It's on... and we're prisoners in our own house.  We're finally getting around to redoing the living room and kitchen a bit, and for the next four days we're basically relegated to the bedrooms, Kylie's craft work room and my photography gallery room.  No TV for the next 4 days either, so now I have to find somehting to do from 12:20am to 12:45am each night.  I might even {gasp} read something.  Also essentially no kitchen functionality. It's kind of a sad day really.  I mean, I'm gonna miss all those pears in the kitchen wallpaper that have been such an eye sore blessing since I bought the house in August of '08.  Today they died a quick and hopefully painful death as the painters tore the wall paper off in about 4 minutes. Here's the living room after day 1:  Painted wood paneling and picture-frame moulding removed so I can put larger photography collections up.  Walls still to be painted (obviously).  Fireplace to be painted.  Mantle to be replaced or sanded adn stained darker.  Updated ceiling fan to eventually replace the current gold one. Plasma TV (hopefully) to be mounted on the wall. Ceiling and beams to be painted.

Here's the kitchen after day 1.  Wall paper gone.  Skip trial texture added to wall.  Cabinets and walls still yet to be painted (cabinets going darker with new hardware).  Hideous ceiling fan still present for now (searching for replacement).  New appliances (microwave, oven and gas cooktop) get installed next week.  New tile backsplash going in, too.

I've gotten to be quite the buddy with Morris down at the Benjamin Moore Paint store.  Current running total:  3 trips, 12 paint tester samples purchased, and 1 new friend.Kylie thinks it's funny (or at least she's trying to laugh) that we're one day into the transformation and I'm still painting samples to finalize the colors.

My office/gallery room has been transformed in to a jungle gym/obstacel course for teh week, too.  Just a tad cluttered as the painters moved a bunch of stuff in there while they do their thing this week.

In less than 9 hours I'll be under the laser gettin' some new eyes (and a dose of Valium - wohoo!).  So to you, glasses and contacts, I'm kicking you to the curb.  I thank you for your years of service, and I especially thank you, glasses, for making me look a little smarter in recent years than I actually am, but you've both been a pain in my you-know-what for the last time.  Well, except you, glasses... apparently I'll still need you a few years down the road to read regardless of whether I have LASIK done or not.  Not cool, but for now... be gone! I started wearing glasses in 7th grade, and I can still remember the day I went to the eye doctor after telling my parents I was having a hard time reading the chalk board in class (yes, back when chalk boards were still used), and he told me to look out the window as he slipped a pair of glasses in front of my eyes.  I was like, Wooaaaa!  Does everyone see like this??  I felt cheated like I'd been missing out on this Utopian visual splendor that all my friends had been enjoying without telling me.  Funny how I still remember that like it was yesterday. Then I got contacts in 9th grade, and I thought I was the coolest thing since, well, contacts.  Let's face it, while very helpful, the glasses - combined with my Italian unibrow and Chachi center-parted fluffy haircut - weren't doing much for the ladies.  I remember just as distinctly my first day wearing contacts because I had a freshman basketball game that day, and I'd never shot so many air balls in my life.  Prior to that day, I had not been wearing my glasses to play basketball; I'd just apparently adjusted pretty well to playing with nearsightedness.  Oddly enough, the first time I played wearing contacts, being able to actually clearly see completely messed with my jump shot... Air Baaallllll!  Also not cool with the ladies.  But things eventually got better over the next couple weeks. Fast forward to 2009.  I really haven't minded wearing contacts for al these years until last year... at least not enough to make me feel like I wanted to pay for LASIK.  But for some reason, last year my contacts really started to irritating my eyes more.  Perhaps staying up 'til 2am most nights working on a computer was part of that equation, but still.  I got tired of watery eyes, contacts fogging over at night, and my nose running because my contacts were giving me problems.  And then Kylie had LASIK done last year, and I thought, If Kylie - who utterly hates the idea of needles and practically runs from the sight of blood - can do this, SURELY it's not a big deal.  So, tomorrow morning is the big day. To all my awesome clients, if on the off chance something goes terribly wrong and I go blind, we may have to reschedule your 2010 sessions.  Otherwise, see you [more clearly] soon.

A few days before the snow blanketed Dallas for it's first white Christmas in 70 years, I was able to squeeze in one last session in 2009 with some of my favorite people on the planet.  Keith and Jennie Marx were Kylie and I's mentor couple at our pre-marital class at church in 2008.  We really enjoyed their leadership and friendship and have kept in contact with them ever since.   One night when we were at dinner with them, we got on the subject of photography, and Jennie mentioned they hadn't had a family portrait done in 14 years.  Yes, 14.  And yes, years!!  I think people were using Polaroids 14 years ago.   That was that... right then and there we decided it was [way past] time for some new memoirs of this super laid-back family, so we marked a date on the calendar close to the holidays when all the kids would be home, and we met down in Deep Ellum to get - at Jennie's request - some images of the family together and the kids together.  Speaking of kids, Jennie and Keith's kids have the coolest collective sibling names on the planet.  They are - from oldest to youngest - Gibson, Perrin, Logan and Regan.  Seriously, most of the time when a family has 4 kids, at least one of them has a clunker or cliché name, but not in this tribe. Here's some of my favorites from our session.

Here's Gibson...

... and Perrin...

... and Logan...

... and finally Regan.

While our trip to Indiana was great, we ended up missing the first white Christmas in Dallas in the last 70 years.  Seriously?  Seriously.  Fortunately nature TiVo'd it for us and replayed it again on Wednesday evening.  Not quite the snow storm they got for Christmas, and it was completely gone the next morning, but I'll take it.

And today's the big day where the Buckeyes hopefully redeem themselves for less-than-stellar bowl performances the last couple years.  Kylie's parents got me an Ohio State flag for Christmas, and after 3 trips to Home Depot today (one of them due to some bad advice from one of their employees), I finally got it hung today just in time for the smack down with the Ducks. O-H...