Now You’re Really Living

On the fantastic album “Blinking Lights and Other Revelations”, the Eels have a great song called “Hey Man (Now You’re Really Living)”. I was reminded of this song title two times during April when I did some things that I never thought I’d ever do.

Early April I was up near Winter Park at a men’s retreat with friends from church. After doing about 90 minutes of snow shoeing in five feet of snow up the side of a mountain (and back down again), I found myself soaking in an outdoor hot tub surrounded by all that snow. And it was snowing while we were in the hot tub. It was beautiful.

Then in late April, my wife, son and myself did some tent camping with the Cub Scouts. That’s not really that big of a deal, except that during the night the temperature got down to somewhere between 10 and 15 degrees. That was some serious coldness! I caught a fish doing some fly fishing. I found that I really enjoyed that. My son is eager to go out and do some more of that with me soon.

Want to Know When the Housing Market Hits Bottom?

Here’s an excellent article on the housing market. It is especially good at explaining the real costs and business sense involved in buying a house to rent it out. So start saving now and maybe sometime after 2012, you’ll be able to jump in.

What the -?

My son (our oldest) came home from 2nd grade the other day really on edge. Upon asking him what the problem was he said, “I’m really worried that I’m going to be in big trouble because I think I know what the F-word is now.” So he spelled it quietly into his mom’s ear and, yep, some girl in his class taught him the F-word. So we explained that knowing the word isn’t going to get him into any trouble, but using it probably would. He sighed a sigh of relief and said, “Good, because I don’t even know what it means”. So I told him that it’s used in different situations to mean a lot of things and so a person has to be careful about how they use it. I told him that one of the meanings is that it is kind of the ultimate way of saying “Oh, Man!” when someone is super-duper upset. He said, “Oh, OK” and that was the end of that.

Awesome News: Peter Jackson to direct two Hobbit movies

I missed this press release amongst celebrating two birthdays and Christmas. On 12/18, a press release confirmed that Peter Jackson (director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy of movies) has settled all his lawsuits against New Line (the studio he worked for on LotR) and will be directing not one, but two movies based on “The Hobbit”. So there’s some much happy news to end the day with instead of that Best Buy rip off re: Blade Runner.

So rejoice with me. I’m off to dig in the fridge for an oatmeal stout.

Read more about The Hobbit movies here.

Absolutely Ludicrous

So quite a while back, I decided that I would stop with the ranting and whining that seems to make up the content of many a blog. There’s too much negativity in the world already. I don’t need to add to it. Do things bother me? Some things do, but it’s usually not worth complaining about. Nobody wants to hear it anyway.

But today… I can’t believe what I’m seeing. So take this as a consumer tip. If you are looking for the new 5-disc Blade Runner DVD set that has an MSRP of $78, do not buy it at Best Buy. Best Buy would like you to pay them $100 for it. This is the same set that can be had at Amazon, Deep Discount DVD, and just about any other place for $55.

LaserQuest Champion

The LaserQuest birthday party was today. It was awesome! It was even cooler than I expected it would be because the group of players included unknowns (teenagers off the street) to add to the challenge as well as two of my adult friends who stayed and played. So the kids were gunning for each other, three dads and a bunch of teenagers.

So do I still got it? You bet I do. In the first match, I came in second place out of 25 players. The top spot went to one of the teenagers who told me he plays regularly. My son, the birthday boy, came in third to last place… just above his 5-year-old sister. I asked him what his strategy was and he told me that he was the team leader of a bunch of friends… he was kind of in the middle of the pack and not shooting much.

The second match included the teenager who came in first place and several more “extra” players for a total of 34 players. On this match, I came in first place! My son, who broke away from the pack, did much better this time coming in 13th place with a shot-to-hit ratio of 9% (as point of comparison, mine was 11%). He would’ve scored much higher, but he had to hit the restroom in the middle of the match. D’oh! So while I got 914 shots fired, he only shot 536 times that match.

All in all, it was a blast for him, his friends, me and my friends. The place was huge… almost as big as Photon was (in Huntington Beach, CA) back in the day. This had two levels, vertically, with several ramps up and down. Lots of slots, mirrors and grates in the floors of the upper level.

What’s Wrong with this Picture? (or Does My Son Really Have Better Taste Than Me?)

So I had some music on this morning while checking email. I paused the music to answer the phone and I could hear that my 7-year-old son was listening to music pretty loud up in his room. He was listening to “The Seeker” by The Who. What was I listening to at the same time in my office? The Crazy Frog version of Axel F.

The Bible according to Google Earth

This is cool. An art project that takes four key scenes from the Bible and imagines them as if we were looking at them using satellite photos (or Google Earth). Pretty amazing. Check it out here.

‘Tis the season

Here we are in the Christmas season. The decorations are up. The music is playing on the stereo. Snow is falling. There’s a fire in the fireplace. And mom is cooking up yummy treats. Perfect.

Warmest wishes to you.

Time for a riddle

So the other night at dinner the two oldest kids started asking each riddles that they’d learned at school. So I tried one to see whether or not they’d heard it before. It was the ol’ classic “What’s black and white and re(a)d all over?” The answer, of course, is “a newspaper”. As it turns out, they had not ever heard that one before. But the funny thing is that when I first asked the question, my 5-year-old daughter instantly… I mean without even taking a minute to think about it… blurted out “Clifford in a zebra costume!”

I laughed so hard, I almost choked to death. Good times.