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Yes, friends, the time is fast approaching. And so, with the intent of shedding just a little humor on the impending doom set to befall my follicles, I give you the first installment of Bald Watch:

If you haven’t seen them yet, you ought to take a look at Burger King’s Star Wars Toys. They’re kinda fun little things, and as far as kids meal toys go, they seem to be of decent quality. We bought the kids a couple at our local BK last night. Burger King has made an insanely smart move by offering 6 weeks worth of toys to collect. That’s 31 toys in all. You can either get one toy per kids meal you buy, or you can buy a combo meal and pay $1.49 for two toys. So to get them all you spend roughly $100 and have to eat at Burger King at least once a week for 6 weeks straight. I hope somebody in their promotions department got a huge raise and promotion for coming up with this little scheme. The worst part of the whole deal, of course, is that as soon as you have one of the toys in your grubby little hands you can’t possibly not want more. Humans seem to be wired to collect things. So what did I do when we got home from the restaurant last night? I got on eBay to see if I could just buy the whole set. Yep. $95 for all 31 toys. Of course then I don’t get to enjoy all that greasy uber-unhealthy food. The King must be laughing all the way to the bank.

It is finally time to start, evidently, because though we still can not afford it, Erica keeps pestering me to go looking at houses. Should never have shown her utahrealestate.com. Oh well. Tonight we are officially going to drive around and look at houses. We’ll mostly be trying to get an idea for which neighborhoods we like, I think, because any houses on the market right now are likely not going to be when we can actually buy, but at least we can get an idea of what is available in our price range. Looks like we will be living in the south part of the valley, because Jonathan is going to be going to school next year at Reagan Academy, which is a brand new chartered public school in Springville. We’re excited to finally have him into a charter school. Too bad it is so far away from where we currently live. Of course I will make regular updates as we hunt for a place to live and then (oh the terror) get a mortgage. My brother just finished that process and from what I could see of it I am not looking forward. My sister is even in that industry and it still was a bit of a fiasco for him.

I went to the city library this afternoon on the way home from work to rent a copy of Double Indemnity. It’s out of print on DVD and I have been wanting to see it again for quite a while. Netflix doesn’t have it but the library did. I don’t know if I was just ignoring the fact that it costs $1 to rent DVDs there or if I had really forgotten, but I got to the check out station and had to ask if they could charge it to my debit or credit card. I guess the city only allows that for charges over $5, which is understandable. As I was discussing this with the clerk, suddenly a dollar bill materialized from the right and landed on the desk in front of me. I turned in the direction it came from and found an attractive older lady (50s maybe) at the station next to me. I made an appropriately shocked face and thanked her.

That has never happened to me before! Kind of restores my faith in humanity. As I turned to go I told her thank you again and said I would be sure to pass her generosity on when I had an opportunity. She smiled.

We took the kids to the new pool in Lehi on Saturday afternoon because my mother ended up with a free pass and, hey, I’m not one to turn down free. Anyway, Marissa is astounding. She’s two years old, right? Little kids are supposed to be mortally terrified of water. Jonathan was, and still is to a large extent. Marissa is a fish. She refused to let her mother or me hold her, instead doing her utmost to dive from our grasp and drown herself in the shimmering deep. Part of the pool is meant for little kids and is only a foot deep. She had endless fun wandering around through the water, climbing up one side of the playhouse in the middle of the pool, walking through the waterfalls and down the other side of the playhouse. There’s a float rope that divides the shallow part of the pool from the deeper part, and she would jubilantly climb over it into the deep part and keep on walking… only to find that it eventually got deeper and deeper. Several times a wave would knock her over into the water and she’d lay there underneath, looking up at me with wide eyes as if to say “This is interesting!” I even put her down a water slide, which was dark inside and very wet (it was meant for little kids!). She didn’t like that much but it didn’t take her long to get back to wandering around through the water. My daughter is a stud muffin.