Sometimes true Massey-ness shows its face

See that face? The one on the left with the pouty lip? I'll tell you why I've got it...but not yet.

This has been an interesting weekend to say the least. One of the many things we have to do before we have children in our home is to pass a fire inspection, which is scheduled for Tuesday morning. The city of Killeen in all of its wisdom requires that all fireplaces be inspected in order to pass. Our fireplace is used just about as much as I eat salad, so we've never actually used it. I called a business called Chimney Pro and a very nice lady answered the phone on Thursday and said "well, part of our business is cleaning and installing above ground pools and we do our chimney work on the weekend, but we can schedule tomorrow at 9am." So, I took the day off, Amanda gave me a list of things I (ahem) we needed to have done before we have our inspections (oh yeah, we have a health inspection on Wednesday too ) so I decided I would spend my day getting that list accomplished. 9am rolls around, and no chimney sweep. I wait 15 minutes and call, no answer, and leave a total Bob Massey like message,  which consisted of "perhaps this is an error on my part and I heard the wrong time, if so I apologize, blah blah blah." My Dad passed on an amazing ability to apologize for everything especially if its not my fault. As the comedian John Mulaney said "you could pour soup on my lap and I'd probably apologize to you." All in all, I called these folks 6 times from 9am-11:30 and got no response. At this point, I'm ok if this guy shows up:

Dick Van Dyke is awesome

At 11:45 I get a call from them and the lady on the phone was profusely apologetic. She then went on to explain that when she said "we can be there tomorrow" she thought that it was already Friday (wishful thinking) and so in her mind Friday was actually Saturday. Once again, the Bob-ness came out and I felt very sorry for her and told her that we could only have somebody come over Saturday after 3 since we have class in Austin. She then said that she could schedule us for 5PM on Saturday.
I then went about my day getting the rest of the tasks completed and as soon as Amanda got home we high-tailed it to Arlington to meet my Uncle Mike and Aunt Susi to see the Rangers play the Yankees. Mike was able to get some amazing seats, row 15 behind home plate, and we got to spend a really nice evening watching real baseball being played. It was a ton of fun, AND there were fireworks. So double awesome. The only drawback of course was that we didn't leave the game until 11ish and got home around 2am.

And then we woke up the next morning and drove to Austin for class #6.

Class #6 was on of the better classes so far. It started off with a panel of current foster parents talking to us about their experiences, offering advice and fielding questions from our classmates. It was truly touching to hear there experiences and what it had meant to them to be a foster parent. Our only wish was that we could have heard from someone who had gone through the full adoption process and not just emergency placements. The rest of the class was spent going over forms and paperwork that we will need to fill out, such as clothing inventory, medicine scheduling, all that loveliness. We kinda powered through it and it was a lot to go through, but it did also mean that we got to leave early, which was really nice because it gave us an opportunity to help Amanda's dad who was doing some work at our house, and we are getting closer now to the sad face.

When Amanda and I moved into this house 6 years ago there was a very large deck in the backyard that was meant for an above ground pool. The pool was gone, but the deck remained, teasing us like a chicken fried steak that was just breading. We decided about 2 years ago that we would knock down the part of the deck that surrounded the invisible-pool so we grabbed hammers and knocked down a TON of wood, which we piled up behind our shed. We moved it back because we thought our dog was pulling a Shawshank out of our backyard and was using the wood to jump over the fence, but that is a whole other story. Anyways, this wood has been sitting in a pile for good while and it is not exactly kid friendly with all the nails and mess protruding. My father in law, being the amazing man that he is, had wanted to use the wood to cover up the large spaces under the deck, so he showed up this morning at 7:30 and loaded all his tools into our backyard and spent the day using the old wood and covering up those spaces....but there was still enough wood left over to make 2 other decks. So we decided that we would do exactly like you do when you were a kid and your mom wanted you to clean your room: you throw all your junk under the bed, so we threw the wood under the deck and then nailed it closed. In addition to the wood there was a large metal structure that was used to prop the invisi-pool up and that needed to come up to. So Kenny and I were out there digging up all this metal, he even had a jackhammer out so we could break up the concrete. We had to unscrew these large metal posts and then pull them up and as we are working them back and forth I stepped back...

and a nail went through my shoe and right into my heel.

Yeah, it didn't feel great, and I was bleeding. So we did what you are supposed to do when you impale parts of your body with a nail, you go get a tetanus shot. And thats where we were when the picture above was taken, waiting to be seen at urgent care to get a tetanus shot. Come to find out, I had gotten a tetanus shot in April of 2016 when I sliced my hand open at work with a razor. I apparently hurt myself a lot. We only had to wait about 5 minutes when we were taken to the back and the male nurse, who I'm pretty sure was Tracy Morgan, and he soaked my foot in warm water and iodine. Come to find out though, its much more dangerous to your health if you step on a nail and have a shoe on. The rubber from the shoe will cause something called Pseudomonas, which has to be fought with a high power anti-biotic. So its a good thing we went to Urgent Care. The best part of all this was the doctor actually judging me after she cleaned off my foot. She told me to go ahead and put my sock and shoe back on, and of course its the sock and shoe I was wearing with I stepped on the nail. "Oh, you're going to put your dirty sock on after we did all that cleaning?"
Yes, yes I am. I didn't have time to put on my hazmat suit after I stepped on the nail. And the best part is that she didn't say "here is a new sock" or "here is a bandage" or "here is a magic shoe that we use to help fight clumsiness." My foot is ok, by the way, it just has a slight throbbing pain to it, but once again we can't really do much without somebody (me) getting hurt.

Suffice to say, its been a long 2 days, but its totally worth it. We're going to have kid in our house and I'd move the house 2 feet to the left using an ice cream scoop and spatula if thats what it would take.

Next week we have class on Friday AND Saturday, and those are the last classes. So, see you next week. Same Bat-time, same Bat-channel.