Hits and Misses

Another year over, a new one just around the corner. The Holland Sentinel has a section every week called the hit and miss section. It talks about the hits and misses of the previous week. I am about to describe my hits and misses of 2008.

Hit: Tying the knot. This was definitely the smartest move I made all year.

Miss: Falling asleep on my accounting midterm. You never wanna fall asleep for two hours on a 3 hour timed test.

Hit: Spending a week honeymooning in Hilton Head. Most relaxing vacation ever.

Hit: Watching Michigan beat Florida in the Capital One Bowl. A great way to send off one of the greatest coaches in Michigan history, Loyd Carr.

Miss: That gunshot I heard just now outside of our apartment. Missed us by a long shot.

Hit: Getting a Nintendo Wii from our good friend Doug. I have already achieved greatness status in Mario Kart.

Miss: Getting excited about watching Michigan and Lions games. wow.

Miss: My plan to workout 3 times a week. That worked, for one week.

Miss: Throwing the first pitch at the whitecaps game. By miss I mean, missing the strike zone.

Hit: Saving money on my car insurance by switching to Geico.

There you have it. Josh Willink's hits and misses of 2008. It has been quite a year, its gonna be hard to follow up that one.

Update

Here is the latest in our crazy lives we live.

We got our Christmas tree the other day, and a video camera. This is one of the most exciting times in both of our lives because its our first holiday season as a married couple. We are having fun decorating, getting gifts for people, making Christmas cards, the whole shabang.

We wanted to cut our own tree so we went to a tree farm about 20 minutes from here. When we got there we asked where the douglas firs were and the lady points to the left. After walking a good half mile seeing just about every other kind of tree we decided to turn back. Once we got to the front again we told the lady we couldn't find them. Then she proceeds to say oops, I meant they are that way, and points to the right. Alright, so we walked forever in the other direction. No douglas firs. We went back to the front and decided to ask a different worker. He said that there are no signs for douglas fir but that they are kind of sprinkled in among all the trees...We ended up buying one at the front - precut. We could have gone across the street at a gas station for the same thing, but at least we had an adventure. Once I figure out how to transfer clips onto the computer I will post some from our new video camera.

There is a dog yelping in the apartment next to us. It sounds like a puppy. Great.

The Smelly Thing

Marriage is God's greatest invention. We have now been married for 3 and a half months. They say that there is an adjusting period when you need to adjust to one another's little habits or ways of doing things. Like placing the roll of toilet paper so that it goes under or over, like remembering to leave the toilet seat down, like one may like things in one place and the other may like things in a another place, decorating, cleaning, there are all kinds of things two people who have been dating for 3 years don't truly know about each other until they are married and lived together. For the most part I can say (with the exception of the heat dilemma) we have adjusted pretty well. There was this one thing a couple of months ago. It was this scented aroma piece that we had that was just bad. It wasn't like barfy or poopy smelly, it was like, well really the only way I can explain it...is like...you know how some older women spray perfume that doesn't smell ...bad... per Se, just really really strong which can cause it to be quite offensive. I tried to tell her that this was the source of the smell in our apartment that we had been trying to track down, but she seemed to like the thing so we kept it out for a few more weeks. Finally I couldn't take it any longer. I did something I am not proud of. Something that a giving, caring, self-sacrificing husband should not do, I hid it. I just wanted to put it away a couple of days to see if our apartment would smell better. Anyway, I don't know how she found it so fast. But the next day she found it in an unused cupboard, wrapped in a plastic bag next to an open box of baking soda. The cupboard that I put it in actually smelled really bad too, only this smell was like something had died in there, so my plan was to get rid of the smell in our apartment, and kill the rotten dead smell in the cupboard. My plan worked better than I could have imagined. The thing is still in the cupboard along with the baking soda. Our apartment is smelling much better and the unused cupboard is smelling like strong perfume.

In other news. Carrie cooked an incredible meal tonight. Ham and scalloped potatoes. mmm. She is so good. While she working her butt off in the kitchen I went and got a movie for us to watch. We watched the movie 21 while we ate and decided to leave the dishes for tomorrow. She's in bed sleeping now and I think I'm going to go join her. Married life is so great.

Heat Problem

Today I will address Carrie's and my first and largest disagreement as a married couple.

This is a problem that we may need to see a marriage counselor about as we just cannot seem to reach an agreement on and neither one of us has been willing to compromise. The number one issue is who controls the thermostat.

Now typically, guys are warm and women are cold, am I wrong? In our case it is opposite. I don't know why, but since I was little, my body temperature is always unbelievably cool. I believe this is due to poor blood circulation. In any case, I did not realize when I signed the marriage license, that Carrie's blood circulation must be really...strong? Is that the right word? Anyway, she is never cold. I have developed a couple of theories as to why this is the case.

One theory is that she was born on some other planet such as Mars or Jupiter. This is why she gets so warm, because ever since she transported to earth somehow (I'm still trying to figure out how, trying to locate a UFO of some sort, or sneak up on her when she isn't expecting it in hopes of intercepting a conversation between her and other extraterrestrials), she naturally would be warm being several millions of miles closer to the sun. She would have had to have been raised in cooler climates because that would explain why she is having difficulties adjusting to planet earth. This would also explain her "out of this world" beauty she possesses. ;)

My other theory is that she is part human and part penguin. This would explain a lot. Look at the similarities. Penguins are terrific swimmers. Carrie is a terrific swimmer. Penguins feed off of krill and fish and such. Carrie enjoys seafood. Penguins don't have many predators just sea lions. Carrie's predators are mice, snakes, things that scare her, green cars, and, you guessed it, sea lions. Penguins can't fly. Carrie can't fly. Penguins waddle. Carrie...well...I guess the comparison stops there. At any rate, if she was part penguin, she would never be cold because look at penguins, they waddle around in the snow all day and never get cold. I think this is the stronger of my two theories.

Usually we have two fans going in our apartment, along with the air conditioning, along with the heat on full blast, and sometimes she cracks a window also. A waist of energy you say? We call it a compromise. When I get up in the morning, due to the fact that heat rises it has actually gotten pretty comical how in my walk from the bed to the shower, I will notice my face sweating and my feet freezing.

I guess you could say I was forewarned about this. After all, from the from the first day I laid eyes on her, I knew that she was extremely hot.

Stalker

Apparently we have a stalker in our midst. While Carrie was walking from her car into our apartment a couple of days ago, a short little lady bolts across the parking lot yelling "EXCUSE ME!!". She proceeded to warn Carrie about a man wearing a doctor's mask whom she had seen sitting idle in his green car apparently stalking little children and women. I don't doubt that there are many weird and crazed individuals, and we should take the warning seriously and take necessary precautions. However, Carrie is now freaking out over all parked green cars in the parking lot. Its kind of funny. I offered to sit in my window with my shotgun every time she leaves the apartment, but she said that makes her feel less comfortable as she has very little confidence in my aim.

Abortion

In church on Sunday Pastor Paul brought up a good point that I had been thinking about for a while. I think it is worthwhile to write this one out.

Pastor Paul talked about how in this political season, with the election just around the corner, so much focus is being put on the economy, bailout and financial crisis in Washington, some are putting other important issues on the backburner. This is extremely dangerous. I would like to bring up the issue of abortion. Every election I vote for the republican for this particular issue. Obviously there are other issues that are important, but to me, there is no one issue that is more important than this one. Most people that would read this would think I'm crazy for suggesting that the topic of abortion is more important than what's happening in the economy, but stop and think a second, is having money in our wallets or in a 401k or other investments REALLY more important than the millions of innocent, helpless babies that are murdered in cold blood each and every year? Are we really that selfish? You could make the case that if we have a president who doesn't know how to get us out of this financial crisis we could slip into a depression and people would lose jobs, food and goods would become harder to get and our quality of life would decline. But again I ask, is even our quality of life more important than the killing of millions of babies? Something to think about.

Trying Something New

I decided to try something new. I am not much of a blogger, I have tried keeping one before and could not keep up on it. I'm not much of a writer for that matter, it always seems like I have better things to be doing than sitting down and typing away. But in an effort to better keep track of the events that take place in my life, and to have something to look back on and recall, makes it worth it for me. I don't expect people to read this, its more for me to have an online journal because it is next to impossible for me to keep a real journal. But feel free to read as I am making this public. This way you can easily keep tabs on what Carrie and I are up too. This is just an intro. I'm tired. I meant to start this tonight but I think I'll just leave it where it's at and start this thing tomorrow or something. I got a paragraph. Nice.