We had my mom and dad (aka Re & Pop) in town for Easter as well as Olga’s sister from Venezuela, so we decided to go to the bilingual church so that Helena could keep up with the Easter message (it was translated so that Re & Pop could keep up, but they’ve heard it before anyway).

I took Cesar to his class so that he could enjoy Sunday School.

The service was really good. They had a great choir that was very energetic and celabratory (a must for an Easter service). While the songs were in a mix of English and Spanish most of them were tunes that at least Re & Pop could recognize and might even be able to sing along with in English.

After the service, I went to pick up Cesar. As usual he had a handful of stuff to cart home. The handout with the Bible Story, a chocolate bunny (yippee!) and an Easter egg that they had made in class. As I took it, the teacher told me, “That’s a real egg” which I could already tell. I just made the assumption that it was a hard-boiled egg. (You can already see it coming can’t you?) So, I said thank you and proceeded to cart Cesar’s armload of stuff down the hall while herding the young one.

At some point in the hall, I decided to put the egg in my pocket to free up a hand for herding (after all he’s a four-year old boy, he takes a lot of herding. I immediately forgot about the egg… It’s hard-boiled right? It’ll be safe in my pocket.

So I took Cesar to the bathroom and commenced herding the family to the car. I got Cesar and everybody situated then got in the driver’s seat and started for home. Well we didn’t even get out of the parking lot before I feel something on my leg. I stuck my hand in my pocket and pulled it out wet, sticky, and yellow!!!!! The Sunday School teacher had given a class of three and four-year olds raw eggs to decorate.

I don’t know about you, but ever since I was a kid, I had never seen a raw easter egg. They’re  always
boiled. I was pretty upset since I had ruined my only suit slacks with a raw egg.

After all who in their right mind gives a four-year old boy a raw Easter egg? I’ve come to the conclusion that the answer to that question is “Nobody! Nobody in their right mind anyway!”

So there you go, enjoy yourself at my expense, it’s the greatest story never told… until now.
Kevin Harris

You can see a little bit about my project at www.cpaservicegroup.com, although, I will warn you. If you’re not in public accounting that page may not make a whole lot of sense to you. In a nutshell what we’ve done is created some software to help accountants with public audits. We’ve set up a system that is much quicker, more accurate, and a great deal easier than anything currently available on the market.

If you know anybody who is in public accounting, have them give me a call or shoot an email. I’d love to visit with them.

I’ll try to find some time over the next few days to post some holiday pictures.

We took a new road home today. We shot North on 281. This took us through the heart of the Texas Hill Country. The road was much less hectic than I-35. It took about an hour longer. But the views were just georgeous. The hills stretched from San Marcos all the way to Benbrook, just south of Fort Worth.

Marble Falls, Texas was probably the best jewel along the way. Just a beautiful little town with a nice lake snaking along it’s southern side. We’ll have to get back out there again soon. Although, we certainly played the tourist when we asked where to find the falls. We were told they were under the lake. Oooops! They dammed the Colorado River several years ago and flooded the town’s namesake falls. Oh well!

No trips planned for the near future. But the some of The Harris Family is coming in next weekend. Looking forward to seeing them.

-kevin

We had to wait until the next day to get everything cleaned up properly (and the cleaning crew really did it up right the second time around). They also brought a little ozone air handler to run in our room. This little unit is marvelous and does a terrific job of handling odors in the air and completely removed any trace of cigarette smell from the entire unit.

We immediately went online to track down the company that makes this unit: RainbowAir.net Now, the units are not cheap. But I can certainly recommend them. It really works well. I can think of a few friends that have indoor pets that could use a unit like this.

Time to head over to ebay to setup a watchlist for one of these.

-kevin

I have my family in Venezuela so it is a BIG deal to me being able to see them when I call them. We had our first video call this week and it was so exciting to see them and for them to see our son Cesar. One of my sister decided to come to visit us in September after seeing how fast he is growing.

We also visited with Pop once and another time with Re and Pop. The night that we visited with Pop he was able to pray with Cesar before he went to bed…what a blessing when you live far away from your love ones.

Chao
Olga

Of course I have seen emails like this before (haven’t we all). But I had never seen one with family members’ names in it like this.

Now, you probably have figured this out. But just in case you haven’t, I’ll say it anyway.

You should NEVER fall for this type of scam. And that’s exactly what it is, a scam. Yet people get greedy and fall for this kind of thing every day. Just don’t be one of them.

By the way, while I’m at it, I may as well share with you the solution I use to filter about 98% of all my spam email into the trash bin on my computer.

Popfile is the program I’m talking about. I have used it exclusively for several years and it maintains about 98% accuracy for sorting my mail, including spam, into the appropriate folders. As a matter of fact, I would have missed this email because it had been sorted into my trash bin. The only reason I found it was because I decided to go in and reclassify a few emails that had been sorted incorrectly. It had keyed on some of the phrases in this email and identified it as spam. Which really meant that it was doing it’s job correctly since there was some spam included.

Now, a word of warning. If your using Yahoo or Hotmail this program won’t work for you. It is meant to be run on your local system so that it can scan your mail as it is downloaded to you PC. And it can be a little bit persnickety to setup, but it’s worth the effort.
-kev

Gecaching had its start in May 2000 after the US government decided to make an improved GPS signal available to the public. This made the public use of GPS systems far more accurate and much more useful than it had been to that point.

Soon after this government announcement David Ulmer of Oregon placed his first geocache. His concept of the game, then called The Great GPS Stash Hunt, was very simple: the hider would hide a container and note the GPS coordinates. The seeker would use those coordinates to locate the container, make a note in the log, and trade items.

It didn’t take long for that cache to be found, and a new outdoor sport was formed.

The game has grown dramatically in the last few years. There are now more than ¼ million geocaches hidden around the world. There is probably a cache somewhere close to you. The first cache I found was less than ¼ mile from my back door. We go geocaching as a family and we have found many since then and even hidden a few.

It’s really not too hard:

1. We use Geocaching.com or Terracaching.com to pull up a list of caches where we want to go hunting.
2. We can either print out the pages or load them up into my Palm PDA.
3. We load up the coordinates into our GPS unit.
4. We pack up our trading trinkets and some cold drinks (don’t want to get dehydrated).
5. We use the GPS unit to help us navigate to the geocache site and start hunting. The listings usually give a good indication of what we should be looking for.
6. Once we find the cache we make a note in the logbook and trade items (usually small toys for us since we hunt with a 3-year old).
7. When we’re done, we make sure to go back to the listing website to log the find.
8. I usually like to write a blog entry on my geocaching blog at Caching Adventures. This is a good place to tell the stories that don’t quite fit into the log entry.

Geocaching has taken us to several local parks that we knew about but had never explored. Our family usually takes in 3 to 5 caches in a single outing. Others will take on many more.

One positive thing that geocaching has done for us is that it has gotten us out of the house and back out into the great outdoors again.

Well feast your eyes on the new site, because you’ve got all new stuff here to enjoy! Now no more complaining!

We’ll be updating this site with our adventures and fun stories. Stay tuned!

-Kevin