Humphrelia

Sunday we leave for vacation in Seattle, and we are getting a little excited. Washington state, here we come!

We’ve been talking about the things we’ll do and the places we’ll visit. This all vaguely reminds me of an awesome song by Coconut Records (Jason Schwartzman‘s latest band): West Coast. I usually prefer jazz and classic rock to contemporary popular music, but Coconut Records is definitely an exception (along with U2 and Coldplay to name a couple of others…).

In the meantime, we have lots of preparation to do. We’ve only just begun really planning the week. We briefly entertained the ideas of taking a day trip to Portland or to Vancouver, but both are a little too far away for that. We’ll have to do those cities, as well as Napa and/or Sonoma valley in northern California, the next time we do a west coast vacation – when we have more time set aside. For this upcoming week, we’ll only be there for six days, so it will just be Seattle. Malin and I hear nothing but good things about that city from our friends that have been there, so we are starting to get very excited (just a few more days until we leave!). We’ve already scheduled to have the dogs boarded for the week, and we’ve asked our neighbor across the street to feed the cat. This will be Willem’s first time on a plane with his very own seat (he’s flown several times before, but always as an “infant in arms”). Half of preparing for the trip is figuring out things for him to do on the plane to keep him occupied and at ease!

When we return we can hopefully post some pictures from the trip – as well as some pictures from last weekend (of old friends, weddings, etc…). We’ll be taking a laptop, so maybe if I’m inspired I will write a post from the Pacific time zone.

This past weekend my good friend Bob got married. He arrived in Atlanta on Wednesday. Usually while in Atlanta, he would stay at his fiancée’s (Christine’s) parents’ house, but there were too many out-of-town guests staying there, so he stayed a couple of nights at our place (we live very close to Christine’s family, so it was a relatively convenient place for him to crash).

Also this weekend was our fifth anniversary (Malin’s and mine). That was on Friday night – more on that in a minute. Most folks coming into town for Bob’s wedding were not going to be around until Friday. Since Friday was our anniversary, I knew I couldn’t visit with all of them that night as Malin and I already had plans. So I tried to organize something Thursday night. There weren’t many of Bob’s friends in town on Thursday night, so I chose to augment the gathering with a couple of other people. Both of the additional folks I invited knew Bob and wanted to wish him congratulations, too. So we had a group of six of us out in Decatur. Most of the night was spent talking and shooting pool at Twain’s after which we walked around, ending up at a place called Trackside Tavern (we tried the Brick Store Pub, but it was closing).

Friday night was our wedding anniversary. We had a very nice evening, and have since discussed extensively what we thought about our restaurant of choice for the evening: Trois in mid-town Atlanta. Read More »

Japan keeps giving me more reasons to be jealous. This video, presumably from some sort of bizarre Japanese television program, is great. The director was able to achieve over-the-top drama – thanks to dynamic cut-aways, zooms, and musical score – that is absolute, comic genius!

Ski Jumping Tires

See it for yourself. If it gets a little slow, stick with it – you owe it to yourself:

I’ve seen pictures of the new Chevy Camaro in quite a few car magazines over the past several months. This month I saw the car premier on the big screen in Transformers. This stunning shot is of the convertible concept car – which is due for production as a 2010 model (the coupe, as seen in the above-mentioned movie, goes on sale next year as a 2009 model).

If they offered it in my color:

Speaking of blue Camaros, I got a used tire for my Camaro this past weekend and have driven the car to work all week because the Blazer is having issues. In fact, it is having so many issues that I’ve decided to sell it. After fixing it up and getting new tires for it, I should be able to sell for a decent amount. It is worth enough to payback the repairs and (hopefully) have enough left over for a full set of tires for the Camaro plus another commuter car (about $2k for something old and small that gets decent gas mileage).

If anyone knows someone who wants or needs an SUV for about $4500, let me know!

You may recall that this site’s original header image was a little different. Until just recently it looked like this:

After getting some great pictures of ducks and geese at the park, I decided to replace the stylized , balloon-headed, cartoonish gosling (to the right of that great-looking couple) with a doctored photograph of a real gosling. My original re-design was a little different. Malin said that it looked creepy – like the goslings were our captors or were attacking us:

Since Malin didn’t like it, I decided to try again. This time, I came up with pretty much what we originally had. But we now have a better looking gosling and a cooler-looking font (I added some subtle touches to make it look a little more interesting). Voila!

It is Independence Day in the US today. Right smack in the middle of the week. We aren’t doing anything special today, so I figured I’d post some silliness to the blog. Feel free to let me know what you think of the new header (if anyone even noticed the difference before this post).

Japan seems to have the most awesome game shows ever. I’m jealous. The Price Is Right wasn’t bad, but this game show is awesome:

Japanese Tetris

I’m not really sure why they call it “Tetris” since it has nothing to do with the objective of that game. But there is no mistaking it – this game show rocks.

On a completely unrelated topic: I finally got my convertible fixed. It had problems in the differential and was making horrible, loud, grinding and whining noises. I took it in months ago to hear the bad news that it was a bad pinion bearing – which is much more expensive to fix than a wheel bearing. I had toyed with the idea of fixing it myself. But, without a lift, adequate experience, or even all of the necessary tools, I quickly abandoned that idea. According to the mechanic, after he took the differential cover off and inspected it, the pinion was bad.

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If you haven’t read the first installment of “Day at the Park”, go ahead and catch up first.

I had some more pictures to share of our day at the park. These pictures are a little better at capturing the number of ducks and geese that were all around us.

In the first pic you can see me holding a bag of bread and Will reaching out to me. “More bread!” Will said, wanting another piece of bread to toss to the ducks. The big, white one on the left (looks almost like a swan) was the jerk. It was starting all sorts of fights with the other birds to keep them away from the snack source (us).

There were also several selfish geese out that day, too. One of them was even snapping at its own goslings. Talk about poor parenting… Perhaps daddy bird was lashing out because he never gets to go out partying with his single friends anymore.
There were several cute goslings out that day. I may use this lovely portrait on the left as a logo for the BlueGosling.com landing page. The little guy seems very inquisitive, doesn’t he (or possibly she)?

Everyone participated in the feeding of the ducks. When they saw us walk into the field with a bag of bread, they swarmed us. At first there were only a handful of geese, a couple of goslings, and a pair of ducks. As soon as the rest of the field saw what we were throwing to the birds, they decided to attack!

My mom even got nipped by a particularly hungry goose that must have been trying to say, “Hey! You! Give me more bread!” I would have never guessed just how voracious these birds can get! You would think they were ravenous wolves and that we were tossing chunks of raw red meat.

And so concludes this chapter of “When Animals Attack.” Join us next time to see a carnivorous ostrich single-handedly incapacitate and then eat a full-grown cow.

Will’s aunt Kristie (my sister) was in Atlanta the other week. Unfortunately, her husband, uncle Cass, wasn’t able to make it – hopefully next time we’ll get to see them both.

Will had lots of fun hanging out with K. Several of the books he has were gifts from her, so she got to read them to him in person. Will learned the word “Lamborghini” the other day and kept insisting that K’s rental car was one. “Lamborghini, Lamborghini!” he would say – in a not-quite-accurate pronunciation that only a two-and-a-half year old child can intone.

Will also enjoyed playing in his swimsuit in a bucket full of water while his mother and his aunt Kristie watched and laughed. He seemed a little too big for the bucket to me, but that didn’t stop him from having a blast in it.

My parents came into town from Greenville, SC for the last day that K was here. That morning we ate at the Original Pancake House in Peachtree City, and then we all went to the park. It was a park near our house, right behind the Peachtree City Library. They have a big playground for kids, a large, grassy field for picnics. And it is all on Lake Kedron, so there is water around and there are many, many ducks (and geese) all demanding to be fed.

The playground is one of Will’s favorite places to play. They have a giant metal structure consisting of ramps and bridges and towers with slides coming down from every tower and various other things with which to play in each tower. They also have swings, and Will loves swinging in a swing. He also likes playing on slides. There is a playground near our house to which we walk regularly, and Will loves to climb on it and slide down the slides.

But we didn’t actually hit the slides and swings until after we walked in the field to play with the ducks.

We brought a bunch of old bread with us – specifically to feed to the ducks and geese. This made us quite popular: the sheer number of ducks and geese that surrounded us was quite a spectacle. There was much in-fighting amongst them, too – some a$$hole ducks and geese were starting fights to keep the others away from the food. We also saw a family of mallards by the lake, and they were very pretty.

So after beating back the army of marauding, malnourished mallards, we went to the playground so Will could swing in the swings and slide down the slides.

After the day at the park, we went home (to get out of the sweltering heat and humidity) and did nothing. There is nothing like hanging out in lazy-town on the weekends. Unfortunately, we all had to say goodbye to Kristie, Franny (what Will calls my mom), and Grandpa. But it was a fun weekend.

Will really digs cars. But lately he talks about them even more than ever. He likes to look at my car magazines and ask me what the cars are. After he learned the word “Lamborghini” he began applying it to everything. He thinks that my sister’s rental car (a Ford Focus sedan) is a Lamborghini. The other day we saw a ’69 Camaro RS in a parking lot, and Will kept exclaiming, “Muscle Car!”

I must confess that I’ve encouraged this interest a good bit. Sometimes we’ll sit at the computer, and I’ll search Wikipedia for cool cars and show Will the pictures. He really gets a kick out of seeing pictures…

So I’ve decided to post some of these pictures – all exceptionally nice rides. As you can see, I’m teaching Will to appreciate the classics.

Read More »

Our new virtual server at SliceHost is now fully operational!

Sorry for the long bout with technical difficulties. This site has been down for quite some time. But now we’re back in business with a solution that should keep us in business for a long, long time to come…

I’ll write more later. The last post, The End of May, has some info on what we’ve been up to while this site has been down.