The Monkey Barrel

Archive for the ‘Fred’ Category

Sometimes I have nothing to say and wonder what to post instead of words, and Monkey Tune Tuesday could not be a more appropriate day to share this with you.

Our third year anniversary came and we were so broke and tired working on our new home. Before there was software to make this easy, Fred spent many late nights putting together this video for my gift. It has never been the price tag on a present that has meant anything to me, but the heartfelt sentiment in the giving that stays with me. He polished up this beauty and put it on fb for all the world to see. I have a sneaking suspicion that he likes me a little.
Enjoy!

On Friday morning, bright eyed, freshly showered, we scurried over to the gates and waited patiently in line to get to our first band of the day. We’d reviewed a bunch online and Cadillac Sky was recommended as a MUST see so over to the HIllside stage we trekked and found our seats. We were completely unprepared and blown away by these guys. The moment they bounced on stage and the first note sang out over the hills we were on the edge of our seats. I don’t really think you can classify them as bluegrass but then, I am not sure what category you’d put them in. We were fans within minutes and saw every other performance they were slated for during the weekend.

My favorite thing about them besides their high energy performances, their unbelievable musical artistry, and crazy sense of humor was that I noticed in quite a few of their songs they talked about God. It is not at all uncommon in bluegrass to hear lots of old folk tunes and such talking about Jesus but this was different. I”m fairly certain the songs they sing were their own writings. In one of their stage shows, like four songs in a row mentioned him in some form with one of the repeated lyrics being Sin is the Cause and Christ is the Cure. When we bought their latest cd we opened the cover and found a scripture from Colossians 3:17 inside which says, “17And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.” Pretty awesome statement aye??

And just as a little by the way, the entire weekend was dry. There was no alcohol served on the festival grounds anywhere that we could see. There was a huge children’s area with loads and loads of things for them to do. For the most part, people were extremely kind and considerate of others. There was only one time we ran into some bad attitudes but it was really late and people were tired and that’s bound to happen at some point. I can’t give enough credit to the guys who organized the whole event for making it a place you can take your entire family to enjoy.

So Here’s a little taste of two performances of theirs that were the absolute highlight of the festival. You may not enjoy this style music, but you can sure appreciate the artistry in what they do. I have to scoot off to church and may post a little more on them later but chances are slim given my sporadic postings lately. And also, you MUST watch the first one ALL the way to the end to catch Steve’s performance. Cuh Ray ZEEEE Thanks Brian, Matt, Dave, Andy, and Ross for a spectacular anniversary weekend. We will catch you whenever, and wherever we can.

I’m sorry I didn’t get to this sooner. It’s been a pretty nutty week and a lot busier than I had aniticipated. And frankly I wanted to give myself a breather so that I wouldn’t sound like a gushing fan girl over the weekend. Outstanding as it was and indelibly marked into my heart, it requires thought to reminisce and do it justice. Sooooooooo I’ll stick to the comedy parts first!

The drive down to Wilkesborough began uneventfully enough until about 2 hours in when the local paparazzi was flagging us down in Southampton county. And by paparazzi I mean cops and by flagging us down I mean pulling us over for a speeding ticket. I told Fred he should cry and tell the officer he was pregnant and he started laughing really hard as the sheriff was moseying over and could barely compose himself enough to show the due respect you should upon receipt of your misdemeanor.

Ticket in hand we sped on down the road, I mean cruised, yeah, that’s right.. About 2 hours more into the 6 hour drive, Fred slaps the steering wheel, his hand ricochets to his forehead and he exclaims, ” I forgot the schedule!!!” Now this means nothing to you people but represents countless hours and late night meetings agonizing over bands to see and mapping the route from stage to stage and cataloging the “must sees” from the “meh’s”. This process could very nearly have ended what is a pretty stellar marriage if I hadn’t conceded to the master and let him chose the paths we’d take, otherwise my stubborn self would have killed the vacation before it had begun. Trying very hard not to smirk,or maybe not so much, I said, “It’s ok babe, they’ll have more schedules there.” He was not impressed and lamented more than once the rest of the way.

SO…. We arrive at the Wilkes Family YMCA to check in, get our info, and stake our claim for our tent. We’re kinda rushing at this point so we can get over to see the Zac Brown Band. We get the tent set up, and while I’m loading it up, Fred goes back to the car to blow up the air mattress. And for some reason I still haven’t figured out, the car door snicks shut and traps the keys inside in the ignition. All of the keys in fact. The spares hadn’t been unpacked in there various luggage yet. Since it was just barely locked and there was a gap between it and the car, we spent the next 45 min. tracking someone down for a coat hanger or some other device to jimmy the lock. Success was had, but we missed the band. boo hisss We drove over to the Burger King and grabbed a royal meal instead and headed back to camp.

At this point it’s 30 some degrees out and we pile on our warm jammies and crawl into bed. Around 11:30 we finally hit the sheets. About 12 we both wake up and notice that there is no longer any air in the air mattress cushioning our persons. Dead flat. Exhausted beyond belief we roll over and try to ignore the hard ground and catch some z’s.

Tired and sore, the sun streams in at 6 a.m. and we stumble toward our toiletries and shower gear and head for the showers. Hot water is highly, highly under appreciated and underrated. Our first day at the fest was full and I’ll write more on that in our next post but we’re still on the comic tragedy end here folks that’s almost at an end. We pull back into the camp around 11 after a trip to Wally World to grab a new air mattress. We blow that sucker up, settle in, close our eyes around 11:45 and wake up at about 12:15 and realize this mattress also was stickin it to the man and refusing to perform it’s job. Evidently opposed to air containment, we find ourselves mostly on the ground, yet again. Exhaustion winning over comfort we pass out on the hard turf, again.

6 am the sunshine pours in, and we stumble to our gear and head for the showers. Midway there we run into a couple we’d met the previous day who inform us that they Y doesn’t open until 8 on Saturday. WHAT???????? The shuttles begin running to the festival grounds at 8, doors open at around 8:30 and concerts begin around 9. There is NO way that waiting around until 8 for a shower is going to go swiftly with all the other campers having awakened by then and clamored over to the facilities. So we did what any good folk at a hippie festival would do. We forewent the shower. Originally we thought we’d head back later in the morning but as we reviewed the schedule we knew we’d miss quite a few highlighted bands and I sucked it up and threw our gear on and said screw it, we’ve probably had more showers this week than lots of these people have had in a month, no one will notice. And they didn’t. Frankly as hot as it got a shower would have proved pointless anyway.

With a few minor annoyances in all these events, we still managed to have one of the best weekends on our marital record. I missed my boys pretty terribly by Sunday, but we were privileged to hear amazing live music and further instill the place of blue grass/new grass/acoustic music into our souls. I’m debating on giving you the whole festival enchilada or band by band reviews of the 5 we really loved. We’ll see, but for now, you have been teased long enough and I hope I delivered a wee bit o’ humor to your morn. Top o’ the mornin folks!

Be glad this picture isn’t scratch n sniff! It was on the non showering morning

I have been imagining all the way home how to tell you about all the wonderful, crazy, insane, weird things that happened on our anniversary weekend. I may have to divide it into parts because there is so much to tell. And yet, to you, may seem like complete drivel as you weren’t there to experience the moments in their stunning hilarity and surreal beauty. I will do my best to try to paint a picture in words the highlights. For now, it is late and my fingers and body are numb and so I must leave you with a teaser as I continue to noodle and reminisce the details and compile the data to share later when my mind is not drunk with thoughts of slumber.

A note, breaks the stillness
Still mountain air, shredded
Carded, strung, rewoven
A tapestry of words in a language
Only the soul recognizes
Caught, twined from the body
On strings
Threaded through a bow
Slid through frets
Gliding through fingers
My heart leaps
Understanding the dialect
Tears stream
Recognizing the pattern
And my soul soars
Upon the note
Carried away
With the wings of the music

I feel like a mad scientist with all the creativity building up lately. I have literally laid awake a few nights with things rattling through my brain for sewing projects, craft ideas, going away brunch plans, coupon clipping, new recipes to try and on and on and on… It’s not really any wonder I’m up until 11:30 every night lately. There isn’t much I can get done when the kids are running about and being unable to focus on the task at hand leads to a very friendly relationship with the seam ripper, the garbage can, and escaped expletives.

My sewing projects have included, dresses, aprons, and crochet hook roll ups. I have a huge list of ideas in my head for new projects and orders I really really need to get to. My fingers veritably dance with longing to get to the machine but we’re so up to our eyeballs in family stuff right now that I have to put it off for two weeks. I just may collapse with anticipation to get started. Stay tuned for pics on those things.

I’ve also been researching and redesigning our humble little blog so that it is more fetching to the eye and the content has more appeal to bring you back on a regular basis. I’m hoping there is enough hodge podgity topics to be able to post at the very least once or twice a week. Fred installed a stat tracker so I can find out how often you are all opening the door to stop in for spell and how many new readers are coming through to gander in the barrel.

And last but not least, my friend Andrea has turned me into one of those bleary eye, paper cut laden cuckoo crazy coupon ladies!!! I have been building a supply and amassing printed deals. I like printing because it feels less wasteful as I’m only printing what we actually use. But somehow, when we go to the store and go through the register and out the yawning doors, I feel a little like a criminal. I feel like we just stole a huge amount and at any minute either the manager will come screaming after us or a cop will pull up and demand full payment for what we snuck through. So far our personal best has been about 89 bucks worth of groceries for the low low price of 22 dollars. AND it was all stuff we regularly use. I’ll be adding tips and links in the future to help cheer you on in this department as well.

Be sure to keep checking back and I’ll be adding links to blogs I frequent and also to the amazing friends I have in the blog world. It feels a bit like sending you on to the neighbors house for a cup of sugar or a a couple of eggs in a modern sort of way. And isn’t that a fantastic picture Fred took of me??

Reading back over our anniversary posts since we began our blog, it seems that nearly everything that we could say about our marriage and our relationship has just about all been said. And yet, the truth in each of those postings, in every word, is as true today as ever since the moment we shared our vows, our rings, the light of one candle, our covenant, our hearts, our love, and our lives. It has been the most fantastic journey I have ever set foot on and more than that, it has been a life in which every moment has been shared together. We aren’t merely getting by, or co-existing, or sharing space, but actually living it.

A dear friend of ours got married on Saturday after long, faithful years of waiting on God to bring just the right person into his life. Witnessing their ceremony and celebrating at their reception and the date being so close to our own, brought the memories back for me in a flood. Every day, it seems as though we were standing in that church just yesterday. My mom catching her finger on fire lighting the candle, Fred whispering that we forgot the communion elements as I choked on Dr. Pepper and then again on a piece of pepperoni ball, smashing cake up each other’s noses, Brian’s nutty toast and all of the little things you’d think would fade from memory over time, still fresh in archives.

I am blessed to share Fred’s name, and blessed still, to have the honor to walk by his side as an individual and a partner. He is honorable, compassionate, gentle, gracious, generous, talented, creative, dedicated, devoted, and many many more adjectives that would make you roll your eyes up into your brain so I’ll stop there with the most important ones. 13 years together with the light of many more to come that I look forward to chronicling for you and our kids to see a living testament to a faithful God in the example of what He has done for Fred and I. Happy anniversary baby, and may we be blessed with many many more. I love you.

Check out our anniversary history in the links below!

9 years
10 More Years
Marriage Code
11 years of Emily
12 years

Our morning in pictures. Enjoy!

1:30 a.m. Thursday morning – a warm little hand jiggles my arm, and a sleepy voice whispers, “John threw up and he’s in the bathroom” I crack open an eye and peek at Luke and ask, “Did he barf on your bed?”. Luke says, “No, I don’t think so, but he’s in the bathroom.”. Oddly, Fred hears this conversation and as I crawl out of bed and go to the bathroom before going to John, he beats me to it. I wander down the hall and hear Fred and John talking in the bathroom and figure Fred’s handling any future yarks in there and veer over to the boys room where my mostly asleep, unsuspecting personage stumbles onto the scene.
The words carnage, and explosive, and other expletives chased each other rapidly in and out of my head. It was like a scene from CSI in there, only not blood, but recycled lasagna. John has a loft bed and Luke’s comes out from under it so the beds create an L. How Luke missed the vomit covering his bed, and got out of that room without an ounce of it on himself is a freakin miracle. There was hardly an inch of that room untouched. I didn’t even know where to begin to start cleaning up. Oh, and because God has such a sense of humor and to add to the mayhem, the boys had been playing legos earlier in the day and had not cleaned them up so nearly all of their legos were on the floor and the ones that should’ve been safe by remaining in their boxes, were also baptized with gore by sheer virtue of their proximity.
The best way to begin really is just to begin and so with shirts over our noses, window sash thrown high, and armed with towels, rags, and powerful cleaners we started in. Beds were stripped, legos removed to a bath of bleach and hot water, and the beds and mattresses were scrubbed. Tackling the carpet was the epitome of the nightmare. We started out using some carpet cleaners but I finally said screw it and filled a bucket with hot water, bleach, and oxy clean. I figured a bleach stain trumps a vomit stain any day of the week. And oh my gosh I thought my arms were gonna fall of and the skin on my hands would be peeled back to the bone. I loaded the first two loads into the whining washing machine and groaning dryer and pulled out sleeping bags and sheets to set up a sick room. Making sure they were settled for the moment, we both stumbled off to showers. Fred stayed with both boys downstairs to keep watch and I got to sleep around 3 a.m. until about 7 when a sweet, kind, wonderful neighbor had a tree crew come in to blast me awake with the sound of nature being murdered. And yeah, if that makes me a tree hugger, hippie type person then sue me. Or you can blame J.R. Tolkien for making those trees come alive in his books and leaving a hard and fast impression on my little soul that they really do talk and move and live.
All in all, I think we managed to survive Barf-O-Rama 2010. It’s early days yet to know if anyone else has picked up the bug. I hope never to have another encounter with such a disaster of this proportion ever ever ever again, but I think we’ll secure a bucket with a bungee cord to John’s bunk from this moment on, just to be on the safe side.

Just as a quick by line to the previous blog posting, I am suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccccccccccccchhhhhhhhhhhhhhh a procrastinator. But the ideas are still coming for a revamp. I’m just fleshing them out and weighing the options. I know I should jump in both feet but that usually produces trouble for me.

So to the subject at hand. As a woman, I am prone, as most of my married female colleagues, to take the temperature of my marriage periodically to see how it’s doing, how I’m doing, how the kids are affected by how it’s going and so on and so on. This is usually preceded by some irritable phase I have been in that has caused me to behave poorly and winds up with poor results on the husband end that I focus on more than my own foibles. Still with me?? So in an effort to better myself as I am the only one I can truly change, I picked up a book that has been REPEATEDLY recommended to me and read it on our trip down to Fl.
Now lemme preface this with the fact I have read many books upon the subject of marital matters and as of yet have been really unimpressed. Two samples I’ll give you are Love Languages and Love & Respect. My issues with the first are that we in some form give and receive love in all those languages so I found all points to be moot and half way through the book “donated” it to “good will” I hope whoever bought it saw something better in it than I did. My issues with the second were specific to the marriage I enjoy. We don’t get into the crazy cycle that that book is pretty much centered around. From the first days of our marriage I have enjoyed for 12 and 1/2 years of mutual respect and servanthood from my husband. He’s pretty laid back and awesome, I’m pretty high strung, we kind of balance each other out in a weird way. I think that’s allowing God the reigns of this endeavor. It’s not perfect all the time and we screw up with each other. But there is a willingness to yield, apologize, ask forgiveness and seek the other’s own good above our own. An unspoken agreement to be happy rather than to be right. So for us, not such a good book. However, I think many couples caught in the wheel of craziness could benefit from the advice written inside the binding of that particular book and know that many have and it has changed lives as well as marriages.
So I cracked open the pages of “Sacred Marriage” by Gary Thomas with a load of skepticism. He blew me out of the water. What I found beyond the psychobabble of a therapist, and the preachyness of a pastor, was the layman’s terms of a husband and father in the trenches of real life experience relating his walk. He poses the question very astutely of whether or not our marriage was meant to make us more holy than happy. I firmly agree with him that in pursuit of holiness, by default our marriage becomes a happy, comfortable, trustworthy partnership. Much of which Fred and I have pondered over the years about what makes our relationship solid was covered in the pages of this remarkable read, but much more was presented and my brain has been reeling with the thoughts.
In addition to having read this, our pastor has begun a new series and today’s installment was about building your house upon a rock. How many times growing up in church did you hear about the wise man and the foolish man, sand and rock, songs of the parable and so on and so on?? For me it was TONS of times, and yet today it took on a new ring, a new perspective. My life over the last 12 and 1/2 years certainly has not looked at all the way I’d imagined it would. No rose colored glasses here and certainly enough storms to threaten my very existence let alone the strength of the bond between my husband and I. So it got me to thinking, yet again, about this marriage of mine and how after all these years it is standing solidly.
Here’s my perception of it’s stability. When Fred and I met, lo those 13 and some years ago I’ve made no secret that I was a less than desirable human being on all fronts. Loathsome in fact I think is a more accurate description. You don’t need the gory details, just trust me that it’s true and there are all too many witnesses to attest to it. But what you may not know, aside from the very first time I laid eyes on him, is the countless hours we spoke on the phone in the middle of the night while he worked third shift and I should’ve been sleeping. For some unknown reason all of the darkness in me spilled into Fred’s ear. Every dastardly, slovenly, wicked, unimaginable misdeed I ever had the misfortune to make came tumbling out of my mouth and into our conversations. On several occasions I can very clearly recall the silences that followed such dissertations and a few times in person, I can very vividly recall the look of disgust on his face. Beyond all of that, was an overwhelming compassion in his eyes and often tears as I laid my soul bare before him. God for some reason had made Fred my confessor and Fred in my darkness was a light pointing straight to the One who would bear my burdens and cleanse my heart and make me a new creature. He was God’s earthly evidence of unconditional love. Fred knew literally every detail of evil in my heart and yet somehow found a child of God in the midst of it and he loved me in spite of and I think because of who I was and who I became.
So 9 months after we began dating and Fred proposed it was with awe in my heart that I accepted him. He had already proven trust and unfailing love to me and I knew that with him I was safe. Early into our pre-marital counseling we agreed that marriage was worth nothing if it was not based on and entirely given over to the Lords leading. We have striven every day of every year to be honest and true and faithful to that promise to each other. And as a testament to the covenant that we made, we are still standing and standing together. Life has hit us with some pretty awesome storm and Satan has taken every advantage to shake us, but here we are.
I cannot imagine what the days and years ahead of us hold. I can believe harder and tougher trials as a certainty lie before us. But if we continue as we have begun, if we are dilligent to allow God the reigns, if we are transparent and willing to serve each more than ourselves, then our years ahead are looking pretty good even in spite of the forecast. Oh, and it is a total bonus that he’s just as good looking now as the day I first saw him round the back of that volleyball court mere moments before he drove a volleyball into my throat.