It's been quite a week

It is Sunday afternoon and I just finished eating one of the best home-cooked meals of my life. Rachel decided to try her hand at the Italian cuisine, and she pulled it off spectacularly! We had a great farfalle pasta with a tomato-and-goat-cheese side and bread dipped in seasoned olive oil...and it was all made from scratch. I am surely a lucky man.

Anyway, it has been quite the week for us. As always, I am busy in school (right now, my dentures class is taking more than it's fair share of my time) and Rachel is doing a million things at once. One of the things that takes a lot of her time is going to the dentist. She literally spends more time at the dentist office than she does at work. The latest news from all this dental work is that she is getting an implant for her front tooth. Right now she has a removable front tooth thing that she will wear for a couple of weeks before the whole implant process starts. It's sort of funny because sometimes she takes it out to eat and stuff, an people seem to find this pretty shocking! To all of you shocked people out there, fear not...the removable tooth is only a temporary thing.

Also, we got a new "toy" this week that we are pretty excited about. So, we had this really, really old DVD player that we got at a garage sell when we first got married. Seriously, it was like one of the first DVD players ever made. The problem was that it was starting to die on us, and it wouldn't play all of our DVDs (something with the formatting). Anyway, we decided it was time that we get a new one. As it turned out, we were at some friend's home a couple of weeks ago and they told us about a new technology called Clearplay. It is amazing! It is a DVD player that is programed to edit movies. You can rent movies from Blockbuster, or RedBox, or the Library (our favorite) and the DVD player does all the rest. You can change the settings to whatever level of editing you want in 14 different categories (violence, nudity, language, etc.). The DVD player has a program in it that plays the DVD in its edited form, but it doesn't change the actual disk (that way, the movie-rental place doesn't have a fit). It can do this for over 3500 movies, and they are constantly adding more. In fact, we have yet to find a movie that it can't edit.

So, we are now the proud owners of a Clearplay DVD player. It is great because we can now watch movies without having to worry about any "bad parts" popping up. Also, it is now possible to watch a lot of movies that we have always wanted to see but wouldn't because of an R rating. Right after we got it we watched Air Force One (rated R), and with the Clearplay filtering it was transformed into a PG or mild PG-13. Anyway, we are excited because we watch a lot of movies on account of not having any TV stations that work.

On a different note, our sweet little Eva was pretty sick all week. Maybe it was from the toxic green algae at the lake last week- maybe it is from kids that we are babysitting. Anyway, she was miserable all week. Saturday we finally saw a doctor, and it turns out that she had an ear infection, a cold, and a viral disease known as Roseola. Poor girl. She is starting to feel better now, but it has been a hard week.

Also on Saturday I went on a run. Well, not just a run- I was attempting to do a marathon (26 miles). I haven't really trained or anything (actually, I haven't run at all for a couple of months), but I am in pretty good shape so I thought I'd give it a shot anyway. I was feeling good and I made it as far as mile 16 when I felt something pop in the back of my knee- not the best news when you still have 10 miles to go. I ran a couple more miles, but started feeling this gross grinding sensation in that leg and I was nearly collapsing when I would put weight on it. So I stopped. I was actually pretty disappointed because I still felt pretty good (besides the stupid knee), but I didn't want to do any lasting damage. I guess the moral to the story is that mind-over-matter only goes so far, and then physics kicks in and it doesn't matter that you are ignoring the pain because even if you are trying to keep going there are physical forces that just can't be beat. Actually, that is sort of a dismal thought. Ignore it. Maybe the real moral of the story is that even if you are in pretty good shape you ought to train before attempting to run a marathon on a dirt trail.

Here's our sweet sick Evelyn. One good thing about her being sick is that she became very cuddly (usually, she is too interested in the world around her to spend time cuddling).

Here's me running toward the beginning of the "marathon." Shown below is Evelyn, who helped Rachel along the way to provide "aid stations" every once in a while (wherever the trail crossed the road). The cute PJs that she is wearing were a present that we received this week from my parents. Thanks Mom and Dad!