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This weekend MomR and DadR came by and helped us fix our fence. Actually, more accurately, we helped them fix our fence.

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Unfortunately I had drained just enough of our camera's battery life the day before taking pictures of crap I want to sell that it couldn't take any more pictures, but not enough for it to indicate it was time for charging. So our camera sat useless on the table all day Saturday. Thanks to Mom & Dad for getting a few shots with their own camera, and to DadR for taking the time to email them to me! The scariest part of this entire project was cutting notched ends for short sections. I won't try to explain the method to our madness, but suffice it to say that 6 times I held up a rail while Dad beat on the end with a splitting maul and baby sledge, and it only took the first one for me to realize that I should have been holding it so that the maul came down away from the general area of my face and good health*, instead of directly towards it. (I wanted to see what was happening!) I understand there are pictures of this brave act, but I suspect that they were not included in the email because of the wet spot on the front of my pants. I will do my best to get some pictures of the notched rails, because I don't think we actually took any that day; and I think they are quite impressive. * Ok, so not so great. But would it have been as funny any other way?

Having a DVR has been great. We watch the shows we like on our own schedule and don't have to sit through commercials if we don't want to; but I do always go back and watch the new Mac commercials if I see one I don't recognize. When I fall asleep during Heroes because my pain medication makes me drowsy, I can watch it again at my leisure. It also gives us the ability to pick and choose the order in which we watch our backlog of shows and that's what I'm bickering about today. We've been busy recently and are probably a week and a half behind the shows we like. The advantage of this is having the opportunity to watch two episodes of The Office back to back (which really worked to our advantage with the Dwight quitting cliffhanger!), but the disadvantage is that (damn it!) it wasn't until last night that I saw the advertisement for the competition to win a spot as a dead body in a future episode of CSI. I mean… how cool would that be? When we saw the commercial I got pretty excited, but when I realized that they tape in California (the show is based in Las Vegas, of course) I figured that even if I won I would have to pay to fly myself out for the taping. Not the case (see: "7. Prize:"). They are paying to fly the winner and a guest out to L.V. (coach, but hey, its free!), and for 2 nights in a hotel. This, my friends, is one heck of a disadvantage to DVR. Nothing would be cooler than being John Doe #165.

My Parenthack got published. I'm giddy like a school-boy!