Sex Bomb!*

Click here for the funniest ice skating routine ever.

(Not really unsafe for work, but not all that appropriate, either.)


*The Tom Jones song.

Christmas in July.

We celebrate Christmas in July, i.e., an excuse for summertime gift-giving and decorations. We finally have the tree and leis put up, and the tiki gods overlook the fish tank.

Which reminds me...we got that fish tank a year ago. But not the fish. As Lee says, "Let's just say we recycled the fish."

Anyway, this year's it's on July 29th, because I'm not going to be able to get the 25th off...

Girl Stuff.

Mike gave Ray a belated Christmas present: a little luggage bag with kiddie makeup. Including nail polish. Hm...Barney videos? Drum set? Live animal? The glove has been thrown down, baby, and I am not afraid of the challenge.

But Ray loves it, and I've put away the nail polish so only Mom can put it on...

Fireworks.

It stopped raining long enough yesterday for us to watch fireworks at Memorial Park with Mike and Connie and the kids, who left this morning to go back to SD. We parked down by Zorbadillos (one of my favorite restaurants ever; I'm biased) and sat near the lake.

The girls were antsy, to say the least. "Is it time yet?"* I had to laugh. These girls, they aren't actually blood relations, but you can't really tell. Mine's brunette and the others are blonde, but they were picking on each other like sisters all day yesterday.

I don't know how many people were there, but it was more than the population of most South Dakota towns. Maybe even most SD towns added together, say, if you left out the top ten. People were restless, too. The walkway around the lake was packed with people. People with cell phones. People with dogs. People hawking red, white, and blue glow sticks. People with strollers. People with wheelchairs. Even what looked like Amish folks, only the ladies didn't have the white cap thingies. There was no sitting still, not even during the fireworks themselves.

Maybe it's blasphemy to say this, but the fireworks, when they did get started, lasted too long. Not the fault of the planners; everything went smoothly as far as we could tell (no flaming bodies shot off into the lake or anything). It's just that there were two very wiggly little girls on my lap through almost the whole thing, two little girls who each had butts over 50% of my own, and third who wanted attention, too. So I sat cross-legged on the ground and balanced the two little ones each to a leg and leaned the other one up against my side...and today my thighs hurt, almost as if I had been (shudder) working out.

But I'm glad I went. Lee offered to let me stay home, but I knew I'd just be whining about not going if I did that. And lo, it was fun.

(It's rained so much over the last few days that the countryside is minty, i.e., the color "mint" rather than the flavoring. Yellow-brown, yellow-brown, yellow-brown, mint. It's strange.)

*By the way, Mike said he timed the girls on the way out here. Twenty-two minutes to the first "Are we there yet?"

Independence Day Quotes.

Here are some Independence Day quotes that I found today...

You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism. ~Erma Bombeck

We on this continent should never forget that men first crossed the Atlantic not to find soil for their ploughs but to secure liberty for their souls. ~Robert J. McCracken

Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim. ~Thomas Macaulay

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves. ~Abraham Lincoln

Independence Day, as such, is always a mixed experience for me. Sure, celebrating our independence is worthwhile; however, I usually run into some ass who sets my teeth on edge today by insisting that taking away someone's rights is a good way to express patriotism.

"Marriage ain't fer gays!" "Them Mexicans are out to steal our jobs!" "Anybody who don't like America out to be shot--it's my Second Amendment Right!" "Why shouldn't it be 'One Nation Under God'?"

If you paint taking away someone's freedom (or pursuit of happiness?) with red, white, and blue, does that make it patriotic?

Hello? Beuller? Beuller?

Smell...bad....

I rode to and from work on the short bus today.

(There's a bus that shuttles people around on the base, but it's normally a full-sized bus. It had been parked off to the side today. Fuel effiency? Not a lot of people in the office today.)

It smelled terrible, as if someone had been raising chickens on it. Recently. I looked under the seats, but it seemed clean, except for the single bloodied feather stuck to the bottom of my shoe, and the mysterious clucking sound coming over the loudspeakers from whence one would normally hear "The Star-Spangled Banner."

Zoo Trip.

The Zoo trip went well. Everybody (except Mike, who is over the weight limit) got to ride both the restored antique carosel ponies and the real, live ponies. Ne-eigh! Afterwards, at the point where I (although suggesting it in the first place, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa) chickened out of going to the Shrine of the Sun, Mike and Connie took all three girls with them up another couple of thousand feet and walked around some more. Come on, these people are flatlanders. Sheesh.

I went home and got some writing done, cashed my first Harris paycheck (!), and picked up some pad thai while everyone else hung out at their motel room and ate chicken. I may just make my deadline for the first draft...

Off on a tangent here, I would just like to say that pad thai would be a perfect food if people would take spring roll peanut sauce and dump it all over the noodles. It's odd. It's not like I'm a peanut-butter-and-jelly hound or anything, but whenever I can get away with adding peanut butter to noodles or something, there's me with my spoon in the jar. Anyway, our new favorite Chinese delivery place also makes a few Thai dishes, and they will send along extra peanut sauce when I remember how to ask for that specifically and not just extra pad thai sauce, so voila! the perfect food is within reach. I think my next goal will be to get them to put about a quarter-cup of chopped cilantro on top, instead of a measly sprig for garnish.

Parenting.

The following bit of overheard conversation appears to me to sum up the quintessence of parenting: what you don't know can't gross you out in the middle of the grocery store.

"Mom, I got boogers. See?"
"Tommy, I don't want to hear about boogers any more today, okay?"
"Okay, Mom."
"Thank you."

Family in Town.

Lee's brother Mike, his SO Connie, and her two daughters, Hannah (7) and Alexis (4) are in town visiting us. Today, the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, and possibly the Shrine to the Sun. We'll hand-feed the giraffes, see if the wallabies have settled down enough to want to be petted, goggle at the baby gorilla...

And ponies. There will definitely be ponies.

Eragon Forwarder.*

Lee's brother Dale pointed out the movie adaptation of Eragon, by Christopher Paolini, is coming out in 2007. Click here for the in-production-type trailer.

Dunno. Looks altogether too full of bombast. It's being directed by Stefen Fangmeier, who, admittedly, is a great visual effects guy, but who's never directed a movie on his own. Hrm....

*Trailers aren't after anything.