Friday, October 31, 2008

Halloween


Today at school was hero day. Basically the class invited all the parents in for the kids to give a report. So all the kids prepared a report and then presented it in front of all the parents. If you'll remember Quinn gave one last year and it lasted all of about seven seconds (approximately two sentences). This year the report was written on just one page. I think it lasted about 30 seconds, but I haven't gone back and checked, so I might be wrong.


The kids had to read up on someone famous (they got to choose the subject) and then present a report on them. Quinn's report was on the Wright Brothers. We just figured that he choose the Wright Brothers because of all the time he was exposed to them while we were on vacation down in North Carolina this past summer. Turns out that afterward when asked about it he told us he picked them because Ginger had read the book to him and Catherine over vacation and this way he didn't have to read the book. But he did end up reading about the Wright Brothers in making the report, so his reasoning did not hold out.




I took a video of the event, but it is pretty hard to make out what he's saying during the report, so I may or may not put that up a later date.


I came home from work early today so we could carve our pumpkins. We only carved Catherine's though because Quinn didn't really want to carve his. Catherine used blue marker to draw what was suppose to be carved. She also drew a ton of hair. And the marker never really dried, so as I was carving the pumpkin my hands turned completely blue.




Later the kids put on their costumes to hand out candy. Our neighborhood must run later than some others because our first visitors didn't even show up until 7:15 PM. The whole event was over in about an hour as the last visitors were just after eight.


The kids were really excited about people showing up and would hang out at the door looking around to see any kids were heading towards us.

McCain Hates Halloween

How can I say that? It's pretty easy if you use the transitive property. John McCain is against redistribution from the haves to the have nots. Halloween is about people that have candy giving it to people that don't. Therefore McCain cannot in good conscious support Halloween.

Don't believe me? Take transcripts from McCain's stump speeches and substitute candy for the words wealth or money.

That is what change means for Barack the Redistributor: It means taking your candy and giving it to someone else. He believes in redistributing candy.

Doesn't McCain realize that for kids that's a large part of what Halloween is about?

America didn't become the greatest nation on earth by giving our candy to ...[snipped]... "spread the candy around."

So the real question is: Why does John McCain hate Halloween?

And yes I'm joking, but it's really not that far of a leap from McCain's current arguments.

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Another Visit To Cox Farms


Today was the day of Catherine's class field trip to the Cox Pumpkin Farm. This is the last year she'll be going as part of the school trip since next year the she'll be in the elementary class. All the times we've gone in the past (and I think we've gone for five year now) it's been pretty cold in the morning and then warmed up considerably. Not today. It was really cold the entire time. Made me wish I was wearing some long johns.


Sadly I once again had odd camera settings. I had dropped the EV stop considerably the night before trying to prevent motion blur from taking shots at night and didn't reset the camera settings back to normal. I've been getting better about checking the settings before shooting these days, but this was another case where I botched it. Luckily I was able to post process some of the shots so you could at least see some facial features.


Ginger decided to attend the event in her new gangster outfit. So even though she looked a bit funny she was at least somewhat warm. Although she did say she was wearing the same layering as she did the night before for the Vienna parade and she was colder than she had been the night before (which just goes to prove it was pretty cold).


Because Catherine had been up so late the night before in the parade she slept in pretty late, so we got to the farm about half an hour after it opened and missed entering the facility with the rest of the school. As such we were on our own for most of the day and when we finally did the hayride it was with a bunch of other folks we didn't know.


In years past I've been the stuckee that has had to go one the slides with the kids (I say that like it's a bad thing, but honestly I usually enjoy the rides as much as the kids). But this year Catherine only wanted to do stuff with Ginger. Partly because apparently in years past I "beat" her going down the big slide. Well this year that wasn't an issue since Catherine and Ginger came down together. Did I mentioned they ended up getting stuck at each horizontal level and had to scoot to get to the next drop? Wish I had taken a video of that because it was highly amusing.


One of the new attractions this year was the corn field maze. Catherine really enjoyed this section going through it multiple times. They also had a dark spinning tunnel that looks like something out of the old Six Million Dollar Man episodes where he fought Sasquatch (how's that for an obscure reference, and kudos if anyone out there actually remembers what I'm talking about). Since it was so dark in the tunnel I don't really have any good picture of it, but it did give you a sense of vertigo.


Other than that it was mostly just doing the slides and attractions like in years past. Lots of pictures follow.














We ended the day by getting to watch Quinn perform in costume in his hip hop dance class he's taking. For some reason they had the kids facing away from the parents and towards a mirror, so I didn't get any real good shots of him doing the routines.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Bat-Family


The kid's participated in the Vienna parade tonight with their school. We were told participation in the parade was mandatory, but there were a significant number of kids from the school that weren't there. The parade was a bigger event than I was expecting and even had Mark Warner in it (I've actually got a story for that, so someone remind me later and I'll put that up). The good news is the experience was so much better than the parade last year.


We showed up later this year, but still ended up standing around for about an hour and a half before we actually started moving. This year we were group number fifty-six (whereas last year we were in the high seventies). So even though we had to wait until close to eight before our group started moving, it was still better than the previous year. Add to that this year it wasn't pouring rain, so that was a bonus. There was some very mild rain that was on and off during the course of the parade, but it was so light I would hesitate to even call it a drizzle (rather than drizzle I would probably call it mildly annoying).


Since we had no idea where to park we conned Ken into letting us park at his place. We even got to see Amanda very briefly (she was also in the parade with her school), but they went their separate ways almost immediately.


Another nice thing about the parade this year was the kids got to choose their own costumes this year versus last year where all the kids in the school had to go as Powhatan Indians. As you can tell, the kids current fascination with Lego Batman ended up influencing costumes decisions. They also requested I walk in the parade in costume also, and how could I refuse. And since Catherine wanted to be Bat-Girl does this mean we're out of the Princess phase? I don't know the answer to that, but we can only hope.


Ginger made the kid's costumes herself and I personally think they look pretty good. Sadly only some of the adults knew who I was since these days a lot of younger kids don't even know about Batman and Robin being a team. Nor do they realize that typically Batman is the adult and Robin is the youngster so the "joke" was lost on a lot of kids. I had a lot of the kids asking me stuff like "Who are you suppose to be?" When I replied I was Robin the next question was something along the lines of "Who's Robin?" And after explaining that Robin is Batman's sidekick the invariable next question was "What's a sidekick?" Kids these days. No one's teaching them the basics anymore.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

More Art Class Drawings


In art class today the kids drew a posable doll. I get the impression it was a small wooden doll. They were suppose to draw the doll in three sizes, a little one, medium one and a big one. Then they could draw branch off on their own for a bit. As you can see above in the bottom left Quinn took "little" to the extreme. He also added some hair to the doll which gives a good indication of movement. A nice touch I thought. Then he apparently decided one of them needed to have super powers and be able to shoot beams from it's eyes as he has one doll "shooting" eye blasts at another (I have no idea where he gets this superhero fixation from).


You can tell this one is Catherine since she added female characteristics to the doll. The above is her attempt at the little, medium and big versions. And I thought she was doing pretty good at adding features. Now mind you, neither kid's drawings are on par with Will and his sketches, but for a seven and five year old I think the kids are doing pretty well.

Monday, October 27, 2008

Metro Picture


Grammy is up for a visit for a couple days. I didn't get any pictures though so you'll have to settle for this old picture I took of the Metro when we went downtown. I was going to have a really cute video of Catherine helping Ginger make some fried chicken from over the weekend, but Catherine decided she didn't want the video of her on the blog and refused to cooperate at the end (I had wanted her to say "It's shake and bake, and I helped" but she just wouldn't go for it). Trust me, it would have been adorable. But you can't make kids do what they don't want to do (well, you can, but then no one is in a good mood afterwards).

Sunday, October 26, 2008

The Fun Number


After church we went out to lunch. This turned into a marathon lunch session as the kids took forever and a day to finish eating (and truthfully they never did finish, we just got tired of waiting after a couple hours and went home). While there Quinn ended up needing an extended bathroom visit. Which meant I got to go hang out in the restroom for about ten to fifteen minutes while he did his business (bear with me, I'm going somewhere with this). So as I'm waiting he starts talking to me from in the stall.

Quinn: Do you have your cell phone?

Me: No, I don't have it with me. And aren't you a little busy to be calling someone at the moment?

Quinn: I wanted to call this fun number in here.

Me: What's a fun number?

Quinn: Someone wrote a fun number on the wall.

Me: What are you talking about?

Quinn: It says "For a good time call 703-###-#####". Can we write the number down and call it later?

Me: Uhhh, no. I don't think that's good idea.

Guess this is one of the downsides of him being able to read.


Included this picture of Catherine from last week. It's her wearing a dress Ginger's grandmother gave her. So folks in Richmond can show this picture to whoever needs to see it.

Saturday, October 25, 2008

No Festival


The original plan was the post for today was going to have a ton of photos from our Church's annual Fall Festival. There would have been games, pony rides, moon bounces, and all kinds of stuff. Unfortunately the poor weather conditions ended up causing the Festival to be canceled. Instead the kids spent most of the day playing with Nana who was up for a couple of days this weekend. I only got a picture of all of them right before Nana left on Saturday night (hence the reason the kids are in their pajamas and bathrobe).

Friday, October 24, 2008

Keep A Light On


Another post with nothing but a photo.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Just A Photo

Gah! I got so busy with working until 3 AM Thursday night (I guess it was really Friday morning) that I forgot about the blog. So nothing to update for yesterday and all I have available to me at the moment is this picture for your enjoyment. It's from downtown DC.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Incredible Hulk

So I watched the Incredible Hulk tonight. I managed to get really lucky with having a Netflix rental return on Tuesday which was the first day the DVD was available. This is the rebooted / do-over version with Ed Norton. There were some nice tidbits in opening credits. They pay a lot of respect to the original reference material in the credits mentioning Rick Jones, Leonard Samson, Nick Fury, Stark Technologies and SHIELD. Most of these things don't get any serious screen time in the movie itself though. The idea of this Marvel movie shared universe is interesting though since you do see Stark Industries mentioned. I was a bit disappointed though that since I watched the non Blu-Ray widescreen edition I didn't get to see the alternate opening with the brief Captain America cameo.

The movie itself is okay I suppose. Not a ringing endorsement I know, but honestly I've never been a huge Hulk fan (one of the reasons I didn't go see this in theaters I suppose). Something about a character whose whole schtick is simply to get mad and wail on their opponent just doesn't do anything for me (I was never a huge wrestling fan either). The Hulk has always been more of a cautionary Frankenstein tale than anything else, but they've removed some of that since his origin is no longer based on being created by a gamma bomb he worked to invent and instead is now along the lines of the old TV show where he simply sat in a chair and got bombarded by radiation. And speaking of the old TV show, there are more than a few nods to it in the movie from Lou Ferrigno having a bit part as a security guard to a variation of the theme playing as Norton walks along a road.

The film ignores the whole aspect of the Hulk being all the repressed rage Banner has in a primal and uncontrollable form. Here the Hulk is more a raging force of nature instead of a fragmented personality. And I wasn't thrilled with how at the beginning sequence they went out of their way not to show you the Hulk and keep his look somewhat secret and hidden in shadows. I mean we all know what he looks like, why the forced suspense? They also seemed to go out of their way to create a bad guy for the Hulk to fight. Try not to think about the fact that were it not for the Hulk the bad guy wouldn't wouldn't exist. And really in this case, who is the bad guy? I could easily argue it's the Hulk himself since when he roids out he becomes a raging behemoth that causes massive property damage and wanton destruction.

I had heard there were a lot of disagreements between Norton and the director on what the vision for the movie should be. I'm not sure how that ended up changing the movie, but I could tell that from watching the movie though there doesn't seem to be a clear vision for Hulk. The CGI Hulk is done well enough even although in my opinion they did have problems with scenes where Hulk isn't raging. The action scenes are passable, but I enjoyed the middle fight the best where Hulk was fighting the Army better than the climax fight where he fights his new nemesis. The one thing I did like about this version was Hulk finally got a couple of speaking lines. Not many mind you (I think there were less than a handful), but at least we got to hear a "Hulk Smash" even if we didn't get to hear him call someone a "Puny Human".

So to summarize, the movie gets a rousing "meh". It's too bad Marvel initially sold the movie rights for some of their characters to other studios. It would have been cool at some point to see Spider-Man, Wolverine, Iron Man and the Hulk characters all together in a movie at some point. At least we'll get some of that since the movie makes it's obvious their current strategy is to build up to an Avengers team movie.

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

More Art


Tuesday's are art class day for the kids. Today they drew leaves. Most of the leaf drawings were of oval shaped leaves, but in the midst of those drawing there was the one above from Catherine. As she explained it that's her school with trees on either side and her outside the school. Why are there holes in the trees? I don't know. Maybe those are squirrel holes. And the front of the school does have four glass doors (two sets of two), so that explains why there are so many doors (I think).

Today was also the kid's school picture day. It'll be interesting to see how those turned out. Last year they took them outside in front of some leaves, but yesterday it was a bit colder so I don't know if they were outside or not. From dinner conversations I know the full class shots were taken indoors, but I don't recall if the individual ones were or not.

Monday, October 20, 2008

Frosty


We had our first serious frost last night. This morning everything was covered in a thin layer of ice crystals. It was very pretty, but if there was some way to get the same effect without the cold that would be good.


So here's a question for you. Oil prices are now around $70 a barrel. That's about half what they were at their peak price a while back. And yet gas is still over $3 a gallon, which is about 3/4 of what the highest price was. How is that the price of gas can increase quickly enough to insure that companies producing it don't lose money, and yet when the costs of the materials go down the price doesn't come down anywhere near as quickly (if it ever does). Could it be that the oil companies are simply leaving it high to bring in even more profit because they can.

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Tax Day Reminiscing


Ginger has mentioned how disappointed she was that I didn't do a Tax Day post back on Oct 15th like I have for the previous couple of years. The lack of the post about it wasn't because we turned our taxes in early this year. Nope, like previous years we waited until the last possible day to mail off the taxes. The reason there wasn't a post is just because I kind of forgot about it since I wasn't the one that had to take the taxes by the post office this year (I was in downtown DC this that day chaperoning the kids as they visited the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History).


Not much going on today. Lunch was another marathon session of kids not eating, but eventually we got past that. And then later in the day Amanda came over for an impromptu play date and dinner. That turned out to be a good thing since before that Quinn was itching to go outside and play, and honestly it was a bit on the chilly side to be outside today. Okay, it wasn't that cold, I'm just a wuss apparently and it felt cold considering that earlier in the week it was so warm you were hot with a jacket on. I tried getting a picture of all the kids together right before Amanda had to leave, but none of them were really interested in sitting still long enough for a decent photo at that point.


At some point I have to face the fact that tomorrow I will be returning to work. Since I ended up only working for two days last week that's kind of spoiled me. I'm really not looking forward to going back to work for the full week.

Saturday, October 18, 2008

Mt Vernon


We decided to take the kids down to Mt Vernon today. They were having their annual Fall Harvest Family Days this weekend so it seemed like a good time to take the kids. I will say we were not the only ones with this idea since the place was absolutely packed. We never got to take a tour of the mansion itself (pictured above) because the wait was listed as being around an hour. You can see the line to get into the mansion way over on the left.


The entry fee into the grounds is a bit on the steep side ($13 per person over 12, $6 for kids 6-12 and kids 5 and under get in free. We had a minor mix up when we paid since Catherine was suppose to get in for free and they charged her the senior rate. I personally didn't think she was looking that old.




There were lots of activities for the kids though aside from the mansion tour. They had these toys kids used to play with in the old days. Like a wheel you push along with a stick. I was amazed at how the kids took to such a simple activities. I think I know what they're getting for Christmas.


In addition to the games there were wagon rides. The wagon rides weren't all that impressive since it was just around a field, but that didn't stop the kids from going on multiple rides.




There were also other activities like a hay bale maze (which was exceedingly weak I thought) and activities to make corn husk dolls. Quinn didn't want to make one of the dolls and went back and did the maze a bunch more times while Catherine was making her doll.