I cannot promise all the weeks' adventures to be covered in this post, but it'll have a couple bits of news.

Strange Stuff: A week ago (Sunday night), my wife and I turned in about midnight.  We turned off the lights in our room and fell asleep.  Now, we have touch lamps in our room, those fancy-shmancy ones that are only activated by the touch of a human hand.  Well, we both woke up at about 5 am and our lamps were on again.  I thought my 5 year old might have come in trying to wake us and turned them on, so I didn't think much of it.  Well my wife turned hers off and I mine, and about 20 seconds later, my lamp turned on again… by itself! I'll tell you something, nothing scares you like a good scary movie… and watching something turn itself on.  I turned off my lamp again and circled the house making sure everything was in order (doors locked, kids alive, etc) because it freaked me out a little.  I even did some research on the web to find out if it's a common thing or not.  I learned a lot about touch lamps, but only a few reported cases of them turning themselves on.  I guess a random cloud of charged particles may have drifted through our room and turned them on, that's all I could find.  I even coaxed my cat to touch the lamp to see if she could have done it… nope.  So, whether it be paranormal or a weird display of science, it was weird.

Car Hyjinx: In the middle of March, we had the unfortunate experience of bumping another car with our own.  Then, at the beginning of April, another unfortunate person backed into our car…. well, we worked with their insurance company and ours, and today we are getting it fixed! Thank goodness!  Well, I have learned one thing about this whole ordeal, my car insurance agent is a little under qualified, to say the least. I am insured through State Farm (have been for 15 years or so), and have had a short list of exceptional insurance agents.  This last agent, though, is totally different.  His secretaries can't answer simple questions, he is very difficult to get a hold of, and his office is a renovated house, so it doesn't even look like an office outside.  Furthermore, I cannot find his information on the State Farm website, so I think I am going to change agents.  After the whole fiasco of trying to talk to his office, I got the regional State Farm claims phone number and had zero problems from them.  It was a walk in the park…

School: I can't believe that Emery has been in school for almost an entire year.  It just blows my mind.  She is getting so big and she is so far beyond the skills of her peers, it's truly amazing.  She's only got one more month of school before she's out for the summer.  Wow, that's going to be an exciting for her. I hope she'll have stuff to keep her busy the entire summer.  Ashlynn is also doing great in her class, though she seems to be on the opposite side of the spectrum.  She is, however, using multi-word sentences regularly, which is a huge improvement.  She used to only be talking in 1 word "phrases" that we understood, but now she can chain 2 or more words together.  She tells her food she doesn't want to eat to "Get Away!" as she throws it on the floor… and she will tell you "Here you go!" when she tries to hand you something.. It's really cute. 

Writing Front: For those of you who don't know, I have had a desire to write since I was about 15 years old.  I had to write a short story for 8th grade English and have been mildly interested in writing ever since.  Well, a few years ago, I had to take some humanities classes in college, and I decided to take Creative Writing.  I studied all aspects of fiction and poetry, and had to write a couple short stories for the class.  I then took my studies beyond school and outlined 2 novels that I think need to be written, both of which I used in my Creative Writing courses.  Anywho, about a year ago, I decided I would work on getting published, so I started heavily working on a story I first dreamed up about 6 years ago or so. I started creating characters, scenes, plots and the such when I read a book about 6 months ago by Stephen King on Writing (that's actually the name On Writing by Stephen King).  After a short memoir about his history, he gives his tools for the trade.  The jist of one section said that if the story is meant to be written, it'll write itself.  Stephen gives a writing activity in the book where he sets up a scene and tells the reader (ie Me) to write the scene.  He said don't outline it, "Just start writing, the characters will tell you what to do" (or something to that affect).  That seemed to strike a chord with me. I had heard this in other places, but never from an actual writer.

So, back to my story.  I wrote chapter 1 for my Creative Writing course.  I spent the month of March cleaning up the chapter and then I started chapter 2 sometime in the middle of April.  When I started chapter 2, I decided that I was going to use Stephen King's method of just writing.  It was kinda difficult to get into, but after a bit of writing, the story seemed to take off by itself.  It was very cool to watch the story start to write itself.  I even told some people that I was interested to see what happens.  I'll draw the analogy of driving a car.  I was in the driver seat and I knew the destination, but the trip (the story) was like the scenery between the start and the destination.  It was really cool when the chapter ended because it didn't end where I had planned, it actually ended a little earlier than I had imagined.  It did, however, say "dude, it's over… stop driving" when I reached the chapter end.  If I had written more, then there would have been an awkward transition.  In short… it was really neat to see the story begin to take on a life of it's own.  I know what's going to happen in chapter 3, but like with chapter 2, I am very interested to see what happens along the way.  Chapter 1 is currently available on my devinatArt page if you desire to read it.  Criticism is encouraged and appreciated.

I'll leave you with this for today.  I'll share more as time passes.  Cheers!