Brads Blog

Friday, Brandon had his braces put on. Here are some pictures of him getting them put on, and sporting them.

We went up to help haul out some garbage out, and to drop off my air compressor and took some pictures while there.

On Saturday we all got together at Moms and had a nice turkey dinner. Ron is heading out today and deploys Thursday so Saturday was his family send-off. I took plenty of pictures, and got on everyone’s nerves I’m sure. I also got some pictures of mom’s new bedroom furniture.

Click on one of the images to see it full size.

Christmas is this week. Since Brandon will be at his dads on Christmas day, we asked Santa if he would instead come a day early. He said yes and so Christmas Eve morning, the boys will be tearing into Santa’s gifts. Last night we had the annual Schneider Christmas gathering, the boys really enjoyed all the gifts they received.

I’ve been taking many pictures, and instead of trying to post them all here, I thought it would be easier to direct you to my Kodak Easyshare slideshow. You can see them here. These are pictures at Zachary’s Christmas program from preschool, as well as dinner with our friens Judy and Jerry (Christmas Carolers showed up and sang in their living room, it was great!) Also are pictures of the Schneider Christmas last night.

Also worth updating, our bathroom remodeling project is complete. The downstairs bathroom, we gutted leaving absolutely nothing and installed porcelain tile, new cabinet, vanity, sink, toilet and all the extras.

I was going to send out an email, but figured I might as well just post it here since I don’t have everyone’s emails. Click on the picture to enlarge it.

Earlier in the month, I was contacted and asked to give an honest review of a pair of Pinhole Glasses. I never heard of these, and since they would ship them to me I figured it couldn’t hurt.

In preparation for this review, I took a look around thepinhole eyeglasses website to get some general background on the product. They claim these pinhole eyeglasses will strengthen your eyes, and may even correct certain vision ailments including Myopia, Hyperopia, Astigmatism, Cataract, Presbyopia and Computer Vision Syndrome. I don’t suffer from any of these, so I probably don’t really need these glasses.

Once I opened my package, I chuckled a little bit. I’ve never seen sunglasses with holes punched through the lenses. I put them on, walked around a little bit and decided they were too small for my head. After walking around for about 5 minutes with these on, my eyes started to ache. I remember this similar sensation when I first got reading glasses, years ago. I is probably my eyes straining, or getting a good workout.

The plastic frames are clear, and the dark part of the lenses you cannot see through, only the holes. Maybe you need to wear them more to get used to it, but I didn’t like it. I asked Samantha to try them on, she did for just a minute and didn’t much care for them. She said they were too small for her too, and didn’t like how it made her eyes feel.

In my opinion, the problem with these is that you feel like you can’t see everything you should be seeing. I had to move my head around to see things that were right in front of me. I’m sure there are people who really need these pinhole glasses, but I’m not one of them.

This week we went camping at Natural Spring Resort. We’ve been there once before, this time we went with Samantha’s parents. We all had a great time. The kids did a lot of fishing and played in the pool.

Zachary really enjoyed riding his bike, we couldn’t get him off it! They had a mini-golf course and we did that also. Here are some pictures of the trip.

This week I had a couple days off, we loaded up and went on another camping trip. This time it was to Grandpa’s Farm in Richmond, Indiana. Samantha went there last year, enjoyed it, so we went back again.

The boys really enjoyed playing in the game room, ping-pong and pool. They met some other kids there and had a really good time!

Here are some pictures we took(Click to make them bigger!):

This weekend we had our first camping trip of the season, and we had a great time. Thursday Zachary and I headed up to Natural Springs Resort near Richmond. We got there and met up with some camping friends of our, The Porch’s and The Studly’s. Tinman came to visit Saturday night.

We spent the weekend fishing, playing shuffleboard and we had a wonderful flag retirement ceremony Saturday night. I think the kids learned a lot about flag etiquette that night.

Samantha came home Sunday, to get the boys ready for School Monday and Zachary and I stayed another night and came home Monday. Here are some pictures of our trip and the video of the flag retirement ceremony.

Tuesday, that would be “Super Tuesday” I had family over to watch the results come in. Mom, Dad, Crystal and JD, Mark, Theresa, Madison and Gracie, Ian and my family, and Uncle Kevin made an appearance as well. We had baked spaghetti, and a bunch of sides. It was a great time that was had by all.

We made up a map and used it to track all the winners of the states. Mark drew it up, and here is a picture of it.