Summertime.... and the living is easy

June has been a quiet month for us. It started off with my niece's wedding (sort of -- she's been married for a year already and so the wedding ceremony was completely superfluous, but it was fun anyway) and has kind of meandered along. I turned 44 on June 3 and it wasn't a great birthday, but I knew that going in. Every seven years since I was 16 I've had bad birthdays, and this year was it. I spent the day at home on the computer, which was fun, but what made it suck was that 1) I got my period, and 2) I had to have the car repaired to the tune of $362. On the plus side, I'm good now until I turn 51.

Despite a bang-up start to the month, we haven't done much. We've gone swimming in the lake. We've gone to see a lot of movies. We've had several barbecues. Other than that... not much.

The summer movies have been a mixed bag this year. Iron Man was awesome, as expected. It's my second favorite comic book movie ever, taking X-Men 2's spot (but not ousting Spider-Man 2 as the best comic book movie ever). Konkles of Nonya was great, thanks to acting powerhouse Peter Dinklage and a sexy hott Caspian. Speed Racer was dumb and flashy. Indiana Jones made me want to commit ritual seppuku because of the insanely stupid and unnecessary relationship with Karen Allen and the cutesy family angle. We've also seen The Happening, which has turned out to be the worst movie so far -- so bad it's good. Marky Mark has used up a huge chunk of Boogie Nights goodwill by not only being in this turdfest but also by his hilariously bad acting (to be fair, he didn't have much to work with -- the dialog was laughable). We also saw Wanted, and that was okay. Kinda dumb. Next up is Hancock and then Hellboy.

I sort of decided not to do One Local Summer this year. I had a lot of fun with it last year, but since I'm only home on the weekends I'm limited to only two nights in which to produce a local dinner. To tell you the truth, I've been feeling extraordinarily lazy (even lazier than usual) and half of the time I've been like, "Oh, let's just Five Guys it up tonight." So, unless Five Guys counts as local food, I'm afraid I have to bail on OLS this year.

This weekend is July 4th, so expect a forthcoming post in which we have an Americue, shoot off fireworks, and laugh at Fat Ringo.

Grilling Season has officially started!

We had plans yesterday to take Amy to The Franklin Institute for a Star Wars exhibit but we had car problems and had to cancel. We'll go next weekend but in the meantime we were stuck at home doing nothing. Nothing. :(

Fortunately, it was a very nice day so it was the perfect opportunity to lug out the picnic table and grill from out the garage for the start of Endless Barbecue '08!

It wasn't a major to do or anything. Just pork chops and bratwurst but still it was a good beginning for The Summer of Meats 2008.





The only thing missing is cornbread but that's only we didn't really plan ahead. Like all of life's funnest fun things, this was an impromptu dinner.

It was over 60° today.

It will be over 60° tomorrow. So much for all those sweaters and long sleeve shirts I got for Christmas.

Best Christmas ever!

Thank you, Nintendo Wii. And you too, Jesus!

We didn't really give the kids much this year but what we did get them was all kinds of AWESOME!! The big gift this year was the Wii and we all love it. We've had it since September and the girls knew we had it but it was supposed to be for Christmas. We've all been itching to get at it. So much so that Faith had to keep the Wii locked up at work for fear that we'd open it up early.

We didn't have the girls until around dinner time on Christmas day. Faith spent most of the day cleaning up the place and wrapping presents. I couldn't wait for the girls to get here. I kept asking for the time. Again and again. When they did get here, it was to the presents immediately. Besides the Wii, the girls got a few smaller presents, a few crappy dollar store presents filled with Chinese lead, and trinkety things and candy for their stockings. Anna got some Beatles things mostly and the Dead Silence dvd. Amy got a sweet Soundwave t-shirt because she's a massive dork and there's no Transformer cooler than Soundwave. She also got a Darth Vader mug. And she's got one more gift coming because Overstock did not ship it on time, those lying buttbags. I got a matching Storm Trooper mug, a blue sweater, a pair of pyjama pants, and a pair of Levis. The girls got Faith a pair of jeans, Superbad, and Jack of the Fables: Volume Two. I got Faith two volumes of Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip from Drawn & Quarterly which look fantastic. D&Q really did a great job on these. For the Wii, Anna got Resident Evil 4 and Amy got Medal of Honor: Heroes 2. It really was one of the better Christmas days we've had because we planned it out ahead of time which we never did before. Quality won over quantity and it felt great!


I iz gard kat. No op3n til Crizmus dai!!

We can be heroes too!

Anna and her bestest friend in the whole wide world.

Christmas Lights! Wow!

This past weekend we hung up our Christmas lights (and by "we" I mean "Onil and Amy"). When Onil was in NYC last week he went to the Phil-Am store in Queens and found an inexpensive parol, so he got one for us. We have a larger, more expensive parol that we hang inside, but we figured that for $15 we could hang this one outside. Here are our pictures:

As usual, the Littlest Lord of All contributed NOTHING to the procedure other than to sit on the stepladder and play her guitar for the cars passing by. Hmmm... I seem to remember this happening before....
















Here she is, pretending like she's actually working:




This is a good shot of the parol, by the way:




I was upstairs folding laundry while this was going on, and I came out and saw the Little Lord playing guitar for the passing cars, so I shook my booty like she was a rock star or something. Amy eventually joined in. Please ignore my glasses and lack of make-up. I usually try to look better than this. NOTE: Torrk, if you take any of these pictures and do rude stuff to them I will totally kill you.








At one poin during my dance a car pulled over to laugh and watch. Good times!




And here's what our house looks like, all lit up! Yay!!!





The one with Amy is all fuzzy because we suck at taking night pictures but you get the idea.

Tanksgibben 2007

We had our Thanksgiving day here, just the six of us (four humans, a cat and a hamster) and we had loads of fun! We had a turkey dinner (of course), made funny hats, had a MST3k Turkey Day Marathon, and went out to a crappy movie (Beowulf, and we wore our funny hats to the movie theater). Awesome! Here are some pictures.



Here's our turkey! I love that they misspelled my last name here. Frankly, I like the way they spelled it more than the real spelling. We got a local free-range turkey from Meadow Run Farms in Lititz. It was very tasty -- I think that even thought it was more than twice the price of a store-bought turkey we'll continue to get one every year.







Here are some pictures of Onil, Anna and Amy making the hats. Anna made mine for me (and she made it too big so I had to adjust it). I was a boy pilgrim, Amy was a girl pilgrim, Onil was an Indian and Anna was the turkey. They also made shirts.





















Time for the food!















Hope you all had a great Thanksgiving! Happy Holidays from all of us!

Apple Picking 07

Well! It's been a long time since any of us have updated! One Local Summer is done, and I bailed on the last meal. Onil's sister and her family came down to visit us for Labor Day and there was too much going on to make sure everything we ate was locally produced. We did have a Cowboy BBQ (much like our Luau BBQ) and most of what we ate was local anyway. We'll do pictures of that whenever we get through everything -- between the Cowboy BBQ, Knoebels, boat racing, and just general sitting around, we took like a billion pictures that weekend. It's going to be a lot to go through, is what I'm saying.

This past weekend, though, we went apple picking. We wound up with 37½ pounds of apples. What are we going to do with all of those apples? Make 37½ awesome pounds of apple sauce, that's what. And maybe a pie or two. We went to Cherry Hill Orchards, south of Lancaster city. Here are our pictures:





Onil and Anna, waiting for the fun to start:



Faith and Amy, walking around and picking apples:



Anna and Onil wanted me to do a perspective shot:



They also wanted to get some shots of apples in mid-flight, so they chucked apples up in the air and took like a billion pictures:



Onil Appleseed:



I'm not sure why, but there was a corn field in between two rows of trees...



So someone (probably Onil) got the bright idea that we should lay down and look like we got run over like the corn.



Children of the Corn:



We always get a picture of Amy crying by signs telling you that you're not allowed to do stuff. Here's the latest in a series. (We should make a photo album just of pictures of Amy crying at signs.)



And then we have Amy getting up and looking like she's farting:



This is the sign you see when you're leaving. Bye until next year, Cherry Hill Orchards!