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Driving to work, I saw the new Twins stadium lights on. They also had the big TV screen showing some football program. From the little bit I could see from the highway, it looks like it will be really nice. I think it will be worth getting some tickets for a game, just to check out the stadium. That will probably a common occurrence once the baseball season starts. Sorry, no pictures. I didn’t have the camera with me.

Speaking of baseball and thinking about warm weather just around the corner – well, maybe in another 4 months – I was thinking about grilling this year. Have you ever seen the Big Green Egg grill/smoker? It looks like a great grill, but out of my budget at $700+ for the large size. I watched a video online of a guy smoking a ‘Boston Butt’ – a pork roast-type thing, not from the butt, but from the shoulder of a pig. We call it a picnic ham or picnic shoulder around here.

Being a DIY kind of guy, I was wondering how I could get the equivalent of the Big Green Egg, but at a decent DIY price. Obviously, there are others who have wondered the same thing and a search on the Interwebs finds THIS and THIS and THIS. Building the actual clay pot smoker/grill will be the easy part. I’d like to go a step further and make it a programmable, computer controlled cooking machine. That video I watched about the Big Green Egg had a device that would control the heat in the smoker by monitoring the meat temperature via a probe, it would monitor the temperature inside the smoker via a probe and the controller would adjust the smoker temp by turning on a fan that blows air into the firebox of the smoker/grill. The guy said with just a single load of fuel, it would burn for 24 hours. The long, slow cooking is what made the meat turn out perfect. Why is it that usually guys do the grilling? Is it the fire? The mess?

What about that State of the Union tirade that PeeBo (President Barak Obama) gave. Boy, does he think he’s something. I listened to some of it on the way to work, but I don’t think he heard me yelling at him and what he was saying through the radio.

At the risk of giving you armchair psychologists out there a reason to give a negative analysis of me, I’m going to write about Jessica and Erika today. It is, after all, the one year anniversary of them being stolen from our family. Don’t worry, I won’t go on and on about it for days to come.

One year ago today was one of the top 5 worst days in my life. If you read my blog entries on December 20th of last year, you’ll remember it was one of the top 5 best days in my life. How could those two days happen so close together? Why did they have to be the one of the top 5 for the same reason? I’ll say right now that there is no legitimate reason that Jessica and Erika were taken away. It did not have to happen.

Well, they were taken from me, but given up by others would be more accurate. I would never have wanted my God-given daughters to be taken away – for ANY reason. During the events of last year everything was a blur. It wasn’t just a little blur, it was a complete white-out. As time passes, things become much more clear. I can focus on what really happened and I hear things from other people that were familiar with or were in the events that led up to Jessica and Erika being taken. It all helps sort out what really happened. If only we could turn back the clock and change things….but, what’s done is done.

At the risk of sounding vindictive or blaming, I have to stop writing about it now. All I will say is that I would still to this day and will always, give anything to get Jessica and Erika back where God put them, into our family. That doesn’t mean that they are more important than Brenda, Holly or Mitch. It just means what it means…our family should be complete with all 6 of us together.

Here are my favorite pictures of Jessica and Erika. Below is a picture of all of us together.

Google Click this Click to watch video at Google website

I did not write the last 2 logs because I’m struggling with Jessica and Erika being gone or because I’m depressed. The ONLY reason I wrote what I did is because it was the one-year anniversary of them coming home to us. Aren’t anniversaries a time you look back and reflect? I don’t believe it’s abnormal to do that. Don’t most people remember anniversaries by reflecting on the reason for the anniversary? If you look further back on the website, you’ll see that I have barely mentioned them in quite some time. You’ll have to go back to December 2008 to March of 2009 to really start reading about them again. Before you call me crazy or needing therapy, consider what you would do. On an anniversary of losing someone, what would you do – wouldn’t you have some emotion about it? Don’t you celebrate birthdays and anniversaries in your family? Since I can’t talk to my own family about Jessica and Erika – really, I don’t have anyone to talk to about them, so I just wrote it down. There are few people who know what happened regarding our adoption attempt and even fewer that have SOME of the FACTS of what really happened. Even those who would consider themselves in the ‘even fewer’ group really only have one side of the story. I wrote what I did because I was remembering December 20th of last year. What I wrote was only a glimpse of my side. Remember Paul Harvey’s “The rest of the story” and him delving deeper into the life of someone you have heard about but weren’t aware of this part of their life? The last two blog entries are my ‘rest of the story.’ (I know I mixed up quotation marks, but I wasn’t very good in English class and don’t know the rules for using them). I won’t continue writing about Jessica and Erika very much – probably just on birthdays, anniversaries of when they came home to us and maybe when they were taken away.

There is likely some of you who may consider yourself in the ‘even fewer’ group mentioned above, that read my last two blogs and see it as confirmation that I’m stuck in the past, depressed, or it’s proof I’m a jerk, but you’re basing that on the other side of the story that you’ve heard for so long. I don’t expect to sway anyone with what I wrote because that other side of the story has been out there for such a long time. That other side of the story has been based on things that just are not true for so long, they are believed without question. I’ve heard it talked about politicians or maybe the global warming crowd – if you tell lies long enough they become truth. I may not go quite so far to say that the one sided story that’s been told for the last year contain lies told on purpose, but nevertheless, much or maybe even most of it is not true, or at least it’s not the complete story. My two ‘rest of the story’ blogs were just an attempt to bring to light what I saw. If you believe without question what one person tells you as the ‘true facts’ of what happened – and you base your opinions on that…what if the story you’ve been told is false, or at least not complete?
There is a bible verse warning us not to base things on one person’s story or side – but first get the facts:  Proverbs 18:13

¹³ He who answers before listening—
that is his folly and his shame.

Then, hear both sides of the story before coming to a conclusion: Proverbs 18:17

¹⁷ The first to present his case seems right,
till another comes forward and questions him.

So, in conclusion, I believe it’s perfectly normal to remember events on their anniversary. We do it all the time, for both happy and sad times in our lives and events that happen in our world. This was my time to remember a happy time a year ago. If you don’t like it or think it was bad of me to do that, I really don’t care.

By the way, Happy New Year.