Before jumping into the fun stuff about the dinner party, I didn’t do a post last week. Or the week before. The reason I didn’t write was because I didn’t know what to write- or how to write about it.

My older brother Jake had a birthday. I haven’t spoken to him in 2 years. It is embarrassing to talk about. Some things in life are- embarrassing, sad, broken. The details of how this came about are not worth going into here, but my phone number is blocked, which means I cannot call him or his wife to wish him a happy birthday.

The biggest shame is that it has been allowed to go on for this long. Surely someone, somewhere could have spoken into his life over the past two years and said something to the effect of, “Hey, I know things aren’t great, but he is your brother, and you should give him the benefit of a doubt. Cutting him out of your life isn’t the right thing to do.”

There is a lot more to say about it, but I love and respect him, and do wish Jake a happy birthday.

Party Time

Taylor and I work pretty great as a team. We learned this early on in our marriage, and have recently gotten out of the habit of collaborating for parties after 10 years of having Children and living through a global pandemic. So we thought this might be a great time to have a party. What were we celebrating? Nothing at all.

Taylor has to have something to look forward to. I think we all do- whether it’s a vacation, party, time off of work, etc. Since there haven’t been any weddings in a while out of our friend group, and our group is almost done having kids (are we, Cores?), what fun reasons are there to get together and celebrate? Nothing much, but let’s have a party anyways!

Taylor took the Friday off of work, the grandparents had the kids, and Taylor spent THE DAY cleaning. How this was relaxing, I have no idea. But, Tay the house looked beautiful. You could hardly even tell that children lived there.

She asked that people dress “funky formal”, which was part of the fun. Bowties? I have never worn one before. Funky Formal? Definitely gonna wear a bow tie.

Dinner was catered- kinda. There is a great local place with some tasty, but not too pricey, food. They cater many events, but also have options for a take-and-bake kind of thing. Along with a fancy dessert. And charades. Then, fireworks that I brought home from South Carolina. Mortars that shoot up into the sky are a lot louder than I remember them being.

Something New.

We have 2 cars. One is 15 years old. The other is 13 years old. They are paid for. My role in the household is to keep the cars running- change the oil, tires, lights, inspections, and ensure there are no “check engine” lights in the car.

I go to the car shop every other month. The cars are running mostly pretty great- but I am sick of it. Going to our mostly awesome car repair guy, and taking a few hours, every other month for ONE of the two cars, I kinda reached the end of my patience. To argue the other side, at least all of the recent maintenance things have been fairly inexpensive recently.

We knew we needed a new car. Taylor wanted a minivan. I wanted the SUV. Neither of us have ever had a new car before (3 years old, anyways). I was motivated because I tend to obsess over things. After many months and wayyyy too much time researching, we finally got out to a place that had the model of minivan, and SUV for us to test drive side by side and see what we like. We even had the kids, and made a unanimous decision: we all liked the SUV better.

So I knew what we liked, and made them an offer: $2k less than their asking price. THEY SAID NO. My children were there, and they still stuck with their guns. Really?

There was another model, almost the exact same. $1k less than their asking price; they still said no.

Some might say, surely you could have financed just a little bit more? Yes, we could have, but I wanted to pay for it, and stick with an exact figure that Taylor and I agreed upon.

The THIRD option was 90 minutes away, in Raleigh. So, I asked my mom if she had anything to do that Friday afternoon, she said no, so we went to Raleigh.

This is the last pic of the Camry. We had it 9 years, added 80k miles, and it only depreciated about $5500. I guess its true what they say: Toyotas really hold their value

Originally I was hoping to sell it myself and get a few thousand more than the dealer would offer, but the last time I sold a car myself- maybe 5 years ago- it was hard to navigate around all the scammers out there, and seemed like a hassle. And the dealership made a better offer than I was expecting.

A nice guy named Jermaine helped us out. We had been in touch the day before. The car was a trade-in, and had just come in the day before that.

He saw what I was reading, and we ended up talking about Jesus for a bit; Jermaine helps to pastor a few churches in the area.

We are pretty happy with it. Coming from a car that is 15 years old, it feels like I am just coming out of the Stone Age: the bells and whistles on cars are pretty amazing. This is a 2021 model, but feels pretty darn new to me. Some of these things have been normal on cars for a LONG time.

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Other fun things

These are just some other fun pics from the past couple weeks, with no context.