Harvey peed in the office tonight. A LOT. I mean he emptied his bladder. It’s really a shame too because, while he’s not blameless, it’s not totally his fault. Amanda had just gone upstairs to bed and I was in the bathroom and he hadn’t been let out in a while. We generally let the dogs out pretty often, but it just hadn’t occurred to us tonight. We’re out of paper towels too. I used a bunch of napkins, but they weren’t nearly as effective. I might steam clean the carpet tomorrow.

Backing up to the beginning of my day, I fell asleep on the long couch last night pretty soon after Amanda went to bed. Bruce was snuggled up on me in a way that, when I woke up late in the night I didn’t want to get up. Around 4:30 I woke up again and decided it was indeed time to get in bed. Harvey heard me moving around and came downstairs so I put him and Bruce outside for a bit.

He really is good about that. Just a few minutes ago I went out to the living room and asked Bruce if he wanted to go outside to go pee (okay, I said “pee pee”) and I heard Harvey jump off the bed and come on downstairs. He went straight to the door.

Work was a bit busier today, but it wasn’t like it was a couple weeks ago.

Kristen invited us to a party that’s going to be on Saturday. Amanda and I had asked several people about coming to our place for one (although we knew it would be small so I’d call it more of a get-together), but most everyone was already doing something. Admittedly, it was very short notice so we weren’t expecting much. Anyway, Kristen called to see if we’d decided if we were going to the one she invited us to because the host wanted a headcount so I called Amanda to talk to her about it. Unbeknownst to me (although Amanda said she told me and she probably did) a few people from her work were going to be able to make it, so I told Kristen that.

Amanda has decided that we’ll have to play CLR (or is it LRC or some other combination of those three letter?) on Saturday. It’s a very simple game, but it’s one of luck. Amanda and I won quite a bit of money at it playing it at Elliot and Melissa’s a few months ago. Anyway, we’ve decided we’ll play it with quarters instead of dollars, so we’re telling everyone to bring $2.50 each in quarters.

I talked to my brother Adam to make sure he and his girlfriend Renee are coming, which they plan to. We might get together with them on Saturday for breakfast and to go out shopping for gifts for our nephew Jackson. His third birthday is on the 23rd, so we’ll be doing birthday and Christmas shopping.

I’ve probably been talking about God on here more lately than I have in the past. It’s not that I have suddenly found myself in some new phase- I talk about God in regular life with regularity. Maybe I’ve just gotten more comfortable with writing it in a place where people (all two-three who check this site out in a month) will look over my thoughts, and that can be a vulnerable feeling, to put something like that out there.

That prefaced, Amanda and I were shown another miracle in our finances today. It seems like every time things get tough with our money, something happens to take care of it. When we first moved here to Wilmington there were times when we didn’t know how we came up with enough money to pay the bills. There were months where things were really tight, then an order for some wedding photos I took would come in out of nowhere. Just the other day when I was plotting out our money to pay bills and whatnot, we would have had well under a comfortable amount of money in the bank at the end of the month after paying all the bills, the mortgage, our tithe (which we credit to having things like this work out for us), the money drafted for our investments and paying off the credit card bill. That last one is the big one.

Anyway, I told Amanda we’d have to discuss what to not pay for the month earlier today, but then a Christmas check came in from Aunt Robbie. It nearly teared me up. I can’t wait to thank her tomorrow.

I talked to Andra a bit tonight. Not about any particular things, just stuff, although she does seem to have a knack for calling and asking if Amanda’s pregnant yet on the day we can tell her with absolute certainty that she is not. Andra said she’d been thinking about Christmas so she gave me a call. I talked to Jackson for a minute after she got home. He told me “This is my daddy. This is my mommy.” I told him, “Jackson, your mommy is my sister.” He corrected me, though, by telling me, “No, I’m her sister.” Then he hung up on me.

Amanda and I watched a little TV- I joined her for the end of The Office then we watched 30 Rock and a Saturday Night Live Christmas show with some best ofs. While we lamented that it didn’t have the lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree (we’ve got the episode with it on our DVR from probably two years ago now), we (along with Michael, who was here at the time) cracked up at Schweddy Balls, which is one of Amanda’s all-time favorite SNL sketches. I’d forgotten how funny it was.

Speaking of Michael, he’d had a bit of a day. His new cat, Goat, has a stuffy nose and is sneezing a small amount of blood. He’s taking him to the vet tomorrow, but he’s also leaving for Charlotte to met up with Chris Flowers, go to a Bobcats game then go to Washington DC for a few days. I don’t know if he’s decided yet whether he’s going to have us keep Goat for him or not.

So that’s one thing. He was shipped a replacement phone for the one he’s got now, but it didn’t come with the battery. Deciding he needed something, he bought a battery but then realized they didn’t give him the back of the phone to cover his battery either. So he took that back and talked to the Alltel people, but they had to talk to Phil, his dad, whose name the account is in. He’s back to using his old phone, which dies whenever it feels like dying.

Then he was waiting on his roommate to get home because Matt was going to go with Michael to his small group meeting tonight. Matt called just a few minutes before Michael was supposed to be there to say he was on the way, so Michael came by our place to drop off some laundry, knowing how long it would take Matt to get back to the apartment. Then Michael got home and realized he’d forgotten that we had his clothes. But at least, because of that, he was able to watch Schweddy Balls.

The upstairs toilet is messed up.  That thing’s given us nothing but problems.  Now the tube that takes the water back into the tank has a hole in it, so I guess I need to either patch it somehow or replace it.

Zach Dotsey