After I got home from church tonight, Michelle handed me the Sunday paper and pointed to an article on the front page of the Arizona Living section. The title was: “But it’s a fry heat: Cool tips for newbies.” The article is all about how newcomers to Arizona can survive their first summer here. Click here for the digital link. And you’d think there would be some mention of french fries, but you’d be wrong. After both Michelle and I read it, we’re guessing this was a major typo and “fry” was actually supposed to be “dry.”

Believe it or not, Michelle saved it to show me so that I’d feel better when we make mistakes like this with stuff we do at Central. I’m a bit of a perfectionist, and errors like this drive me nuts when they probably shouldn’t. So it’s morbidly encouraging to see others do it as well. In the process, we also had a funny interchange that went like this:

Me: (to Michelle as she reads the paper) “I’m amazed you are still getting the paper. You are holding a dinosaur.”

Michelle: “This dinosaur comes with coupons.”

Me: (stunned silence)

We recently took family pictures with an incredible photographer named Jill Knight. You can check out her site here. She was wonderful with the kids and showed her skills in how great the pictures turned out. Both of the kids wanted to do their own thing but you’d never know it with how the final product looks. Kudos to her.

Click on any of the pictures below to zoom in on them:

Click here to watch a slideshow with even more pics!

Thanks to everyone who gave me birthday wishes today. It is overwhelming and encouraging all at the same time. I have it setup so that my phone gets an update whenever someone posts something on my Facebook wall, so as you can imagine I had a sander in my pocket today.

After work, my wife made an incredible dinner for our family. She made some of our favorite things and had them all labeled with our names on them. As you can imagine, mine involved cheese. I then got to go to the Suns playoff game with my Dad. We were told that we had to wear orange to the game, so we stopped by Target and picked up some sweet matching shirts. We both commented on how bright they looked and how out of place we felt wearing them in the parking lot of Target, but I noted that we would soon fit in.

And it strikes me how often we live with this struggle. We want to fit in somewhere, but that often means we stand out somewhere else. So we must choose which is which and I wonder how many life decisions are the result of this choice alone. Who our friends are, what we spend our time doing, what becomes important to us, etc. Nonetheless, the Suns made it a fantastic night with a terrific birthday victory. Thanks Steve.