Busy, Busy, Busy. . .

It was almost painful to re-live this next set of pictures as I posted them to the blog. From Wednesday, July 2nd to Saturday, July 5th, we were over booked, over tired and over the edge! I exaggerate just a little, but we were stretched pretty much to our limit. We need to hire a crew for this!!


We spent the day on Wednesday prepping for the weekend events and then headed out to Homedale in the early evening to set up part of Kurt's 4th of July event. We made this contact last year by running Straight Shooter out here in exchange for tickets, so they called us back this year and had us run the band again AND provide the sound in the arena for the demolition derby.

Rob and Kurt had already made a trip out here to line out where the speakers should go and if there would be enough power to run everything. The plan: hoisting several large, heavy speakers up onto these sturdy (?) pieces of plywood that are a good 20 feet off the ground. Of course they assured me it would be safe and not to worry. . .

Zach is in a money-making mood so he was more than willing to help run all the cables.

Gloria was more than willing to watch and make comments. . .

We had a whole crew from the arena come out to help guide the tractor that would haul the speakers into place. I don't think the job required that many hands but you just never know. . .

The speakers were carefully loaded into the "shovel" of the tractor (along with Rob) and lifted up to where Kurt and Zach were waiting. . .

. . . where they were carefully unloaded onto the "sturdy" (?) piece of plywood. . .

Zach hitched a ride back down as they prepared to load the speakers for the other side. . .

It really was nice to have the extra help. . .

One guy in the crew said something about me being the "worried wife" as I stood around taking pictures. I just told him you get used to this kind of thing after awhile. At least they weren't flying these speakers off of some pole in the sky. Not that it won't happen at some point in the future. . .

Gloria convinced Rob to let her ride, too. . . he lifted her on, against my better judgement. . .

It really didn't take too long to put the speakers in place, run the cables and fire up the system.

We walked around the arena testing the wireless mic and playing a CD to see if we needed to set up speakers anywhere else.

Not surprisingly, these speakers covered the entire arena and then some. . .

They looked good and sounded great:

Thursday was kind of a busy blur. I had a morning hair appointment and Kurt had very important family matters to attend to (adding guilt to my stress that he should even have to work at all that day. . . ) so we didn't get to the Qwest arena for a stage load-in until after 2:00. We were a little rushed since we had to get out to Nampa Nights by 3-ish so it was a little stressful. They weren't quite ready for us when we pulled up, so Kurt stood in the middle of a busy downtown street and protected the precious trailer. . .

The only way to pull into the arena is through a busy parking garage and. . .

. . . down a very steep ramp. . .

This caused me a little stress but it worked out OK:

We backed it up into the reserved space and set to work letting down the sides. . .

All in all it was a pretty quick set-up. . .

We made it out to Nampa Nights in plenty of time even though I had to go all the way back to the shop (in an un-air-conditioned car in 105 degree heat) to get a forgotten drive rack. For once I was too tired to take pictures . . .

Friday morning came too soon. . . Kurt arrived at the shop first and found that our van had been broken into. The back window was smashed in pretty good but nothing seemed to have been taken. We have a pretty vigilant police department in the area, so we can only assume they scared the thieves away before they could take any thing. Still, it gives us one more thing to do. . .

We helped Kurt load up the rest of the stuff for Homedale and then Rob and I prepped for our event in Eagle. Rob has been wanting to turn our big U-haul truck into an R.V. for awhile now but just hasn't had any spare time to do it. Since we didn't have to be out on our event until 4-ish, he decided to put in the windows so we could try out our home-away-from-home on one of the hottest days of the year. He put in a door a few weeks ago, so he already knew what needed to be done. I won't try to explain it- the pictures speak for themselves:

By the time he finished the windows and we loaded the truck, we were running short on time. I still had to pick up kids and go to the store and he had cables to make along with setting up stacks and racks of speakers and amps. I had absolutely no time to take pictures once we got out there and the set-up was hot and difficult. We had to run a cable out to the guy running the fireworks so we could synchronize the fireworks with the music. We had planned for about a 1000 feet but it turned into more like 2000 feet. It was crazy and difficult!! We had great help, though, and Rob sent Jered and Zach over ditches, under fences and through mosquito-infested swamps to get the cable to it's destination. We needed background music playing by 7:00 and then firework music at 10:30 so I "manned" the computer full of music while Rob continued to run cable. I finally sent the boys out with the camera so I could have a few pictures. . . The final view was quite impressive:

There were thousands of people in the park and we actually had coverage for the entire area. Everything ran great and the synchronization worked exactly how it was supposed to. Here's the finale':

The tear-down wasn't as stressful as the set-up, but it was still a lot of hard work. We made good use of the boy's muscles and they did what needed to be done without a single complaint. When we were almost done, I realized that once again I hadn't taken any pictures so I told them to pretend to be working:

This is all the light we had for our 3 hour tear-down:

In the meantime, Kurt was out in Homedale running sound for the Demolition Derby. He took along my spare camera and got some good shots:

After the Derby ended and the fireworks were over, he still had to run sound for the band. When all was said and done, he ended up pretty much working through the night to pack it all back into the trucks. . .

. . . leaving him no time to sleep at all since he had to meet Rob down at the Qwest Arena first thing in the morning to drop off some of the equipment he had used in Homedale. . . We also had to meet a customer there who needed to pick up a small sound system he was renting from us so I went along to help. Yep, it was stressful. We were all very tired. . . This event only required our stuff, not our selves so we were finally able to leave and get some much neded rest.

We all met back at the shop in the evening so we could go back to the arena and take it all down. This is what I found when I arrived:

The boys were hanging out in the Redneck Motorhome.

We made it back to the arena just as the event was ending and proceeded to take everything down. Again.









It was a long, stressful, dificult 4 days and it's probably the closest I've ever come to wanting to "throw in the towel" but we all survived and I'll have a full week up in McCall to recuperate. Of course I'll be in a cabin with 5 elementary-aged girls, but it will be a relaxing vacation compared to all of this!!!!

Random Rambling

I'm pretty sure I take way too many pictures everyday but when life gets crazy, like it often does, I feel like life hasn't passed me by when I can look at my pictures and see that I actually did something meaningful with my time and energy. I can see that my kids aren't quite as deprived as I sometimes think they are and that I laugh more than I cry. My pictures give me proof that even when things are hard, I'm finding little (and big) pieces of joy in the chaos.



The latest heat wave has made our unconditioned house a sweltering 94 degrees! I was tempted to join Gloria in her garbage can filled with clear, cool water. (Just for the record, it was a brand new can!)


She also managed to cool off at Roaring Springs with her sweet Cherry Festival friend! I was a little nervous about leaving her there unsupervised but I figured if she can hang out with this responsible 12 year old girl for two weeks at two festivals, she can probably handle 5 hours at a water park. It stressed me out a little when a big storm came in and the traffic was so bad I couldn't get to her!! Everything turned out fine, though, and she had a fun day. . .


These pictures have nothing to do with cooling off- these are plastic spoons in her eyes. . . If you look carefully, she looks a little like Yoda from the poster behind her. . .

Hmmmm. . .

This van belongs to my new best friend. We now have an air conditioned home for the first time in 3 years!!

Catch-up lunch with Vic!! I haven't had much of a chance to talk to Vic since Alysha's twins were born last month so it was great catching up with her life. The twins are still in the hospital but it sounds like they are doing great and the adoptive parents are doting on them.

Zach doesn't believe me when I tell him he's too old for the play place. His response: "Who will scare the kids if I'm not there???????"


I love this next picture of Gloria. It doesn't seem to matter how many other toys she has, she always comes back to her baby dolls. She has two very special babies that she's had for years and years and she nurtures them like she gave them life. . .

July is starting to look like it might be even crazier than June!! Although the stage trailer seems huge to me, it isn't big enough for a couple of rentals that we have coming up so the guys built two of the additions that we'll need for July 5th. Rob painted them very, very late one night (or very, very early one morning. . . )

Zach has been in dire need of a haircut for a couple of months so I finally made him an appointment. Mechelle has been cutting our family's hair since just before Gloria was born and she recently invested in a brand new, fancy, schmancy salon. I've been putting off making any of us an appointment because her "spa" is a little intimidating! Mechelle, however, is very down-to-earth and authentic and very, very good at what she does so I finally made appointments for me and Zach.

Mechelle endearingly refers to us as The Hair Family. It's easy to see why. . .

We decided to keep Zach's hair on the long side and just give it a trim. This picture doesn't do it justice but it looks pretty good. There's a funny story about this photo, but you probably had to be there. We went to Sharis after Nampa Nights on Thursday and we have a tendency to be kind of silly when we go out after shows. Rob arrived before us and ordered all-you-can-eat fish and shrimp. We had a very on-the-ball waiter so when Rob requested a lot more shrimp, the attentive young man brought him 3 plates of fish and shrimp including several more ramekins of tartar and cocktail sauce. The kids and I arrived just as these were being served so it looked like Rob was eating for four. . . Then Zach ordered the same thing and every time the waiter would refill the shrimp, he would also bring several plates of fish and tartar sauce and cocktail sauce! Rob told him early on that we wouldn't need any more fish or sauce, but apparently there are rules at these places and you have to have everything or nothing. Every time he came by, we got sillier and sillier . . . We didn't want to waste anything so we asked for boxes and just started dumping the fish into those. Rob and Zach can eat A LOT of shrimp, so you can imagine the pile we had by the time we were finished!!

I guess maybe you had to be there. . .

Sleepover

We finally had a chance to get the 6 kids together for a sleepover on Sunday night. I'm not thinking of it as "the last" anything because it just ISN'T. We'll have plenty of opportunities in the future for sleep-overs and birthday parties and get-togethers . . . Just because 2 of the 6 are moving approximately 444.98 miles doesn't mean we'll never see them again. I'm still pretending they're just taking an extended vacation. . .

I sent my little camera with Gloria so she could take plenty of fun pictures. Not because I think it's the last time they'll have a sleep-over, I just like to have lots of pictures. . .

I'm tempted to go on and on about these special friendships but then I would slip out of denial and maybe cry and I'm just not ready to do that yet. What's a mere 444.98 miles between friends, anyway?????

Girls Rule. . .

Boys drool. . .

:)

Game Night

On Friday night, Kurt and Laura invited us over for dinner and games. It's been so interesting watching these relationships unfold. I feel such a connection with Laura because of our high school friendship (and the fact that we knew each other before we had husbands and families. . .) And it's fun to watch the kids make connections- almost like they're related. . . Gloria is sure Kurt and Rob are long lost brothers. . . So, anyway, we ate pizza, played games, talked, laughed hysterically and relaxed . . .

Laura and her youngest teamed up and beat the rest of us at Scene It:

The kids spent a lot of time on the tramp. . .

This is a bad/blurry photo, but still so cute:

We probably over-stayed our welcome by leaving after 1:30 a.m. but we just had to watch The Princess Bride. . . . I did come to the conclusion that Gloria may be right and Rob and Kurt just might be long lost brothers when they started quoting Monty Python . . . This could be bad. . .