An Ode to Guh Guh

yes, yes... everyone loves their siblings. i know. but my brother has got to be one of the coolest around. what prompts this post, you might ask? a weekend of neediness... and answers from the man pictured above.

so victor and i would willingly admit that we are not the most handy people around. not by a long shot. but my big brother is mr. handy-man-extrodinaire. just call him "josh the builder". he finds joy in fixing things himself. he's always been like that, ever since i can remember. when we were younger, he drove my parents crazy by taking things (usually electronics) apart so he could "see how they work". i'm not sure if he was always able to put them back together, though.

anyway, on to the ode.

why guh (my big bro) is awesome, reason #1: our home has always had a fairly large laundry list of "things to fix" or "things to update". We, as mentioned above, are not handy people... although i try to pretend to be on occasion. i call him up this weekend to ask him a question (which i'll mention below) and happen to tell him about this laundry list. he's planning on coming back to visit for christmas, and he offered to do them all for us while he's here!! woo hoo! now, on the one hand, i feel bad for asking him to take his vacation time to do work for us, but on the other hand, i know that he enjoys doing stuff like that. so i'll just stick to the "other hand". :)

why guh is awesome, reason #2: this past week, i purchased something off craigslist that needed some serious cleaning up. victor was so grossed out by it that he didn't want to have anything to do with it, and asked me to sell it. while i know i could've gotten our return on the purchase, i was sad. i really wanted to keep it. i tried cleaning it with some good ol' fashioned elbow-grease, but it just wasn't cutting it. what did i do? call my brother, of course. he told me how to clean it off... and after a few hours in the backyard this afternoon, i'm proud to say that we'll be keeping the purchase...

why guh is awesome, reason #3: (this one was the most important to victor) victor's ritual these days is to come home after church and turn on the tube to see how the football games have been playing out so as to check on his fantasy football team. we came home this afternoon, victor turned on our tv, and found... nothing. nada. a black screen. after some investigation, we come to find out that our tivo "live tv" function isn't working. that means we can't watch anything on tv, and can't record anything new. the only thing we can do is watch already recorded stuff. PANIC. tivo has been a necessity for us, especially after having caleb. my brother actually gave it to us for christmas 2 years ago (hmm... that merits a "why guh is awesome reason #4). so after a lot of fiddling with cables and rebooting, etc, etc... victor was fairly certain that our tivo had died. (tragedy!) BUT... of course, who do i call? my brother! and sure enough, he gives us a couple of suggestions... presto, change-o... tivo is up and running again. peace is restored.

of course, there are many many more reasons why i love my bro, but this weekend, he was truly the hero of the chiao-lin temple.

thanks, guh guh. what would we ever do without you?