I got to do a voice on a story on Marshal Latham's Journey Into... podcast. I play the voice of Don on Rish Outfield's "Troubled Child" story. The story won second place in Marshal's Journey Into Journey contest (the same contest that I easily took last place in).
Give it a listen. You'll be glad you did.
When I lived in Brazil for two years, I got to know the Brazilian tradition of hammocks. They're so ubiquitous there that people embed hooks into the walls of their porch or even the walls of their indoor rooms so that they can attach a hammock. We couldn't do that here, but we decided to make something similar, a wooden hammock stand for our backyard:
That wasn't the end of our plans however. Back at our last house, we built a pergola on our back porch.
Though we never managed to grow a plant, we had dreams of growing wisteria up into the pergola that would look like the wisteria tunnels in Japan.
Sadly, we moved away before we could even get started on such a project, but here in Houston we're trying to achieve a slightly toned down version of that same dream. We're growing wisteria on our hammock stand.
Each year since we planted it, it's been improving, and this year is the first year that it is starting to look like what we dreamed of. Here's some pictures to check out and see what you think.
I got the Arcee you can find in stores these days, but, while it was a great figure, I wasn't satisfied with it. I needed to make an adjustment, because this baby's got back...pack.
It doesn't have to be quite that big of a backpack. She can unload some of the junk out of her trunk, but even then the backpack is still big.
I'm just not a fan of the backpack. And truthfully, I don't care if she can transform or not. I never display my Transformers in the vehicle mode.
But, I watched a video on YouTube that showed me how I could modify her until the backpack was off. Yes, it took breaking it a little bit, but I don't mind.
So, there you go:
Looks great, right? Surprisingly, you can even still have the car form with what was left of the backpack as well. I guess the thing just went over the top of her like a shell.
The only issue is this stuff on her back...
But of course you'll never see it when I put her on my shelf.
My son got these sticky gel letters to put on his door at Halloween. We got them from the dollar store. Let me just give you a little warning if you see them this upcoming Halloween and are considering buying them. They bleed.
I mean, yeah, they're meant to look like words scrawled in blood, but that's not what I'm talking about.
We peeled the letters off back in November, but the words remained. The color bled out of the gel and onto the wall.
Now, here we are in April, and it's still there. We're going to have to repaint if we ever want it to come off.
It's cool at Halloween time, but having "Get out!" scrawled in blood didn't make for a particularly good Easter decoration.
Still life paintings of fruit bowls have long been staple of fine art. Here's one that Pablo Picasso did in 1918:
Here's one by Paul Cezanne:
So, it seems like something that every artist needs to do at some point. Maybe that's what my son was thinking when he started making fruit out of Legos this week. The first thing he did was a banana.
And an apple.
Those were pretty cute, I thought. But the next thing I knew, I came home from work and this entire bowl of fruit was waiting on the bar.
I thought it was pretty impressive.
He'd made a big old blue bowl to house his banana and apple, and then continued on to fill the bowl. He made a pear.
And an orange.
And even a slice of watermelon.
My wife says he made some grapes as well, but wasn't happy with how they turned out so he trashed them.
All in all, pretty cool and a lot of fun, so I just had to share it.
It's wildflower season in Texas again, and they are everywhere, on the side of every road.
These are pictures of the wildflowers growing beside the drainage canal where I go for my walk each day.
The funny thing is that the pictures just don't do them justice. I find myself unable to capture the absolute riot of color growing around me.
Notice all those tiny little specks of yellow or white or purple in the background of some of the pictures. Every one of those is another flower. It's simply amazing.
This one below is probably my favorite pic of the bunch. I love the bee perched on the flower. I took two pictures at this moment, and the bee was at the best angle in this one.
It was interesting to see my old friends the thistles. I used to see a lot of those back when I lived in the desert, but I didn't expect to see them here with so much moisture around. They're a spiny, horrifying plant, but I still like the flower they produce.
It's a tradition among many folks in Texas to find a big meadow filled with bluebonnets to take family pictures and pictures of their kids etc. I guess I'm not a real Texan yet, because we still haven't done that yet. Though, I still have time. Maybe I should try to fit it in this month...
PS- I had a typo the first time I wrote bluebonnets above. I accidentally spelled it bludbonnets. BLUDBONNETS! Now that is a good name! Sounds like the name of a great period horror piece. My mind is actually churning to come up with some kind of story to go with the name. If nothing else, it would be a good name for the red flowers I got pictures of, kind of the anti-bluebonnets.
I've heard people say that they are not real, but this is the second person I've personally seen find a four-leaf clover now. My best friend in grade school did as well. Before, I could only give my witness statement of the actual existence of four-leaf clovers. Now I have photo evidence to go along with it.
Of course, I'm sure if I searched on Google, there'd be hundreds of other pictures...but this is still worth it, because I couldn't vouch for those pics.
I ran into an issue as I was getting everything set up. The air mattress I had brought to sleep on was missing a vital component.
This was the air mattress that my friend's son had used for the week that he had been sleeping at our house. When they brought it back downstairs to pack up for our camping trip, they didn't notice that the plug was not screwed on. So I had an air mattress that couldn't hold air to sleep on for the night. Yay!
While setting up our tent, My son yelped, and told me that there was a centipede on the tent door. I looked, and there was indeed a long worm-looking insect on the door fabric, so I gave it a flap and the bug flew off into the nearby grass and trees. A few minutes later, he yelped again. There were seven centipedes on our picnic table. Aren't centipedes poisonous?
I went over to take a look and found that they were not centipedes at all. Instead, our picnic table...and indeed the entire state park...was overrun with caterpillars.
They were everywhere. They were coming down out of the trees like crazy, and often wound up clinging to our clothes. I can't count the number of times while we were at Brazos Bend that I felt a tickling sensation on the back of my neck or on the skin of my ankle, and grabbed a caterpillar that had crawled its way off my clothes and onto my skin where I could feel its wispy hairs. It wasn't gross or anything--because who is grossed out by caterpillars?--but it was pretty annoying.
Once everyone arrived, we headed out to hike around and look for gators, although because our last scout adventure we had done was on fishing, it seemed like most folks were more interested in casting their lines that seeing big reptiles.
That fishing fever may have been exacerbated by one of the scouts hooking a giant fish and bringing it all the way out of the water before it managed to slip its hook and fall back into the lake. They bemoaned the loss of that fish the whole rest of the campout.
We hiked around the lake, and saw a few alligators along the side of the path.
But mostly the cubs didn't seem to care about the gators or even the fish anymore. What they were interested in was...the Spanish moss? Yup, you heard it right. The kids only cared about grabbing Spanish moss out of all the trees that we passed. They balled it up and carried it around with them despite how stifling it became in the hot sun.
Their plan was to save it up to throw on the fire that night, and they just refused to believe us when we said that it was not dry enough to burn well, and would only smoke us all out if it didn't extinguish the fire altogether. I mean, it felt dry to their hands, so it must be highly combustible, right?
They called it Moss Man at first, then it evolved into Moss Monster, and then it became Anakin Mosswalker. My son was the one behind that final name. The Mandalorian has turned him into such a Star Wars fan that he thinks about it probably three times as often as most kids do. In his mind, the moss going on the fire was like the end of Revenge of the Sith where Anakin fights Obi-Wan on that lava world, and he catches fire and gets seriously burned before becoming Darth Vader. He said that Anakin Mosswalker was going to change and become Darth Smoke through this ordeal.
A little silly and over-the-top, but who cares, right? Well, surprisingly, it turned out to affect our day more than you'd expect. We reached the point in the hike where we could continue walking down the path to the spot where the most gators usually hang out or we could turn around and go back None of the others had ever been to Brazos Bend, so they had no idea what could be in store for them. I tried to convince them that they would regret it if they turned back now, but the kids all voted to take Anakin Mosswalker back to the truck and go look at another lake instead of keep walking.
So we turned around after only seeing two gators. Seems like a shame to me, like going to Disneyland bur walking out before going on the Matterhorn because you wanted to take your cotton candy out to the car so you could burn it later.
I wasn't going to let that moss into my car, but one of the parents with a truck was happy to bring it along, so it wasn't much of a fight.
We drove over to another lake that had a fishing pier, and spent some time casting our lines in, but the fish weren't biting. We went for a hike around the lake that turned out to take much longer than we'd expected, and by the time we got back we were all very tired.
We made dinner, and hung around the campsite for a while, and then we joined the other cubs for the pack campfire program. After the campfire we went back to our campsite for 'smores, and the kids finally got their chance to turn Anakin Mosswalker into Darth Smoke.
It was quite the smoky fire. The cubs kept throwing more and more moss on the flames. The moss didn't burn at all, but just sat there for several minutes before the heat of the fire finally cooked the moisture out enough for the moss to burn. It wasn't very pleasant.
Speaking of not very pleasant, it was time to go to bed. One of the other dads at the campout had extra sleeping pads, and he lent me one to use for the night, so things weren't as bad as they could have been, but the pads were pretty thin. They definitely didn't equal up to the fluffiness of a fully inflated air mattress.
The next morning, we packed everything up early because I wanted to see the rest of the family at some point this weekend, but My son insisted that we stay so he could play with the other cubs until they left. The rest of the dads got around to getting their tents all packed up eventually, and we said goodbye to Brazos Bend, but I'm sure it will only be for a little while. We'll be back again to that beautiful place.
