Greetings from #4

Greetings everyone!

Mark great to hear from you in India. I got to say, reading about those terriorist attacks is pretty scary. I'm sure you guys are in a fairly secure area but shit! Take care of your selfs over there. Are you going to be staying at the hotel from here on, or going back to the apartment?

I'm also happy to hear your plane ride went well. Those business class seats are freaken sweet man. I got to see how you were liven as I walked passed them on the way to my poor-man seat on the way to Italy.. Are you all feelin sorry for me yet?

Speaking of Italy, I'm going to try to attach the link to the photo website. Theres too many to put on here.

http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=hy3qgze.ayl5icge&x=1&y=-810ldt

Let me know if that dosent work and I'll email them to you all. We had the time of our lives there.

By the way, Molly and I celebrated our ONE year anniversary this passed weekend. We had a great time watching our wedding DVD again! Robbie, you had a great time! Ha ha.

Anyway, looks like we are going to be joining everyone in Austin this weekend! Can wait to SEE you!

Mike

Greetings From Hyderabad!!

Hi everybody in CoopBroLand! #3 checking in from Hyderabad, India. Week one is down and we have 11 to go! It seems like this whole first week has been the hardest one because of all the adjustments. Here's a quick blow-by-blow:

SATURDAY

We arrived in HYD at 11:30PM and checked into the Novotel Hotel. It is an Accor hotel rated 4 stars and is actually quite nice. Getting through customs at the airport, getting our luggage, and travelling to the hotel was an interesting experience. There are so many people that loiter around the airport regardless of what time it is. Here are some pics








SUNDAY

Natalie had a team lunch so I had kid duty right away. We also went to see the Jayabheri Apartments where we would be moving the next day.




The kids slept okay but were up a good amount of time at night.

MONDAY

Natalie's first day at the office. I'm watching the kids at the hotel. We are living out of the suitcases so keeping the kids entertained is tough. After Natalie gets home from work she smacks me on the butt and tells me to go put on something sexy. I tell her that she never appreciates me anymore... Just kidding. We then move into the Jayabheri Apartments and unpacked all of that food we shipped ahead. Some of it did not get handled well and we had to throw it away. We tried getting some sleep but it wasn't happening. Full batteries at 2AM for both girls.

TUESDAY

Trying to find a routine that works. Natalie is taking to the job of managing this team like a duck to water. I'm taking to full time parenting of two kids like a lead boat anchor to water! It aint easy! A strange Indian woman comes to clean the apartment and takes 4 hours. The whole time all of the doors and windows are open so all the bugs can get in. After Natalie gets home, we venture out to another hotel for dinner that night. We check out a suite room in the hotel we stayed at as an alternative to the apartment because it is starting to suck.

I realize that I am going to LOVE evenings. We try to get some sleep. Delaney wakes up again at 2AM. It wakes Lillian up. Natalie wakes me up. Life sucks! The apartment, we are realizing, is less and less comfortable. The window units are very loud and make the rooms cold. They don't do anything to make the rooms less humid. With them off it gets hot and arid. Natalie is miserable because she can only take a luke-warm bath at best. You have to turn on the hot water heater on the wall and wait. Also the beds are very hard and uncomfortable.

WEDNESDAY

Natalie and I are running on no sleep. So are the kids but they don't sleep in at all. Today is particularly tough because Natalie has to fly to Mumbai. She doesn't get back until 10:00 PM. During the day I take the kids swimming at the pool. Here are some pics of that, and hanging around the apartment.






This last one is really sweet. Lillian was walking around hugging this picture of Finley that we brought. It touched me. I should say that she has been the biggest trooper through this whole ordeal! I am so proud of her!

There are no other American's here in this complex, nor other foreign expatriates like we originally thought. We stick out like a sore thumb. I think the idea of a man staying home to watch the kids is alien to a lot of these people and I get a lot of weird stares. The pool staff are not particularly friendly. I get warned about Lillian not having a pool cap, splashing water on the concrete, and having plastic toys in the pool respectively. The guy came around every ten minutes.

Anyway, later I made some of the spaghetti we brought for dinner then got the kids to bed and said a fervent prayer that they would sleep throught the night. I am hopeful because Delaney was the only one who got a short nap during the day. I use the time between then and when Natalie gets home to listen to some music on my ipod and unwind. I'm listening to a praise song that has "Come to me weary now and I will lay you down (and give you rest)" in the lyrics. It hits home in a peculiar way. I feel particularly rejuvenated from the experience and praise God for it. I begin to improve my attitude and look forward to Natalie coming home.

Natalie gets home and tries to go to bed. We are both overtired at this point so I sleep like a brick... That is, untill 2:00AM. We get up with the kids, but this time with some struggle we get the kids back down. We have to go turn the AC in Delaney's room on and off every hour to make a somewhat liveable (sleep-able) environment. We can't get back to sleep. Natalie and I have some heated discussions about the apartment and our alternatives. We end up making the decision that this would be our last night at the Jayabheri. Since we are up we start the packing process. We are both ass-whipped as all get out.

THURSDAY

Natalie goes to the Hotel on the way to work to check us in. The kids wake up and we have breakfast then go to the park. Later on I decide to make a trip to the hotel with as much as I can take. I try to get situated and get the kids down for a nap. It is so much easier in the hotel because you can make the rooms really dark. Natalie gets home and we go to dinner in the hotel restaurant. Major improvement! Later on we get some much needed sleep. Delaney still wakes up, but she is convinced to go back to sleep. It's nice to be back in the hotel!

FRIDAY

This day is the first that feels like somewhat of a routine. We still have half of our stuff at the Jayabheri (and most of the food) so we make due with what we have. Our room includes a nice breakfast buffet so we go eat before Natalie goes to work. The day passes fairly quickly. Still getting settled, but it feels like progress is being made. The rest of the day is uneventful.

SATURDAY

Slept in as much as possible. Natalie got some much needed kid time and I got some much needed chill time. I worked out at the Hotel's Gym. It is very nice. In the afternoon I had the driver take me back to the apartment to get the rest of the food that we had shipped along with the rest of the toys. Basically we are out of there now. Here are some pics in our room (the kids' adjoining room:






The rest of the day was pretty uneventful until the very end. I'm sure you heard about the terrorist attack in Hyderabad at a park and local restaurant. Two bombs went of within 5 minutes of eachother. Pretty scary. We're fine though. Please don't worry. The Hotel is very safe. Security is very tight. The guards check every car for bombs. None of the authorities here care if they "racially profile" either, meaning if you look suspicious you will be checked out. If something else happens like this, Deloitte might send us home early. You can read about it on any news website, or do a search for Hyderabad News on Google.

SUNDAY

Not much going on. Just glued to the TV. We ordered pizza from Pizza Hut for dinner. The dinner buffet is great, but I was getting tired of it. The buffet consists mostly of Indian food, which I love but it gives me some pretty mean farts. Natalie thinks something is wrong with me.

Next week I will start the Business plan and marketing plan for my little company-project. Also, I may get together next weekend with a guy named Edgar Sathuluri, who is from Andhra Pradesh (the state we're in in India) and who runs a local Christian Mission group named NATIVE. I've heard through my church what great things he and his group are doing here.

Anyway, I'll post more when I can. All in all though, the rest of the trip should be pretty un-eventful. We won't venture far from the hotel until the smoke clears from the recent attacks.

Texans-Cowboys

4 tickets to the Texans-Cowboys game: $300.00
Parking: $20.00
Dinner: $65.00
A memory that your son will never forget


Priceless!

Happy Friday!

Hello all! I am wrapping up my 2nd week back home in Houston and even though H-town has changed a LOT since I left 14 years ago, I am having a great time. Working for mom is pretty cool, too, and she runs a pretty tight little ship over here, I must say.

Jennifer, great speaking with you earlier! I am looking forward to seeing you all next weekend. I don't care if I stay at your house or Aunt Gay's. I just miss y'all and want to see you all and catch up. I love the pictures! I can't believe how big and beautiful little Clarita and Carmelita are getting!

Mark, please please please post something! Photos too. Some of those toothless lepers you were telling me about in your email would be nice.

It is quitting time on Friday so I am off to take my fat butt to the gym. Coopbro One is out!

Summertime photos

I haven't played with this photo upload stuff much, so sorry for the strange layout- but I thought I'd include a few pics of our summertime for you all.

There seems to be a lot going on- eh?! Congrats to James for the reclaimation of his native status! How's it feeling?

We can't wait to see you all- I hear that may be a possibility as soon as Labor Day weekend? James and Robbie and assorted children? Please do come on over- we'd love to have you! I'm sure Mom will want to keep as many of you in her house as possible, but you will be welcome at ours too- of course!

There may be too much to write, I may need to get caught up in person. Just real busy around here lately... we've gone on a couple of vacations: Oregon and South Padre Island. They were both as awesome as they could possibly have been. Then coming back and working like crazy to get caught up just kills me!

Austin City Limits is the next big thing on the calendar. We have a friend from Oregon visiting for that. I think it's going to be a great year for it- it hasn't been as hot this year, and it's still green at Zilker since we've had so much water.

I'll write more later, mainly wanted to upload the pics and say hello to the blog world again .

Have a great evening!

Last Post from Florida

Well dudes, tomorrow's the big day. I am going to pack what I can into boxes today, pick up Rob at the airport this evening then load the truck and point it west tomorrow. After about 2 days on I-10 we'll be rolling into H-Town.

I can't wait.

Last night, Courtney and I went to Jax Beach for the last time and had dinner at Joe's Crab Shack. I took the photo above of her with my Raz'r cell phone camera. Even though it's bit of a pain in the ass to get the photos off the phone and onto the computer (I have to email each photo individually to my yahoo email account from the phone) I am pretty impressed with the quality of the photos.

Anyway . . . I expect it to be weird (in a good way) living in Houston again and am really looking forward to getting back home. It's been a long time since I have even thought of our home town as "home" so it'll be cool making that transition again. I do plan to blog about that too.

Think I'll be golfing with a handicap when I get back to Houston . . .

. . . when I try to get laid, being that I’ll be an unemployed 41 year-old who lives with his mom? This should make for an interesting exercise, to say the least! Damn Rob, I may yet come by and try to throw a few bottles of wine at your lovely MILF-y neighbor and just see what happens, my rule about not messing with married women notwithstanding ;). To paraphrase Eddie Murphy, “lack of pussy make you brave, man!” And unscrupulous, too.

Well, it's Monday morning; my first day of unemployment in like 16 years. All in all, I must say that it's pretty fucking nice to not have to be anywhere. I met with my new realtor yesterday and she gave me some ideas for generating more traffic. She said my last agent killed my house's appeal when he lowered the commission down to 5% when we lowered the price. The idea was to cut the price but to do so in a way that couldn’t require me to bring money to the table. However, Kim (my new agent) said that local inventory is now roughly triple what it was this time last year and so lowering the commission ended up killing its appeal to the buyers' agents out there.

My first agent--Sean--was a nice guy and had had an interesting pre-real estate life (he was ex-Special Forces and fought in Desert Storm) but he was also kind of a fucking idiot. For instance, he was real fond of using the word “bugger” a lot, and that kind of bothered me. While we were filling all of the requisite paperwork in the beginning, he kept saying “now if you’ll just sign this little bugger . . . " and shit like that. I actually said to him “you keep saying that word, I do not think it means what you think it means” and when he didn’t catch the Princess Bride quote, I should have known that he and I were ill-matched. Anyway, when I invited him to go to dictionary.com on his laptop then demonstrated to him how the word “bugger” was actually a verb that means to ass-fuck someone, he almost choked.

Anyway, after about 3 weeks of no activity, including a total strikeout on an open house, he actually called me with a hare-brained notion that he could sell my house by holding a fucking raffle! He said that he heard about a dude in Michigan who sold like $250,000 in tickets on a $175,000 house and wanted to try out the method on mine. "Just trying to think outside the box here, man" he said.

Dude, there's thinking outside the box, and then there's thinking outside the box. I can think of about a dozen ways that this scheme could end up badly for me and I rather doubt that you would relish the lawsuit that I would certainly visit upon you and your firm were you to put me in the position of having to give my house away for less than its prodigious mortgage amount. So . . . let's just put that idea back on its shelf, shall we? Raffles are for things like bicycles, genius, not houses. If we’re going to venture outside the box, let’s try to remain within, oh, a 10-foot radius of it, okay?

Of course, I didn’t actually say any of that shit to him. Witty ripostes like this only occur to me like 30 minutes after the conversation is over. Be that as it may, I don’t mind “thinking outside the box” (though I hate the term) but anytime someone you’re trusting to sell your main asset for you starts talking like that, it means they’re getting desperate and that should make your bullshit-sense tingle. Of course, nothing ever came of it and a few weeks later, Sean emailed me and let me know that he was taking a job in Orlando and that another “superstar” would henceforth be taking over my listing. The next week, I met said “superstar” when she came by, quite unannounced, and knocked on my door at 8:30 on Saturday morning.

No, please, do come in! I just love it when people just drop by early in the morning when I’m still wearing the shirt I slept in and still look and probably smell like a hog’s ass. Just love it, I say!

Oh, and did I mention that this new agent, Rhea, had her husband with her, a hatchet-faced ex-Army type? Anyway, she was cute in a vaguely Asian porn star way, however dear hubby was fixing me with his best “don’t let your eyes linger on my wife’s tits or there’ll be problems” stare so I listened to her pitch about how she was going to be able to sell my house when her ex-colleague couldn’t, and did my best to keep my eyes on her face. I was so impressed that I called her a few days later and invited to remove her firm’s sign from my yard and to take their lockbox off my door.

Anyway, I have a new realtor, Kim, who strikes me as having a lot more on the ball than either Sean or Rhea did and I feel more comfortable with her. As for today, I am going to go through my house and throw away stuff that I don’t want and then buy boxes for the stuff that I do want to keep. Kim talked me into leaving a lot of appliances and furniture that I either didn’t want that badly, or that would be cheap to replace. She said that it’ll help to have some stuff in the house when people look at it and she’ll look into renting some stuff to fill it out even more after I leave next weekend. This is all expensive to be sure, but I have GOT to get out from under my $2,000 a month mortgage so I don’t mind spending the money. Anyway, Rob, the bottom line is that we’re going to move less furniture than I anticipated.

This post has grown tiresome, so I will go for now. Peace out, my nizzles.

-J

Looks like it's back to being a "Rob & Big" blog

Hey dude. That was a nice pic of you and Rebekah. If we're still on for it, I recommend that we go to Mexico for the next mega Coop-Fam vacation.

Yes Jen, that includes you, Enrique and your crew! Jeez, I miss y'all. Speaking of Jen though, I am pretty sure she doesn't ever look at this blog anymore so I'll send her an email and tell her that we're trying to resuscitate this thing.

Anyone see any good movies lately? I saw Transformers last weekend when Megan was here and thought it was fun. It was a typical summer popcorn-muncher, but it was cool as all hell to look at and I enjoyed it. However, Courtney didn't love Transformers so much as she just endured it, so I repaid her by taking her to see Hairspray last night. Now, it would be too easy to for me to disparage it by saying that it was silly and only marginally less gay than blowing George Michael in a public bathroom (even though it was) but it's impossible to watch and not grin like an idiot at the thing. It's funny and, once you give into it, really enjoyable. Travolta's wierd to look at though, playing a middle-aged housefrau in circa 1962 Baltimore, but considering how he's allowed his public image to, um, evolve over the past few years . . .


. . . I guess we shouldn't be surprised. Still, even though I know Christian will rip on me for this, I do recommend it.

Rob, can't wait to see you later this week. As a term o my resignation, AS&G is paying me off for my equity in the company and I should get that money in the coming week. Best fucking investment I ever made, is all I can say. I bought it for $20,000 a little over 3 years ago and it more than doubled. Anyway, let me know how much your ticket cost so I can pay you back for it.

By the way, Courtney opted out of flying home ahead of us. She wants to make the 2-day road trip with her dad and favorite uncle. What can I say? You don't have the only wierd Coop-girl in the family.