Let's do a little pimping tonight. Check out some of my cousin Will's recent airbrush work. If you've been reading this blog with any regularity I think you can see why I liked this one. Remember Marz Artistry for all your airbrushing needs. Not exactly sure what's up with the cross in the star on his chest though. That seems like someone's taking some artistic license.
Quinn had a dentist appointment today. Turns out he has a small cavity in one of his teeth. He got the lecture from the doctor about how he had to do a better job of brushing and should be using a real spitting / fluoride tooth paste (versus the training toothpaste he would rather use), because if it got much worse he would have to get a filling. I think the plan is they hope regular brushing will retard the growth enough to the point where the tooth will fall out before it becomes a larger issue.
And Ginger's evidently on the planning commission for the school's Fall Fair again this year. What's that? Don't remember it from last year? Luckily I got your hook up right here. The good news is that since she was involved last year she knows what has to be done and has a better handle on it this year (at least I think so, she'll still probably going into full fledge panic mode about a week or two before the actual Fair).
Tonight's picture is actually from last night. This not so itsy bitsy spider decided to create a home under our mailbox. The rain came down pretty hard tonight, so I'm fairly certain that it ended up washing the spider out. Hopefully tomorrow the sun will come out and dry up all the rain and maybe the spider will come out again.
I wanted to rant about the upcoming Justice League movie and the casting of Jessica Biel as Wonder Woman and how that seems like a bad choice. I mean nothing I've seen her in has proven to me that she can act that well, and isn't Wonder suppose to be, I don't know, tall or something. Although I believe she is considered to be something of a hottie by the general public so they may get some guys seeing the film just to see her in the spandex costume.
If that was the only thing wrong with the upcoming film, I might not be worried. See, I could go on about how the film has been fast tracked for two reasons: to use it as a launching vehicle for other movies (the stalled Wonder Woman movie and a Flash movie), and the other reason is because there's possibly going to be a guild strike in the industry next May and they want to finish it before then because they're worried everything will just grind to halt if there's a strike. So to finish before the stike, they need to start filming in February.
And I could go on about how the movie started out as a live action film, then went to 2D Animation, then 3D CGI using motion capture (like The Polar Express and the upcoming Beowulf movie) and now it's back to live action. And I could also mention how they decided to only have five of the big seven heroes: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash and Aquaman. And I could mention how Green Lantern has been listed as a possibility for the film, but the last of the big seven, the green man from Mars (J'onn J'onzz a.k.a. Martian Manhunter) is getting no love and receives the shaft yet again! Seriously, the guy can't catch a break. I mean they're going to use Aquaman, and not J'onn. I mean, Aquaman? Really? The cast seems more like Super Friends than the Justice League at this point.
And I was going to mention how incredibly insane it would be to recast Batman and Superman as people other than Christian Bale and Brandon Routh since they've just recently restarted those franchises and people recognize them in those roles (I suppose you could argue that as bad as Superman Returns was it wouldn't be that big of a deal recasting him, but Bale rocked as Batman). I could mention all those things and how is seems this film is being completely rushed and will probably be complete crap. But to be honest, it all seems pretty obvious in retrospect, so I don't suppose there's any point in mentioning any of that.
And since that means I have nothing to rant about, I'll just throw up another picture (up above) from this past weekend.
TV premiere week continues as tonight I manage to watch Monday night's debut of Journeyman, tonight's season premiere of Bones, Monday night's season premiere of Heroes, the penultimate chapter of this season's Eureka and finally to cleanse the palate a dash of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. All of which means I didn't get to my Netflix movie that arrived tonight, the recently released Babylon 5: Lost Tales.
And since some people might want to hear something about kids, I'll let you know that Quinn is trying his best to get into serious trouble. He's recently picked up some bad habits in regards to talking back and responding to his parental units. I've been letting some of it slide because I'm pretty sure he doesn't mean for it to sound as rude as it does and it has just become a habit for him now. Recently though if you say anything to him that he disagrees with he'll respond with "Yeah right." And he's even got the inflection down pat that makes it sound disbelieving. Not sure where he picked this one up. I'm hoping it wasn't me, but who knows.
His other response is similar in that if you tell him to do something he doesn't really want to do he'll respond with "Come on!" Maybe a quarter of the time he uses that phrase he'll also throw in a "You can't be serious" after it. We think he might have picked this one up from school since when Ginger and Catherine were at the playground at school today waiting for Quinn to finish classes they heard one of the kids that was in Quinn's class last year yelling "Come on!" a lot. Ginger says Catherine even thought it was Quinn because of the phrase being used and she had to explain to her that it was some other kid.
The third phrase we've heard a lot is when he gets shocked by something. Then it's "Oh my gosh!" Sometimes it feels like we're listening to Janice from Friends though since he'll stagger it and make it "Oh... My... Gosh!" So we're now in the mode of trying to deprogram him from saying these things. Which seems to have the opposite effect and seems to making him say the phrases even more than he was before.
Now that's not to say Catherine's the perfect angel. She has her faults too, but for right now talking back isn't a big one. Her biggest thing now is "I don't want to!" when you tell her to do something, but at her age I think that's to be expected. She also plays the fake crying card way more than she should. Since Ginger and I both know that's what she's doing, it's not affording her any real benefit at the current time, so we're hoping she just stops that on her own soon.
The picture up top is another from me wandering around the school this past weekend while Quinn was attending his tennis lesson. I've been trying to play around with stuff in Gimp trying to get more comfortable with making adjustments to the photos. So far I've just played around with tones and contrast. Photo manipulation at this point is far from second nature and I find myself struggling to find the presentation of the image that I like or even to accomplish what from reading tutorials and such seem to be easy tasks. Hopefully it's something that comes with practice. I suppose it could that the photos I'm taking just aren't good to begin with and no amount of playing around in Gimp can save them.
Woo hoo! Tonight Heroes returns to the airwaves with the start of season two. I won't mention anything about tonight's episode since I don't want to spoil anything for anyone that might not have finished watching season one yet (you know who you are). And even more importantly, I didn't actually watch it. You see, John was in town and came over for a quick visit tonight. I didn't know he was going to be in town since he didn't bother mentioning it to me until 8 PM tonight. So once we found out he was in town we invited him over. He said he was in the mood for a comedy, so we watched the premiere of How I Met Your Mother which he had never seen before (shame on him, it's one of the few really good comedies left on TV these days). I think he liked it, but based on his comments about how little TV he actually watches these days (except for a nightly guilty pleasure) I got the impression that even though he found it amusing it wasn't going to make the list of shows he would be watching in the future. We started watching Heroes, but since he's never seen any of season one, it didn't seem fair to force him to watch it without knowing what was going on with the characters.
This week seems to be the floodgate of television premieres. My plan to watch the first episode or so of a couple of the new shows to see if they have any chance of garnering my interest. Last week's Back To You with Kelsey Grammar turned out to be much better than I would have guessed considering it's a sitcom on FOX, so for at least a week or two that one will maintain a season pass on the TiVo. We watched about 10 minutes of Chuck tonight also. Considering the show is an hour long and we watched an hour, I think that says it all. I may go back and finish watching that first episode at some point to see if it becomes salvageable at all, but it didn't look good from that first 10 minutes.
So instead I forced him to try out the Wii. He tried bowling and baseball. He just barely broke 100 on bowling finishing with 103 only because he managed to get a strike in the 10th frame. And in baseball he managed to hold off the computer playing at the worst skill level to finish with a tie game (could have been worse, he could have lost). It's a shame too, because he started out with a couple people on base in the first inning but then left them stranded there.
The image up top was one of the ones I got when I was wondering around the school while Quinn was in his tennis lesson this past weekend.
Spent some time this afternoon trying to get the weather strip on the door again. Had the kids help me this time too. We had a bit of trouble with caulking the strip on the door. The tube of caulk I had at some point ripped, so the top half of the tube was pretty solid. I cut the entire tube apart and we used the caulk from the bottom and manually placed it on the door before adding the metal strip. Catherine really liked this activity (we might as well have been playing with play dough as far as she was concerned). Catherine then helped with the drilling on the strip right up until the drill ran out of juice.
At this point I just want a drill that's not rechargeable, one I can just plug in somewhere, I'm tired of it always either being out of juice when I need it or having to stop because it runs out. Luckily Quinn took over after that using his manual screw driver. Once we got the strip on and added the bumper bottom (and cut it I might add so there's no hope of returning it) we found out the door wouldn't close with it on.
Guess I shouldn't be surprised, it adds about a quarter inch as you can see from the picture of Quinn cutting it. So we really need to get something similar to what was on the door previous, a sweep of some type. Even though after going by Home Depot and Sears Hardware I've seen nothing that looks like what was on the door before. Guess my last best hope is going to be Lowes, and just like Babylon 5, it will probably fail ("Last Best Hope", anyone? Bueller? Bueller? *sigh*). Not sure what to do if I can't find something at Lowes. I really don't want to replace the floor piece also. Maybe we could just buy a new house that doesn't have this problem. Or maybe I could stop pretending I know what I'm doing when it comes to these at home construction projects.
After we were finishing up with the door, I had to reign Quinn in a bit. He wanted to continue using his drill and saw on various parts of the deck. I told him he couldn't do that. And this idea of him drilling holes and sawing up the deck caught me so off guard that after I told him no, when he asked "Why not?" the only thing I could come up with was "Well... Because!" So much for thinking fast on my feet.
We had light rain (sprinkles really) throughout the morning. We actually thought with it threatening to rain that Quinn's tennis lesson might be canceled. But since we have no way of knowing whether the class is canceled or not, I drove Quinn up to the school. I'm thinking a lot of other people also thought it might be canceled since there were only about seven kids this morning where last week there seemed to be like fifteen kids in the class.
Since it didn't rain, it actually ended up being pretty hot today. It was about 87 during Quinn's tennis lesson. At one point the instructor was working one on one with the kids she had the others go up against the fence in the back where it was somewhat shaded (last thing I suspect she needs is a lawsuit if one of the kids overheats and passes out or something). Quinn seems to be doing fine in the class. I don't have any real good way to judge whether he's picking it up though. The instructor afterwards told me his biggest issue is that he doesn't pivot on his swing though. She also semi scolded me for playing some tennis with Quinn after the lesson, telling me it was too hot and that he shouldn't be playing in this heat. I assured her that we were only going to be playing for about ten minutes, but that didn't seem to change her opinion.
Before Quinn's tennis lesson this morning both the kids decorated their shirts again. They seem to enjoy the activity, and all it takes is putting the shirt through the wash and they get do it again. The picture above is what Catherine modeling her finished product. I didn't get a picture of Quinn's today since he didn't wear it very long (we decided he shouldn't wear it to tennis in case it rained since the colors are washable).
Catherine decided she didn't want to go with me to Quinn's tennis lesson today. So she stayed home and made cupcakes with Ginger. That's a good news / bad news scenario, because I would have loved to have the chance to take some more pictures of her, but at the same time I do like cupcakes. Mmmmm... Cupcakes...
This afternoon Ginger was looking for the Tech football game on TV but we never found it. I guess playing William & Mary isn't a big enough game to justify TV coverage (considering Tech won 44 to 3, I suppose I can understand that logic). Quinn did watch some other college game though, which has now made him want to play football (shortest... attention span... evar...). Good thing we're doing tennis lesson since he's now decided he wants to play football. Or baseball, baseball also seems to be a perennial favorite of his.
I have to admit, when we were out tossing around the football I was pretty impressed at how well he was doing catching it. Now admittedly it is only a Nerf football, but considering how many times he used to drop it in the past, he was doing fantastic today with keeping his hands in the right place and everything. He would even jump and catch it sometimes. He would have to jump because I'm apparently not that good at throwing it. Which is another thing that surprised me. When he was throwing it it had a perfect spiral to it. Makes me wonder if he would be able to do that well with a real football versus this Nerf thing.
So I watched Donnie Darko last night. I kept seeing it show up on message boards and various other places where people would say how good it was. I had never heard of the movie so I figured I would give it a shot. It's no big surprise that I had never heard of it since looking it up on Box Office Mojo reveals it made under a million dollars in theatrical release. Not exactly what one would refer to as a blockbuster. Sadly I can't discuss much about the movie since the main plot is slowly revealed through the movie and as such it's probably best to know as little as possible before watching the film (otherwise some aspects of it will be ruined). I'm not even sure what genre this movie would fall into, probably fantasy or Sci-Fi if I was forced to choose. And I will say that the characters in the movie are entertaining and enjoyable throughout most of the move, but I absolutely hated the ending. In fact, the ending was so different and illogical that I actually watched parts of the movie again with the director commentary on to see what the heck they were thinking. Unfortunately what I discovered is they were playing with a set of rules they hadn't bothered to tell the audience. There's a book referenced in the movie that explains what is happening. This book is an extra on the DVD (at least the 12 to 15 pages of it are), but as a viewer you're never exposed to some of the concepts within the book until you look it up in the extra section of the DVD (and if you look at it before the movie, then that ruins part of the mystery plot). So overall I liked the characters, the mystery, and for the most part the execution of the movie, but I absolutely hated the unexplainable / illogical event that drives the movie.
So I watched Collateral. I've not going to say anything at all about the plot points so as not to spoil it for anyone that hasn't seen it. I'm having a hard time categorizing the genre, I think I'll say it's action / drama. As for actors it has Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx in it. And right off the bat I'll say this, it's hard to watch a movie with Tom Cruise in it these days without his personal life / craziness affecting the way you view his character in a movie. The good news though, it totally works in this movie. Tom's playing a character a little left of center so because of how crazy he is in real life, his character is totally believable in the movie. And Foxx, man, Foxx plays his role so well you totally believe him in it. He really comes across as an average Joe. You can tell from watching this that Foxx has some serious acting chops. The cinematography is excellent throughout the movie with some fantastic night shots from above the city. I think one of the things I kind of liked about the movie was not everything in it drives the plot. There are moments where people are simply talking, and maybe there's some deeper meaning or subtext I was suppose to pick up, but sometimes it just seemed like a real conversation people in that situation would have. And the fact that there's this real dialog in it made everything seem more believable since it wasn't just characters spouting facts for the purpose of exposition. I really think part of why I liked it so much was I went in with really low expectations, and the movie in turn really delivers.
On Tuesday Quinn and Catherine had a play date with Perry over at his place. Perry's Mom (CeCe) made a "Quinn pizza" (cheese, no sauce) as a snack. And when Quinn was eating it apparently everyone heard a 'crack'. And just like that Quinn's remaining front bottom tooth was really loose. His first tooth evidently made the cracking sound too before it became really loose (I haven't been around to hear it either time). I don't remember when my teeth were falling out, so I don't remember if they ever made a noise like that, so I don't know if that's normal or not. Anyway, at breakfast Wednesday morning we noticed the tooth was gone. A quick survey of his bedroom though revealed nothing. And tonight when I got home I checked extensively under the bed and found nothing. There was a small blood stain on the sheets around the area here his head is when he sleeps, so it probably did fall out sometime during the night, possibly when he was taking a swig of juice (the kids still have juice cups filled with water they can get to at night). Ginger suspects the juice cup may have knocked it out and he may have unknowingly swallowed it along with the water (that part we didn't share with Quinn because he would probably find that upsetting). But Quinn's biggest concern on realizing that his tooth was missing? He wanted to know how he was going to be able to get his money for tooth if we couldn't find it.
Here's something I wasn't expecting to see. Catherine wearing jeans. This might be the first time since she she started having an opinion about what she wears that she's actually worn a pair of jeans. It's hard enough getting her to wear pants, much less jeans. That's not to say she runs around naked, well, actually, sometimes she does, but that's beside the point. Typically if you let her pick out her own clothes, she probably wouldn't pick out pants (although she'll wear pants if she has to). She would much rather wear a skirt, or a skort, or a dress. But she's never voluntarily worn a pair of jeans before. I told her this morning how good I thought the outfit looked. Hopefully with some positive reinforcement this will be the start of a new trend, but somehow I doubt it. This was probably just a one off.
And since Ken asked in the comments yesterday for a picture of the toaster oven, I went ahead and got one (I was right about it already having been tossed out though). As you can see from the photos, it wasn't looking too good. I went ahead and included a photo at the end of the new one (bought on Monday).
Shiny.
Just about burned the house down Sunday night. Okay, slight exaggeration, but I did stink the place completely up and melted an appliance. When we grilled out we also had tater tots and some onion rings. Much later I decided to reheat them in the toaster oven for a snack (this would be about the time Ginger was going to bed). I then proceeded to do laundry, empty all the trash cans in the house and take out the trash, cleaned the grill and then promptly forgot about the toaster oven and went downstairs and worked on the blog. Which means that over two hours later when the burning smell wakes Ginger up she's all miffed because the entire house smells like burned plastic from where the frame of the toaster oven had turned a lovely shade of brown (it used to be white). Whoops. We're still trying to get the smell out of the house today.
Looks like the kids might be catching a virus or something. They started showing some signs of running noses. Although it could just be a reaction to the ragweed or something. The allergist told us Quinn would start to react that started, but that it wouldn't start until it was cooler temperatures, and considering it's below 50 tonight and was only mild for the last part of last week, I suppose it could be that. Or it could be they're in school now with other kids and being exposed to a lot more (that sounds much more probable if you ask me). I still can't believe that the leaves are already starting to change (and speaking of changing colors, I really can't believe my hair color is in the process of changing over to white).
Since the kids may be coming down with something we skipped church. So Ginger decided to to take them to see a movie this morning. It was Strawberry Shortcake: Gotta Dance. I had seen the poster for the movie back when I went to see Superbad. At the time I was thinking of taking Catherine since that was the weekend Quinn was in Richmond, but they only show the movie at 10 in the morning on weekends, so I ended up not taking her at that time due to not looking into it until after church that weekend (so the showtime was over before I even tried to find out about it). I would include a link to the movie but I think it's a straight to DVD movie they're just playing in theaters to milk more money. On the positive side there was a story time and some activities for the kids after the movie. And the whole shebang only ended up being about ten dollars for all three of them. I still can't believe Quinn went. From what I heard he was the oldest boy there. Although he did end up seeing one of the girls he was in class with at school last year (Darbie) and he ended up sitting with her (let's see, a ladies man, another way he's not like me I suppose).
So one thing I've noticed from watching a lot of Blogger Play. People like to post pictures of food. Got it, so here's some jumping on the bandwagon. We grilled out tonight. And had some truly flame broiled burgers.
Ginger and I watched some of the Emmy's tonight. Normally we wouldn't watch that, but we were killing some time upstairs waiting on the kids to fall asleep. And what I noticed early on is that they were doing the while "play the music to get them off the stage thing" if people said more than a couple of sentences. I mean, I'm all for shortening down someone's prepared speech of four typed pages, but if they're that pressed for time they should have axed out all the parts with Ryan Seacrest since he seemed to be really unfunny in the role of host.
If you have some time to kill and want to see some stuff that's amusing, check out ItsJustSomeRandomGuy's youtube videos. There's a semi story going on, so watch them in the order they were added (watch the last ones in his list first and work towards the beginning). The first ones are parodies of the Hi, I'm Mac. And I'm a PC commercials". They really start getting amusing once they start the story in the bar though (the "After Hours" ones). Of course I find them funny, your mileage may vary.
Today was Quinn's first day of tennis lessons through the county. And since Ginger had a migraine this morning which ended up lasting basically all day, I ended up taking Catherine with me to Quinn's lesson. If you can't tell from the picture, the woman teaching Quinn's class reminded me a lot of the bailiff Selma from the old Night Court TV show. She would talk in this really raspy voice and looked like she was out of place without a cigarette in her mouth.
While Quinn was at his lesson, Catherine and I ended up wandering around the school while I took her picture.
At one point we climbed some stairs to the second story of the school so we could see Quinn during practice. Quinn eventually saw us and found our location to be highly amusing.
We eventually ended up at the football field which had a nice "No Trespassing" sign. But we saw some other people in there using the track to jog, so we figured we would break the rules too.
Catherine ended up running all the way around the track two times. Which may not seem like that much, but that's a pretty good distance for a four year old. I assume it was a regulation size track, which I think puts it around 400 meters all the way around.
After that we went back and got Quinn, who once Catherine told him what we had been doing insisted he needed to go to the football field also. He also ended up running all the way around the track twice.
Quinn's track time was significantly shorter than Catherine's, but he also ended up having to stop and rest for a bit after that first lap (which he basically had run about as fast as he could).
Once we got home and the kids had a little downtime, Quinn and I went out to the park to practice what he had learned at tennis. For the first ten to fifteen minutes he did really good, and we even had a couple of rallies that went for about six hits (which doesn't seem like a lot I know, but for now for us that's really good). After that I think he was just too tired to really put a lot of effort into it, so eventually we just gave up and went to the playground for a bit. While we were off at the park, Ginger and Catherine were at home playing Cooking Mama on the Wii. I don't think they did that the entire time we were gone, but they did it for a while after we left.
