Work was busy again today, which sucked because Andra, Josh and Jackson Sawyer were in town with Josh’s mom, sister and brother.  I picked Amanda up from work and headed to lunch anyway as they coordinated where they wanted to eat, which ended up being the Reel Cafe at my suggestion.  I was talking to Andra on the phone on the way there and Jackson got on to ask if I was coming and if I was on the bridge and a bunch of other questions he hardly gave me time to answer.  I had conferenced Amanda in at that point (because she and Andra had both called me at about the same time and it was easier that way) and Amanda had put Jackson on speaker so some of the girls she works with coule hear him.

We all walked up to the Reel Cafe from different directions at the same time.  Jackson was on Josh’s shoulders, and when he saw me and Amanda he got al ittle shy for a second but then I told him to come over to me and he ran up and gave me a big hug.  Once we were seated he and I colored on the kid’s menu.  He wrote his name and Amanda’s.  I should have taken a picture- it looked a bit like Chinese.

I took a picture of him then he started taking pictures.  He actually took a number of decent ones.  Once he got bored with that he played with games on my iPhone and mostly ignored everything else for a while.

Amanda was late getting back to work, but it apparently wasn’t much of a big deal since she had come in really early anyway and I think her boss, Laura, was understanding.

After I dropped Amanda back by work I went back to hang out with the others for a short while as they perused a few shops in downtown Wilmington, mostly playing with Jackson then I headed back home to do some more work.  Jackson wanted a pirate ship and he told me that the battleship, the USS North Carolina, which I pointed out to him across the Cape Fear River, had pirates on it.  Jackson told me today that he likes my hair.

I’m still not caught up with work and tomorrow will be another busy one.

Our upstairs shower has been in a bit of disarray for quite some time, and when I consulted Josh, who is a plumber, about it around two months ago, he and Andra said that when they came to town he’d take a look at it.  It turned out they weren’t able to because they had other family with them and had to get back to pack up and such.  To be honest it frustrated me and Amanda a little since we specifically waited for them as opposed to hiring a plumber.  I talked to Andra about this a little and she said that since she and Josh have the same weekends off now and we want them to come visit more anyway that maybe in the near future they’d come to stay one weekend and fix the shower, go to the beach and take some pictures.  Andra wants some pregnancy pictures.  I may go ahead and give another try at fixing it myself.  There’s this putty stuff that I saw advertised on TV that I’ve thought about getting and I’m pretty sure it would do the trick.  It would also fix the sliding door thing we have at the top of the steps, which is coming out of the top of the doorway.  It was just screwed in but there wasn’t much of anything for the screws to bite into.

For a few weeks Amanda and I had discussed volunteering to help out at Grow Zone, where the baby to pre-school kids are watched at Port City Community Church.  Well, I finally sent off an e-mail about it and it turned out that of several meetings coming up for it, one was tonight.  Amanda and I were doing an individual small group meeting with Kyle Van Zandt (Lorin Van Zandt, if I haven’t mentioned it yet, started taking cosmotology classes this semester and will be busy every weeknight for the next year or so), but we had a perfect window of opportunity in between the two meetings and took it.

Amanda didn’t even get out of the car when she got home- I came on out with a bagel I’d prepared for her (half for her, half for me), we got some gas (which is “down” to $3.65 per gallon) then we headed over to PC3.  There were quite a few people who showed up to the orientation.  That lasted an hour or so, and after it was over we headed on over to the Port City Java at Lumina Station to meet with Kyle, who had just gone body boarding with someone on Masonboro Island.

We had a really good talk with Kyle.  Last night, with Justin, we had talked about plans and expectations.  Kyle was in a unique position where he had been around for everything going back about a year and, not really being able to be a full part of the group coming up, was able to give us some different insights than what I expect to get from everyone else.  I came away from the meeting thinking what good counsel the Lord made of Kyle.

We got home and Amanda fast forwarded a bunch of the Olympics while I messed around on the computer.

Zach Dotsey
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