Author: midder

My wittle wucy turned 4 on Friday. On 4/4 she turned 4. We decided to be good examples to Abigail and Grace, cementing the good attitudes they are sure to have toward education, by taking them out of school on Friday to go to the zoo. Julie was sure that Friday would be much less crowded than Saturday. Seeing the 10,000 or so elementary students changed her mind. Luckily they didn’t stay much past noon.The sun was intense (it is the desert after all), but we were somewhat prepared for it. What I certainly was not prepared for was shelling out $16 for 2 ICEEs and a frozen lemonade. So much for saving money by bringing our own lunches.

The girls really enjoyed the zoo. The highlights were the petting zoo and the monkey enclosure. I had never been through it before. You literally go inside this exhibit and are walking around with these spider monkeys. They have the walkway sort of chained off, but the zoo folks that are in there with you encourage you not to touch. Because the monkeys touch. And who knows what else they touch. In these photos the monkeys were probably less than 5 feet away. Luckily I didn’t get unmentionables thrown at me.

Lucy wouldn’t let us leave the zoo without experiencing that all-time favorite zoo exhibit, the carousel. Unfortunately I had spent $16 for hydration, so I only had money for 2 of them. Abigail was good to let Grace go in.

The petting zoo took me back a few years to when I would go there as a kid with my grade school classes. There was always some idiot kid who would try to ride, poke, push, or otherwise annoy the poor animals. And 25 or so years on proved that the tradition holds true. This one kid had a good time pulling tails. And when I say he pulled their tails, I mean he grasped the tails with his might, lifted them up as best he could, and they held on for dear life as the animal tried to run away. Julie decided she had had enough when the kid started choking the goat with his bare hands. Of course they didn’t react too well to Gwenyth approaching with a “brush” either:

They seemed to take a little better to Grace:

Somehow I was able to navigate traffic back to Arrowhead without falling asleep. Who knew that watching lions and tigers and bears (oh my!) could be so tiring? Maybe it was the lions and tigers and bears that I left the zoo with. Hmmm. We picked up the ice cream cake that Julie ordered from Baskin Robbins, they we went over to Fuddruckers for some good grease. Lucy really had a great time and seemed happy.

We spent the rest of the weekend painting a few walls. Twice. The first was a little too Big Bird. It sort of reminded me of a restaurant in Tijuana. So we toned it down a bit. I’m afraid that it was just the beginning of the projects to come. Lots to finish.

I’ve been putting in some insane hours lately. We just went live with a project early this morning. So if you have a new rebate with Apple or you are needing to check the status of your recent rebate with Apple, it will hit software that I wrote. Very exciting.

Somehow the advent of the nuclear summer keeps getting pushed back. I can’t remember a spring as nice as this one. I’d better stop talking about it before I jinx us all.

More pictures here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/midder/

We watch lots of HGTV at our house. Julie especially likes watching Divine Design with Candice Olson. She’s got some amazing designs. My favorite show is Color Correction, with that “designer” that used to be on Extreme Home Makeover, Constance Ramos. I enjoy it in much the same way that I would enjoy watching a train wreck. It’s so bad that you just can’t turn away, though at the same time you cringe every time she displays one of her designs. It helps me harken back to the time when I first heard Aaron Neville sing. I remember thinking, in all seriousness, “Oh that’s nice. They let a . . . boy sing.” (By the way, I worked on that sentence for quite a while. The truth is that you just can’t say that in any way that’s PC. So I just said it. Apologies.) So it is with Constance: “Oh that’s nice. They let a color blind, tacky designer loose on HGTV.”

She’s a little OCD about her “palette” that she makes the poor saps who signed up to be on the show use. It’s purple, light purple, dark purple, and then some God-awful bright orange/yellow color that she dreams up. She thinks that particle board is crown molding; spray paint is for glass knick-knacks; and “art” is putting some little thing in the middle of a board, putting it on the wall, and show-casing it with the tackiest bright brass accent lamp that you’ve ever seen. It is truly unbelievable. I am absolutely floored that this woman has a show on television. It certainly is all about her. Somehow she comes out with 37 different outfits in a 30 minute show. Unbelievable.

The first episode we saw is highlighted below. The first picture is the “before.”

Notice the standard screen door above, with the standard vertical blinds (what else are you going to do with those doors, really?). Below is (seriously) the “after” shot. I think I honestly heard the “carpenter” say something like: “And, if you ever want to go outside, you just pull this board off of the velcro that’s holding it up, and you just go outside!” !!!!?!?!? Yeah, and then you just throw the piece of board off to the side, ignore the cheesy rope lights hanging out, and make your way outside. But, hey, at least you’ve got “balance” on that wall and some “custom” art pieces. Unbelievable.

This is the before shot of the dining room.

Notice the “crown moulding,” the custom crap (there’s just no other word for it) wrapping the stairs, and the very hip, stylish wallpaper in this lovely “after” shot.

I leave you tonight with a close-up of the “custom” artwork on the wall. You should have seen the faces of these poor people when the big “reveal” happened. I hear the bank is demanding the loan be paid in full immediately because that house will never sell, even when the real estate market rebounds in 2060.