Restoration Project

I have not seen much of Forrest this week. He is of course at his job during the day (and some evenings when he has meetings after hours). But this week he is also working on Andrew's floors at night. Andrew & Jen-Yu are in Taiwan, so they asked Forrest to work on refinishing their floors while they are not here to walk on them.

For those of you who do not know, Andrew bought an old two story building and they have their gallery and studio downstairs and they live upstairs. The building was built in 1911 and was originally a drug store with rooms that were rented to bachelors upstairs. It is of course an ongoing restoration project. It is a good thing that Andrew is handy, and of course, Forrest often gets called on to help.

The area that was the drug store still has its original tin ceilings and mosaic tile floors. Upstairs the floors are heart pine and that is what Forrest is working on this week. The floors had been painted in the past so he is sanding all that paint off and then varnishing them. Here are some pictures of the building as it was as a drug store and as it is today as well as some photos of Forrest at work. Just click on the arrow.

We Made a Book!

Forrest loves Apple computers. He would never have anything else if he could help it. I think he had one of the very first Macintosh models. The iphoto program has a fairly new feature which allows you to create a book right in iphoto, push a button that sends your creation off to Apple, and then they deliver  your finished book to you a week or two later. Forrest had to try it. Together we chose the style of the book and the pictures we wanted to include. We dropped the pictures into the template, added captions and sent our book off to Apple to be printed. Our book was just delivered to us. It turned out great! Here are some pictures:

By the Way...

I posted the video of Rick Burgess speaking at the memorial service for his 2 year old son on the left side of the page. If anyone has not yet seen it, please watch it. It is amazing. It is in 3 parts and they are not in order, so keep that in mind.

Changes

Those who know us well are aware that we have undergone some major changes in our lives in the last few years. In addition to both of our children getting married, Forrest retired from his long time job with the City of Birmingham and is now  the Economic and Community Development Director for the City of Bessemer. On top of that, in the last year we decided to no longer publish the football recruiting publications that we have been doing for so long. Forrest has actually had time to enjoy this football season without football being so much work. It has been 25+ years since we have been able to say that. The "Football Recruiting Annual" was always on news stands in December and most of the sales occurred between then and the first week of February, so some people do not yet know that it is no longer being published. I get calls every day asking "When will the Recruiting Annual be  out?" or "I've been looking for weeks and can't find it, where can I get a copy?" Most of the people are very nice and say how much they have enjoyed it over the years, how they still have every copy that has been published for the last 20 years, or how much they are going to miss it. I think Forrest enjoyed doing the magazine, newsletters, radio shows, etc. but it was also a lot of work. We are enjoying a life that is a lot simpler now.

Jekyll Island

I posted a slideshow of Jekyll Island in the left margin, so I thought I should explain something about that. Three weeks ago Andrew told me that he had to go to Jekyll Island to photograph a golf tournament(Andrew works for a company that does event photography). Since he was going alone, he asked me if I would like to go with him and keep him company. It didn't take long to talk me into it because I have wanted to go to Jekyll Island for a long time and I never have had a chance to go. Anyway, we spent the weekend there and the slideshow is just some of the photos that I made while we were there. As you can see it is beautiful there even in the winter.

About Us

I guess our first post should start off with something about us. As of tomorrow, we will have been married for 33 years. We were young when we got married, so we are not really all that old. I like to think like that anyway. We have two boys. Andrew, who is 28, has been married to Jen-Yu for a little over a year and a half. Right now they are on their way to Taiwan to visit Jen-Yu's family and attend the Chinese New Year celebrations. Daniel, who is 24, has been married to Magen for almost a year and a half. Yes, in the summer of 2006 we had two weddings which were 7 weeks apart, and we lived through it and are here to tell about it! Daniel and Magen are preparing to be missionaries to France. They will be leaving us and moving to France when they have raised enough support to fund their ministry. If anyone is interested in helping to support their ministry, let us know and we will get you the information you need. We also have a cat whose name is Byron and is a big part of our family. He will soon be having his 12th birthday and he has been with us since he was a baby. He never goes outside and is very spoiled. You can see his picture on the header. That is the basics about our family. We will add more details as time goes on.