Two comic book stories in one week. I'm back baby! Bob, Agent of HYDRA may well be the best new comic book character in years. You can't make this stuff up. Well, obviously someone can since someone obviously did. First off this is obviously a humorous parody of Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. Nick is the ultimate Agent, in charge of everything and highly competent (you can already see where this is going). Some backstory is in order I believe. Hydra in comic books is an evil terrorist organization. Think organized Nazis. They all wear these hideous matching green and yellow uniforms and run around yelling "Hail Hydra!" a lot. Perfect bad guys since no one is going to complain if some former Nazis get beat up / killed.
Add to the mix Deadpool. Deadpool is known as the merc with a mouth. An ultra sarcastic / crazy mercenary character that has a healing factor (think Wolverine or Claire from Heroes). There's even talk of Deadpool getting a movie made (but at this point with the numbers that superhero flicks are pulling in, just about everyone this side of Razorback is getting a movie made). Deadpool's healing factor adversely affects his brain and he acts like a kid with ADD and he's a bit nuts. Makes for entertaining reading to be sure. Deadpool has a sidekick of sorts in a guy named Weasel who is tech savy and supplies Deadpool with weapons (he also acts as a straight man for most of the jokes). In an attempt to prove to the world he's the best mercenary Deadpool decides to shrink himself to six inches tall via Pym Particles (Pym was Ant Man, the particles are what allowed him to shrink, and yea, you just have to go with it sometimes) and then proceeds to take on some of the toughest mercs in the business. He wins and his reputation now secured, but not having thought his plan all the way through, he has no way of returning to normal size and is now trapped at six inches. Add to the mix that his clone (Agent X) has been captured by Hydra and and Deadpool and Weasel are off to rescue him. And that's when the fun really starts.
That would be foreshadowing folks. While Weasel is looking for a way in he locates Bob's blog. Deadpool decides his diminutive stature can be used to his advantage to easily slip inside and rides in on a supply truck.
After causing some mayhem and maiming, he finds a stooge to help him, but the guy is being definiant because after all, Deadpool is small, what can he do.
I think he's ready. Once Deadpool forces the guy to go where they need (and has him shooting other agents along the way), they start to bond and we find out the guy's name.
Here Deadpool gives us a good summary of what's going on by breaking the 4th wall. Deadpool as one would expect rescues Agent X and, luckily for him, in the process finds some Pym Particles and manages to return to normal size.
They commandeer a Hydra airship and make good with their escape.
Bob, Agent of HYDRA. Will he become Deadpool's new sidekick? Will he get his own limited series? Who knows.
Good grief. I came home tonight and was presented with two incredibly whiny children. Seemed every little thing was setting them off. Worse, they were setting each other off since one would say something that apparently morally outraged the other one to which their only response was to start whining. I'm guessing they need to catch up on some much needed sleep. At least I hope that's all it is. Otherwise an important project at work might just appear that will require me to 'work late' for the rest of the summer.
One thing that's struck me recently is that with the advent of TiVo and DVRs, I'm not sure kids will ever fully grasp the concept of scheduled television programming. Currently they don't look forward to when a program comes on (not that they watch enough TV to know schedules, but still). They just ask to watch something assuming the TiVo somehow has access to whatever they're interested in. I'm guessing it's not just my kids that are like this since I get the impression Loren is also like that from reading between the lines of one of Curt's recent posts. I remember someone (name withheld to protect the innocent) telling me they learned about time because they would always watch Sesame Street after their nap when they were little, and one day they took a longer than normal nap and missed watching Sesame Street and just like the concept of time is learned. I'm guessing my kids will never experience anything like that. I wonder if that means the kids will never really understand time and only know about time shifting. I can see it now, "I'm not late, I'm showing up when it's convenient for me." Speaking of the kids, I've been pretty negligent about taking pictures of them recently, so that's why you're stuck with the nature channel tonight.
This one is a picture of the buds on those trees I was talking about a while ago. The ones that Buddy (a.k.a. the horticulture / dog guy) identified as being "tulip poplar, Liriodendron tulipifera, not really a poplar at all, but more closely related to Magnolias". I managed to get a picture of one when we were in Vienna. But I had to pull down a branch to get the picture, hence it's a bit on the blurry side. I still think it would make for a good picture, just have to get one in better conditions. Doubt that it will be this year though, since the big rain we got a couple of nights ago took out most of the buds.
And which shot do people like better? The color or black and white? I think I'm partial to the color one myself, but I don't know why exactly.
So after school Catherine got an impromptu play date with some of the kids from school. The lot of them went to Frying Pan Farm Park. They have tractor rides and some animals and tries to recreate the atmosphere of a 1920's farm (at least that's what the blurb from the website says).
I've never been there, but it sounded somewhat interesting I suppose if you don't get to see that sort of thing normally. And they got to see a baby calf. If they had been there past 4:30, they could have milked a cow, but they had to leave to get Quinn who got out of school at 3.
I think Antoinette ended up coming back to our house after they picked up Quinn from school since I can see remnants of drawings the kids made while playing out back made.
Been a while since I've posted anything comic book related. I figure I 'm due. So about a week ago FOX and the Franklin Mint announced a promotional stunt for Fantastic Four 2: Rise of the Silver Surfer. Seems they were going to take a bunch of California quarters (40,000) and place an image of the Silver Surfer on them and release them into the wild. They said these would be legal tender, and if you were one of the first to find one of the quarters and entered a code or something from it on the website, you could get some free preview screening or something. Then the US Mint weighed in stating that they had nothing to do with the promotion, and that defacing US Currency for the purposes of advertising is against the law, and that contrary to what the Franklin Mint publicized, the coins were not in fact legal tender. Doesn't mean I wouldn't love to have one of these puppies. But since I rarely spend cash for anything anymore, I have little to no chance of coming by one. And I think it's the stupidest thing I've ever heard of to shell out more than $100 for a quarter than isn't even worth a quarter anymore (okay, okay, "one" of the stupidest things since I've heard of bunch of stupid things).
Today was all about catching up on sleep. Ginger slept in this morning, then once she was up I caught some shut eye. Then after lunch we had the kids take a nap since they had both missed out on a lot of sleep during the weekend.
After that we had them play outside in the sprinkler for a bit. And I gave them some water guns that they both enjoyed using as they tried to soak me. The only thing that saved me was the limited capacity in the tanks as we would constantly be having 'time outs' while I refilled their water supplies. We also did the mandatory Memorial Day weekend cookout thing and cooked some burgers out on the grill. So it was a pretty slow day compared to the rest of the weekend, but I think that was good since now everyone can be rested as we start what looks to be a short week.
I thought today was never going to end. And that was with me sleeping in until after 10 this morning. Ginger bought a new little outdoor blow up pool for the kids so we had to blow that up, but our air compressor was busted, so I had to go get a new one. Ginger and Catherine with to Michaels to check out their sale and Quinn and I went to Sears to get an air compressor. I've never seen as many floor salesman in Sears as were in there today. Guess they have it packed for the holiday. And they guy was really anxious to help me find an air compressor, to the point of pushing away other sales people, that is until he found out I wasn't looking for a $700 work area air compressor and just wanted a small one to blow up inflatables. Then he couldn't get away from me fast enough. Anyway, I got a compressor, but once I got home I discovered it only had a plug for a car lighter and not a standard wall jack. Since I got the only small version they had (they had a larger $90 one that seemed a bit much for what I wanted), I returned it and went to Target and got one. Only to get home and discover that one only had a car plug also (yea, I was just brain dead on that one).
So after one more trip I finally got one that can plug into the wall. Once I got home we blew up the mini pool. I'm not a fan of this new pool thing myself. Since we have a real pool in the neighborhood, and it just opened this weekend (that's right, the return of the weekend pool posts is just around the corner). Because of that I'm not seeing much of a need for this one. But it has a little water slide that you can put on it, and I think the slide portion is why Ginger got it.
After playing in the pool most of the day was gone, but Viva Vienna is back in town, and the kids had so much fun at that last year that we really wanted them to go again. Wow, I had to look at that post to find the link to it, looking at that post from last year I can see how when I was blogging then I put a lot of time into carefully arranging smaller pictures within the text. Man, I'm just phoning it in these days.
We had decided to not go to the fair during the day since it was in the high 90s here and the thought of the kids running around on rides in that heat just didn't sound like a good idea. So that's one of the reasons why we ended up going later in the day. The downside of that decision is that at night it's almost impossible to get any good pictures of the kids on the ride. I got a couple though, so I'm happy with that, but I feel like during the day I could have gotten a lot more. Speaking of taking photos, one guy at the fair kept putting his kid in front of me to take a picture. I had to actually ask him, "Do you want me to take a picture of your kid or something?" and then he explained that he had assumed that I worked for a magazine or newspaper based on my camera bag and size of my camera (I get the impression that the SLR is slowly going the way of the dodo).
The cost of the rides has increased. Last year tickets were fifty cents apiece, and it was four ticket per ride. This year the ticket price went up to one dollar per ticket, and most rides were now three tickets. So it's still a money sinkhole, but we had more or less planned to limit the amount of time we were there, and by going late there really wasn't an option of staying much longer.
The 'roller coaster' was once again a favorite of both kids being the only ride deemed worthy of a repeat. After the second roller coaster we informed they kids they had two rides left before going home, and then Quinn proceeded to scare me half to death on one of his last rides. It was this silly ride were the kids sit in a SUV / Jeep type vehicle on an elevated platform (maybe two feet off the ground) that just goes around and around. I believe there's a working horn in the cars also, but that's really not relevant other than to give some info on why any kid would want to get on this ride (I still really don't know, but I've given up trying to understand it). Anyway, Quinn couldn't pick which car he wanted (and since it was later in the evening, the rides weren't packed so there were a couple of empty cars). So he switched cars a couple of times. Then the ride started while he was standing on the platform running around to get to another car. Now the rides going around and Quinn's there running around the edge. I tried yelling to the guy in charge of the ride, but by the time I got his attention Quinn had made it to the next car and dove into it. I had just had these visions of him falling off the platform while it was moving and cracking his head open, so I'm glad that didn't happen. After it all this went down the guy next to me said "Can you believe that kid? He must have switched cars like three times before the ride started." Obviously he didn't know Quinn was with me, and I didn't bother telling him at that point and just replied with "Kids will be kids I guess."
And what kind of post would this be unless I included some shots I just took for fun.
The Ginger and the kids met up with Quinn's best friend Perry and his brother and Mom for a bowling playdate today. I heard all total they bowled 19 games. Ginger, Cece (Perry's Mom) and Drew (Perry's younger brother) only bowled one game each. That means Quinn, Perry and Catherine bowled 16 games between them (I'm pretty sure that extra game in there was Quinn). Evidently Quinn worked on his form throughout the day. Ginger took some mini videos and you could see him improving throughout the videos. He ended up doing really good by the end. He even got to the point where he could run up and release the bowl very much like you're suppose to instead of doing his normal shot put throw. I threw together a couple of clips from the ones Ginger took above. My little guy is growing up. Catherine meanwhile stopped using the ramp for throwing the ball and started doing a granny roll. And that's really good progress for her to move away from the ramp since she had been depending on that a lot the last couple of times we had gone. Won't be long now till they're giving me a run for my money.
Not much to report today. Ginger took this picture of Catherine sporting a NASCAR shirt. Guess I should have seen this coming. I can't believe the shirt is pink though. I mean, it's NASCAR, shouldn't that be a 'manly' color. But pink? Really? In case you're not 'in the know', number nine is driver Kasey Kahne. Kind of a good looking guy, so I guess I could see how the ladies would like this particular driver. A quick google search for NASCAR drivers and female fans reveals an article that says this about Kasey: "a better-than-average driver who is anything but average when it comes to looks."
On the Quinn front one of the things he got for his birthday were some Lego race cars. This one he put together all buy himself with no help from anyone else. He sat there and followed the instructions and put the whole thing together stickers and all. I think he did pretty good. I know, this may not seem like a huge accomplishment, but for him it's a pretty big deal since he tends to give up on stuff pretty quickly at times. So this should be a big boost to his self confidence I would hope. Quinn's also been doing really good reading entry level books. Still takes him a while sometimes for words he hasn't seen before, but I'm very pleased with the progress he's making.
When I got home these two guys were playing out back. They were very skittish though, so I could only take pictures from really far away with the zoom. Which with the sun going down and not using the flash it pushed the shutter speed to the point where things started getting a bit blurry. I probably should have tried shutter priority mode, but I was just trying to get the shot before they ran off (which they did shortly after I got the picture). Luckily neither of these were the rabbit Curt referred to in the comments the other day.
And if only I knew someone who knew a thing or two about horticulture. Then they could answer this question I have. There are these trees in our backyard, and I can see these blooms in the tree. But all of the blooms are significantly off the ground (at least two stories most of the time). I haven't been able to locate any tree with these blooms closer to the ground. It's been speculated the bloom placement may have something to do with access to sunlight, but at the edge of the tree line even those trees that have significant access to sunlight all down the side of the tree only have these blooms way up in the tree. So why exactly is that? I really wanted to get a picture inside one of those things, because they look darned cool from what I can see of them from far away.
Tonight Quinn was very excited. It was the first night where he got to wear the Superman pajamas he got for his birthday. And here we were trying to get him to calm down and get ready for bed and the next thing we know he's jumping off the bed and beating me up (because I was "the mean guy").
In other news, Catherine had an appointment with the dermatologist today. We've got about a billion new rules that we need to follow with her and no fewer than three different types of medicine (each for a different part of her body). We're hoping this helps get her eczema under control, but who knows.
Catherine helped Ginger make blueberry muffins today. Problem was instead of simply folding the berries into the batter Catherine mixed them in. And mixed, and mixed, and mixed. So what we got were blue blueberry muffins (now with even more blue). I'm sure the berries are still in there somewhere, it's just they're evenly distributed throughout the muffins now. At least the sugar crumb stuff on top isn't blue also.
Catherine wore a couple of really cute outfits today. But since her eczema is so bad recently none full body shots look too good (and yes, I realize I could try and airbrush it out, but then it's not a real picture of Catherine, plus, that's like work). I also tried recreating that shot of Quinn from yesterday, but no luck on that front either. I got the one shot up above that I think is marginal at best, but that was it.
And we watched what was very likely the series finale of Veronica Mars tonight. It was a two hour finale. Which is a fancy way of saying that played two completely independent one hour episodes back to back. Unfortunately they thought the series might be returning and ended with a very minor cliffhanger. But the network in their infinite wisdom decided that the reality TV show the Search for the Next Pussycat Doll was able to get more viewers per dollar. Notice I didn't say more viewers, just that the cost ratio aspect is lower for Pussycats (probably because it doesn't look like it costs anything at all to make that show). Veronica Mars was a fun ride while it lasted. Season one was probably one of the best seasons of television I've seen (I would put it on par with the good years of Buffy and Angel). The first season was easily the best of the three and each subsequent season was slightly inferior to the previous one. I blame a lot of that on the fact that in the third season they never got a full season pick up and were prevented from doing one season long story arc (they compensated by having mini arcs to fill out the additional episodes as they were ordered). That's still not saying any of the seasons were bad per se, and they were still better than a lot of the other crap I watched on television (I'm looking at you BSG season 3). So now the search begins to find what show if any will replace Veronica Mars next year. Gonna be tough though since Veronica was one of those rare shows that both Ginger and I looked forward to watching. New Amsterdam looks potentially promising since it appears to have aspects I think we both might like.
The above picture is of Catherine and one of her Barbie dolls. The reason for this photo op was because this was the first time Catherine redid the hair on one of the dolls all by herself. I've been told by Ginger that this is a big deal.
And as I write this, the time is 11:30 pm (ish) and Ginger and I are making banana bread. And no, that's not a euphemism in case you're wondering (although it sounds like it should be). The reason for this is Ginger is the homeroom mother for Quinn's class at school. Tonight she just found out next week at school is Teacher Appreciation week. But wait, you say that next week isn't actually Teacher Appreciation week? That it was actually a couple weeks ago? Well, that's true. But while Teacher's Appreciation week was a couple weeks ago, since the time was conflicting with impending Mother's Day, they decided to move the time of celebrating it to a later date. Not sure when someone decided it would be this week that it was going to be celebrated, but no one bothered to inform Ginger of this event and she only found out by getting an email from the homeroom mother in Catherine's class. So because part of Ginger's responsibilities is to provide breakfast for the teachers during the week of Teacher's Appreciation Week that means we're baking some bread right now (still not a euphemism).
It's now after midnight. Here's where it gets good. Ginger has long since gone to bed and I'm now solely in charge of taking it out of the oven. The decision of whether it was cooked enough has been left up to me and my cooking abilities (or lack thereof). So, in light of that, I would like to go ahead and apologize to Quinn's teachers in advance. You think I'm joking, but I already managed to get a first degree burn just by testing the bread to see if it was done. I ended up accidentally touching one of the heating rods and now I know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a hot poker from Jack Bauer (even if only ever so briefly).
Now that it's closing in on 1 AM, I went ahead and snapped a picture of the final product. Must... get... some... sleeZzzzzzzzz.....
Two comic book stories in one week. I'm back baby! Bob, Agent of HYDRA may well be the best new comic book character in years. You can't make this stuff up. Well, obviously someone can since someone obviously did. First off this is obviously a humorous parody of Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. Nick is the ultimate Agent, in charge of everything and highly competent (you can already see where this is going). Some backstory is in order I believe. Hydra in comic books is an evil terrorist organization. Think organized Nazis. They all wear these hideous matching green and yellow uniforms and run around yelling "Hail Hydra!" a lot. Perfect bad guys since no one is going to complain if some former Nazis get beat up / killed.
Add to the mix Deadpool. Deadpool is known as the merc with a mouth. An ultra sarcastic / crazy mercenary character that has a healing factor (think Wolverine or Claire from Heroes). There's even talk of Deadpool getting a movie made (but at this point with the numbers that superhero flicks are pulling in, just about everyone this side of Razorback is getting a movie made). Deadpool's healing factor adversely affects his brain and he acts like a kid with ADD and he's a bit nuts. Makes for entertaining reading to be sure. Deadpool has a sidekick of sorts in a guy named Weasel who is tech savy and supplies Deadpool with weapons (he also acts as a straight man for most of the jokes). In an attempt to prove to the world he's the best mercenary Deadpool decides to shrink himself to six inches tall via Pym Particles (Pym was Ant Man, the particles are what allowed him to shrink, and yea, you just have to go with it sometimes) and then proceeds to take on some of the toughest mercs in the business. He wins and his reputation now secured, but not having thought his plan all the way through, he has no way of returning to normal size and is now trapped at six inches. Add to the mix that his clone (Agent X) has been captured by Hydra and and Deadpool and Weasel are off to rescue him. And that's when the fun really starts.
