Category: Life in general

So I’m pretty proud of my garden. It’s looking like it will turn into quite the business venture for us. Some kids have lemonade stands, sell sno-cones, whatever. I’m going to have Abigail and Grace set up shop out front and start selling tomatoes. These things are good. The cherry tomatoes are like eating candy. Even Lucy was popping them and wanting more. Today I had my first sandwich with the homegrown tomatoes. Very yummy. I’m a little concerned about the enthusiasm of the pumpkins. I wasn’t expecting them to take over the whole side of the house. I am going to have to pull back some more of the rock and make some more room for them. Once it gets to be 110, they may wilt on that granite and next to the wall.

In other news, I’m officially boycotting US Airways for the rest of my life. In the span of 10 days, they’ve canceled 2 flights on us. I had the displeasure of sleeping in the Philadelphia airport a few weeks ago. They finally decided to cancel my 8:40pm flight at 2:30 the next morning. They compensated me with a $10 meal voucher (!??!) and a flight back home at 10am. But I guess I was one of the lucky ones. A husband and wife tandem that was sitting next to me got split up. One was routed through DC on her way back and the other directly to Phoenix. So the husband was going to have to wait for his wife for 4 hours once he got back to Phoenix.

The other canceled flight was Julie and Gwenyth on Tuesday. They left me to go up and see Julie’s parents. Like clockwork, they canceled her 1:50pm flight at 3. They did get her on another flight around 5, so that was good. Luckily it didn’t take too much haggling to get Gwenyth a seat by her mother. The geniuses at US Airways assigned them seats at separate ends of the airplane.

So I got all tough on US Airways and told them I would be closing my (un)substantial credit accounts I have with them (through Bank of America). I’m sure they’ll miss all of my business.

In other news, like I mentioned, Julie is up in Utah with her parents. It sounds like there’s been lots of sleeping going on, which is always a good thing. Gwenyth thinks she owns the joint. There’s much less sleeping here while Julie is away. I just wallow in my patheticness without my wife.

Speaking of Gwenyth, she can now swim and thinks she’s really hot stuff. She didn’t really enjoy it at first (or in the middle!), but she’s done really well. She always wants to go “jumping,” which means jump in the pool and “kick, kick, kick!” back to the side. She’s a certifiable nut. Her high hopes at the beginning:

Quickly faded to blood-curdling screams and glares of “daddy, why are you letting this happen?!?”:

After a few of these:

she came out on top and was happy as ever:

Abigail and Grace had a performance the other night at school. They both did really well. Abigail has quite the voice and really learned to project during her short time at her theatre group in Pleasant Grove. Grace sang a solo. Yes, that means that Grace was all by herself on the stage. Well, her microphone was with her. She did awesome. I have some video that I’ll try and put up soon. I’ve also got some of Chuck jumping off the diving board.

Jana was kind enough to take Lucy for the week so that I would have time to blog . . . errr . . . I mean . . . . work this week. I think she’s taken over that household as well. Jana said that Lucy insists that her mother is on every plane that flies overhead. Hopefully by today she understands that Julie and Chuck have landed safely at their destination. Of course maybe she knew they were flying US Airways, so there were really no guarantees that they would get there before Memorial Day.

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