for the adults, the last couple of weekends have involved lots of fishing and shooting during the day, grilling and chilling at night. no pictures of any of the parties, because i’m lazy. i didn’t take the camera along for any of the shooting, either, which is a shame, because one of the 3rd year residents, PimpDragon, brought his little beretta handgun. it’s a shame that i didn’t get a video of the 4 of us going through about 50-60 rounds and putting exactly 3 holes on the paper target. my accuracy notwithstanding, i still maintain that i need a handgun. for fly-fishing. you think i’m kidding.
i did bring the camera along for last weekend’s fishing trip. it was, at 39 degrees, actually colder than the previous week’s fishing trip. that’s not including wind chill. at 20-30 miles an hour (we had spent the previous day hiding in the basement from a tornado again), i’m thinking windchill was significant. fuck it, it took us all day to warm up after 2 hours on the water, but it was still an awesome day out!
i call this one “still life with man-ass”
on the way home, we stopped at the grocery store. PRM, not surprisingly, hung out by all the meat:
and i covered the refreshments:
and then we went back to accidentprone’s for some grilling and movie-watching. despite his philosophy that “women love assholes,” and his tendency to call her “piggy” (the second-worst term of endearment i’ve ever heard someone use with a straight face), make fun of her accent, and ask if she had a driver’s license for her mule back in “whatever country you’re from,” accidentprone can not only get, but also keep, a real live girlfriend:
despite the fact that PRM enjoys refering to her as accidentprone’s mail-order bride, she’s a graduate student, meaning she doesn’t have to put up with accidentprone to keep her green card. she puts up with him because… well, i don’t know. secret anthropological research into the mating habits of assholes, maybe.
notice that my nose is still red as we watch a movie later:
PRM had to take some refrigerator porn. he’s impressed by the quantities of pickled vegetables in accidentprone’s fridge. he says this picture is to show that accidentprone “isn’t fucking around.”
as for the other half of the weekends, activities with the kids… have i mentioned how much i love the kids in this neighborhood? there’s ScreamySpaz, who is kind of like a taller, blonder version of Spazmonkey. like Spazmonkey, all dialogue coming from her mouth will be written in all-caps… because that’s how they talk. even if it’s just asking for a glass of water. IT’S JUST ALL SO EXCITING!!! i would steal her and make her mine if not for the certainty of hearing damage to everyone else in a household that contained both ScreamySpaz and SpazMonkey. anyway, ScreamySpaz and her big sister PrincessNinja have been over quite a bit for the monkeybars, scooter-riding, tag, and lightsaber fighting… but strangely, one day PRM, using some sort of jedi mind-trick, got our three oldest and the two girls to rake the leaves in our yard… and they thought it was fun! they were actually begging each other to take a turn with the rake!
the two boys a couple houses over, ArmyOfOne and SuperFly, also own 8 million lightsabers:
we got mariokart for the wii, with 4 steering wheels. it came in the mail wednesday. i opened the box, and left them out on the kitchen table, thinking the boys would be thrilled when they discovered it. they never discovered it. they spent the entire stretch of time between dinner and bedtime attempting play the star wars theme music on an accordion and two harmonicas. if you know anything about degrees of difficulty of music, you already know that this was a spectacularly unsuccessful endeavor – not for lack of trying, though! they finally noticed the stuff thursday… and declined to play it, since there was more interesting stuff going on outside. losers! it was all ours. briefly. but back to that in a moment.
here’s a little something i didn’t know about may day. the twits came home from preschool with “may baskets.” they were little green plastic baskets, lined with rainbow-stripe tissue paper, decorated with pictures of flowers they had cut out and colored, and filled with a mix of cap’n crunch, m&ms, and gummi bears. the only explanation i got was “it’s a may basket. and i don’t like to kiss anybody.” later, FreckleBeastie and PaleFace (NewfieMama and RadHippie’s kids) walked by with their own maybaskets. Then ArmyOfOne and SuperFly. EVERY kid on his or her way home from school had one, and there seemed to be a lot of excited discussion going on about them. finally, EvilGremlin came home with his (filled with corn pops and skittles), and i got the full story: you leave your may basket on someone’s doorstep, ring the doorbell, and run. if they catch you, you have to kiss them.
so the rest of the afternoon, the doorbell would periodically ring. my boys waited to the count of ten to avoid catching anyone (who would then have to kiss them) before retrieving the maybaskets left for them. SpazMonkey declared the basket full of mini marshmallows and twizzlers HIS, period, but other than that, they shared them in the backyard; 12 kids passed around at least that many maybaskets full of dinner-ruining goodness. at some point in the evening, they wandered into the house, and found me and PRM jumping up and down, laughing at each other, calling each other very long, expletive-ridden names, and occasionally beating on each other (this passes for “friendly competition” around here, so long as nobody’s crying or bleeding) as we played mariokart, and the boys finally decided to take a turn at it.
so we had an 8-boy mosh pit (9, if you count monkeybeef, though his only contribution to the mariokarting was to periodically clamber over the obstacles to smack at the buttons on the tv, and then cackle as the big boys howled) for a while before dusk and everyone’s mom’s starting calling them home for dinner and baths and homework. and let me tell you, that many boys between the ages of 5 and 9 is about the cutest damned thing ever. they’re all trying to be cool, and all failing miserably. it’s kind of like a midget version of revenge of the nerds. they have a loooooooong way to go before they actually impress girls with their chest-pounding, high-fiving, smack-talking, shoulder-punching displays of testosterone.
as for the coming weekend: friday night at the pub after work with the homies. because 5-7 pm is half-price half-gallons. not to drink there; we’re not alcoholics. you take those home to drink later. the mug club mugs that we do drink there with our wings and cheese fries are only about 1/4 of a gallon. see? we’re not assholes.
saturday morning, while PRM takes his mock board exam, i’ll be at the grocery store on the corner. they’re having a “children’s olympics.” all i know is that this will involve competitions and prizes. and probably me singing. because my impulse control at 10 am on a saturday? not so strong.
saturday night… PRM actually extracted a promise from me NOT to blog about the plan for saturday night. i can only tell you that MyEvilTwin and i formulated the plan. and it is good. and i will not have cash in my wallet. at least, not at the beginning of the evening.
