Category: family

pam, my wife, has officially gone crazy. pam now spends ten to fifteen minutes each night trying to get montana to howl. i’ve written about this once before but since then it has become a nightly occurence. pam will throw her head up in the air and shout “arooooo” and montana goes crazy. this only eggs pam on and she slowly gets worse and worse. so just be warned that if you come over to my house at night and here some howling it may or may not be my dog.

i really need to get some prozac for pam.

pam and i have two new children – sort of. for quite some time we’ve been dealing with the question of what biblical hospitality is. part of the answer for us has been a need to bring people into our family who are not entirely like us ethnically, socially, educationally, and all those other “lys”. because of this pam made contact with with l.s.u. to see if there were any international students that were wanting an “adopted” american family. that’s how we have our new kids. pam and i are now the proud adopted parents of a 27 and 24 year old bouncing baby indians. they are sam (27) and bajjee (24).

they came over for supper tonight and we spent the evening talking and learning about each other. i don’t know many indians so i didn’t have muh past cultural experience to work with. before tonight all i knew of indian culture was what i had read (which i didn’t think was much but was apparently enough). now after spending an evening with two indians i feel that i am an expert on indian culture.

so here are my hard and fast rules for those wanting to understand indian culture:

• indians hate carrots – i’m not sure why (probably a civil war or something fought over them) but every indian i have ever known hates carrots.
• indians love blackberry cobbler – the indians i have known have really liked cobbler VERY much.
• indians can tolerate chicken divan – every indian i have ever known has considered chicken divan worth eating but if they had a choice they would choose buffalo wings.
• indians naturally cause children to kick into “show off” gear – i’m not sure why but my kids respond to indians by trying to impress them by doing any magic tricks, random drumming on a djembe, or even doing the worm.

okay actually the evening was a lot of fun and it taught me that i basically know nothing about indian culture. of course, i’m still convinced that indians hate carrots. that just seems obvious to me.

last night was a rough night at the terrell household. i was up late working on some material for the discipleNOW. when i finally went to bed at about 2:30 a.m. i ended up not get very much sleep. the reason for this was because noah woke up at 3:30 a.m. with a bad case of croup. croup is a childhood viral problem that is usually finished by the time someone is five. unfortunately for us noah is the exception to the rule. he’s eight and still has bad cases of croup. it’s not a fun situation. in fact, it’s pretty dog gone scary.

last night’s was definitely scary. i got up with noah and started giving him some albuterol to help with his breathing. it didn’t help much so i gave him another breathing treatment. the second treatment help a little more but it still wasn’t good enough. it’s not much fun to watch your child not be able to breathe. he was panicing and that made the situation all the worse. there was no choice left so at 4:30 a.m. noah and pam went to the emergency room. of course, being a hospital and all means that they have all these great drugs that do the things that our simple little consumer and prescription drugs can’t. so they had him fixed up in a matter of minutes. they shot him up full of steroids and gave him epinephrine to breathe in. everything was fine and he began to breathe perfectly.

the problem here was that neither pam nor i had been able to get any sleep so we were worn out. noah on the other hand had just been shot up and breathing liquid speed. he was bouncing off the walls. pam and i just wanted to sleep. noah just wanted to talk loud and fast and run all over the place. the boy who earlier couldn’t breathe was now driving us crazy with his energy. that’s not a good parenting combination – tired parents and a hyper kid. i’m not so sure but that noah may have been in more danger from his tired parents than he had ever been from his croup.

all are resting now and life is good.

it’s a common proverb that you should try to learn one new thing every day of your life. with this in mind i would like to tell you my lesson for friday, february 11, 2005. what i learned today is that terrell men should never attempt to fly stunt kites. terrell’s are traditionally excellent kites-men. it’s really true. when i was in high school my family and i would make our own kites from scratch. we even entered dothan, alabama kite flying contest – quite possibly the world’s premiere kite competition. many people would say that the history of kites began in china 3,000 years ago but those people would be wrong. kite flying began in dothan, alabama and the art of kite flying reached its zenith in dothan. the terrell men were a part of helping dothan reach that high point.

of course, that was with traditional and box kites. we never flew stunt kites. they’re a different breed. since, pam is gone for the weekend (trying of for jeopardy) i decided to have a little fun with the boys and go fly some kites at highland park. we went to academy to buy a few kites. apparently academy sports & outdoor is trying to destroy all of the traditions of america because they did not carry any traditional kites. all they had were stunt kites which operate by means of two separate strings. being an expert in regards to regular kites i guessed that my skill would be sufficient to operate the easiest stunt kite they had in stock. turns out i was wrong.

me and the boys tried again and again to fly the stunt kites we bought from academy. each time we tried to fly a kite we met with complete, abject failure. our longest flight was about fifteen seconds and reached an apex of twenty feet in height. we tried for an hour solid with three different kites and never did any good. it was all pretty humiliating. ironically we had allot of fun in spite of the fact that we were horrible and flying those stupid kites.

tomorrow we’re going to search the town and see if we can find a traditional kite. if all else fails i’ll make one.

SIDE NOTE – if you are a pc user (instead of an intelligent mac user) and you are still using micro$oft internet explorer then you are missing out. you really need to consider swapping to mozilla’s firefox. it is a much better browser and allows you to surf in tabs. try tabs for a few days and you’ll wonder how you ever got along without it. on top of having tabs by using firefox you’ll also have the pleasing knowledge of not supporting the “evil empire” of micro$oft.

my life is usually quite noisy. my home is full of sound. i have an amazing wife, two wonderful kids, a dog and two cats all who like to make tons of noise and tremendous amounts of activity. i work in a wonderful church that is constantly full of noise. i have an incredible office suite that always has someone new walking into it just to talk. when i’m not at the church office during work i’m usually at a school visiting people or at a hospital checking in on someone, both active, busy places. my life is full of activity and sound. this usually means that i am desperate to find some quiet. this means i’m usually looking for a place where no one else is so that i can focus on studying or just to winding down. it’s a constant struggle.

but not now. pam has work and school that is keeping her busy, my kids are in mobile, alabama making noise for someone else, and all the schools in town are out for mardi grass break. it’s very quiet. i’ve gotten so used to desperately trying to find quiet that now that i have it i don’t know what to do. i find the whole thing quite disturbing.

i feel like i have been blogging alot over the past month about my dog, montana. it’s just that she is so new to us (we’ve only had her for six weeks) and i personally find this one foot tall, cat-poop eating dog fascinating. therefore, i want to describe the “basset 500” to you. whenever montana gets excited her body responds with a need to run. since she is primarily an “inside” dog this means that the desire to run usually hits her while she’s in the house. as many of you know the terrell home is built with the living room, kitchen, study, and den all forming a circle. this circle is montana’s track of choice. when we came into the house this afternoon that was enough of a reason for montana to get excited and thus the circle of the “basset 500” began to be raced.

you really wouldn’t think that a basset hound could run very fast but you would be wrong to think that. she may have short legs but she has a long body and this gives her short legs a very long reach with each stride. imagine a very short cheetah. he short legs and long body end up producing a great velocity. montana is a red and white blazing missile when she starts running. of course, being a basset hound she’s a “red and white blazing missile” that is cruising a height of your shins.

now many of you may not know this about me but i have weak shins. i know it sounds stupid but my shins are really sensitive. we all have our weaknesses. superman has his kyrponite, spiderman has his teenage insecurities, and i, robert terrell, have my weak shins. it’s something i have had to live with for all of my days.

you see that’s the problem with having a basset hound in the house. once she starts running the “basset 500” and really gets going with all her blazing speed someone is gonna get hurt. today it was my shins. montana ran head first into both of my shins and knocked me straight onto my rear. of course, montana’s head is much harder than my weak shins and therefore she didn’t feel the slightest thing. instead she saw me falling down as the perfect opportunity to jump on me and lick me to death. gotta love the basset.

SIDE NOTE – this afternoon i introduced my children to the original bbc version of “mr. bean.” noah didn’t like it but adam loved it.

about 10 minutes ago the terrell family just finished the first ever “terrell howl off”. it all started because pam, my wife, desperately wants montana, our 1 year old basset hound, to “howl“. hounds are great howlers when they are mature. montana is only one year old and has another full year before she will be considered a mature basset. i figure that’s why she doesn’t howl. her voice hasn’t changed yet (yes basset’s voices change as they mature) and nobody wants their voice to crack while they’re howling.

still, pam really wants montana to howl. in her attempts to figure out how to accomplish this goal pam has done what she usually does when ever she faces a problem – researches the problem. pam is excellent and getting on the web and finding the right material to answer whatever question she has. so she read up on the world of bassets. she dug into the vast amount of basset hound literature in search of the answer to the age old question “how do i get my basset to howl?”

what she found out was that bassets like to sing in chorus. these smart dogs like to be with others when they let loose of their melodic howls. apparently releasing their voices alone is just not as much fun and bassets are all about fun. so this left us with only a few options:

• we could get used to having a basset who doesn’t like to howl.
• we could start a howling support group where bassets of all ages, sizes, and ear length could get together and howl freely.
• we could buy a few more bassets just for the purpose of getting montana to howl.
• or we, the terrell family, could pretend to be bassets and howl in order to get montana to howl.

pam, of course, chose the last option.

i truly think the whole thing kind of scared montana. she looked real concerned and confused when pam started the holwing. montana went from “confused” to “excited” when pam cajoled the rest of us into doing it. i would love to say that it didn’t work but i can’t. my wife is strange but she does know how to accomplish what she wants. so we now have a basset who howls.

i’m resting my arms right now from working on noah’s pinewood derby. last year adam won district with his hot-dog mobile. apparently he wanted to go out on top because he decided that he didn’t want to build a car this year. noah on the other hand decided to steal adam’s foot motif from the year before and wants to build a blazing ice cream sandwich.

you would think that it would be easy to build an ice cream sandiwch. it’s flat. the piece of pine that you start our with is flat. this should be pretty easy right? nope, it’s not. the reason it’s not is because i broke the blade that i was working with. i needed to cut away approximately a third of the thickness of the soon to be ice cream sandwich. that wouldn’t be that difficult if my band saw had a blade. actually it did have a blade for a few really good seconds. unfortunately those mere seconds weren’t long enough to actually cut the piece of pine into it’s ice cream sandwich shape. on the good side the blade had a good long life.

not to be daunted i decided to use my belt sander to remove the extra 1/3 that i was going to be cut with the now none existent band saw. this seemed like a good idea. after all, the purpose of a sander is to remove small amounts of wood. i figured i would continue to push the pine against the belt letting the belt remove small pieces of pine until the full third was removed. it seemed like a perfect plan and it would have been if the sanding belt was new. it wasn’t and therefore it didn’t remove much if any wood. strike two!

third time’s the charm right? well apparently it is with pinewood derby ice cream sandwiches. it was on my third effort that i went to my trusty dremel tool. if you’re not familiar with a dremel tool just imagine a tool that can do anything and still fit in the palm of your hand. it’s kind of the swiss army knife of the handy man world. if you can’t fix something with a dremel then it can’t be fixed. the dremel never fails and it didn’t fail this time either. the dremel fixed what the band saw and belt sander couldn’t do. praise be to the dremel.

after a frustrating evening the basic design of the ice cream sandwich car is now laid out. tomorrow we paint!

my wife, pam, recently sent in an application to be a part of the game show jeopardy. it’s been a life long goal of hers to be on the show. she received an email today saying that she needs to be in atlanta february 12th for her try out. so of course, she’s going. i’m sure she’ll blog about this later. i’m very proud of her.