For the Record - Back of the Head, originally uploaded by B.Marty.

For your review; this should fulfill most of the requests for further documentation of the beautiful hair!

You Can Sort of See the Hair, originally uploaded by B.Marty.

The hair - you can sort of see it!

It is plentiful and dark, the way Marty hair should be!

Molly Marie Marty, originally uploaded by B.Marty.

5:57 AM
21 1/4″
8lb 13oz

Pretty self explanatory this time!

My company holds two parties each year - a formal one during Christmas, and a Fall party at their farm.

This year’s farm party was a little more subdued on account of the weather, but the kids managed to have a good time nonetheless!

So, I used to host my pictures on ringo.com. I say used to, and I didn’t hyperlink that url, because they don’t exist anymore. Apparently their “unlimited free storage for everyone” business model didn’t pan out.

So I went and got myself signed up with flickr. I’d heard of this site, of course, because it is a part of Yahoo and is immensely popular. It was also recommended to me by Jeff - almost exactly one year ago.

So anyhow, those pictures in the sidebar over there will take you to my photostream. For the uninitiated, this is how it breaks down:

• Every picture I post gets thrown into my photostream.
• The photos in the photostream can be organized into large collections.
• Collections will contain sets, which contain a group of photos.

So that is the hierarchy. It takes a couple minutes to sort out, but a little poking around and you’ll be fine. You won’t actually see the collections very much. Those are mainly for me to keep things organized. I’ll be pointing you towards sets most of the time, one of which I’ve embedded below (use the button in the lower right corner to go full screen).

LuVerne Days

LuVerne days is an annual celebration that takes place in LuVerne, IA. LuVerne is a small town near my hometown of Algona. It serves as the origin of the last few generations of Martys. Several of us grandchildren got to drive some of Grandpa’s antique tractors in the parade. Abby even got to drive one back to the farm!

I don’t like warm milk - not one bit. I will make the exception for oyster stew, but I only have the once a year. Yes, I like my milk very cold, and it is my disdain for warm milk that finally taught me that “Is your refrigerator running?” isn’t just a joke for children.

We spent a few days last week living out of coolers because our fridge was having trouble maintaining a temperature much below sixty degrees. This was not an inexpensive appliance. We bought this back in the days when we would spend money like the owners of a bull that has ventured into a china shop. I was not looking forward to replacing this thing. After a little bit of research; it was decided that perhaps something had frozen over and the device needed to be defrosted. I couldn’t get to where the actual coils were, but there were vents behind the ice maker that were filled with frost and the freezer was working just fine.

I took the kids up to the QuikTrip and tried to load six bags of ice into the van without either of the children getting run over, stepped on, or knocked out by a door. This wasn’t going well, but the most excellent man behind the counter came to my rescue. After right about 24-hours, we fired the fridge back up and it was making nice cool air again. I did pick up a couple of thermometers from HyVee. They have ranges printed on them for what temperature the fridge and freezer should be. I have the fridge up as cold as it can go, and it sits right at the top of that range - forty degrees. The freezer doesn’t quite make it to zero, but pretty close. The most important thing; however, is that I didn’t buy a new fridge!

Regular maintenance is important.

That goes for cars and appliances. I noticed the other night that my allegedly super-charged Regal was acting awfully sluggish. It’s been acting a little irritable for a while now, but we finally got it to our mechanic. It turns out that the super-charger belt had become much too hot, warped into some molten abomination that will never be straight again, and flown off of its assigned position along with a few a tensioner or two and another part whose name I cannot recall.

I’m told that I’m pretty lucky nothing else got ruined. That does make sense - I imagine those pieces came away from the engine at pretty high speed. What I can’t figure out is how didn’t hear it happen. The wife may know something…

All in all, I’m feeling rather blessed today. I got away from a refrigerator malfunction and some significant car repairs for just over six hundred dollars. Here’s to another 140,000 miles!

Angela finally threatened to stop looking at my old news, so I thought I’d better get with it!

So I believe when we left off Hayden had just banged his head on the fireplace and gotten stitches. This was just before Easter. Ahem.

Someone had asked how the scar healed up:

So he is enjoying the new, post-stitches life.

I’m off to shake some of the dust off of this WordPress installation. I’ll return soon!

I should probably have gotten over it by now, but I continue to be shocked when I look and discover that it has been over two months since I posted here. As you might have noticed, by birthday passed by on April 16th. Thanks to Angela for remembering me!

I have so many things to talk about… I won’t try to fit them all in here. Do stay tuned over the coming weeks as I dump my brain on what I’ve been up to since then: Velvet Elvis, Prince Caspian, The Total Money Makeover Live, and a whole bunch more that I can’t remember anymore.

Kicking things off, we got to experience the first real damage done to one of kids. The boy was trying to step off of something onto the fireplace and didn’t quite make it. Since his arms are shorter than the fireplace he had to stop him self with his head. These are the results - eight stitches!

(click to enlarge)

It was pretty deep - definitely no question that stitches were forthcoming. He really didn’t fuss too much after a few minutes of crying. By the time we got to the ER waiting room, he was running all over their play area and we had to keep reminding him to come back to us and get his would cleaned.

We got back to the room, and they came by on three different occasions to put this numbing gel on his head. Apparently it does its job very well. He had been coloring, and when they started stitching him up, all he did was frown and ask for his colors back. That would have been nice to have picture of, actually.

Anyway, there wasn’t much he could have done. They had him in this immobilizing device with about five thousand straps and buckles - also something that would have made a nice picture. Maybe next time