Longhorn in Paradise

Hello all! I am sitting here in Tulsa, OK enjoying my first week "on the bench". My project fizzled out and died last week, so I will be hanging out at home and bothering Kat and disciplining the kids with a bit too much vigor for an indeterminate amount of time. :-) Unfortunately, the pool is closed for the season (yikes!) and I cannot just lay out in the sun catching rays and reading trashy novels. Which, as we all know, is my preferred mode of relaxation. Instead, I did a bunch of yardwork this weekend (with a TON of help from Kat and Liska) and spent all day yesterday firing our cable company and bringing out the DishNetwork folks to put up the satellite. Looking forward to getting back to some sense of normalcy...Cable sucked. Problem is, the guy showed up to install and then left for a family emergency...Cable is getting stopped today and there is no guarantee Dish will be back finish their work....it could be a disaster waiting to happen, but I am holding out hope that we will avoid such a calamity. PLease send your prayers, white light and well-wishes. A night without any sort of non-network tv is not a good thing for the Knight clan. :-)

Things continue to go well for the Knight family. Liska and Hagen are thriving in pre-school. Hagen is impressing all with his smarts and his ability to take it to the hoop and dunk on his non-walking classmates. Liska is little Ms. Personality and her teachers told us she is very involved in class and welcoming to all who enter the classroom. They didn't come right out and say it, but I get the sense that the teachers think that Hagen and Liska are the most intelligent, funniest and best looking kids in the entire school. Or maybe I read too much into the "hello" they gave us at open house last week. Either way, they are having fun.

So, what's the point? That is a game that Kat and I have been playing (unwittingly) over the past few months as Hagen has begun to constantly ask "what's that?" while pointing indiscriminately into the distance. It makes it very difficult for us to ascertain what object he is referring to. For instance, there are two items on his shelf...a frog (gift from the Mongers) and a football. He says "whats that?" and points in the general direction and I just have to guess what the hell he is referring to. It happens all over the house and when we are out and about. I am just telling you this as fair warning...if Hagen comes over to your house and asks "can Jimmy come out and throw frogs around?", you don't think he is some animal abusing psychopath. Also, if he asks you to warm up his hotdog in the refrigerator or turn on the lights because he wants to feel the wind...well, you get the idea.

On another note, I am trying yet another diet. This is one that actually worked for me when I was living in Glendale. It is called the Abs Diet. I lost about 25 lbs with it last time. I am up to about 240, so a good 25-30 lb weight loss would not be a bad thing. And, it is easier to eat well now that I am at home. Which reminds me, going out for queso tonight. :-)

OK...here is what you all have been waiting for...some more pics of the fam. Enjoy!

A little microcosm of the Liska/Hagen dynamic...Liska encourages Hagen to do something dangerous...he cries about it but does it anyway...he screams cheese whenever he sees a camera...Liska takes advantage of his being distracted and slides into him...he expresses himself by throwing something. Amazing I was able to catch all this in a short video. :-) Enjoy!