Tomorrow is my wife’s birthday. I have been looking forward to that day for months now! I love celebrating my wife. She is by far my favorite person. (Though, I do rather enjoy my kids, as well) 🙂

Speaking of that, Jen’s present tomorrow is a weekend at a cool time share resort in Maine — without the kids! (Thanks, Grandma!) We leave tomorrow morning, sans children, for 4 days and 3 nights … without kids.

Have I mentioned we will be leaving the children behind?

We’re looking forward to some quiet time together. An extremely nice birthday present for Jen, I know, and I can’t wait to spend some time with just my wife. It will be so great!

We will meet Grandma on Monday around noon at a half way point between here and Maine, and collect our offspring for the remaining 4 days of vacation (through next Friday.) We always love those times too! It’s fun to just be a family with no daily agenda! Just enjoy being together!

So… hooray for vacation! 🙂

Can’t wait!

I have officially contracted Foot In Mouth disease. I hear it’s not fatal, just quite painful, and slightly embarrassing to go out in public.

This week a series of events that have been building for a while, and then a “last straw” sort of event collided with my tiredness and an area of personal weakness, and I stuck my size 11 foot right in my rather large mouth. And now I am feeling the relational and internal repercussions.

My words were not exactly what I wanted to say, and in my haste, were certainly not how I wanted to say them. And so I hurt some friends of mine, and my wife. (That’s still a weird one to me, because she was hurt indirectly by what I said… that took me by surprise.) I have asked the one friend I thought I offended (I thought she was the only one) for her forgiveness of my stupidity, so that we could not let this hinder our friendship (or our families’ friendship). I think we’re cleared up there, though as mentioned above, Foot In Mouth disease causes the afflicted to be slightly embarrassed in public for a while.

Well, last night, I discovered there were still effects from my wake left a few days ago now. More people were hurt than I thought. Argh.

I definitely recommend keeping your distance. This might be contagious.

And the tongue is a flame of fire. It is full of wickedness that can ruin your whole life. It can turn the entire course of your life into a blazing flame of destruction, for it is set on fire by hell itself.

I guess James contracted Foot In Mouth a time or two as well.

I hope to recover from this soon. The best thing to do, it seems, is to go back to the place I contracted the disease and display my foot firmly entrenched in my mouth, and ask forgiveness of my friends, who were the unfortunate recipients of the quite unpleasant results of my disease. I hope to do that next time we are together.

Until then, I will keep taking my medications, and deal with the public embarrassment, and keep my distance from anyone else who might become a casualty of my self-inflicted disease. Time will heal, but hopefully this bout with Foot In Mouth will help me see the symptoms long before I actually contract the disease next time.

That would be good.

So consider this a friendly reminder to avoid Foot In Mouth disease. It is not pleasant. For anyone.

I really should be going to bed right now, after finishing my second 9-5 shift today. On Mondays I do a regular 9-5 shift in the day light and then after dinner and a little fun with the family, I go back at if for the night time version of 9-5 for the Buffalo Bills show I am doing. It’s a blast, but Mondays can be pretty long…

I am doing all sorts of great stuff these days, and God has given a bit of a respite from the stress of unpaid bills, but I noticed tonight as I saw the uncontainable smile of our 4 yr old son panning across the screen of Jen’s computer in a random photo screen saver, just how much my family means to me. I get to live every moment of my life (that I choose to give) with my best friend who calls me her husband, and with three (and soon four?) tiny people whom I can’t imagine my life without. The beaming smile of Alex. The creativity and gentle heart of my son Ian. The spunk and beauty of my daughter Kirsten. Whoa. I know I am tired, but just thinking of them gets me teary-eyed.

Relationships, people. That’s what it’s all about. Love and cherish the people God has put in your life. They’re worth it.

Well, we got to see the baby yesterday! We’re about 20 weeks along for this little one, and happy to share some photos and yes, even the VIDEO from the ultrasound yesterday!

Click here to see our baby! 🙂

When you hear the word “Ambition”, what comes to mind? Perhaps not a ‘what’ but a ‘who’ pops into your conciousness first. Someone very driven to succeed, and quite good at accomplishing things they set out to do. Their motivation and their, well, ambition, produces very tangible, visible results in their life.

Now beyond the person, or definition you thought of, what was your first impression when you read the word, “Ambition”? Was it a positive, or a negative reaction to the word? Or, perhaps it was neutral, though I somewhat doubt that as the word is definitely loaded with meaning.

In many circles, the word signifies success, and the driving force behind it. When you have ambition, you are bound to do well. You will accomplish many things. You will taste the fruits of your labor. You are a “real go-getter”. And, most assuredly, ambition is a quality to be praised. Self-motivated behavior that adds to and improves your life and the lives of others around you is a great thing. No one needs to tell an ambitious person what to do next. They are already doing it.

I am such a person. I have so much ambition, and so much creativity, there never seems to be an end to the good things I could do. Aye, but there’s the rub. There never is an end. I go in these cycles of starting (and completing) project after project after project until I notice at the end of a very long day following a very long week… I am completely overwhelmed. My life is fragmented into too many good things. My attention is required in more areas than I can possibly handle. All because of my super high ambition.

Now, I must admit, my ambition is tempered by my refusal to let the things that I do overtake me. I do stop when it’s time to stop. I make time with my family a priority as much as I am able. I make time with friends another priority. So, I will never make it to Donald Trump status financially, but I will maintain some level of sanity. The part that drives me insane is that I think I do have Trump’s ambition, just not the desire to carry it out to its end (expending my life on a career, or the things that I do).

So, I am trying to figure out again what can get cut, what needs to stay, and how I can get out from under this giant weight I have put on myself to be so many things in only so much time. I know life will settle back down. It always does. I know God is taking care of me, even now. Part of my ambition is derived from that. I feel the crunch of bills waiting to be paid, and of everyday expenses needing to be taken care of. So, I do some more things. But I am tired. Weary. I want to know his peace right now.

Perhaps I will just ask him.

Yeah. That will probably do it.

By now you are keenly aware of the fact that I support Apple with all of my technogeek heart. I love their stuff. Every bit of it. But the coolest thing perhaps is their customer service. I might have mentioned before the free tech support offered at every Apple Retail Store – the Genius Bar – but after last night’s visit to our nearest Genius… their stock rose considerably in my mind.

We have been having a few issues with our third generation iPod’s battery. Some charges were only lasting a couple hours (should be 8 for this model). So, having heard of an Apple iPod battery replacement program on the web… I figured I should check it out. Sure enough, I found some info on it at their site, and after a brief phone call to Apple’s tech support, I was heading in to the Eastview Apple Store.

After briefly explaining our situation to the resident Genius that evening (who was supposed to be closed for the night since we were there just before the store closed) he offered to exchange our iPod for a brand new one if they had one in stock. (As I mentioned before, our iPod is a couple years old, so I figured chances were quite slim.) Well, they had one left, and after some brief paper work (and a waived $70 fee), we walked out of the store with a BRAND NEW IPOD.

Folks. No one does this. No one replaces a product they sold you (we even got ours on eBay, not directly from Apple!) after you just use it so much that you wear it out! WHAT IN THE WORLD???

So, again I ask you…

Why would you use anything else???

Go Apple.

The Apple iPod touts their music player’s ability to sort through your song library as such an essential feature that they named an entire product line “Shuffle“. Well, apparently some folks were not happy with the randomness of the shuffle songs feature, so Apple recently added a control to the randomness. As shown above, you can now make it more likely that you will hear songs from the same album or artist in a random selection, or less likely, whichever you prefer.

And I thought, “Well, actually, I just prefer… RANDOM.”

I don’t want any sort of manufactured randomness that is more or less random. I want just plain old random. True and complete, honest-to-goodness randomness.

Does that say something about me? 🙂

Money continues to be an issue in the Campbell home. Weeks go by sometimes where bills are not paid. We are paying the “big” ones, or the ones who have the most penalty for late payments. But in most every area, money is coming in more slowly than our creditors would like us to dish it out.

Now, I am no slacker. I am working long days, and even some nights. And something my parents instilled in me from my early years is to do everything with excellence. That’s definitely part of who I am. Sometimes that’s annoying, but usually it’s helpful. 🙂

But still, the money just is not there.

This morning, I think I remembered a major reason why we don’t have as much money as we would like.

We have a doctor’s appointment this morning. A routine baby check-up. Leaving in about 20 minutes, actually. I have always liked to go along for those as they are a cool moment of connecting with our baby that we don’t get otherwise. Just hearing the rush of the baby’s heart or talking about the baby brings a sense of reality that is not present (for me) in everyday life. And, I just like to go with Jen, so she’s not having to go by herself. That’s no fun.

This pregnancy is different, though. I do want to go for all of the reasons above, but I am also thinking about what happened last fall, when we went to doctors and there were not good reports from the womb. And then, when we finally heard and saw that our baby had died. Those were not good moments. And I definitely do not want Jen to be there alone for something like that.

So, the only reason it is a dilemma is my current workload is off the charts. We have two gigs this weekend, which these days is abnormal, and all of a sudden I have LOTS of web business – which is, of course, a giant blessing from God. So, I was up early today, getting some stuff started, and wrestling with myself over whether I should stay home and get the work done I need to do which brings money into our home, or, should I go with Jen for a two-hour doctor visit (with travel time) for the reasons mentioned above?

That’s when I realized, I will never make a million dollars.

It was almost no contest. Jen, the baby, and my family win hands down. It is far superior to be together, to share life than it is that I stay here and earn money. Money is necessary, but can not drive our lives. At least not mine. But, there is the rub. We often wonder why we don’t have a lot of money… but that’s it. We don’t really love money. We don’t really want it. We do… but we don’t. We are not compelled to spend time to earn money over anything involving family or other relationships. Again, not talking laziness here, just… priorities.

So, sorry Dad. I know you’re counting on me to take care of you in your old age. 🙂 And I will. But not necessarily by buying you stuff. 🙂 I will go with you to all your doctors appointments, and we can share life together, along with perhaps even your great grand kids. 🙂

But I’m pretty sure I’ll never make a million dollars.

Four years ago today, we were resting with a little bundle of fun in our arms. Alex came into the world fast and hard, which should have warned us as to what was to come… but we were just happy to have him here. And we still are.

🙂

I can’t imagine life without him. He is so full of joy, and life, and just has a smile that invites you to smile along.

Happy Birthday Alex!!! 🙂 We love you!