how to convert my Sony DVDs into little movies like so many of you do. I consider myself a technical person, but apparently the camcorder we have records with the idea that you're going to edit on the camera and not the PC. I'm downloading some software right now to convert the files from *.VOB files to *.AVI. Hopefully that will work. If not, this camcorder is going up on ebay and I'm going to have to get a new one. I've spent way too much time trying to figure this out!

Some adoption updates: Karyn & Norm are on their way to Russia to meet Baby C, Sinziana and Mark are on their 3rd trip getting ready to pick up Diego, Janine and her husband are in Russia meeting Emily, Carrie and Michael head to Tver Monday for court and Dana and Aaron are heading to Russia at the end of this week to meet their little one! I hope I didn't miss anyone and if I did, I'm so sorry!! There is so much going on, it's getting harder and harder to keep up which is a great problem to have!

Well, back to fighting with Sony and their unique DVD format! :-) I will outsmart it... I will prevail!! :-)

Night!

Becky