File this under things I never imagined I would ever find myself saying: "Why is there a naked Barbie in the bathroom?"
Saturday night happened to also be the night of the school auction. Ginger's been working furiously all week trying to prepare some movie / slideshows for it. Since she's involved she has to be there. I've offered to stay home and watch the kids while she attends since I have no interest in attending the event myself. I did find the event mildly entertaining a couple years ago when it was more a more casual setting and the entrance fee was cheaper (and there was "free" alcohol / wine tasting once you paid your entrance fee), but I can't say I'm a fan of the more formal event now (and the higher attendance fee and lack of free alcohol doesn't do anything to change my mind in that regard). Add that to the fact that there's not that much I would want to bid on and there's really no reason for me to go.
While Ginger was gone that meant I was suppose to keep the ship running here at home in an orderly fashion. Well I can report that didn't happen. The kids decided to become superheroes (I admit to being a bit concerned that Catherine's idea of a "Super" woman requires her to be wearing heels) and that went on longer than I realized. Because of that dinner didn't even end up getting started until probably an hour past the time I was suppose to already have them in bed. They're going to be super tired tomorrow is my guess.
We had lunch today with Ben. We were already planning on having lunch out today to celebrate Ginger's birthday (she's old now (just kidding dear)), so the timing was right. We met Ben at the restaurant, and as we were driving there Ginger made the comment that she was hungry enough to eat a horse. Catherine quickly piped up at this comment and said "Don't do that, you'll die!" After a bit of prodding on why she thought that she informed us that's what happened to the old woman who ate a horse, she died. A bit more prodding got us to the fact that the lady ate the horse after she had eaten and a cow, a goat, a dog, a cat, a bird, a spider and a originally a fly. So we promised Catherine Ginger wouldn't eat a horse. But it was a learning experience, because I told them the morale of the story was if you swallow a fly, just don't worry about it.
So at lunch we got to hear Ben tell us about how he proposed (ask him about the lady they asked to take their picture, hilarious) and after that we came back home and played the Wii for a bit till Ben had to take off.
Today's pictures are supplied by Catherine and Quinn. Catherine took the ones above. Quinn decided he didn't like the flash on the camera and as taking his pictures (below) without a flash, so they're what you might refer to as on the blurry side.
Catherine continues practicing her photography skills. In her defense she's short and I'm tall, so she was taking the picture at a lower angle.
Quinn's recently gotten into reading a new set of books, The Hardy Boys. This is the first thing he's been interested in since he breezed through the Captain Underpants books a while ago. It's interesting to see that these "oldies" still manage to grab and keep his attention. He seems pretty stoked about the fact that they drive around on motorcycles and that they chase and find crooks. It's like an everyday superhero. He's currently reading through a "Best of" book, but he's already looked in the back and seen how many different books in the series they have and has started talking about them. I sense a large number of book purchases in our future.
Over Christmas Quinn got a new camera. That means his old one has now been handed down to Catherine. For the past couple of months she really hasn't been interested in taking pictures with it (to be fair, there was one time she was interested, but the memory card was full and by the time I had cleared it out she was on to something else). Now though she's decided she likes taking pictures. So we get lots of pictures of her puzzles, her stuff animals, etc. So I thought I would kill two birds with one stone, the above was a picture taken by Catherine of her leprechaun that she made at school for St Patrick's Day. I can already tell from looking at the "quality" of the pictures the camera takes if she really gets into this it won't be too long before I decide she needs a new camera herself.
Since Ginger's busy all the time working on preparing slide shows for the upcoming school auction, that's left little time to watch movies. So we wheeled a TV into Ginger's office and watched Ghost Town while she was working. And despite the fact that I was almost traumatized by how small the TV we watched it on was (it was a mere 20 inch television set), I enjoyed the movie. The premise is pretty simple. It's a romantic comedy version of The Sixth Sense (there's something you probably never thought you would see someone try). They have Ricky Gervais playing the main character Bentram Pincus. I have to believe Gervais was adlibing a lot of his lines, because the things he says at time are exactly what you would expect to hear him say if you watched the show Extras (this was especially true when he was filling out the questionnaire at the hospital). After he briefly dies during a routine surgery he can suddenly see the dead and from there the hijinks ensue. Overall the movie is pretty funny. Gervais is fun to watch as always. And as an extra bonus those people that watch the Daily Show get to see Aasif Mandvi in another serious role (the other two people besides myself that saw him in Jericho raise your hands).
Woo hoo! Ben and Katylin got engaged yesterday! And no, I wasn't stalking them and taking a picture when it happened I was still down in Richmond (stalking them only happened in my head I think). Rather this is a photo they let me "borrow". But they can't have it back, it's mine now! Anyway, a hearty congratulations to them both.
On more mundane topics, we headed home on Sunday. Leaving early enough that the kids didn't fall asleep in the car, but just late enough to get into all the slower than desired traffic. Perfect! We did take some time out on the way back to stop at a Krispy Kreme shop to pick up from hot just cooked and glazed doughnuts (in addition to picking up a couple boxes for breakfast during the coming week).
We headed down to Richmond for the weekend. Ginger's grandmother is home again so this seemed like a good time to head down again. Unfortunately I was rushing around packing at the last minute and even though I packed up my camera to bring, I forgot to put it in the car. We did bring Quinn's camera. So I tried taking some pictures around the house down there with that camera to see if I could still get a decent picture independent of the camera being used. The shot above is the best I managed to get.
Amazon was having a sale on games. And since I got a gift certificate to Amazon for my birthday I loaded up. I got de Blob (which is a puzzle game that I've heard good things about and wanted for a while) and Wario Land Shake It. Those were my "big ticket" items. Then I picked up 3 more games that were around $10 a piece: Sega Superstar Tennis, Spider-Man 3 and Mercury Revolution. I don't really know anything about those games except they were pretty cheap (actually, I've heard nothing good at all about Spider-Man 3, but one of these days I'll realize life is too short to be spending it playing bad games). A couple of the games (de Blob and the Sega Tennis) are multiplayer, so I'm hoping those will be fun for all of us to play. They had We Love Golf on sale also, but I know the kids don't like golf, so the only way I would ever play that one is online with Barry or something, which from his blog sounds like he's not going to have any free play time anytime in the near future.
I watched Role Models the other night. This movie is crude. It's inappropriate at times. Possibly even slightly politically incorrect. It's down there with stuff like Superbad, but with a bit of gratuitous nudity thrown in. Having said that, this movie is also really funny. Maybe it's Paul Rudd. These days I seem to like most of the stuff he does. I don't know, but it's funny and mostly unapologetic. I know there's a love story subplot in this movie, but they're not fooling anyone. This is much more of a guy movie than it is a chick flick. The plot is pretty weak, two guys get in trouble and to keep from going to jail they have to sign up for 150 hours of community service at Sturdy Wings, which for all intents and purposes is Big Brother (given some of the stuff that happens in the movie they probably were legally required to use something other than Big Brother since I doubt that organization wanted to have their name associated with the movie). From there it basically turns into the two guys and crazy hijinks they get into with their assigned kids. The movie isn't for the easily offended, but I found it highly entertaining.
So Ginger's been working on putting together some movies for the upcoming school auction using iMovie on her Mac. The problem is it's been slow going. I mean really slow. Her machine had 2 Gig of memory and it was still running like a dog. Now the machine itself is a couple years old, but still it shouldn't have been running this slow I didn't think. Turns out part of the problem is the memory footprint of one of the applications she was running, specifically iPhoto. Normally I suspect this program isn't that bad, but when trying to run with iMovie, which wanted close to a Gig of memory all by itself running iPhoto is just the computer's Achilles’ heel. That's because iPhoto apparently has a large number of photos on the computer resident in memory at any time. Unfortunately since Ginger's got all my pictures from the past four or five years of digital pictures this ends up being about 33,000 pictures that iPhoto is tracking (which in turns has it wanting almost 2 Gig of memory all by itself).
So to alleviate the problem I bought more RAM for Ginger's computer. Another 4 Gig. She only had one paired slot left though, so I had to remove some of the memory to add the 4 Gig. Now after the memory upgrade she's running with 5 and a half Gig of memory, and it runs a lot better. I think it can still slow down a bit if she has iMovie and iPhoto up and running simultaneously, but it definitely runs a bit better in the normal case now. All this has me amazed at how well Picasa runs under Windows, because before last Christmas I was running that on a Windows machine that only had 1 Gig of memory and it handled tracking all 33 thousand photos of mine fine for the most part. The other thing that sort of surprised me was the cost. I figured since it was for the Mac I was going to be paying an arm and a leg, but I got the memory from Crucial and got it for only $43 a Gig, which I don't think is all that bad.
So lately one of the things that's been talked about around the house is the concept of a last will and testament. I know, not exactly what you would call light conversation, but you work with what you've got. Anyway, ignoring for a brief moment the reason behind why the topic came up, the kids quickly steered the conversation to being all about them. Basically it became them asking who gets what if Ginger and I were to pass away. The big ticket item wasn't the house (which is what I was expecting), but rather Ginger's car. Both kids are adamant that they should get the car. In fact, no one wanted my car, they both were just fighting over who would get Ginger's. I believe mine was too dirty to want(although mine's been a lot cleaner lately than any car I've had in the past). Then they started basically calling dibs on everything else. Catherine claimed all of Ginger's jewelry. Quinn decided he would get all my comic books. The one bright spot was they decided to actually share the Wii. I have to say it feels a bit weird them having these conversations while we're still here. On the other hand I guess it lets us know what they consider important (and that would be Ginger's stuff for the most part).
The photo is another leftover from the snow a while back so no one panic thinking another winter storm is coming through.
Above you see a photo of Catherine showing off her ability to "do a handstand". Since I almost never go to see them at gymnastics, this is as close as I get to seeing what she can do. Quinn attempted to show me how he could do one also, but I can tell that's an area he really needs to work on. Not that I can talk, not sure I could do one either. In fact, I would probably throw my back out if I tried.
Just a leftover shot from back when we had snow. Really hard to believe the temperature has been in the 80s since this shot was taken a little over a week ago.
Today Catherine decided Ginger needed some pony tails and took steps to correct that deficiency. I don't think you can tell from the photo, but she had six ponytails (none of which were symmetrical, not that non uniformity bothers me, but well, I guess it kind of does).
I got a report from Ginger today that Catherine can now ice skate for a while on just one leg. Too bad Ginger didn't take a camera with her. If only in the future she would take a camera. Maybe next time before she goes I'll mention to her that she should take a camera. Anyway, it seems like Catherine has really taken to the whole ice skating thing. The couple of times I've gone to see her ice skate she has a group of friends that she ends up skating around with, so at this point I don't think she really needs for me to be there.
On a completely different subject, I got to watch the movie Body Of Lies last week. This movie stars Leonardo Decaprio and Russel Crowe. At a high level it's about how the CIA functions and positions it's operatives, one in particular (played by Decaprio), around the globe. It also serves as an examination of policy decisions that drive the CIA as an organization, such as do you acquire information via technological means and sift through that or do you have to have operatives on the ground that know the area and the people. It's pretty apparent from the film how they feel that decision should be made. It also casts the American intelligence community, or at least the one higher up person (Crowe) they show representing it, in a fairly negative light. It's a film by Ridley Scott, so just knowing that you can already expect it to be a bit on the preachy side. It's an okay movie, nothing spectacular in my mind. The most interesting aspect to me was seeing how low tech methodology could outwit and defeat high tech toys. I think it's more interesting as a springboard for discussion on policy direction more than anything else though. My personal opinion is if you skip this, you won't be any worse for wear as it's a decidedly average to less than average film in my opinion. Don't get me wrong, the acting is fine for the most part (if you like Decaprio) and the actual filming seems to be top notch, but the story is a bit weak and as I mentioned seems to have been produced to promote an agenda.
One of the Mom's at the kid's school (who is also a friend of Ginger) has had a family emergency and has to go deal with an ailing parent overseas. This means that for the foreseeable future we'll be having her daughter Antoinette come by after school and hanging out until her Dad can come by and pick her up. Catherine is thrilled since Antoinette is one of her best friends. Quinn is excited also, but not thrilled since this means there's a definite chromosome imbalance at the house.
And I know a while back I said there were no pictures of me on my actual birthday, but I was mistaken, I found a batch of hidden pictures on the camera. Unfortunately all the pictures suffered from the same problem of having been taken while in bracketing mode, I also found I had taken some all of us together as a family but none of the normal exposure ones were any good.
