Sorry it's been so long since the last post, but I've been super busy. I'll try to stay fairly chronological, here it goes.

As you can see, the kids got new bikes and we got a new puppy. Faith brought her home from Idaho, she's my Christmas present. Her name is Oona, but her registered name is "First August Snow", Oona is a variation on the spelling of Una, which is latin for one or first, so the internet tells me. She's a pretty good puppy, she's learning really fast, but if she doesn't lose those puppy teeth soon the kids won't have any toys left. She's a pure bred lab, and she is hopefully going to be my duck hunting companion for the next 10 or 12 years. Faith and the boys had a great time in Idaho, I still haven't seen any pictures though. Simon got out of the car when they got home and started riding his old bike, which still had training wheels. He rode for about 5 minutes, then came over and said "Dad, I think it's time to take my training wheels off." So I did, he hopped on his bike and took off, no problem at all. So we bought them both new bikes, Dylan was getting too big for his just like Simon was. Of course, Faith and Simon learned a valuable lesson a couple of days later, Simon learned about not parking his bike behind the van, and Faith learned about doing walk arounds before reversing over the 2 day old bike. So Simon got another new bike. They're only about $40 at Walmart, so it wasn't that bad I suppose. About 5 days after Faith got home we had a huge windstorm here, and it knocked a powerline down and started what turned into a 650 acre fire that ran in between two roads that had about 50 houses tucked away between them. No houses burned down, just one barn. I went out to it after it had been going for an hour or so to help the incident commander manage all the engines and crews that came, and ended up going to look at the road that the fire was heading toward to see what we could do to try to stop it there. It spotted across that road, and the story I heard later that evening from the incident commander before I left for the hospital was that I was solely responsible for stopping the fire, and if I hadn't been where I was with the plan I had developed we would have been chasing the fire for another week. Let me tell you what really happened: I drove up to the road, found a couple of small spot fires, snagged an engine that was driving by to help put those out, put them out, looked up on top of the hill, cursed profusely for a minute when I saw the big fire that had crossed the road, stopped the engine from rushing up another road into the head of the fire, fell in a ditch and hurt my knee so bad I walked with a limp for a week, got dumped on by 3 big retardent planes (30 mph winds will carry retardent alot farther than you think it will), found some local yahoo in a bull dozer and led him around trying to stop the fire from getting into a bunch of wheat fields, climbed a few barbed wire fences, and left at 9:00 pm to go to the hospital, where I got a free water bottle. Apparently they gave free water bottles to all the idiots that cut themselves badly enough on barbed wire fences to get stitches, though. Then I ended up staying on the fire for 8 days, 4 with the management team that took it over, then 4 more when it went back to the local state DNR district. I really have no idea what Faith and the boys were doing at this point, however. So that finished, I had a few days off that I ended up coming down with a sinus infection for, and Simon started 1st grade. He was super excited. He likes his teacher, but none of his friends are in his class. It's funny, because when his friends were in his class he couldn't focus on school because he was showing off for his friends, now there's no friends in his class, and he is apparently falling asleep. He's been telling us all summer that sometimes he doesn't ever go to sleep at night, apparently he was telling the truth. Dylan starts school at the end of September, he'll be in preschool again. They both started soccer tonight, Faith's the coach again, and Simon will be doing Cub Scouts here in a week or so. Faith got a job at her friend's parent's store working in the deli/coffee shop, she'll work a couple of days a week. I switched my schedule so I'm working 4 ten hour days so I can have Friday's off to watch Dylan while Faith is working. I started brewing beer again, Faith had bought me a kit about 10 years ago, and I made a couple of batches, but a bunch of the equipment got broken when we were moving at some point, and I never replaced it until a month or so again, and started brewing beer again. It's turning out pretty darn good, I even had one of our friends come over who is really into brewing and is opening his own brewery pretty soon, and he said my beer was excellent. That's about it, the boys are home from soccer practice and are telling me to stop typing. Hope everybody's doing well.