The Three Amigos

Errands ran with the kids yesterday:

Kohl's
Lunch w/ Mom @ Culver's
Say hi to Rick (Rick's)
Bank
Another bank
Game Stop (LEGO Star Wars & Dance 2017)
Dillon's

All in three hours? Nice job, Amigos.

Talkin' Tracks Season 2, Episode 4 — Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

The weekend that was, 7/13/18

Boyd chasing waves on South Padre Island. 

I've got a photo from our week in South Padre here with this post, but instead of writing about vacation, I thought I'd write about the weekend that was...

***

I was in-between issues so I tried to get a bunch of "catch-up work" done... it made for a long week.

I barely left the house all week. I also got an ear infection. So I was in kind of a weird place all week.

The Amazin' Asian (Greg Nunn) texted me Friday afternoon to see if I was around and wanted to grab a beer. YES INDEEDY, I said... and I met him out Friday night.

It was great catching up with Greg. He took a big job with Walmart in Arkansas. It's not that far away, but I wonder how often I'll see him now that he's not in Derby. It was great to catch up.

What was going to be an "early night" ended up with me taking an Uber through the Burrito King drive-thru at 1:30 a.m.

***

Saturday morning I woke up with enough time to fire out a deluxe-o breakfast* for the family, then chill out for an hour or so before we headed to pick up my truck, then off to the theater.

I watched Serena Williams get thumped at Wimbledon (surprisingly, as I thought I was going to watch her make history... kinda like the night I thought I was going to watch Hillary make history... but with less of an impact on the world.) Then we loaded up and went to Rick's to retrieve my truck (thank you family, sorry for taking you out of the way.)

We dropped the truck off at the house and then were on our way to see SOLO. Boyd was sound asleep when they picked me up at the house. We drove for 20 minutes to get to Olathe Studio 28, then Boyd woke up and asked Evey... "Did I miss the movie?"

He thought he slept through everything. He was relieved to hear we had not yet arrived at the theater.

We did the dine-in theater, which was kind of fun. Kids got cheeseburgers, me and Adrianne got chicken fingers (random detail. Sorry, I've been drinking.)

The surprise of the weekend for me was how much I enjoyed SOLO. I thought it was really good, with a lot of twists, some great action and a few cool tributes to the original movies. Chewy was great, so was Solo. Great characters, cool sci-fi ideas. (How about the train heist? What a cool sci-fi twist to a cinematic classic!) (And the first meeting between Solo and Chewy? Way better than I expected.)

Here's my ranking of 2018 movies I've seen in the theaters so far:

5. Ant-Man & the Wasp
4. Jurassic World
3. Infinity War

The kids and I at the Action Figure Museum in Oklahoma,
on the way home from South Padre. The museum was bette

2. Incredibles 2
1. Solo

Yeah, I just ranked Solo # 1. And I stick to that. It was fun! It wasn't predictable (cough, cough, Incredibles 2). It wasn't depressing (INFINITY WAR!)

I still want to see the new Mission Impossible, the Clock in the Walls (or whatever), The Meg (if Boyd wants to see it) and that Bohemian Rhapsody movie, if it's out in 2018...

We came out of the theater and it was clear we missed a storm; the temperature had dropped 20 degrees and everything was wet. We drove home and talked about the movie... what we liked, characters we disliked, best scenes... it was fun! (This moment ranked # 1 for both Evey and I when we discussed at dinner tonight.)

Home, then chill. Adrianne cleaned Boyd's room, while he did his best to find ways not to help her. We wrapped the night up with me falling asleep on the couch while Boyd was watching Batman: The Animated Series**.

I had been struggling with that ear infection all week... Saturday night was the first good night of sleep I've had in a week. And wow, I needed it.

***

Sunday morning the family went to church while I hung out at the house.

(The story from church was that the Jones family sat in the front row of the pews and eye witnessed a little baby make a fool of himself and then, after the parents gave up on controlling him... he ras to the front of the church and dropped a load in his diaper for everyone.)

I recorded the World Cup final, to be watched at my convenience...

Brandy and Holden came over and Brandy gave me and Boyd haircuts while Holden and Evey hung out. Adrianne started working on Evey's room...

I watched the WC game, it was pretty good. A couple nice goals. We were rooting against Croatia, because Adrianne had a Croatian professor who was a jerk back at UT-PanAm. So I was on board with France, because F that guy.

Not much else to report beyond that. Evey's room might be clean by now, I don't know. I worked on re-alphabetizing my comics, which is good fun, and a total waste of time probably... but it's a good thing.

OH! I saw a jogger face-plant up the street. After about three minutes of watching the kid just lay there, I decided to be a good samaritan and drive up the road to see if he/she needed help. By the time I got there, the teenage jogger was moving again... and she decided, rightfully, it was better to limp home than trust the weirdo in a beat-up truck who asked if she was OK.

Kinda awkward. But I thought the kid might have really been hurt.

Well, that's my weekend report for 7/13/18. It was a good weekend. Low-key. Just the way we like it.

*The best breakfast I cook, in my opinion, is eggs over medium with breakfast potatoes, bacon and tortillas. It's also the messiest/most time consuming breakfast. I mean, I can scramble eggs in about 5 minutes... breakfast burritos are fun because they're so easy. But the Daddy Special # 1 is a mess to make... and only me and Boyd will eat it! (I make the girls a separate order of scrambled eggs so they can ruin their own breakfasts.)

** I used to watch Batman: The Animated Series after school everyday, in stereo surround. It was such a cool series at the time. I still remember the stereo system Mom and Dad had at the time -- it was a funky Aiwa stereo that did OK... and since I got home at 3:15 and they didn't get home until around 5-ish... I would listen to that cartoon LOUD! I hear that they're going to upgrade B:TAS to high-def soon. It needs it. Funny how bad the colors look with modern day TVs. But I think the animation and the stories still stand up today. So it's cool that my son wants to watch this series... he doesn't know it, but he's got a guy sitting right next to him who would watch the whole series in order if he wanted to....
 

Talkin' Tracks Season Two, Episode Three: Best Summer Music

Talkin' Tracks is back! This time with our pal Sean Lipford as the special guest star!

2018 South Padre trip: best moments

(Note from Seth: I wrote this last week, and I'm just now getting to posting it. Sorry for the long absence!)

We’re back from a weeklong vacation to South Padre Island. It was a nice trip, but it’s even nicer to be home…

We left last Saturday morning and drove to Austin (on the road from Eudora at 7:15 a.m., pulled into the Fairmount Hotel in downtown Austin at 7 p.m.) Then we returned Friday morning (left the beach at 8 a.m., arrived at Abasolo’s house at midnight… then left Saturday morning at 8 a.m., home by 11:30 a.m.)

I might go into some detail later on the vacation… but for now, here’s a recap of our lunch conversation here at the house, when I asked everyone to recall their “single favorite part of vacation.”

Adro: She refused to give one favorite, but instead three. They were 1) Watching the new Jurassic Park movie at the South Padre theater… 2) the dolphin watch, particularly when two dolphins chased the boat… 3) sitting in the water on the beach.

Evey: Her favorite moment was when we were at South Padre Island Brewery together for lunch on Wednesday… it was a return trip, and we re-ordered the good food from the day before. It’s possible I was a little, uh, fun-lovin’ at the time, as I started my day at the Kraken to watch the Mexico/Sweden World Cup game, and I was yelling at Boyd about eating all the cheese curds that we ordered.

Boyd: Interestingly, Boyd’s favorite moment also came at South Padre Island Brewery… the same lunch, when we ordered a bunch of, what he calls, “cheese turds.” The day before was the first time him, Evey and Mom ever tried cheese curds… Boyd was a BIG FAN and wanted to eat a thousand of them.

Seth (me): I thought everyone’s top moment would be the same, but clearly the South Padre Island Brewery had a more profound effect on the kids than I thought it would… my favorite moment was when we chartered a boat and took a “dolphin watch” tour that Adrianne arranged… two dolphins playfully chased our boat, and even shot water out at us and slapped the water with their tails. The dolphins — big ass dolphins —  were damn near within arm’s reach.

The joke I made to a co-worker was that if I knew the kids enjoyed breweries so much, I could have saved a lot of gas and hit one a lot closer to Eudora! But it was pretty sweet, I think Evey enjoyed it so much because it was our family together... and Boyd thought those "cheese turds" were really funny, and really tasty.