Reese Roper from Five Iron Frenzy, Brave Saint Saturn and Roper has a garage (or hallway) band: Trash Oven. Feel free to give it a listen, they have free MP3’s, but I will warn you they’re goofy [gasp, I’m sure his fans are surprised]. Satire isn’t one of Reese’s week points.
Monthly Archives: July 2006
Do You Google?
If you use Google, try googling with Blingo. They share part of their revenue from ad clicks with users by doing random giveaways. The results are the same as Google, but you can also win prizes. Its kind of like what you’re used to, but with free stuff. Check it out. And by prizes I mean money and iPods.
Make with the Pictures Already
Some folks have asked where the pictures of our new car are. And by some I mean me, I had promised them but haven’t delivered yet. The reason? Tomorrow the windows are being tinted and we’re having 22″ rims put on with low profile tires. Then the car will be as we negotiated, and on top of that? It’ll be clean 🙂 Apparently rain and sprinkles put spots on cars. Who knew?
I did also want to say how thoroughly impressed I am with my experience so far. I had to drive in the rain, break quickly, and drive carefully with sleeping passengers all in one day – and the CR-V handled fantastically. The rear seats recline as well as the front seats so that back seat passengers can catch a nap if needed (or sleep all night if we’re on a road trip from heck). I strongly recommend the CR-V so far and am quite impressed with everything in it with a few minor exceptions:
- The ‘three on the tree’ stick gets in the way of the fade and balance controls. Normally people don’t mess with those every day but I do because Abby may want to listen to “Popular Disney Princess Songs” but I don’t.
- The rear window latch requires that you close the window harder than you think you should or else the sensor flickers on and off over bumps on the dashboard. The window is surely closed, but the sensor still flickers. I’m going to ask them to look at this tomorrow.
- It has a tape player as well as a CD player.
With a short list like this, one of them being a minor, minor issue, one of them probably being a small repair job and one of them is me picking on a non-issue (the tape player), we’re really, really happy with our Honda.
Abby’s First Baseball Game
Tonight I took Abby to her first (professional) Baseball game. This is a big thing for me for several reasons. First, let me also point out that Grandpas Peterman and Forland were there (it was also Clair’s first pro game). Grandpa Peer will more than likely get roped into going to a professional baseball game with Abby whether he likes it or not 🙂 Second, it was with the San Fransisco Giants, which was my first professional baseball game that my dad took my brother and I to [they lost to the Cubs]. Third, my grandpa Martin never got to take my brother and I to a pro ball game because he died of a surprise aneurism before he got the chance [we were scheduled to go to one with him later on in the year he passed away]. My grandpa Martin was a Giants fan. So tonight was the culmination of 2/3rds of something I want to give to Abby: baseball games with grandpas [Grandpa Peer is the other third]. She’s a girl, so she probably won’t care like I do about baseball, but she’s also excited about things that are new, which this certainly was.
The Rockies really did a number on the Giants in the second inning. They scored 4. Later the Giants scored a total of 3
runs, but the Rockies kept ahead ending with 5. My granpa Martin would more than likely have been muttering at the idiot players dragging his team’s name in the mud 🙂 I think that the only thing he’d have joined in on was the booing for Barry Bonds. I haven’t heard a crowd make such a stink in person. When Bonds came up to the plate the crowd made it known that they didn’t appreciate his steroid fueled record.
Abby had fun and I bought her a purple foam finger that she enjoyed waving in the air yelling, “Go Rockies, Go!” The Rockies went, and I was glad that we had come 🙂
I Was Tired
I was tired last night and came home from attempted firework watching and brushed my teeth and just crashed into bed. Jessica, being a good mother actually was working on getting Abby to bed. She woke me up to come participate in parenthood. I sleepily stepped out of our room and participated in the nightly prayers and saying goodnight… like I normally do. Then I did something not normal. As a side effect of being so tired I brushed my teeth again. I was about halfway through the brushing when I realized that it was my second brushing. I finished because it seemed like a good thing to do and then went back to bed. I don’t know when Jessica got into bed…I was out again quickly.
Fourth of July
So to celebrate the Independence of the United States we did racks of ribs. Jessica and I don’t have a lot of experience in feeding large groups ribs so we bought 4 racks. That would be roughly the gross national income of a small country in ribs, but I guess I’m a generous host. Jessica had read that you should count on half a rack for each person eating. We had 8 people (7+2 youth + 1 Abby) so I got four. I think combined everyone ate about 1.3 racks of ribs. So we have left overs.
LOTS of leftovers. At least the local grocery store was open when my propane tank went dry on me 🙂 The ribs were good, but took about 5 hours to cook so it was a labor of love. And my love, Jessica, did most of that while I went to help my buddy Craig chop up wood from his tree that had blown into the neighbor’s yard during our funky storms of the last three days.
Speaking of storms we went out to watch fireworks in the car. In the rain. In a Toy ‘R’ Us parking lot. And the fireworks did not come… because rain and fire do not play well together, sort of like Pam Anderson and the 1700’s shakers [the shakers believed in celibacy]. One thing that was fun though is that we had Kailey & Trystan with Abby, Jess and I so we played the camping game. That’s the one where you say, “I’m going camping and I’m going to bring [insert item name] to start it and then each person has to add one item to the end of the list after reciting it from memory. One of the tricks to the game is that you can add complicated adjectives to the items so it can be the ‘ooey-gooey green sleeping bag’ instead of the ‘sleeping bag.’ Abby did surprisingly well. I, on the other hand, did poorly due to being quite tired.
I think fun was had by all and in the end I still have about 3 pounds of ribs to eat. Tonight? Abby’s first baseball game, if it doesn’t get rained out.
Royal Gorge Route
Today we went down to Colorado Springs. And kept going. Right on down to Highway 50 heading West. Had we kept going we’d have passed my old house in Carson City at some point in time later in the week. However, we stopped at the Royal Gorge. We went on the Royal Gorge train and enjoyed some lovely views of rock, water and sky. We also enjoyed some lovely views of bathrooms without toilet paper, employees not doing things in a logical fashion, and tourists doing dumb things (and no, we were not looking in the mirror).
I’ll write more about it tomorrow, as for now I’m exhausted and need to go to bed… Just had to avoid NOT writing something.
The Pitter Pattern
Tonight I pitted three cherries. Plus about 500. So in total I think I pitted 487 because some of the cherries didn’t cooperate with the pitter and had to be thrown into the fiery inferno-like hell of my garbage can. That’ll learn ’em. I did this in an effort to help Jessica who was having a moment of Domestic Wonderment the other day and purchased more cherries than I have probably eaten in my lifetime.
The upside is that they’ll be turning into pies. And pies are good. And they’ll be turning into jams, which are also good. And even more gooder is the fact that some of them will be turning (not pie cherries, but dark/black cherries) blackjack cherry ice cream!
Yum.
Sweet Maria’s
I love Coffee. But not in a three pots of coffee a day way. Instead I like it in small single cup batches. That way I can focus and concentrate while working as well as not shake so much. Sweet Maria’s is a fantastic site my friend Craig pointed me to.
It is truly awesome and has lots of good information on coffee, coffee roasting, coffee regions, and of course sells some of the stuff so you, too, can be a junky like Craig, Me and several other folks at church who have slowly been turning me to the dark side (though I’m not a huge fan of dark roasted coffee).