Posted by Patrick Corkum on May 12, 2010
I really want to know if I am being ridiculous or not. Yesterday (and many other times), I have peered into the Peanut Butter jar in the hopes of making a delicious peanut butter sandwich. I unscrew the top, look inside and there’s white crusty stuff in the peanut butter jar! See, my darling wife, God bless her, doesn’t want to clean the knife or get a new one when making fluffernutters. She makes them regularly for the kids and always puts the fluff on first. Then, using the same knife, goes for the peanut butter. So, am I nutso for being annoyed? I mean, the incremental cost of washing two knives over 1 is nil since we use a dishwasher. In addition, we have plenty of knives. If we were to run out, I could walk over to the in-laws (10 feet away) and grab one of theirs. But once that fluff gets in the peanut butter jar… it’s all over… start a new jar! So, am I alone in this?
Posted by Patrick Corkum on May 11, 2010
Like to fish? I don’t know what took me so long to find this, but… I found TakeMeFishing.Org. I plan on going up to NY for their free fishing weekend. If you don’t fish and have kids, take this opportunity to take your kids fishing! I have so many great memories and stories to tell of fishing with my kids. Here’s the list of states and their free fishing dates.
Posted by Patrick Corkum on May 8, 2010
So, I had to watch Ty yesterday afternoon all by himself. I can’t get much done inside with him, so I took him outside to play. He is quite good at entertaining himself in there. Well, he’s pretty good entertaining himself inside too. Outside, he plays in the sandbox, on the slide, with trucks and all kinds of constructive things. Inside, he screams, yells, whines, bangs things, and anything else that he can think of to annoy the heck out of me. If the other two are home, he will add hitting, taking toys and bugging. So, outside we went. Besides, I had plenty of work to do in my garden.
So, he played for a good while and was generally behaving, which doesn’t happen all that often. I was off watering the plants, tying back the raspberries, building a “trellis” for my peas and green-beans and a support thing-a-ma-bob for one of my grapes. Ty comes over to me and tells me that he wants to ride on his scooter. I tell him, “no, go play in the sand, you can’t ride your scooter with flip-flops on.” He goes away and plays with trucks. He comes back over to me and says “Daddy, I want go inside. I hot.” “Ty, it’s not hot out here [it's like 72... in the sun]; we’re staying outside. Go play in the sand.” Ty walks slowly over towards the sandbox… walks right past it, finds a chair in the shade of the red maple, and climbs up. He then puts his head on the arm rest and doesn’t move for the next hour and a half.
I love how some people can just pick a spot and sleep. I can’t even climb into a hotel bed and sleep, no matter how tired I am. Some people have all the luck!
Posted by Patrick Corkum on May 6, 2010
Okay, so Melissa thought it would be a good idea to blog about our fighting style (Read it here). Generally speaking she is right on track. She missed a couple things though. Namely that I am always the one that is right 
.
The funny thing about fights is that they always start with something stupid and insignificant. You know those kinds of things… they’re things like “leaving the bathroom light on”, or “forgetting to take out the trash”, or “leaving your shoes in the wrong place”. It usually stems from something deeper that the stupid thing just pushes to its tipping point.
The type thing that usually is the bubbling problem differs between men and women. And this may sound crazy to some of you, but the REAL underlying problem can usually go back to either the husband or wife not holding up their part in what the Bible says about husband/wife relationships. For instance, from the NIV:
- Husbands, in the same way be considerate as you live with your wives, and treat them with respect as the weaker partner and as heirs with you of the gracious gift of life, so that nothing will hinder your prayers. (1 Peter 3:7)
- Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. (Eph 5:22, 23)
- Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. (Eph 5: 24)
- Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her (Eph 5:25)
- In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. (Eph 5:28)
- However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself (Eph 5:33a)
- the wife must respect her husband. (Eph 5:33b)
- Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them. (Col 3:19)
I know… some of you think that those are WAY out there and oppressing to women. I have one thing to say about that… “THEY’RE NOT”. God has ingrained certain characteristics in men and certain characteristics for women. Men, whether they know it or not, seek a woman to submit to them. They have an inherent desire to be respected and submitted to. When that doesn’t happen, many men are going to seek a different situation. Women want little more than to simply be respected and loved.
Anyway, I wanted to add to my wife’s list of fighting rules:
- Be slow to speak and choose your words wisely as you cannot take them back.
- Try to keep the volume low.
- Resolve before you depart or sleep.
- Don’t bring up past misdeeds.
- Always try really hard to remember how much you loved the other before the fight.
Shoot… I was going to try to make this post funny… oh well.. maybe next time.
Posted by Patrick Corkum on May 5, 2010
So, it has been a little while since I have updated on my weight loss journey. The bad news first…. I didn’t lose any weight. In fact, I am up to 187.4. Argh…. So, I have to ask myself why. And here are the reasons excuses why:
- My body doesn’t want to cooperate.
- I have not been able to do much exercise because I hurt my achilles while playing golf.
- I had to eat out too much because I went on two trips.
Now, regardless of whether or not I have been able to exercise because of my injury (which has been quite painful), I had gone almost a full week eating only a very few calories per day and running on the treadmill for 30 minutes a day. After all of that, I had gained weight to more than I am now. I think my body has gotten to the point where it pulls calories out of the air. Either that or the energy companies need to obtain my body for scientific research in order to determine how to get more energy out of a system than goes in. I could be a millionaire!
Posted by Patrick Corkum on April 23, 2010
Yesterday was PJ’s baseball practice. He plays coach pitch. This is a really strange thing for me as I really don’t get why they just don’t use tees. Maybe they are finding kids hit better when they start this way younger, I don’t know. Anyway, 5-7 year olds are really funny to watch on the baseball field. Their minds are EVERYWHERE! Well, everywhere except baseball. I was watching my son on the field playing first base (really just the kid closest to first). He’s jumping all over the place, throwing pretend baseballs, pretending to catch baseballs that are just far enough away from him that he needs to jump or dive. Who cares about the batter, right? Of course, then you have the kids that are on the bases. The ball is hit….. I said the ball is hit…… ooo… look at the airplane! I think they need a coach for every kid to tell them exactly what to do and when, because they just stand there, oblivious to what is going on.
Posted by Patrick Corkum on April 22, 2010
So, I am going golfing this weekend. Typically I stink. No, not from sweating. I have possibly the worse slice known to man. When I hit a golf ball, the ball goes about 150 yards straight down the fairway. It then stops, turns its right turn signal on and takes a sharp right turn. The slice is so bad, that I sometimes am scared that the ball is going to hit me on its return back towards me. Anyway, wish me luck. My goal is to make 2 birdies in the 4 rounds of golf that I am playing.
Posted by Patrick Corkum on April 19, 2010
My wife, God bless her heart, has opinions about my physical appearance. Yes, I am sure this comes to you as a surprise! Well, my father recently retired from his job of many, many years and brought me the picture that he had kept in his office of me for the past 15 or so years. I am guessing that it is probably during my Junior year of high school. I am guessing this because of the fact that I was wearing blue jeans (before that I would only wear black). Also, I think that I might have been a little bit thinner in my senior. See picture:
So, it is not the best picture ever taken of me, but it isn’t THAT bad. I am/was a towering 5′ 5″ and in the picture was probably between 115 and 120 pounds. After seeing the strikingly handsome image of me in the picture, she proclaimed, “It’s a good thing that I didn’t meet you in High School. Yes, I am that shallow.” Ouch!
This leaves me in a bit of a predicament. Currently, I am a bit heavy. Okay, the stupid BMI things try to tell me that I am morbidly obese. This is a bit overkill (no pun intended). I can run a 5K faster than my wife who tips the scales around the 3 digit mark, so it isn’t THAT bad. That being said, I definitely need to lose weight. The problem is that my itty-bitty wife doesn’t want me to because she is afraid that I will lose my “cuddliness”. Basically, she is telling me that she would rather me be cuddly than healthy/alive. Okay, she really doesn’t feel that way, but she doesn’t want me to look like I did in High School (really, I think it is the hair she doesn’t like).
So, what is a big man to do? Well, I struck up a bargain with her. We are both science/technology/engineer/math freak (aka STEM freaks). So, I devised a method where we will optimize my health/attractiveness/cuddliness/etc…. What we are going to do, starting today is that I am going to start dropping the pounds by eating well and exercising. Then, on a weekly basis (Monday morning), I am going to blog about where I stand with my weight and fat% as it is reported on my scale. She is then going rate me in those categories that she finds so important (i.e. cuddliness) on her blog (www.theCorkums.com). Let the blogging begin!
As of waking up this morning:
- Weight – 186.6 lbs (which is low because I was like 190.2 just a couple days ago)
- Fat % – 30.9% (my water % is low in the morning which throws this number off)
Please, if I am to do this, I am going to need a whole lotta prayer!
Posted by Patrick Corkum on April 17, 2010
Okay, I am going to be a bit more serious in this post for a change. There has been a significant amount of news and discussion around this family who took their adopted child and sent him on a plane with a one-way ticket back to Russia. People are so quick to judge this family and their action. Did they do the right thing? Absolutely not! I cannot condone what they did. However, who was providing them with the needed support?
We in the US are horrible at this thing called community. It is indeed true that it takes a community to raise a child. It is especially true when the child has been adopted and even MORE so if the child was not an infant when adopted. However, in the US, we are a “strong”, “independent” people that cannot show weakness or request help from others. This is just pure hogwash. We are no different than anyone else; we need other people. There are not enough people supporting adoptive parents. I know first hand that raising an adopted child that was not an infant when adopted is hard. It has been much harder than raising my biological children.
The Church needs to step in and support these families. If we as a Church do not step in and support these families with whatever it is that they need, meals, counseling, an ear, anything, then we are as much to blame for these kind of events as the family. We need to stop complaining and step up and make a change. We cannot simply hope that somebody else is going to take action. YOU must take the action and help. And if you need help helping, Melissa, myself, and several others are here to help you!
Via con Dios!
Posted by Patrick Corkum on April 16, 2010
No, this post is not about the movie. This post is about my wife. No, I am not calling my wife an ant. My wife has an obsession about ants. If she sees ants in the house, life comes to an abrupt halt. Nothing else matters in that moment except the ants. Here’s the cycle:
- Melissa: AHHHH, ants!
- Melissa: Where are they coming from?
- Melissa: Arghh, how did this crumb get on the ground?
- Stomp to the kitchen to get the ant spray.
- Stomp back to the ants.
- Spray each and every single ant until they are all dead.
- Melissa: PATRICK, there are ants!
- Melissa: When are you going to do something about these ants? <Followed by one of the following>:
- the ant traps I bought aren’t working
- Pops just sprayed, why aren’t they dead?
- we have to get new ant bait.
- <Stomp to closet and get vacuum cleaner>
- <Stomp back to ants and vacuum up the dead ants>
- Melissa: I hate ants! Why are there always ants in the house?
What is it about ants? I mean, if there is a crumb and it is attracting ants, big deal! Shoot, give them a little while and both the crumb and the ants will be gone. I am not saying that I wouldn’t spray ants if there were tons of them or they were being obnoxious, but life does not come to a halt because ants are crawling around. Am I alone on this? Probably.
