Pack 137 ROCKS!

Today we went to our first activity with Pack 137. Mikey's previous pack, Pack 990 from Grace Christian School, is not active this year, so we're transferring to Pack 137 from Mayo Demonstration School. The kids in the pack (most of which are Mayo students) seem to be really great, and the parents are terrific also. We built three Cubmobile racing cars (kind of like soap-box derby cars minus the soap box) in a couple of hours, and then we had some pizza!

    

(See all the pictures here... I took 127 of them!)

After that we went home and picked up Mama and Hannah and went downtown for the grand opening open house of the new BOK Center arena. I still have my doubts about the wisdom of the logic about parking, but the arena itself is very impressive. I snapped a picture of the three of us outside after we got done looking around, and then just for fun I took a stab at one with me in it. I actually managed to get my head in there, and the heads of several of my family members! (I didn't do nearly as good a job as this guy, though.) Notice Mikey's clown nose in the second picture (Ringling Brothers Circus is coming to the BOK this year).

 

Later this afternoon we went to Applebee's for dinner; Mikey and I had a great time looking out the window as a storm rolled in and the lightning kept lighting up the sky. We watched as these birds on the wire:



...saw some lightning and skedaddled faster than you can say "Hey, bird, it's just LIGHTNING!" (this is the same spot a few seconds later after a lightning bolt went through the sky):



It started raining and we got to watch this cool spider right outside the window. It's a shame the sky was so bright behind him... he just looks like a shadow in the picture, but we could see him really well:

Caturday 8/30/2008

moar funny pictures

Don't TELL me you've never seen ALIEN??!?/!?

(Hmm. Me neither.)

Home School

Today marks the first day of Mikey's second week of school. We're trying something different this year: after three years of private Christian school, this year for third grade we're home-schooling him using Switched-On Schoolhouse, which was recommended to us by several friends. The lessons are all (with the exception of science experiments) on the computer, and they include videos and songs and games, and Mikey is having a great time with it so far. Here's a picture of him busy at his lessons:



Uh-oh. Wait a second. Maybe I should give Mommy a call and get her to check up on him! Wait a second... what's that on the TV in the background??

Caturday 8/23/2008

moar funny pictures

If you don't get it... Remember this thing? Remember how it ate this guy?

That was great.


(It happened sort of like this:)

hold music

I wonder why businesses feel that they need to play music for me when I'm on hold? And I have no way to turn it off. Fact is, I am VERY rarely nto listening to some music already, and having their music playing in my ear is SUPREMELY annoying! I would much prefer, for example, just a recording of someone speaking, even if it is a bunch of advertisements. I have been on hold systems before that allow you to kill the stupid music and just say something every 15-20 seconds (to let you know you're still on hold and not silently disconnected); every hold system should be cool like that.

</rant mode off>

Caturday 8/16/2008

I thought I'd try out the new Advanced LOL Builder (with cool thought balloons!):

Bad Songs

Recently I read Dave Barry's Book of Bad Songs, which was the result of a "bad song survey" that Dave once ran in his column. The book is SO funny and mentions SO many songs that I wanted to hear some of them. That's possible on Last.fm... so I blogged the titles of every song he mentions in my Last.fm journal! Reason being, if you see a title with the little "play button in a circle" it means you can instantly play at least a sample of the song, and often the whole song, just by clicking on it. And even if there's no play button, sometimes there will be a link to a YouTube video or something and you can hear the song that way.

Have fun!

Mikey joins the SWAT team!

Monday afternoon, Mikey's Meme, who is a Tulsa police department chaplain, took him to UDSW to hang out with the police Meme works with. Mikey got to turn on the lights in a car, see a demonstration of the new gun holsters that the police are going to start using, see the "intake" area where people who are being booked come (nobody was being brought in at the time), and he even got to try on some SWAT gear! See Meme's pictures below!

Our Weird (Al) Weekend

Friday afternoon Cathy and I went to the video store to rent a movie or two to watch later with friends. We went to get Bowfinger, and we wound up getting that and more... we rented Weird Al's movie UHF. I've been wanting to watch it for some time, ever since I found out that most of it was actually filmed in Tulsa. I wanted to see if there was anything in the movie that I recognized! Well... there actually wasn't. BUT: as it turns out, on Al's commentary track, he actually says the addresses of most of the locations in the movie! So on Saturday we loaded up Mikey, Hannah, and the portable DVD player, and went and saw several of the buildings that are in the movie! In the process, to help us on our safari, I made this Google Map with all of the locations marked on it:


View Larger Map

We had a GREAT time! At least, Cathy and I had a great time... Mikey was kind of whiny. I guess he's not used to being in the car for that long at a time... plus he hadn't seen the whole movie yet when we went on our Al-fari (he watched most of it in the car as we drove).

Afterward we went home and watched the end of the movie that Mikey hadn't seen yet, and then we watched the whole movie with the commentary turned out. It's pretty wacky in spots. Part that cracked us up the most: when Victoria Jackson, who apparently had been brought into the commentary track via telephone call, excused herself by saying, "Well, I'm making scalloped potates, so I've got to go!" hehe scalloped potatoes.

Caturday 8/9/2008

My Son Has Returned!

My son has returned from a dangerous journey!
My son has returned, no longer alone!

Okay, that's two lines from a song I wrote recently about The Prodigal Son. My son did not just return from a "dangerous" journey, but he did just return from a journey! Meme and Papaw just took him down to Texas to see his cousins, who live just outside Fort Worth. It was my brother's 35th birthday (MAN he's old!!!!!) and it was a surprise visit for him. They got back yesterday afternoon. They had a GREAT time! I haven't had time to hear all about it from Mikey yet, but I do know he spent some quality time with my brother's Wii, so now Mikey's trying to figure out ways to save up enough money for us to get one...

First Crawl!

Cathy has been concerned that Hannah hasn't been crawling. At 7½ months, you would expect her to have shown some interest, but she apparently just hasn't seen too much sense in bothering. Until this morning! Cathy just called me at work and told me that she crawled several feet, backwards, crying the whole time. So it was a joyful event.

"Now she's acting like she doesn't remember how she did it!" Cathy told me on the phone. hehe the little stinker. She knows how to do it. She probably can crawl and walk and drive a Volkswagen by this time. She's just milking the "carry the baby around" thing for as long as she can!

Caturday 8/2/2008

Oh, I get it! He looks like this: