Christmas 2007!

Here are some pictures from our Christmas.

Malikai sleeping with his teddy bear.

Eating some blocks, one of Malika's Christmas presents.

Malikai never actually opened any presents, he just played with the packages for awhile.

Cats, for Christmas? Malikai and the cats playing with a box together.

Stay away from my box!

Sleeping under the tree, before it got destroyed.

A picture of Malikai's birthday cake. It tasted so good!

My sexy wife! I'm so glad I married her, she's the greatest person I have ever met! Nobody could ever come close to replacing her.

BONUS! Some more pictures of Malikai smiling.

Happy New Year everyone!

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Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everyone!

A lot of people send out Christmas letters about what their family updates. Since I hate sending out letters (which is why I still haven't sent in my mail-in-rebate for my phone) and I'm a geek, I'll write a blog about the year.

The biggest news of the year is that we have a beautiful and healthy baby boy!

Malikai Jadon Zenor, born in December of 2006. He is now just over a year old and doing great. He is learning to walk on his own pretty well, and getting into almost everything. He knows how to climb steps, and I've gone through a lot of trouble trying to keep him off the stairs. Health wise, he hasn't gotten sick at all, and his height and weight chart is above average, so everything is perfect with him.

The events surrounding Malikai's birth were hectic and not the most fun. Danae went into labor during a blizzard, had to have the Army pick us up in a hummer and take us to the ambulance. That was a lot of fun, if only I had a picture of it. After Danae went through 2 1/2 hours of pushing Malikai was finally born. We had our family come out to visit and everyone got trapped in our house by another blizzard. That always causes stress and tension, a 1,080 square foot home with 10 people trapped inside for a few days.

Danae didn't have much fun either, she had Mono and Postpardum Depression at the same time, which made things quite hard. Because of all of that, DHS had to get involved. All in all, the beginning of the year was full of doctors appointments, court dates, and a bunch of other junk that we really didn't need at the time. Even several months after all of that was over with, we still got threatened with more legal action. Thankfully, I think we are passed all such actions. I really think none of it had to happen in the first place. When it all ended, we had the doctors, a therapist, the DHS case workers, and another court appointed family person all said that Danae and I both were taking great care of Malikai and all this junk shouldn't have happened in the first place.

I don't want to sound like I'm complaining, but this entire year has been full of extra stress and hassels, things that cost us extra money. But, we have a healthy baby boy, and for that we rejoice.

This year Danae and I have been searching for ways to witness to people online. This has been an interesting way to use our abilities (and addictions). There have been a few people online that we have brought back to the Bible, or just brought one step closer to following Christ. We have had our arguments with atheist, and sometimes we lose hope when not too many people show up, but we just have to remember, no matter how it looks, we don't know how God is going to use us.

I have also started school this year, taking online courses at Calvary Chapel Bible College. I just started my second course, only 32 more to go! So far I am learning a lot of really interesting stuff, but for now I just need to get going on this "textbook evaluation paper". It has to be 5-7 pages and I'm having trouble nailing down the main points of the book, there were so many good ones, it's hard to tell what the main one is. This first class requires me to do some work in the church, so I have been helping in the kitchen and nursery mostly. It has been a lot of fun, and even though it takes a lot of time I'm really glad that I get to do it.

Now that Christmas is almost here, we got the Christmas tree up. We didn't put up outside lights just because I have been tired, working long hours, and even on my nights off I have been dead tired. But I did took the time to put up the Christmas tree and decorate it real nice, but the cats promptly took care of that. Silly cats, climbing the tree at all hours of the night, unpugging the lights and batting down every ornament we had hanging. Next year I'll have to try some training techniques that someone told me about for cats. That should solve the problem so we can have a nice tree up, until Malikai gets ahold of it. So we will just have to figure out how to train Malikai to stay away from it. I'm sure bright shining lights and ornaments will not tempt him to go for it...

Anyway, that's it for this year. Only time will tell how next year turns out to be.

Merry Christmas everyone, and have a Happy New Year!

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Beware: Telemarketing Scams

Today when going through our mail, Danae came across a piece of what looks like Junk Mail, advertising some health insurance program. We normally just open and shred these, but Danae read it, and to our surprise we were informed that they had already charged us $9.95 for an introductory fee and will be charging us $50 per month starting in January….

Hmmm, this isn’t a good sign, but usually they are just trying to scare you into calling, they didn’t actually charge us did they? So a trip to the bank’s website cleared it all up for us. Errr, did it? Behold, on November 30th there is a charge for $9.95 from a place called “HCPGOLD”, Health Care Plus. So I do a search online for HCPGold, and guess what I found? See for yourself, [Google search], Anytime a search for a company begins with titles like "Complaints Board", "Complaint Wire" and "Consumer Complaints", you know this is not a very good company.

Turns out that they call you (usually, some people were never called) with some type of special deal for coupons. Hmmm, we were called about receiving $50 gas voucher and some $25 Walmart gift cards as a "thank you" for buying a product from this company, even though we have no idea what we bought from them. We said yes to the free stuff and were instantly signed up for this scam, but some people were signed up even for saying no to them... it seems like this company doesn't care, they are going to charge you no matter what.

Doing some more looking into my bank account I found two more charges from "WC *VALUE PLUS " and "WC *HOMEPLAY", for only a couple bucks, but still, I don't know who they are, so I search for them as well. Same search results. It seems that these companies are all tied together somehow. Doing some more digging it turns out that these three companies are fakes, the real company is called Provell an honest looking company, but searching their website clearly shows ties to the other three companies. Someone posted a Ripoff Report about this company, and his research shows that they are all owned by a "Damark International".

So all the complaints that I found were dealing with how people are being charged without authorizing the charges, had a hard time getting a partial refund, let alone full refund for anything more than a month (some were taken for $300 total, some more), had a hard time getting these people to stop charging their account, and would refuse to mention where they got the credit card info. In every case that I read about, people are being charged without knowing it, and without receiving any products at all.

I have already cancelled our debit card and gotten a new one on order to stop all further charges and I'm being mailed the paperwork by my bank for reporting frodulant activites, and tomorrow we will be spending our time trying to get our $13 back from this company! Then we will report them to the BBB, state Attorney General, Federal Trade Commision, and even the FBI. This may sound like a lot of work for only $13, but these people shouldn't be taking anything out of my account, and they have taken others for hundreds, so even if I don't get much out of it, at least I may be able to help some other people to get their money back and to protect others from this happening to them. Plus, the only reason they only took us for $13 is because we caught it right away. HCPgold promised to take $50 / month, and the two WC's take $19.95 EACH. That's $89.90 per month that would be STOLEN from us had we (Danae) not caught this in time.

So if any telemarketer calls, don't give them any information and make sure that you keep an eye on your account!

Oh yeah, and we never received our Gas / Walmart coupons and vouchers.

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Snow!

We got some snow today. Actually it has been snowing for 2 days straight and knocked the power out today for a few hours. should make for some good skiing this week.

Jon's Birthday

Since my birthday was a week ago I thought it might be good to post about what I did on my birthday, since that is the kind of thing that people like to hear about.

So, on my big day, what did I do? I spent 12 hours at work and 2 hours driving to and from work. Oh boy, what fun it was. So for the most part it was a day just like any other.

When I got home I got to open my birthday gifts from Danae. I got a powerball and 2 new Dance Dance Revolution games for Xbox. All of them excellent gifts. Monday I spent playing one of my new DDR games, which was an okay game, but I prefered the old techno songs to the new American songs they played, it is hard to dance to Elvis...

But the other DDR game (Ultramix 4) has great music and a battle mode for two to four players. So I'm getting some exercise done finally. Also Monday I went to buy a new cell phone with the money from Danae's parents. It turns out that Verizon changed their new every two year policy a bit so I only got $50 off of the phone instead of the $100 I was expecting, so I still had to pay $50 of my own money, but that's okay. I got the new chocolate phone which looks really nice. The camera phone works great, as you can see from my post that I did while at Garden of the Gods. The money that my mom sent me I spent to buy a pair of ski boots, now I just need to get out and hit the slopes. I should be able to go next Monday now that the mountanis got some snow.

Speaking of snow, this weekend the forcasters predicted a heavy snow storm, slick roads high winds, all the things that make winter nasty. So Friday came along, with no snow, and Saturday was in the 60's.... at least the forcasters were close...

So that still leaves our winter mostly dry. On Friday night we did get a little bit of rain. I don't know how much, but when Danae and I went into the mall it was dry, and when we left the ground was wet and the sky mostly clear. But the mountains did get some snow so my ski trip should be a good one.

Saturday night I helped out at the nursury to help me get time for the college class that I am taking. I finished reading my text book but have procrastinated at writing the critical analysis of it. I need to get that started this week. Sunday morning while I was helping in the churches kitchen, a kid in the nursury set off the fire alarm during first service. That made for an interesting morning.

Work has had a few new things as well. I arrive at work tonight (I'm on the night shift now) and I'm notified that our shifts are changing, instead of being 6-6 they will be 7-7, starting tomorrow. So not only do they give absolutely no notice of this, but they didn't even make any plans to allow us to work only 12 hours so I have to do 13 hours tonight. On the slightly positive side they did work out a deal that will keep me on night shifts instead of me changing from days to nights. This will really help my body and my sleeping pattern, even though I will miss going to bed with my wife.

Another bad thing about getting off at 7 am instead of 6 am, that I just thought of, is that on Sunday mornings I will not be able to make it to hte first service at church, so that means I either show up late to church, or stay up a few hours later for the second service. I don't know if I will do that since I am already so tired when I try to drive home, but we will see. Of course the best option will be for me to get a job that isn't shift work, but God doesnt' seem to be opening any doors in that direction right now.

One thing that I forgot to mention, Malikai started doing some new stuff on my birthday. I saw him take his first few unassisted steps. He took 3 or 4 steps before falling down and I did capture it on video once. I will try to get the video posted online sometime during the next two weeks.

Anyway, I think I went on long enough. Have a good night everyone.

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Christmas Wish List 2007

Hello again everyone.

Since the holidays are nearly upon us I have been asked by a few people for a list of what we want for Christmas. I decided that the easiest way to discriminate this information is through the blog.

Please check back for any updates that I might make to this post.

Feel free to point others to this blog if they want ideas.

Jon's List
Starting in January I will be doing some work on our basement, to turn it into a home theater room that is baby proof. This will all cost money, so if you could get me Home Depot Gift Cards that would be great. I'm also looking for a Miter Saw.

Beyond that:
Remote starter for our car (For those really cold mornings when I get off work. I'm dreaming, but oh well)
Book: The Case for the Real Christ
Movie: The Privileged Planet
A good electric razer (Something that shaves close and will last awhile)
An Apple Mac Book Pro - Black (Okay, now I'm REALLY dreaming...)
Movie Set: The Way of the Master Season 1 & 2 (The price has dropped to $50 each - Link Here)

Danae's list:
gift card for Barnes & Nobles for some books she wants
Fernando Ortega CDs

Malikai's List:
CLOTHES! (18 months and up, variety of clothes)
He likes toys that light up and make noises especially - or just any toy


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