February looks to be a very busy month in the Box household. We’ll be providing a full month of CARES activities for our residents, including two dinners, a breakfast, and a party on Sunday for the Game of Which We Do Not Speak. You can see our event calendar on my CARES page. Email me if you’d like to volunteer at an event! We’re also planning trips to five different SWA cities so Jenny can run new hires events. Next week is Chicago and Baltimore. The next week is Orlando. The following week is Oakland and Phoenix. I’m tagging along as her personal assistant/roadie/bodyguard in exchange for free room and board. Our next doctor’s appointment is scheduled for the final week of Feb, when we hope to learn whether BB is a him or a her. Whew! So forgive me if AndyBox.com isn’t quite as active as usual, but I’ll do my best!
I’m Gonna Be an Uncle!
I’ve been dying to put this news on here but waited until my sister Lisa gave me the green light: she and Phillip are pregnant! She’s due about 6 weeks after we are, and we are all thrilled to be on this journey together. Theirs will be the first grandbaby on Phillip’s side and just barely the second on our side, so 2008 looks to be a HUGE year for several different families. Lisa and Jenny have already talked several times about how they’re feeling and what’s going on. I’m sure they’ll have fun shopping for baby things together later on. We’re also thankful that we relatively close to each other so that the new cousins can grow up together. I got to see my cousins fairly often growing up – not as often as I’d like, but enough that they are still dear to me. We hope to continue that heritage.
In other news, the TV of Greatness has arrived, and we love it! I brought Mom over to watch the Australian Open in HD, and I might have convinced her to get on board. We’re having a great time with it watching tennis, a few HD channels, and a couple of movies using our new upconverting DVD player that came free with the TV. Unfortunately, it’s also tempting us to upgrade other parts of our home theater system. My huge Klipsch center channel is too big and heavy to fit on top, so I did order a smaller one by Polk from Amazon. But I’m trying to be patient on the other elements, or at least be smart about them and not blow all our money on toys. Jenny’s mom is having a garage sale this spring, which would be a great time to sell our old TV and some speakers instead of Craigslisting them. Maybe we’ll win that Best Buy gift card from Southwest’s employee drawing and take home those magnificent Martin Logan tower speakers I heard the other day. (ha!) For the record, I have the coolest wife in the world. She basically told me that home audio is my department and to do whatever I think is best. I love you, baby!
Poker Face
My small group from last year’s men’s Bible study introduced me to poker. (no, that’s not a heretical statement!) As a way to hang out outside the study, we started meeting once a month for games of Texas Hold ‘Em, one popular flavor of the game. Over pizza or other junk food, we matched wits, cards, bluffs, and wills for the title of Manziers Poker Champion. Thankfully (for me), no money was involved, just fun and bragging rights. It’s an interesting game because playing it well requires knowledge of probability (which cards are likely to show up next?), the rules (does a straight beat a flush?), technique (should I raise the ante slowly, quickly, or not at all for this hand?), psychology (is James bluffing? he looks kinda nervous. Or is he faking nervousness to throw me off? hmm…), and observation (Josh bluffs often, so keep him honest), plus some guts if you’re playing for real money. I’m no pro, but I win a few hands here and there. I think I got a straight flush once. I don’t think I’m a good liar, though. Strangely, an incredible hand doesn’t guarantee incredible money, since the size of the pot depends on how much the other players add to it, which depends on their own hands and how confident they are that they can win. Our group took a break from poker for a few months, but we’re getting together Monday night to get back in the game.
Another Technological Milestone
After thinking about, debating, researching, and waiting a couple of years, we finally decided to take the high-def plunge and get an HDTV. Yep, and not a reasonably-sized one that would fit on a kitchen countertop, either – a big-screen one that two poor delivery people will have to haul up to our third-floor apartment. After years of spending our tax refund on practical things like paying off cars, this year (while we still only have two mouths to feed and still have two incomes) we’re “pre-spending” the refund on something fun that we’ve wanted for a long time. So our CPA had better come up with some cash! We got a fantastic deal on a very highly rated TV on Amazon, and it should arrive in the next couple of weeks. Come over and party with us once we get it set up!
We had CARES poker night tonight. Although only one resident came, we had a good time, and I now have bragging rights as the reigning Landings at La Villita Poker Champion. That and $5 might barely buy me a venti cappuccino at Starbucks, but I’ll enjoy it until our next poker night if we do it again. Tomorrow morning is our popular Pancake Breakfast, and my mom is coming to help b/c she rocks! Then we’re going to meet Lacy Rexroad IV, who entered this world Friday morning. Then after Jenny attends Baby Andrews’s baby shower, we plan to take a bunch of garage sale stuff down to Jenny’s parents’ house. Our garage will soon be empty and off our monthly invoice!
Machine Gun News…with Bullet Points!
- The Boxes now have Toll Tags. I hate toll roads and try to avoid them if at all possible. But if I have to use them, I hate the payment process even more – either a bill in the mail for $1.25 or disdainfully tossing in a handful of coins every couple of miles. So I joined the 21st century and stuck the tags on our windshields.
- I successfully sold my second item on Craiglist – the massive filing cabinet that I refused to make one of my poor friends drag up the stairs to our third-floor apartment. Now I have a well-used but cheap cheap Sony stereo cabinet for sale…
- Last night we finally had some residents over for dinner! We wanted to get started with that much sooner, but it takes time to build the relationships. This was a really nice engaged couple, and we had a great time. Jenny made chicken cordon bleu.
- Thursday night we had our monthly CARES meeting with our area director and the other IBC-connected teams. The president of Apartment Life was there to share some news and encourage us. He’s one of the most positive and encouraging people I’ve ever met. His enthusiasm and passion for God is infectious. He said our job boils down to one thing: making God look good. I liked that.
This and That
We’ve been busy lately, so sorry for the lack of updates. Work has been busy the last three nights with thunderstorms, late flights, and helping balance the workload for us midnight guys. As you might already know, the Dispatch office divides up the work by desk, with each desk responsible for specific city-pairs (ex. all flights from Dallas to Houston or Orlando to Baltimore). The midnight guys take over all flights for 2-4 different desks in the evening, monitoring them until they land, and planning all departures for 2-4 different desks the following morning through a given time, such as 830c. To accommodate growth, we add one or two desks to the office each year. To balance out the workload when we add a new desk, we shift city-pairs among the regular desks and change which desks the midnight guys relieve in the evening and release in the morning. In designing a midnight “desk”, my colleagues and I consider many factors, including the relative difficulty of each geographical area (west coast flights are generally easier due to better weather), the number of different airports we have to track, the number of flights to plan, and how many flights depart before the midnight guy leaves in the morning. There’s no perfectly even way to divide up the work, but I think we’ve come up with a decent solution. We’ll see how it works starting in February. I keep volunteering to help with these changes because I like puzzles, although it’s a bit daunting to know that people are unhappy if you provide the wrong answer. =)
Jenny and I had a very nice getaway to the Gaylord last weekend, complete with two delicious meals at the Riverwalk Cafe, a very cold but very beautiful trip through ICE (sorry I don’t have any pics – I was afraid the camera would break at 5 degrees!), a beautiful and comfortable room, nice staff, and plenty to see. I’m on a 12-day stretch at work after picking up a few shifts for a friend of mine whose stepdad is having surgery. We took Christmas down, and now we’re trying to clean out our rented garage so we can quit renting it. Anyone looking for a large legal-size filing cabinet, or have a good place to store a nice gas grill for a while?
Last night we had our second CARES pizza party and game night, which was a lot of fun. No one really played any board games, but we had a decent crowd, and many people stuck around to hang out for a bit. Pizza Hut accidentally shorted us a couple of pizzas, but it turned out that our advertising signs had blown over, and attendance was lower than expected. It’s always cool to see how God can work things out.