Birthday Party Fun and Kissing Rugby!

We threw a party for Tory on Friday June 5th to celebrate her 18th birthday. There were approximately 15 boys and 15 girls, a pretty even ratio which made it more fun. Pizza and sandwiches were provided, along with plenty of snacks, drinks and sides. Board games were set up in the basement, there was humanity everywhere doing whatever.



At about 8:00pm, Cathleen and I arranged for an old BYU favorite party game to be passed on to the next generation, "Kissing Rugby". The kids played this a good long time, laughed a lot, got a good work out, got gnarly rug burns but essentially everyone had a super fun time.

Kissing Rugby Instructions:

Each guy gets assigned a number.

Each girl gets assigned a letter.

Everyone sits in a big circle, one person is in the middle and calls out a letter and a number. The person in the middle should call the same gender’s letter/number first because it is a race of sorts and usually there tends to be gender loyalty in this competitive game.

The objective: opposite gender to the caller tries to kiss the caller (person in the middle) somewhere on the face (some rules say that ears are OK, others say this makes it too easy). Meanwhile, same gender to the caller takes a somewhat protector role to the caller as he/she has the similar objective of kissing opposite gender on the face before he/she kisses caller on the face..

Note: Despite the suggestive name, this is not an inappropriate game since the intent is not to kiss on the lips. It is more a contest of wills and battle of the sexes, not public display of affection… Keeping score might make it a little more competitive, but at the same time competitiveness engenders aggression, roughness, black eyes and broken bones, which is not what fun games are about :)

Here's and example: Girl is in the middle, she calls out a letter/number combination (i.e. D-5). Boy-5 tries to attack and kiss girl in the middle somewhere on the face while Girl-D tries to kiss Boy-5 on the face. Girl in the middle usually tries to evade the kiss (but no fair leaving the circle), working in conjunction with Girl-D to “win” the round. Loser between Girl-D and Boy-5 has to stay in the middle and call the next combination. If Boy is in the middle, he should call number first and then letter (i.e. 2-F).

It is strongly recommended that long pants be worn as rug-burns are eminent. The game should in reality be called “Kissing Rug-burn”. If you have wrestling mats, use them!

After a fill of KR, we broke for cake and singing festivities/rituals.



Later for those hanging around past 10:30pm we started a movie "Hitch" while some played other games like Twister, foosball and Apples to Apples.

The funniest moment of the evening was when during Kissing Rugby Charli Crandell was the caller in the middle and called for Kristen Wolf and Chris Petriello. Chris, without thinking first was excited to get the jump off the line on Kristen and comically went straight for Kristen instead of Charli. He kissed Kristen on the cheek even as she protested and yet she quickly took the advantage and kissed him right back on the cheek and laughed at him as he tried to sort out why that seemed so effortless and even more confusing, why he ended up in the loser's circle... (see below).

Mormon Prom (3rd of 3 for 2009)

Tory's Brooke Point friends Amy Green and Karen Kappert hooked up with Tory and Aquia ward friends at the Johnston's house (Pierce and Spencer pictured, along with Jason Hunt, Conner Blake, Adriana Foxley) and with a few White Oak ward kids, Matt Hazelgren, Madison Jefferies and of course Tory for a pre-Mormon Prom get together...

It was an 8 stake gathering in Centerville, VA, a good distance for us but according to the youth that attended, they had a great time. Matt Hazelgren said it was better than the school prom (and not just because it was free, he just said it was a lot more fun). Tory said that she had fun at all three. They stopped and had milkshakes afterwards before the long ride home.

Tory's 2nd of 3 Proms In 3 Weeks

Tory was invited to the Brooke Point High School prom by Pierce Johnston. Pierce's family is very close to our family. Tory and Pierce have known each other for 6+ years but even before that we were very close friends with Pierce's cousin's family (the Ensigns) down in Georgia.

When we first moved to VA, we moved into a rental home which the Johnston's had just vacated (their new house construction was finally completed, we were awaiting the sale of our home in GA). Therefore our kids all attended the same schools then, and Tory would have eventually continued on to Brooke Point HS. However after a little more than a year our GA home sold and we bought a home further south in the county, where Gregory and Tory would attend Stafford HS.

Tory is still close to several friends from that first year and has been excited about the opportunity to be a part of Brooke Point's prom too. The "after prom" activity was back at Brooke Point High School. The big event, a hypnotist. Pierce was hypnotized along with 15-20 others from the audience. Tory said she can't remember laughing that hard, it was an absolute hit!

And I should add, we've always loved Pierce, it doesn't surprise us at all that he was crowned "Prom King"!

Tory's prom (1/3) and Ronzonie Women

Tory went to her Senior prom this past Saturday with her very close friend Ben Jennings. They went with a few other couples, had Thai food for dinner. After the prom, they went to Funland for more fun (until the wee hours of the next morning). Since she was all dolled up, I wanted to post a few pictures of her. BTW, Ben is one of the finest young men we know.

It was in the mid 90's, they both were uncomfortably warm in the formalware. But I think they both had a very wonderful and memorable time.

Do these women look like family? From left to right: Dorothy Ronzone (Tory's Great Grandmother), Joyce Ronzone (Tory's Grandmother), Nicole Ronzone (Tory's 1st Cousin once removed, Joyce's niece), Victoria Baker (Tory).

Backyardigan Fun

Last week was Spring break for the kids but it rained through Wednesday so they were forced to spend most of it inside. Thursday and Friday were beautiful and so I spontaneously scheduled those days off to tackle a major yard project that has been looming. Cathleen bought 2 "to be assembled" yard toys last Fall soon after we moved in. A trampoline and the Super Fortress Dual Slide Play Set from Costco. The play set reviews were mostly all very positive, except for the repeated cursing of what an absolute nightmare it is to put together. Oh joy!

Let me digress first to a nice sunny August day last year when Cathleen decided we would set up the trampoline. She and the kids did help, but it was still a total pain as those of you who have been through this exercise know. The kids used it quite a bit until the weather got cold. And now this year (Spring) we have only had a handful of nice non-rainy days so the kids have only just started using it again. Somehow and without anyone realizing it, one of the leg posts managed to become disconnected. It only took our new 8 year old a few jumps on that part of the tramp to cause the frame to buckle in that section, thus rendering it out of commission. It looked like it could be salvaged, I would just need to request a single replacement arc segment from the manufacturer. Of course this would mean I'd have to mostly disassemble it first and those tensioned straps are a huge pain in the butt (pain in the hands actually)! That would have to be a project for another day, the main focus now was the play set from H-word. (Oh and be sure to take notice of the water retention ditch on the right side of this photo below).

So back to my Spring break project, assembling the sodding Fortress. As I was saying, it was a beautiful two days, in the 70’s, the kids were playing outside with me most of the time, offering to help so as to speed things along while also constantly asking me, “is it done yet?” The new house being built next door was also buzzing with activity with beautiful weather prompting wide opened windows and doors. They are mostly in the finishing stages now, doing some work on the deck, some interior painting and probably other fixture work, etc. and others were doing some landscaping in the yard. There were at least half a dozen Hispanic workers chattering about loudly to each other as they worked. I noticed that Nate suddenly became aware of them and looked over to observe for the first time the great activity next door, and then he exclaimed matter of factly, “oh great, our new neighbors are Japanese!” I can assure you that he has no aversion toward Asian people but rather was merely making his point that he couldn't understand a word they were saying. The girls laughed and corrected him saying, “that isn’t Japanese Nate”, to which he replied, “well French then”. The girls further explained that these people were not our new neighbors at all. He argued in protest, not able or willing to believe them, after all, how could they possibly know such things about these new strangers? Ah to be 6 again (and completely oblivious)... By the way, the play set product reviews are indeed accurate, warped lumber and the gazillion non labeled similar looking pieces are making this the project that would never end. After almost 2 full days, it is only about 1/3 complete.

Now back to more trampoline fun. Yesterday in the late afternoon it got quite sunny and warm. After several consecutive days of April showers and shin-high length grass, I decided to break out the lawn tractor and get the much needed mowing behind me. There were supposed to be thunderstorms in the afternoon forecast again, though no inclement weather in sight all (what do "they" know???). But the school of hard knocks (living in VA) taught me that I should plan for the worst and so I decided to put a little hustle in my stride. Just as I was finishing up, the clouds moved in quickly and it started to pour. In fact, the wind suddenly started gusting quite severely and it rapidly became dark, cold and ominous looking as I scrambled to get my stuff put away into the garage and get the door closed. It only lasted maybe 20-30 minutes and then it was over. The temps dropped 15-20 degrees and there was a constant 5 mph breeze but otherwise it was as if the storm never happened. Cathleen then discovered and informed me that the trampoline had taken a neighborhood stroll and was now upside-down in the water retention ditch down behind the new house next door (wish I had gotten a picture of it). Christopher and I went out and attempted to retrieve it but since it was quite twisted and mangled, and the rough sloping wet terrain offered no good leverage or vantage point, the two of us alone could barely budge it. Cathleen and the bigger kids were not excited about the prospect of getting down in that mud hole to help me retrieve it. My anxiety about getting it at least back on to our property was related to the fear of the infamous HOA police and possible fines, which motivated me to not delay this beckoning new project.

I put it off until after work the next day. Every now and then my advanced age and detest for heavy lifting lead me to shear brilliance where brain over brawn is concerned. I decided to pull out my handy dandy lawn tractor, rig up some towing straps and lo and behold I was able to easily pull the twisted pile of doo doo from the ditch, without any assistance from anyone else. My next fun project to look forward to is to take said doo doo apart and haul it to the dump, nothing is salvageable, not even the netted enclosure.

I can only hope that the infernal fortress will be swept away before I can get around to finishing it :)

Home Teaching Stories

I home teach a sister in our ward, Trudi Walsh who is a high school counselor in the next county over. She had Spring break last week along with our county's schools (my kids) and decided to go out to Nevada to spend a week with her cousin (below), who consequently has a very unusual horse.



The horse's name is Cholla, named after the infamous desert cactus, he was born from a Mustang stallion and a Quarter Horse mare. Attempts to "break" this horse were not successful, and if anything, it made him more cantankerous, hence his prickly name.

However, he does have a soft artsy side. Rather than athletic interests, Cholla considers himself more of the artistic type, and he has been invited across the globe as his talents are becoming more widely acclaimed.

Would you believe his works have sold for as much as to $2500? Here are some samples:

Visit the website to watch a video and learn a little more about this gifted animal: http://www.artistisahorse.com/

This cash cow (horse) makes the fictitious Mr. Ed seem not all that implausible...

A Month Later, This Is All I've Got

As Baloo would say, "Groov'n Baby"

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Happy Friday The 13th!

I don’t get home from work until midnight on Saturday nights and my wife usually goes to bed before I get home. I try to be quiet when I come in but as one might expect of a mother of 9 children, she’s a very light sleeper. Often when she awakes, she’s not really coherent. She’ll almost always ask me “who is that?” Since we go through this routine mostly every week, I’m of the mindset that she should know who would be coming into her room on Saturday night at midnight. I don’t know why she wants to wake herself up to have a conversation with me so I'd try to give a concise answer, “me” so that she can go back to sleep. But that's never enough, she then wants to probe further, as if asking incoherent questions will lead me to believe that she’s perfectly aware of what is going on around her.

So, one such night a few years ago when asked, “who is that?” I came up with a random answer that I was sure would boggle her mind. “It’s me, Uncle Steve”. Now, she doesn’t have an Uncle Steve and she doesn’t really know my Uncle Steve very well, so it was fun to listen to her struggle with the computation of this response. Of course she got annoyed, the very response I was looking for and so “Uncle Steve” is now my automatic "without a thought" answer to her when she’s talking in her sleep.

This past Saturday was funny though, my son is home from college for Spring break and he is one of these night owl people that stays up all night and sleeps in the day. So upon my arrival home, he and I exchanged some words downstairs in the entry way and she could obviously hear our voices in her dreams. Realizing that she may be upset our voices awakened her, I decided not to mess with her for our routine exchange and replied to the "Who is that?" question simply, “Me”. Then she asked, “who’s with you?”, I couldn’t resist, “Uncle Steve”. Her next few responses were fun and worth blogging about:

Cat:“What are you wearing, are you dressed like a wolf?”
Me: “Yes Bella, I’m a werewolf!”
Cat: Mumbling unintelligible voice as I retreat to the bathroom...

And then upon my return to the room, hoping she'd be back asleep...
Cat: “Come on, I’m serious”
Me: “What are you talking about?”
Cat: “Do you have a tail?”
Me: “Yes, all wolves have tails, good night!”
Cat: in frustration, “Whatever”

She did remember the conversation somewhat the next morning as we ate Sunday breakfast, I had the kids in tears (and her too) as I recounted the dialog. I said, “this is good stuff, I’m putting this on my blog!” Since I don’t like to post without a picture, I googled “wolfboy” and this is what I came up with. An interesting story of a very unique special little boy. Why does God do this??? Maybe for the very purpose of getting us to ponder that very question!

I realized that it was Friday the 13th only after I had put all of this together, and it dawned on me, the perfect title for this post!

Cursed Viruses, They're Of The Devil!

So yes, I’m a little more vulnerable than most because I have 11 computers connected to the Internet from my home, 7 of which are being used by non-technical children/wife. I’m pretty tenacious and usually try for hours to hack into the registry and rid the virus manually myself. This is dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing (and it’s dangerous even if you do). It’s somewhat easy to mess things up with your system if you’re not careful in the registry, which will require a reformat and complete reinstall. OK, I admit it, the dark side wins, they successfully have driven me to madness!

Usually, the most effective thing to do is to just reformat the hard drive and reinstall everything. This takes a great deal of time but at least once you’ve been through the exercise a few times you get pretty efficient at it. I have two hard drives on all of my PCs, the 2^nd drive should be used for data that you don’t want to lose. That should never really get infected. The primary drive is for the operating system and all of the applications. That way I can reformat (losing everything) at will.

Then you start thinking about the value of utilities like “Drive Image”, “ True Image” or “Ghost”. The beauty of these tools is that you can create an image of your computer after all of your software is installed. Just try to limit using the Internet to updating your Windows, Antivirus maintenance, and things that you know are legit until you get a good copy of the image. I get all of the most current and proven drivers loaded, my windows maintenance, MQ Office, Paintshop Pro and other tools that I use as a standard took kit (winzip or winRAR, codecs, VLC, Mozilla, Macromedia Flash and shockwave players, etc.) Just get the thing loaded up as much as you can but avoiding stuff that you’re unsure of. Then take your image and next time you get a virus, you can just reformat your drive and then restore the image and you’ll be way ahead of the game.

It’s risky to keep taking image snapshots because you most likely will not know when exactly you picked up the virus. So I just try to get a standard image and keep it around for when I need to rebuild the machine. Gwen’s PC was the latest victim, infected with a nasty Trojan Horse called av360 (Antivirus 360). What it does is act like a free legitimate antivirus program and detects like 30-50 fake viruses on your PC and then tries to get you to buy a utility that will go and clean up the hoax viruses. The fact is, av360 is the virus, and it goes undetected right on by Norton and McAfee (way to go Norton and McAfee).

I found out that if you don’t have Norton Antivirus on your PC and then try to install it after the PC is infected with av360, it will cause Norton to not be able to download updates. At this point you’re toast, the only way to get rid of it is to reformat. I also just found out, because this time I did have Norton installed already, that even with the latest updates, Norton doesn’t detect this thing.

There are dozens of write-ups and alleged free utilities for removing this virus if you google av360. I avoided the free utilities because I can’t be sure that they are legit. I did go in and hack the registry and searched the files out and removed them. I’m certain that the offending program that brought the Trojan in in the first place is still out there dormant on her PC, so I may still have a problem in the future. But at least for now the phony virus pop-up that was coming up every time Gwen did anything on the Internet, is now gone. As it was in this case, not having to reformat means I am victorious (this go around)!

I have some PC issue to deal with at home usually every 1-2 weeks, it’s always something fun…