Humphrelia

I feel like every time I post to this blog I preface by writing “We’ve been really busy for the past couple of weeks.” I guess by now you’ve figured out that we somehow keep ourselves very busy pretty much non-stop… The past few weeks have been no exception.

Will has begun to disperse his Star Wars obsession out to a couple of other subjects: Harry Potter and Indiana Jones. As Malin has mentioned, we’ve let him watch the first three Harry Potter movies. He won’t be allowed to watch the others until much since they get into PG-13 territory. He has yet to see an Indiana Jones movie, but still has managed to be completely fascinated with him. It’s really funny to hear him talk about it and mix up his characters, “I’m Anakin Jones!”

A recent favorite activity of Will’s is to play various games on the computer at Lego.com. They have games ranging from Lego Star Wars to Lego Indiana Jones and everything in between (Knights vs. Wizards, Robots and Spaceships, etc…). He would spend all day doing this if he could. We try to not let him though, interrupting his office potato habits by taking him to the pool, taking outside to play, or reading books to him.

Last weekend we were in Boston to visit my brother, Jake. We actually spent most of our time around Cambridge (which is where Jake lives) and slept in Woburn (a 15-minute drive from Cambridge) where the hotels are much, much cheaper. Malin has yet to download photos from her CompactFlash cards to the computer, so I’ll post again later with details and pics. (Hopefully, less than 4 weeks will go by this time).

Yesterday we spent time in town, going to a Japanese book store in Smyrna and then to Decatur to walk around/shop/eat. We got a chance to eat lunch at the 5^th Earl Market, and decided that it is definitely a better destination for fancy sandwiches than Muss & Turner’s (no offense meant to Muss & Turner’s). It’s hard to compare them to Alon’s though because they are so different. Alon’s is much more of a market whereas 5^th Earl Market (despite the name) is more of a restaurant (and thus more like Muss & Turner’s in that respect).

In any event, we split The Moat. It is a big ol’ BBQ sandwich that includes a “white” BBQ sauce. The white sauce is basically like the white sauce (aka yum-yum sauce) that is available at most Hibachi (Japanese steakhouse) restaurants. It is good and tasted good on the sandwich, but I still prefer coleslaw as a BBQ sandwich topper (call me old-fashioned, I guess).

I was so busy trying to document the wedding in my last post that I nearly forgot that the weekend doubled as a beach vacation for us.

We brought a big Tonka dump truck for Will to play with in the sand. We also brought his “tools” – a plastic toy shovel and rake, made for sandbox play.

He made several trips from the house to the beach. The first afternoon we were there, shortly after arriving, Donna took him and Catrina (Audra’s and Jason’s young cousin) to the beach to play. We returned again the next morning, and again in the evening, and again the next day, etc…

During some down time before the wedding, the three of us (Malin, Will, and me) went for a stroll on the beach. Malin took many pictures of us on the beach. When we walked under the pier that was near the house, she handed me the camera and asked me to snap some in order to get herself in some pictures. The first photo up there on the right is shy Willie getting a piggyback ride from mommy. The one below shows the two of them looking for shells under the pier:

There were actually lots of seashells to find down there. Just a few feet away from where they’re standing was an alley of crushed shells that seemed to run the whole length of the beach:

Tiring of my photography skills (or lack thereof), Malin eventually reclaimed her camera to prove that I was actually at the beach with the two of them:

She also got some great shots of Will playing in the sand. This one is my favorite:

The rest of the vacation centered around the wedding and our preparation of food for ourselves and the other guests: a low-country boil on Saturday, crab cakes and fish’n’chips on Sunday.

Unfortunately, we had to leave the beach on Monday. I can’t wait to go back… perhaps later this summer?

It has now been nearly a month since Memorial Day weekend. Sorry for the long delay. Malin and I need to work on a better way for me to get to her pics. She takes lots of photos, but I sometimes have to spend a good bit of time digging around her hard drive to find the ones I’m looking for when I post.

So as you may know, we had a long memorial day weekend on the beach at Oak Island, NC. We were there to see our good friend Audra marry her fiance (now her husband), Jon. We were also planning to bring some foodie entertainment for everyone, and Malin would be taking pictures the whole weekend. Read More »

Last night I saw a huge moth on the back deck. It was quite still so I was able to get close and measure – its wingspan was nearly 6 inches!

Here’s a pic of the big ol’ critter:

In other news, for anyone who was curious about the details of the beer dinner that Malin and I attended (mentioned briefly in my previous post), I’ve finally posted all of the gory details so you can now read all about it.

Will finished school last week, and we have been hanging out here at the house enjoying the air condition in between my work and watching an inordinate amount of Harry Potter. He is only allowed to watch the first three as the fourth one is rated PG-13.

Now, before I get emails, let me explain: when we first had Will, I definitely did the high-and-mighty “I am going to do the best job at raising him and controlling what he is exposed to and yadda yadda…” I have a 2×4 sticking out of my head because that is all bat-shit insane. You cannot really control anything: he is all boy, all the time. So we have shifted our focus to “let’s keep it to ‘innocent’ violence.”

Can you believe that just came out of my mouth? Innocent violence?! Who says crap like that? Well, I do. We say “shooter” instead of “gun” and “fall down” instead of “die”. He may be starting to grasp that death is a permanent thing and all around uncool. So, I guess in the end, my crazy has given way to a more conscious way of dealing with BOY.

On other notes, on the next-to-last day of school, a manila envelope was sent home with him. I did not think anything of it, and neither did Josh. That night I opened the envelope, and the coolest, most awesome gift that is not a gift (but really is) was inside. See picture:

Will sewed all these little sequins on all by himself. Is that not the coolest thing ever? No really – EVER?! I love to sew and had given up any notion of sharing my past time with my BOY. But, when he brought these home, a little spark was lit, and I asked him if he liked sewing, and he said, “yes.”

Music filled the room – I swear (or maybe the TV was up a little loud…).

I am going to frame these, and when he is 16 he is going to beg me to stop carrying them around with me where ever I go.

Among other amusing phrases, “Stormpoopers” is just one of the things you’re likely to hear around our house thanks to our very amusing three-year-old.

Aside from that little quip, the title in no way describes the rest of this post. The past few weeks have been quite busy for us; I’ll try to recap below.

Clown Caper

The Saturday before Mother’s Day was the Counterpane Clown Caper Carnival at Will’s School. My parents came down on Friday and accompanied us to the carnival the next day.

It was a fun parade. Many of the children arrived in costumes – mostly clowns. There was the obligatory Panda Bear, too.

The entertainment consisted of numerous carnival games and the like, all suited for the kids – ranging from Will’s age and into the early tweens.

Will had several favorites: fishing (for blocks of wood shaped like fish), golf (putting to be precise), darts (Will has no skills here yet which made for a nerve wracking 5 minutes), and the bean-bag toss. The objectives of the games have nothing to do with being competitive, so every child plays the game until they “succeed”. Their reward for so doing is a bead necklace – not unlike those traded at the reputedly debaucherous Mardi Gras of New Orleans:

Apparently my dad and I were both amused – by what I can’t recall:

Will’s favorite part, above all of the carnie games, was the horse riding. Will met two horses, Carrot and Jake. He has asked about them almost everyday since the Clown Caper…

Mother’s Day

The next day was Mother’s Day. The plan was to take Malin out to breakfast at The Original Pancake House and then to let her go pick out flowers and other plants (she has a green thumb and likes to make the yard pretty in this fashion).

The first wrinkle is that The Original Pancake House in Peachtree City closed. Say it isn’t say! How could they close!??! Where else can I get Bacon Pancakes (no, that isn’t a joke… and, yes, they’re awesome). We had to eat at J. Christopher’s instead, which was okay but quite a disappointment comparatively (no Bacon Pancakes after all).

After eating, we scrambled all over Newnan in search of the Andy’s Nursery there. We had been before but couldn’t remember exactly how to get there. To insure we found our way, we printed directions from Google Maps. The directions, as it would turn out, were completely wrong! I’m not sure what about the address so thoroughly confused Google, but thoroughly confused it was. The address we entered included the City and State, and Newnan isn’t really big, so that luckily put a limit on just how far away it could take us. But it did take us to the complete opposite side of Newnan from where the place really is. To make matters worse, the woman at the store who answered the phone and tried to give us directions gave pretty bad directions. Eventually we found it, and all was right.

The Fifth Earl

The weekend after that, Malin and I attended a really cool private dinner at a gourmet market and restaurant in Decatur named 5th Earl Market. You’ll find more details of that evening over at Hump’s Brewing (at least you will after I get around to posting about it – still collecting photos from the evening…)

Water Grenade Mischief

The day after that dinner was Sunday. On Sunday I showed Will how to play with water balloons. We found a slew of balloons at the “Dollar Spot” in Target. They even came with a little plastic filler that is meant to screw onto a faucet. Unfortunately, the threads of this piece of plastic fit nothing – not any of the faucets in the house and not the house outside, either. It looks like its meant to fit the threads on the faucet of a utility sink (which have the same coarseness as a garden hose but a little smaller in diameter).

In any event, we improvised. By simply unscrewing the cap on the kitchen sink faucet, we had a nice spout onto which to wrap the mouths of balloons. Install balloon, turn on water, wait for three seconds, turn off water, tie the balloon, repeat… We filled up around six or seven and then headed outdoors to assault mommy (just kidding – no humans or animals were intentionally struck with water balloons)

Some of the balloons were quite full. Will accidentally squeezed one of them a little too hard in his hands, and – oops! like pulling the pin and then dropping the grenade – the balloon exploded, thoroughly soaking Will in the process:

Grandma Frannie’s Birthday

The following Wednesday, May 21^st, was my mom’s birthday (Will calls her Grandma Frannie). The following day, Malin, Will, and I packed a ton of stuff into the car and drove to Greenville to visit her. We were also attending a wedding in NC that weekend and were breaking the drive up by stopping for a night in Greenville, both on the way there and on the way back.

Will found a great birthday card at the Publix. It was an amusing, oversized card that played music when you opened it. Knowing Will you might be able to guess the theme of the card. Upon opening it, one was treated to the theme from Star Wars (the intro music that begins each film and is heard during the opening text crawl of all six films).

We also got her the recently released Indiana Jones trilogy on DVD. Unfortunately, we didn’t get a chance to watch any of those movies while we were there.

The Wedding of Audra and Jon

The morning of Friday the 23^rd, we packed the car back up for a five-hour drive to Oak Island, NC. Our good friend Audra was getting married. The weekend was fun and quite eventful – so eventful, in fact, that it will be covered in more detail in a post all of its own. Be on the look out for that very soon…

Summer Break

Today (Friday the 30^th) was Will’s final day of school. He is now officially on Summer break and won’t go back to school for seven weeks. This should be an interesting couple of months… Luckily we bought memberships to the Fernbank Museum, so I see that in our future – at least once anyway.

Tomorrow we are off to Lilburn. Malin and another friend of hers have been preparing a Jack and Jill Baby Shower for our friends, Scott and Karyn (Jack and Jill meaning husbands and children are invited – not just the Jills).

The week after that we are traveling to Boston to visit my brother and to see the sights. Malin and I have never been to that city before, so we are pretty stoked – especially since we love seafood and shellfish, which is supposed to be a specialty there (and pretty much every city so close to coastal fishing waters…).

It seems I am not alone in my love of swine. The online comic xkcd is usually funny and often strange, but last Friday they really hit a home run:

Their most recent comic, from yesterday, is cute, too. And it’s also centered around a food item that, like bacon, can be ordered from Waffle House:

A coworker and friend also forwarded me an e-mail about the most e-mailed photos, and one of them centered around our favorite food – combined with a close runner-up: the donut.

I had seen these cardiac thrombosis cakes before on a television show: Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations. In one episode of the show, Tony Bourdain visited the Pacific Northwest and makes a stop at Voodoo Doughnut, the purveyor of these fine, freaky, triple-bypass inducing, delicacies.

The past few weeks have been rather eventful around here, so I’ll try to catch up all of you readers.

A New Hope

Malin attended a “Girl’s Night Out” event the other Saturday evening. It was doubling as a surprise birthday celebration for one of her good friends. While out, Will and I watched Star Wars – the original movie (i.e. Episode IV). Malin was a little upset because we had talked about waiting before letting him watch any of them. But when she had proposed waiting until he was seven, I really thought she was kidding (after all, the first movie is pretty tame in content – especially compared to the most recent chapter). As expected, Will enjoyed it. He has inherited his mother’s observation and hearing skills and has already discovered that there are more movies in the series (ones which actually feature his favorite characters, Boba Fett and General Grievous). However, we will be waiting awhile before he can see the next one – perhaps one episode per year (but with a longer delay after Episode II since Episode III is rated PG-13).

Luckily he has been good since seeing it. He hasn’t gone crazy with Star Wars-itis (at least no crazier than before). He has asked to see the movie again, but I was able to divert his attention by showing him Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, which he enjoyed nearly as much and has already watched five times since…

Also related to Star Wars-itis: Now that the weather has been warm (at least before today), Willem and I have been playing in the yard in the evening. It used to consist mainly of us hitting whiffleballs with NERF bats. Lately, Will has wanted to play “Lego Man” – pretending the bats are light sabers and pretending to duel all across the yard. I’m sure it must be a ridiculous and amusing site for our neighbors…

I’m a Nut!

Last Thursday Will joined his classmates in an evening performance at his school. We didn’t even know it was in the works until we got an invite to the performance from his teacher on Tuesday. The whole class (ages 3 to 6) sang several songs, and then the “afternoon kids” (those 5 and older) put on a play – their own, personalized version of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. We got some video of the event both on our digital camcorder and on Malin’s phone; but, because of the low light, both turned out pretty poor.

In addition to learning two French songs – Allouette and Where Is Thumbkin (en Français) – Will also learned another song, the performance of which was quite amusing. All of the kids sang and clucked along to that amusing song, which is about an acorn and is called I’m a Nut:

Verse
I’m an acorn, small and round
Lying on the cold, cold ground.
Everybody steps on me.
That is why I’m cracked, you see.

Chorus
I’m a nut! (cluck, cluck)
I’m a nut! (cluck, cluck)
I’m a nut! I’m a nut! I’m a nut! (cluck, cluck)

Damnable Dogs

Last week, Malin made a big batch of blueberry muffins. We left Friday to take Will to school, and, upon our return, we were witness to Miles’ and Marla’s criminal act: they had dragged the Ziploc bag of muffins off of the counter, torn it open, eaten every single last muffin, snuck into the pantry, and eaten numerous milkbones from their bag o’ breakfast food.

Our dogs are usually quite well-behaved, but this is the second time they’ve turned to crime in the recent past (the other time they just got into their milkbones and ate them all – no human food was destroyed).

Needless to say, they have not been getting breakfast for the past couple of days. In fact, today was their first breakfast since then (so they went only three days without… it doesn’t make sense to punish them any longer since their memory and comprehension skills aren’t good enough for them to really understand why the food was withheld…)

Will was quite upset over the tragedy since he really loved the muffins. On Sunday we made blueberry pancakes as a way to staunch his blueberry muffin cravings.

Wedding Season

This past weekend, we attended a wedding. Malin’s friend since seventh grade, Melissa, was a bridesmaid when Malin and I were married. This past weekend the favor was returned. Malin got to dress up in what Will called a “princess dress.” Since Malin was in the wedding, she wasn’t able to take pictures of the event for this blog. The wedding photographer took a picture of us though, so maybe we’ll be able to get a picture of all of us from that. At the least, we’ll be able to get pictures of Malin (since she was in the wedding party) in her “princess dress” with her hair and makeup all done up, fancy-like!

Also this past Saturday, you may have noticed that this website was down briefly. Thunder storms and scattered showers, moving through the Atlanta area, temporarily thwarted the upgrade of the server. My friend John, one of the other residents on this server, was upgrading some software and storms interrupted his home’s power, which interrupted and contaminated the upgrade process. Luckily he was able to get everything back up in short order.

Pink Eye

Today, Will has fallen victim to the rapid contagion that is Bacterial Conjunctivitis – commonly known as Pink Eye. His eyes are still a little red, but the most disturbing symptom is in the wads and wads of icky mucus dispelled from his tear ducts (which apparently is known as “goop” and “eye crust” in addition to the technical name “mucopurulent discharge”).

The doctor was able to see him this afternoon, and they said he mustn’t go back to school tomorrow because the first 24 hours is when he is most contagious. She prescribed some eye drops and an antibiotic. Now we get to wait and hope that he’ll be better and back in school Thursday.

In the past couple of posts, I’ve mentioned many things musical. I still haven’t gotten around to packaging the DOS-based MIDI composition software for posting here. I also still haven’t gotten around to posting the recently-recorded-from-cassette original MP3s.

I’ve decided to delay that in favor of posting about my favorite animal: the pig! More specifically, pork, since the pig is my favorite-tasting animal. I went to lunch at a barbecue restaurant the other day with a co-worker, Paul (and of course had the pulled pork because it comes from the best-tasting animal ever!). Somehow we got to joking and talking about bacon. We then exchanged amusing cartoons, all related to the subject.

Paul e-mailed to me the bacon flowchart:

My favorite part is where it says “Withholding bacon from a dog is inhumane.”

He saw this image on this site. This site’s author is not the original artist/author that created the flowchart, but he posts a lot about bacon (some are very, very funny; others are very, very disturbing; many are both).

I then sent Paul a couple of gems from a really demented cartoon website named The Perry Bible Fellowship. The cartoons are always deranged and widely varying in subject matter. Two of their cartoons were about the delectable backside of a hog:

Maybe the next post here will be about something somewhat serious. Stay tuned…

This week I’ve uncovered a new genre of movies posted to YouTube: speed painting. Skilled artists (at least the few I watched were skilled) record themselves painting something from scratch using Photoshop and then speed it up. The result is a hyper-speed movie that shows how the artist creates a painting, from beginning to end, in only three minutes (give or take).

I discovered these thanks to my friend Jason. On his blog, he referenced and linked to an artist’s blog. His post was about the “Steampunk Star Wars” paintings that this guy had done. I was impressed and checked out some other stuff on this artist’s blog. I then uncovered a link to a movie he had recorded of himself speed-painting:

From there you can navigate to all sorts of other speed-painting movies, many of which are quite impressive. I liked this one:

I was a big fan of the Halo video game and found that the background music to this one took me back a few years…

On a completely different and unrelated vein, my co-worker John Cooper has returned from several months in Ireland. Today he informed me about the New York Times recent misadventure in scientific journalism. It seems that they printed a rather conspicuous typo. When discussing the Large Hadron Collider, they accidentally printed Large Hardon Collider. If you google the latter you’ll likely find the same juvenile websites, making fun of the incident with a flurry of immature innuendos and inappropriate diagrams of how this machine might work. Unfortunately, I could not find any legitimate report of the mistake online (though, admittedly, I spent very little time trying…). Interestingly enough, the subject of the New York Times article was about the safety of the project and the slight possibility that it could create all sorts of blow-your-mind phenomenon capable of destroying our planet – or worse. My friend Jason has even written on his blog with some of the very same concerns – though he spelled it properly, “Hadron”, instead of the more amusing variation “Hard-on”…

Yet another unrelated subject: I hooked up my only remaining tape deck (as in cassette tapes, from yesteryear) to my computer to move some recorded music into digital form. The music consists of original compositions by yours truly, recorded to tape through various means. Some tracks were recorded using a nice four-track mixer that belonged to my neighbor and friend Keith Groover, others using my current tape deck and an inexpensive microphone, and still others that were recorded using a cheap, crummy handheld voice recorder. The quality of the recordings is as varied as the means by which they came to be on tape. Once I clean them up a little (probably not much since Audacity’s noice removal plug-in doesn’t seem to be that great) I’ll post the better ones here.