The time we spent getting the garden ready is really starting to pay off
tomatoes the size of your head
Now here’s the ironic thing. We have delicious fresh tomatoes and green onions from our garden and we use them to make…nachos!
The irony is delicious. Literally.
From Urban Prankster, check out this video of a dorm “prank” by somebody in Poland. Something this coordinated is obviously not just a prank. If it was really just regular people flipping some light switches, then it is one of the awesomest things I have ever seen. However, it seems a little too complicated and a little too perfect…if it is just something computer controlled then it is kind of lame.
There are a few more videos off of that Urban Prankster link, so if you liked that one, check them out.
So as I mentioned in my previous post, we had a pretty busy couple of weeks and the end cap on all of it was Evie’s birthday party. We didn’t invite as many people as we could have (have I mentioned how large my family is?) so it wasn’t as bad as it could of been. All in all I think we were expecting about 30 people, mostly immediate family, co-workers and Chicago friends. Still, 30 people are 30 people and especially coming back from vacation just a day and a half before, we had our work cut out for us. We had a lot of cleaning and setup to do and a lot of food to prepare. Sara was pretty stressed out, but I think everything came together in the end. Special thanks to my and Sara’s mom for helping with last minute stuff.
First let me say that something about the fresh air seems to stimulate Evie. She just loved camping. So much so that I was sad to have to come home and force her to be inside! She learned many new skills over the trip. She learned to point to many new things like the tent and the trees, she learned to kick a ball (“goaaaaaal” as taught by Bad Uncle Nathan), she learned a few new words, especially “shoe” and “hat”. Every time she goes outside now she reminds us, “Hat! Hat!” And, of course, she learned how to walk. She has improved every day since then and she will now walk > 20 steps no problem.
So everything went great, although it went very fast once it got going. I don’t think I talked to a single person at the party. If I wasn’t working on something I was snapping pictures of the birthday girl. All of the presents she got were just absolutely perfect. I thouht we might get a bunch of random toys, but every toy and every outfit was well thought out and just perfect. There was one duplicate present, a Melissa & Doug band in a box, but it was such a perfect present for her that I can see why two people would get it.
I think the most important (but least mentioned) part of the party was my awesome grill master skills. I had > 30 hamburgers plus at least 2 packages of brats and a package of hot dogs going all at the same time. I actually got to bust out all my grilling tools that I never get to use, including my “Pirates get all the booty” apron. Everything was grilled to absolute perfection and, though nobod complimented me, I could see in their eyes that they respected, nay feared, my awesome grilling prowess.
We ended up having a lot of extra food, so we will be eating good for a while. Everybody said the food was good and I think we had a good selection. Evie didn’t particularly rip into her cake that Sara made special for her, but she liked it enough I think. After everybody left it didn’t take too long to get everything back to normal (and upload all of the pictures to Snapfish!)
All in all a good day, but not one I’d be looking to repeat any time soon!
Sara had just gotten Evie down to bed when this crazy sounding, incredibly loud siren started going off. It seemed very close to our house but I couldn’t see anything out the windows…anything that is except for an almost continuous string of lightning flashes. We quickly looked up the weather and saw there was a tornado in our area. In downtown Chicago! Headed for Navy Pier! Crazy. We were watching out the window and it was getting very ominous and scary. Finally, we grabbed a sleeping Evie and hoofed it to the basement. It is really lightning like crazy and the siren (which had gone off for a while) came back on. Scary!
Add that to the beautiful, perfect lightning strike I saw hit the antenna of the Sears Tower this morning on the way to work and this has been quite a day for weather!
Okay, just because I was talking about it over the weekend, I have to post this up here. This has been waiting to be blogged, sitting in an “unread” email that I sent myself on 5/22/07. It has been so long that the URL I saved off was no longer valid. I don’t even remember anymore where I heard about it. I give you YouMail.
I’m sure you’ve probably seen services like this by now and I haven’t tried this one, but this just happens to be the one I stumbled across and it sounds pretty cool. There are two features that seem particularly neat to me. The first is that you can save and listen to your voice mails as mp3s. I remember a couple of years ago, a co-worker had a VoIP service that would email him at work when he received a voice mail at home and the voice mail would be attached to the email. How cool is that? I assume this is the same type of deal. It sure beats calling home to check your messages! The second service that seems handy is the ability to leave an individual outgoing voice mail message per person. It would be pretty fun in general, but I can also see some uses for it. So like, imagine you know someone is going to call you to see what you are doing later and you really want to hang out with them, but you are going into a meeting or something where you can’t have your phone on. You don’t want to change your outgoing message to “Hello anybody who calls me, but I’m not going to be home tonight between 9 and 12. And prospective employer? I’ll be out drinking.” And that doesn’t even get into the implications for juggling multiple girls on the side! 😉
So anyway, I came across that link more than a year ago and I thought it was cool and I wanted to share it, but I never got around to it. And now I have.
