FIREGIRLS

Liz and our daughter spent some time at our local fire Allen station recently. No one was hurt it was just our daughter's Girl Scout troup taking a tour.

FATHERS AND SONS CAMP OUT

My little buddy and I went to our first "Fathers and Sons Camp out" together. It was located not to far from us at a campground in McKinney. My son had a lot of fun playing with the other boys and I had fun trying to find him. Liz called at one point to see how things were going and asked "Where's our son", and I replied "I don't know". He has never been camping before and he had so much fun. Normally he is in bed around 8 PM and that night I could not get him in bed until way after 10 PM! At 2 AM I awoke to a lot of wind blowing our tent in every direction. I looked outside to see rain on the horizon. My friend had his tent next to me and it was blowing away! We put the boys (his son and mine) in my truck and I held on to his tent (which was now a kite) for dear life while he tried to get his stuff out. After that I decided to take down my tent and pack up as well. Thankfully we had a lot of good men around to help us and others bring down the tents quickly. We were in our truck and ready to go when the rain was upon us and we were glad to get home safely.

NOW WE ARE FARMERS AND WE'RE DIGGIN DIGGIN DIGGIN!

The day before Mother's day Liz's parents came over and helped us build a herb garden. We have been trying to spend our extra time and resoueces on fixing up our back yard. After we finished our wonderful garden Liz's Dad helped me build my first raised garden. We capped off the day with lunch at La Finca a great local Mexican restaurant. The next week I picked up more supplies and built 2 more 8 feet x 8 feet x 12 inches raised gardens. Once I had built the raised gardens the hard part came next, filling them. I got a load of free compost from the City of Allen. Then I added top soil, manure and 18 wheel barrels of garden soil. I do believe with a little more soil and manure we will be able to start our garden!

A TRIP TO THE TEMPLE AND BATMAN!

On Saturday Dave and Liz were able to have spend the afternoon at the LDS Dallas Temple. The temple is special to us. It is a beautiful place on the outside and even more beautiful on the inside. When you walk inside the temple you leave the outside world behind. It is quite and peaceful inside. We learn about our Heavenly Father and his son Jesus Christ in the temple and we make special covenants there. It has been a long time since we were able to go there and we greatly enjoyed the experience and hope to find ways of getting back to the house of The Lord more often.

MEANWHILE...

The kids got to go to MacKenzie Garvin's 4th birthday party. While they were there they got to meet Batman! They had fun playing games and eating cake and they even got to come home with a Batman cape!

HAPPY 1ST MOTHER'S DAY LIZ

HAPPY 1ST MOTHER'S DAY LIZ!

YOU ARE A GREAT MOM AND A WONDERFUL WIFE! WE FINALLY MADE IT AS PARENTS AND WE ARE SO TIRED....

DAN, WE WILL MISS YOU!!!

Last night Liz and I heard of the passing of a great friend, Dan Hennessey. Dan goes way back having worked for ZEE Medical in Long Beach, CA before I worked there and he got to know my Dad since they both worked for ZEE at different locations. I ended up in the first aid business like my Dad and after I followed my Dad to another first aid company I had to obey a simple rule that my Dad started. Do not go into Dan Hennessey's accounts and he will not go into yours! After my Dad passed away I got to know Dan better since he had moved into safety training and we would refer each other for business. Dan was a great storyteller and we both had a love for sales, treating your customers as a friend and the first aid/safety business. Basically it was like hanging out with my Dad who I missed. He also looked a lot like my Dad! Dan and Liz and I had fun going to dinner and hanging out. Dan always had a great story and even though you may have heard it a few times it was still fun to hear him tell it. The bonus of knowing Dan was that he was a great cook! More so, he was even better at baking! He made the best cheesecake ever and Liz just loved his pumpkin cheesecake. He also made great big chocolate chip cookies the kind that would take days to eat! Liz liked the fact that he would make "female" cookies i.e. "no nuts". Sadly Dan had problems with diabetes which lead to his toe being removed, then a part of his foot, then his foot and lastly his leg. He was near death time after time but just kept bouncing back! We gave him a hard time and called him "Kick Stand Dan" since he had a fake leg but we were amazed that he just keep going and did not let anything stop him. Later he ended up with kidney failure and still he just kept on working. The last time I saw Dan was the night we moved to Texas from California. We were trying to finish packing last minute things so that we could get on the road. We did not know what to do with our fish so I said "Dan, take these fish and do something with them". Being the good friend that he was and since he had a fish tank he did take them and he took good care of them. Not long after we moved from California Dan and his wife Lynne relocated to Washington state to be closer to children and grand children. I would call him from time to time to see how he was doing. I could not believe that of all things a auto accident returned him home to his Heavenly Father! He leaves behind a great wife and 4 wonderful kids and grand kids and I know that even as I write this he is in heaven telling my Dad stories on how Liz and I are doing! Farewell my friend!

"Safety Dan"

Showing that he can still stand on a fake leg!

And the good one!
Dan and Lynne

BASEBALL FUN WITH THE FRISCO ROUGH RIDERS

We were able to get free tickets from CPS for the Frisco Rough Riders minor league baseball team. They have a very "family friendly" ball park and it is also near by. It was a fun night with free baseball caps, free food and the team lost! Oh well, we still had a great time! Here in Allen, TX they are building a hockey arena and we cannot wait to see hockey games right down the street! Thank you Susan for the tickets!

RACE TRACK

We told our little guy that if he was good in kindergarten we would get him a race track. He loves racing so this was a big prize for him. We were able to stretch this goal to 3 weeks and he was very good getting 6's and 7's on his daily happy faces. At his school kindergarten is all day and "being good" is quite a endeavor! I know, I've been to his class and scene it! Thankfully he is not the only one in his class challenged day to day to be good for a whole 7 hours! We are very happy that our son has a great teacher who has helped him grow so much in the last school year. When we got him last July he was very behind in school. Now with the help of his teacher and with working with him at home he is moving full speed ahead! This has helped his self confidence and his anger problems are now very rare. Good job buddy! Since our little girl is "always good" at school I let her pick out a barbie too!

GARBAGE DISPOSAL

It is pretty silly but I get excited when I can do something myself and learn from it. With being a home owner stuff breaks all the time and this time it was our old garbage disposal. The garbage disposal got a hole in it and was spraying water below our sink. So we did some research and came up with a new one that was better then the old one but still in our price range. The exciting part was that Liz and I were able to install it in about 35 minutes! It was a happy Friday night for The Anderson's!

SWING SET

After much research we finally bought a swing set for the kids from Sam's Club. Since it was a lot less expensive we also had to put it together! Those of you who know me are well aware of my limited mechanical abilities. Liz is much better at reading directions and putting thing together but even this project was much to much for the 2 of us! We enlisted the help of friends and family to come over a few Saturdays ago and we were very grateful with the results. It seems that our neighbor Jared enjoys these kinds of projects. This was fun for him! He also has cool tools. One of them called a impact driver was the life saving ultra super cool tool! Jared work with Liz and I all day on this starting before 8 AM and not leaving till it was dark at 9 PM! Let's just say that we were pretty sore and tired the next day! We also need to thank Liz's parents, Taylor, Matt and Doug for helping out also! We finished most of it on Saturday and then over the next week or so we worked here and there on the rest when it was not raining. The kids love it!!!

Why we love Captain Kirk

Why we love Captain Kirk
Chris Lackner, Canwest News Service
Paramount
"Don't let them promote you. Don't let them transfer you. Don't let them do ANYTHING that takes you off the bridge of that ship, because while you're there... you can make a difference."
Those words come from the lips of Captain James T. Kirk - directed at one of his successors in the Starship Enterprise's command chair. But the final few words can easily be applied to the character himself.
Kirk did make a difference - but not only in space, the final frontier. He created a cultural imprint that has left us with everything from T-shirt catchphrases ("beam me up") and real-world leadership ideals to seemingly endless forms of parody.
How did a seemingly one-dimensional character on a cheesy space-western - played with unabashed ham-handed, stilted glory by William Shatner - become the most important, endearing captain and leadership figure in sci-fi history?
Why exactly do we love James T. Kirk?
As the new Star Trek film prepares to look at the temperamental Kirk's youth and his rise in Starfleet, it's worth examining the character's durability. Frontiersman, lover, friend, flawed rebel, workaholic, philosopher, a cowboy with a conscience - Kirk connects with many of society's ideals of leadership and adventurer. He is who we'd like to be as leaders, or who we'd like to have lead us - and not just when he's bedding a bevy of space aliens.
"Kirk was a man who marveled and greatly appreciated the endless surprises presented to him by the universe... he didn't take things for granted," Shatner wrote in his 2008 autobiography Up Till Now.
Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry initially crafted the character as a homage to C.S. Forester's cunning and duty-minded sea captain Horatio Hornblower. And Shatner himself once said he tried to imbue Kirk with a sense of the witty "good-pal-the-captain, who in the time of need could snap to become the warrior."
With 28-year-old Chris Pine set to inherit sci-fi's ultimate captaincy in the J.J. Abram's Trek prequel (with Jimmy Bennett also playing Kirk as an impetuous child), Kirk is poised for reinvention to an old generation of fans, while simultaneously being introduced to a new one.
One of the reasons Kirk plays so well in North America is that he's the ultimate frontiersman - a future-era Davy Crockett wrestling Klingons instead of bears. Born in Iowa, Kirk moves from humble beginnings to become the ultimate explorer - part coureur de bois, part astronaut, part larger-than-life sea captain unafraid of falling off the edges of the known world (ie. universe).
"You could feel the wind at your back, about you - the sounds of the sea beneath you," Kirk says about his seafaring forefathers in the original series episode The Ultimate Computer. "And even if you take away the wind and the water, it's still the same. The ship is yours, you can feel her, and the stars are still there."
While a captain's captain, Kirk never shied away from ignoring the orders of superiors if he thought the end justified it -even going as far as stealing his old ship in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, and later being demoted from the rank of admiral for his efforts. And he did it all with a twinkle in his eye.
The Last Lecture creator Randy Pausch said watching Kirk taught him to be a better teacher, co-worker and family man, while noting Kirk's strength was found in delegating, inspiring and establishing a vision -even though he wasn't always the smartest member of the crew (that was generally Spock).
And then there's the cosmic Kirk mojo - an intergalactic seduction record that makes Charlie Sheen and Mick Jagger look like high school virgins. Whether presented with a green Orion slave women, an android, or a primitive, tribal princess, Kirk could found a way into her bed. The web is littered with lists debating Kirk's greatest conquests, but he had a charm that made him seem less like a chauvinist scoundrel, and more just a lover of the moment.
Modern men can use "going to war" as an excuse for a tryst, but Kirk could use everything from "won't be back in this solar system for another 40 years" to "battling a Vulcan to death in hand-to-hand combat tomorrow" to justify his escapades. Life was short, and he flew by the seat of his pants in more ways than one.
"Kirk has been accused of being sexist and misogynistic - I don't believe that's true, but I do think Kirk's very nature prevented him from having any long-term or lasting relationships," writes Brad Trechak of TV.com. "He wasn't that good at discussing his feelings (sensitivity obviously also didn't become "in" until the 24th century). He was too busy saving the universe as he knew it."
Of course, Kirk was just as much a fighter as he was a lover. Despite all the technology at his finger tips, nearly every episode of the original series involved a campy fist fight producing a ripped, abs-revealing captain's uniform (it's a wonder Kirk's tailor's bill didn't bankrupt Starfleet). His fighting style has been widely derided and even coined Kirk Fu (also Shat Fu) - a combat strategy "in which you can defeat someone without actually hitting any vulnerable spots" whose signature moves included the "Kirk drop kick" (which typically left the good captain on the ground along with his opponent).
Yet, it's telling that in the film Fight Club (1999), when debating who the "ultimate opponent" would be, Edward Norton thinks for a moment and then says one word "Shatner." And by Shatner, Norton means Kirk.
Friendship and loyalty are also at the heart of Kirk's appeal - the series linchpin is his friendship with Spock and Dr. McCoy, a Three Musketeers-esque loyalty that went beyond duty and ship.
"I thought you said men like us don't have families,"McCoy once tells Kirk. The captain's typically over-dramatically-delivered response: "I. Was. Wrong."
With an undeniable bravado and a knack for always surviving against unrealistic odds (who else can take credit for outsmarting both a super computer AND a semi-omnipotent being pretending to be God), Kirkhas also been taught lessons in humility. Unlike many sci-fi legends, Kirk is vulnerable, flawed and wounded. In the film series, he lost both his son David and best friend Spock (later happily resurrected) to his chosen profession.
Beyond brute and boor, it is these challenges that made Kirk a philosopher.
On of those most telling moments occurred in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, after Kirk was appointed a peace envoy between humans and Klingons, who he blamed for murdering his son.
"They're animals... Don't believe them. Don't trust them," Kirk says on the subject of helping his sworn enemies and brokering peace.
"They're dying," Spock intones, prompting a guttural, rage-filled response from the captain. "Let them die!"
He later asks in his audio journal "how on earth can history get past people like me?"
Captain Han Solo of Star Wars was a rebel, but he was a loner and no philosopher - and it took him three films to finally get the lady of his dreams. Luke Skywalker was a one-trick "Use the Force" pony who could barely beat his lava-ravaged father, and he kissed his sister. While a ham, Kirk's character dimensions are far greater than both.
A website listing 100 reasons why Kirk is a better captain than Star Trek: The Next Generations Jean-Luc Picard include the following: "Kirk has punched out at least one member of over three thousand known alien races; When it's time for shore leave Kirk goes rock climbing and drinks whiskey. Picard wears nut smashing banana hammock speedos and reads by the pool; Picard drinks tea, Kirk drinks Saurian Brandy straight from the bottle; Kirk looks good in a ripped shirt, and he knows it; Kirk sword fights someone on a regular basis" and, most tellingly, "Style: Kirk did it first, he did it better and he did it wearing gold velour and Beatle-boots with a space girl on each arm."
Since his debut in the 1960s, Kirk has arguably become the most parodied sci-fantasy character in history. And it's the public's - both Trek fans and non-fans alike - familiarity with the character that lend him to such mockery. We truly hurt the ones we love. Among the long list of those who have targeted the captain: The Simpsons, Family Guy, Saturday Night Live, National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon, Galaxy Quest and Futurama, and even Shatner himself in a famous SNL sketch in which he derides his famous role and tells a room full of Trek fans to "Get a life."
Then again, Shatner also once teased about his alter-ego: "We were basically one and the same, although Jim was just about perfect, and, of course, I am perfect."
There we have it from the man to first hold the name: Kirk was "just about" perfect. But the imperfections were what make him great. A warrior and intellectual. A lady killer. The ultimate renaissance man, and a self-professed one for "rushing in where angels fear to tread."
In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Kirk says "How we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life." Now, 15 years after the character's controversial death in the film Star Trek: Generations, James T. Kirk has been given new life to "boldly go where no man has gone before" all over again.
Beam us up.
© 2009 The National Post Company. All rights reserved. Unauthorized distribution, transmission or republication strictly prohibited.

PRIMARY

I teach Primary to a bunch of 5 year olds at church. What more can I say?