Our Brother-in-law Bill celebrated his 40th birthday a couple of weeks ago. Tricia decided to throw him a retro 70's Disco Fever party, costume mandatory.
Not much else to say else to say, but Happy Birthday Bill and something about being funky, groovy or something like that (the pictures say it all!)
So, we're the last to get around to blog about our "Storm of '08" Experience (see here, here, here, and ... here)
Our lights flickered out at 2:30 p.m. on Sunday and didn't come back on for 7 days and 4 hours (but who's counting). That's certainly the longest power outage we've been a part of. So here's the confession... Paul and Debbie had the fore-thought to install a permanent generator, so we were not lacking for a cold refrigerator and a few lights. Of surprise to no-one my first order of business was to get the internet up and running...next, to jimmy the water heater on the generator as well (priorities, right?). So we weren't particularly hurting until Wednesday, when it turns out the Septic system isn't hooked into the generator and only allows for 24-48 hours of reserve time...whoops. Thanks Ryan and Tracy for letting us shower and use your facilities for 4 days! We are truly grateful for the small and simple things now.
We had a few trees down in the yard.
Ours wasn't as bad as some others in the neighborhood.
The pool was a disaster.
Inspecting the septic for extra capacity...you know in case we really had to go...
At the end of the day, (well at the end of 7 days) we were grateful that we had the perfect weather for living a week without the things we take for granted like A/C or heating. We recognize that there were many people in the Texas area and even here in Cincinnati who suffered a lot more through this experience than we. We are reminded of the Church leaders who have encouraged us for years to be prepared for such emergencies. At worst we couldn't shower for a few days, at best we got to put aside many of the distractions that modern living provides and got to spend some quality time together as a family through this adventure.
Soooooo, it turns out my 70's vibes were not appreciated by the whole family, I decided to tackle the world wide face of the family again and get back to our speciality, pictures of Izzy! Tiffany's response to the new look? The title says it all.
Before Sunday's storm (more on that later) we managed to snap these few pictures of Izzy outside.
Since I just updated the design of the blog I figured I'd create a bit of a geek post and review the blog stats:
How people get to our blog
40% of visits come from people who either bookmark or type in our blog address directly.
8% Link to us from our friends Lane and Whitney's blog
8% Find us through Google
What are people searching for when they find us
Our top search term is "Lucia Gattuso" (my sister) who has confessed to narcissistically googling her own name to find our blog.
The next few searches are the expected Gattuso Family blog type searches.
Interestingly we get a bunch of links from people looking for Burger Farm, Cincinnati. We blogged about a trip over there about a year ago.
Any weird stuff in the search report
Here are my favorite searches that sent people to our blog that are just random:
"birthday flowers for a biker chick"
"gattuso in shower" !!!
"gattuso's wifes picture"
"rockstar houses for rent Bahama's"
and my favorite,
"gattuso taking pants off" !!!
To elaborate, there is a relatively famous soccer player from Italy named Gennero Gattuso who (you 'd be tempted to think otherwise, listening to my dad) is no relative. So i'm guessing some of these searches where meant for him!
Where are our visitors coming from?
Most our visitors come from the US, followed by the UK but we've had visitors from 47 countries. In the states we've been visited from 38 of the 50 states the highest being Ohio, Kentucky, Utah and California in that order.
For the interested I get the stats from Google Analytics which is really easy to add to your blog and provides a wealth of fun facts about the visitors to your blog/website.
This one's for both sets of grandparents who have been asking to see Izzy's latest milestone.
We left our little Reds cheerleader at home tonight and headed down to the ballpark. The weather was perfect. The Reds were hot off a 9 -2 win over the Cubs last night so we were expecting big things. Alas it wasn't to be. The Cubs hit at least 5 home runs and there seemed to be more Cubs fans in the stadium than Reds so the stadium was erupting for all the wrong reasons.
We commiserated the poor performance of our local team by stuffing our faces ("we'll take one of everything please..."). So we managed to have a good time regardless.
We went with Trish and Bill and Jeremy and Corinne.
We found out that Bill always eat his peanuts whole, shell an' all. Intrigued, Jeremy insisted on trying it: 
... verdict... "much more manly".
We're going to a Reds game this weekend, we haven't been since opening day so we're getting into the team spirit. I haven't taken pictures of Izzy "just because" for a while so I figured tonight was the night. Izzy happened to be wearing her Reds outfit so we went with a baseball theme.
I was deleting old programs from my TiVo that I just set up this week after moving in (the new TV Season is right around the corner, no more repeats, yes!). At the bottom of the list was this newscast from Opening Day back in 2004. We're not in it but you will see a young Bill and Gavin and Jordan and Travis, our nephews/brothers-in-law.
Check it out:
