Hard Knock Life

Right now, when I am writing this, I am sitting here watching Annie with my wife and niece, Madison (from Gina’s side of the family). Gina’s dad just joined us as well. Do you remember in the beginning of the movie when all the little girls sing “It’s a Hard Kock Life,” yeah that is my favorite part of the movie, and the only part that I like because it reminds me of the Jay-Z song.

We are here in Baltimore enjoying our Christmas time with the family. It is great! It started with Christmas Eve, we came in last night after three church services, WaWa subs, and a 2 hour trip. We arrived and crashed a party that was still bumping at 11 o’clock.

Then on Christmas day we got up and opened some gifts. It was great because it was my first Christmas that I got to experience the holiday traiditions of another family. For 22 years I experienced Christmas with my family and my family only. I loved it and still do. Actually, I was a little disappointed that I was not going to participate in the normal traditions with my own family. But seeing something experiencing something different is really good for the soul.

So I guess I will tell you what made it really good. We gave to each other more than the other expected, random people from the local church and community popped in and joined us, we ate food, we laughed, and then we tried on and played with the clothes and toys we got. This is a picture Ben, my brother, who tried on the clothes of his brother Jimmy.




Did you ever have one of the occurrences that was really cool, but was really bad at the same time? You know, when you see something wrecked car and you were like “Cool!” then you realized that people suffered somehow through that. Well this happened to me. I was sleeping and my phone rang, I did not pick it up, then Gina’s phone rang and she did answer it. She jumps out of bed and run in and says to Ben “There is a fire in Reisterstown,” Ben ran out of the house and I walked to the toilet saying “I wish I was a firefighter.” Anyway, the fire was really big. It destroyed 76 units in a old folks home, but no one was hurt thank goodness. But I am sure a lot of people lost a lot of stuff that meant a lot to them. So, later on in the day we went down to see what was going on. It was great because Gina’s dad is really high up in the fire department, so all it took was a daddy phone call from Gina and he sent someone to take us down there. We passed up the all the News cameras and vehicles to the scene of the fire. I tried to get on the News, but I failed.