Will turned four on Sunday, January 11^th. My parents were here, so we were also able to wish my dad a happy birthday that same day. My dad drove all the way down here to Fayette county to have a Darth Vader cake for his birthday.

Will had been asking for Darth Vader on a cake for quite some time. His patience was finally rewarded. Okay, just kidding – he really has no patience.

On his actual birthday, we just threw a very small party for him – immediate family only. He received a few cool gifts: two DVDs (Horton Hears a Hoo and Kung-Fu Panda) and a voice-activated R2-D2 robot:

R2 is about 18 inches tall and responds to the sound of your voice… usually. He occasionally acts up (i.e. stops working properly), but can usually brought back into shape (worst case: hard reboot is necessary). Will likes to have R2 watch him play Wii. R2 has motion detectors so he can actually follow objects with his “eye”, so it can be a little surreal to see R2 watching him and turning from the TV to Will and back as if he’s actually paying attention.

Will’s Birthday Party

The following Saturday, the 17^th, we let Will have an actual party. He invited his friends from school to come out to Dixieland Fun Park:

The kids got to play for an hours in the “play maze” and then ride on a small indoor ferris wheel. After that, we were locked in a “party room” where we were forced to eat pizza.

After pizza was more Darth Vader cake. Due to a lame restriction of the venue, it could not be a homemade cake. So we brought a Publix cake that was decorated to be a Darth Vader cake:

And, of course, after cake it was time to open gifts. You can see that some of his friends were more than welcome to help open the packages:

Most of his friends (or friends’ parents at least) knew of his obsession with Star Wars, so he received several cool Star Wars-related gifts – like a sticker book and some little action figures. The coolest gift, however, was not Star Wars-related. I don’t think Will thinks it’s as cool as I do, but it is neato. It’s a magnifying digital video recorder. It magnifies up to 400x and records to a USB thumb drive. It is an inexpensive toy camera, but is still pretty cool for getting a look under the microscope so to speak – everything from denim to human skin all looks cooler blown up 400 times bigger than usual. The gift that he least understood at the time but has ultimately come to appreciate the most was a gift card for IKEA: we took him up there, and he picked out a new night light and a stuffed animal octopus that he now insists on sleeping with every night.

Charcuterie

One of the gifts that my mom bought my wife for Christmas was a really great cookbook on making charcuterie at home. We were so giddy about it that the first thing we did after getting the book was to buy a meat grinder and a sausage stuffer. We made a country paté for New Year’s Eve dinner:

Note, the off-color of the meat is from a bunch of parsley ground into it – nothing sinister here. This recipe was basically a fancy meatloaf: plenty of pork fat, salty, serve cold. The pink ground meat in the bottom of the bowl is coarsely ground pork shoulder (aka pork butt or Boston butt). Since most of the meat was only ground coarsely, the texture of the final forcemeat is not as smooth or refined – thus it is “country” paté.

The day after Will’s birthday party we found ourselves in Decatur and found a butcher shop there that sells “pink salt” (sodium nitrite) and natural sausage casings (hog casings at least). The following Saturday, the 24^th, we made knackwurst.

Here’s a pic of “water sausage” as I rinsed out the casings after soaking them for a bit in water:

And here is our wonderful finished product:

We’ve eaten some at various points over the past couple of weeks, most notably as hors d’œuvres on our Super Bowl evening.

Malin snapped a few shots of our mixer (aka meat grinder and sausage stuffer) afterwards. We call these Aftermath:

Auntie K and Uncle Cass

The day after we made the sausage, my sister and brother-in-law rolled into our neck of the woods. They had been on the east coast for the prior week, visiting family and friends all over. Since we lived relatively close to the airport, we were their final destination.

Usually Will prefers to ham things up in front of the camera, like so:

But lately he has been enjoying being behind the camera, too. Observe:

Kristie, a bit surprised by the wee photographer:

Cass, perhaps more prepared for portraiture:

Among other things, we dragged K and Cass up to our most recently-discovered chow-spot: The Porter Beer Bar in Little Five Points. Good times were had by all.

Lego Army

As mentioned above, Will has been making a habit of taking pictures lately. His favorite subject, by far, is his Lego army. I mentioned in a previous post how one of Will’s favorite hobbies is to mix and match all of the Lego-men pieces (heads, helmets, upper bodies, lower bodies) to build Frankenstein figures. Well, now his second favorite hobby is to photograph the fruits of this labor:

Here is a big panoramic shot. If it looks like several pictures all stitched together – well, that’s because it is. (If you bothered to notice little details like that, you have too much time on your hands!)

The Monday before Christmas, we did our celebrations and exchanged gifts with Malin’s mom and Randy. They would be with Randy’s family on Christmas morning, so came over to celebrate with us a little early.

Will loves opening gifts.

Especially when they contain anything related to Star Wars, Indiana Jones, or Batman…

My parents and my brother arrived on Christmas Eve. The next morning we all awoke to see Santa’s handiwork. After making short work of ripping through Santa’s presents, we moved on to the general exchange, during which Will made out with even more loot.

His grandparents got him a really wicked Darth Vader action figure – complete with battle damage (but no hole into which you could pour motor oil or grapefruit juice, no dispensor fist…). They also gave him a video game to which he has been addicted ever since: Lego Batman for the Wii.

Malin got him a Yoda action figure. After all, every plastic figure villain needs a plastic figure hero upon which to whoop ass, n’est-ce pas?

Malin and I also bought Will this Georgia Tech baseball cap to match mine:

The three things that Will asked Santa Claus for this year were a bicycle, “knight” Legos (more formally known as Castle Legos), and a knight costume. Here you can see him trying out the bicycle:

Santa brought him the Legos, too, but the costume was actually a gift from Malin’s mom.

Who knew that one of his favorite hobbies would be mixing and matching the heads, helmets, bodies, legs, and accessories of the Star Wars and Castle Legos? It’s a fun hobby yielding memorable characters like the evil jousting goblin that wears a stormtrooper helmet (I’ll have to get a picture of that guy and post it here, won’t I?).

After exchanging gifts, we ate breakfast: a French Toast casserole, scrambled eggs, and sausage links. Ann made it over for breakfast, and Randy came by after finishing Christmas with his family. They joined us, along with Jake and my parents, for Christmas dinner.

Dinner this year consisted of three courses:

1. Carrot Soup
2. Fresh hand-made fettucine with a brown butter demi-glace sauce, shitake mushrooms, and pearl onions
3. Roast leg of lamb with potato croquettes

Sick Weekend

We were supposed to drive to Greenville, SC the weekend following Christmas. My parents and brother retreated to Greenville the day after Christmas. In addition to visiting with them some more, we were hoping to see our friends Audra and Jon and their young daughter Madelyn.

The night after Christmas, Malin, Will, and I went to see The Tale of Despereaux. The movie was decent – better than I expected.

The following morning when were to get ready to leave, we ended up not being able to make the trip. Malin wasn’t feeling very well, Will’s never-ending cough was a little worse, and I felt like complete garbage: a bad cold resulting in a sinus infection – complete with a sore throat and ear ache.

So we stayed home that weekend, trying to recover. Unfortunately, I felt like crap for pretty much an entire week. I finally started to feel better just yesterday (Sunday the 4^th). Sorry everyone. We really wanted to visit with everyone, but just weren’t up for the car ride, and probably wouldn’t have been much fun in the shape we were in.

The Empire Struck Back

The next Tuesday – December 30^th – Malin was feeling rather gracious. Despite her hesitance to let Will see the first Star Wars movie (she was quite upset at me when she found out that we had watched it one night after she went out), she allowed the viewing of the sequel: The Empire Strikes Back – arguably the best movie out of all six that were made (I would argue that anyway…)

Will was bedazzled by the plot twist. The realization that Darth Vader was Luke’s father – that Anakin and Vader were one – was a total head game. Okay, perhaps I’m putting words into his mouth. But he enjoyed it immensely. Until bedtime…

That night and the following night, he kept us up for hours. He would begin screeching and crying in his sleep. He would wake up from the nightmares and come wake us up. Malin was up with him between midnight and 3am the first night, consoling him and doing anything to get him to fall asleep. The next night, it didn’t begin until about 4:45am, and I was up until close to 7 trying to get him to fall asleep.

The morning after he saw the movie, we asked him what his dreams were about. He answered, “I was dreaming about Darth Vader cutting off Anakin’s hand.”

“You mean Luke’s hand.”

“Yeah. And about Darth Vader freezing Anakin.”

“You mean freezing Han Solo.”

“Yeah.”

It’s kind of funny how he calls everyone Anakin. When he first heard of Indiana Jones this past Spring/Summer, he kept calling him Anakin Jones. I guess he really likes the name Anakin… It’s a good thing Will doesn’t get to name the new baby.

In an attempt to save ourselves another sleepless night, we put a night light in Will’s room the next day. No nightmares since. It will probably be quite some time before we allow him to see this one again. Although, naturally, the next morning when we suggested that he shouldn’t watch the movie again because it gave him such nightmares, he responded, “No, it’s good for me!”

Dirt, Dirt, and More Dirt

On New Year’s Eve, Randy graciously brought Malin a humongous truckload of nice, dark dirt for her garden. When I say big truckload, I mean it. He brought over a Dodge Ram 4500 with a hydraulic-powered bed specifically made for hauling dirt and mulch – literally.

So that afternoon was filled with shoveling a truckload of dirt onto the beds in Malin’s garden.

The next day incurred even more work, of course: tilling. I got to use our baby tiller – the “cultivator” – to re-till the beds and mix the new, dark dirt with the existing soil and clay.

While we were busy out there, we also moved our hop plant to the garden (it was previously in a natural area off the side of the house).

New Year’s

One of the gifts that my mom had gotten for Malin was an excellent cookbook named Charcuterie. Ever since pouring through its pages, we wanted to cook something from it.

So on Tuesday we went and bought a reasonably-priced meat grinder (an attachment for her Kitchen Aid mixer). We had decided to make a country pâté since all the ingredients were easily available – except for pork liver (which is really hard to find around here). We substituted chicken liver in our preparation of a Pâté de Campagne. The result is tasty – a salty, cold, meatloaf that is elevated to new heights thanks to the use of pork fat (to improve its flavor), sweet spices (think pumpkin pie spices – to make for sublime seasoning), and a small amount of liver (to smoothen the texture).

The pâté, unfortunately, was not actually consumed on New Year’s Eve. We prepared it that day/evening, but it wasn’t ready to eat until the next day.

So that night we made braised beef short ribs with some reheated potato croquettes from Christmas dinner.

We didn’t quite make it to midnight. We offered to let Will stay up with us, but he crashed around 10:30pm. We decided to toast around 11:30pm (Lindeman’s Pêche, not champagne) and then go to bed. We didn’t feel like pushing ourselves to stay up that last 30 minutes. Perhaps that’s lame, but I’d say it’s not. I’d say it’s lame to stay up late for the sake of staying up late. After all, we weren’t at a party or even around other people this year. So with Will asleep, there would be nothing interesting at midnight that we had not seen dozens of times before. Besides, we had both had crummy nights of sleep recently thanks to Will’s Darth-Vader-induced nightmares…

Tasty Tacos

This past weekend was my last weekend of vacation. I greatly enjoyed these two weeks at home, but all good things must come to an end it seems…

On Friday, we met our friends Scott and Karyn at Taqueria del Sol. We caught up, saw their baby daughter Zoe (whom I’ve seen only once before – and she had grown a lot since then), and ate some tasty tacos. We’ll be seeing them again soon because Malin is going to take some pictures of Zoe. I mentioned that we’ll bring some home-made sausages (thanks to the magical instructions and recipes in the Charcuterie book). To that, Scott replied, “As long as they’re turkey sausages.”

He is a bit disdainful of fatty indulgences like sausage. Turkey sausage – ha! I have no problems making a turkey sausage. The book even has a recipe for one. But it sure as hell will include pork fat – because turkey is far too lean to make a proper sausage by itself (as is virtually all meat except for pork shoulder and beef short rib…)

After lunch we returned home. The weekend was slow and relaxing. I brewed beer last night (Sunday). All is right with the world.

We bought a few pumpkins while we there – for jack-o-lanterns, for pumpkin pie, and for making pumpkin beer (the lattermost, unfortunately, never came to fruition).

This year, all of us dressed up. I haven’t really dressed up since when Malin was pregnant with Will. My costume was admittedly pretty lazy and lame: khakis, leather jacket, button-down shirt, and a cheap prop hat and whip. Yes, you guessed it: Indiana Jones.

Malin spent a little more time on hers; she actually made a big cloak. Will wants her to make him one next year so he can dress up as an evil-doer like mommy.

This year, Will was a storm trooper.

We got a couple of pictures of me and Malin, too.

In this pic you can see some of the house decorations – at least the three ghosts in the front yard.

That Sunday, Will helped to make pancakes, and he wore his Halloween apron – a gift from his grandmother Frannie.

Thus concludes the photo backlog. I think I’m pretty much caught up as far as posting pictures to this blog.

Stay tuned for Christmas pictures, which will hopefully be up before the end of the year.

I hope everyone else is having a pleasant holiday season and preparing for a great 2009.

Flying West

We left on a Friday, one week after Will’s last day of school for the term and my last day of work prior to my sabbatical.

Our trip out west was on a Song aircraft, so it had the entertainment units built into each seat:

We got settled quickly after we arrived. My sister picked us up from the airport and drove us to her place. I had sent a package to her and Cass earlier that week, and the tracking info said it should arrive the very same day that we landed. When we got there, however, we discovered it was not there. The package was a box packed with many homebrews.

National History Museum

On Saturday, we had a big day out – at the museum. Kristie and Cass had gotten a zoo keeper outfit for Will when they were last at the Santa Barbara zoo, so Will wore it much of our week there. He hesitated in putting on the jacket at first – not sure why. But he wore the hat and binoculars to the museum.

There were a bunch of USC fans tailgating as the National History Museum is just outside of campus on its southern side.

The museum had two special interests that attracted us (Will): dinosaurs and spiders.

The first set of dinosaurs, aside from the display out front in the above picture, is in the main foyer. And it is quite a spectacle. It reminds me of the great room at Atlanta’s Fernbank museum – which also has a towering set of dinosaur skeletons.

Will helped Cass give a small token of appreciation to the museum. Donations are fed into the dinosaur mouth:

Our first stop, after the grand display in the foyer, was the land of spiders. Outside the main spider exhibit, they had all of the nasty, poisonous arachnids on display. Will was keen on inspecting each and every one:

The main exhibit inside was awesome. Arachnophobes need not enter. It features numerous spiders, many quite large, freely running amok in a large outdoor space. You walk under their webs, you can see them in the bushes, and you have to be careful not to walk right into some of them. No glass walls protect them from you (or you from them). I think Malin and K were a little freaked out. Cass and Will enjoyed it thoroughly. I thought it was pretty awesome, too.

Malin found the molted exoskeleton of a grasshopper among the bushes and webs:

After the spiders, we visited the halls of mammals, of which there are three at the museum.

They also had a really cool exhibit of birds, including this fellow with the ridiculously long beak:

There was a section on marine life, including some very large fish. This is a picture of an incredibly huge nautilus (> 6ft tall) that defends the entrance to that wing:

Last but not least was an exhibit about the restoration process for dinosaur bones and fossils. They had an actual restoration lab in there with windows so you could see inside and watch the people work.

On our way out, Malin noticed how cool the water fountains were. It looks like you could perform a baptism/christening in one:

On the outside, we had one last set of photos to take – of the giant tiki head, similar to the heads on Easter Island:

Olvera Street

The next day, Malin, K, and I went for a walk through an art festival in North Hollywood. It was pretty uneventful and boring, so we decided to go somewhere else. We ended up going to Olvera Street, looking at shops, and eating good Mexican food for lunch. Warning to tourists: Olvera Street restaurants are expensive. Unfortunately, Will was behaving rather poorly at lunch time, so we left in a bit of a hurry. So we weren’t able to grab a Mexican wrestler mask while there (of which there were plenty available).

The Zoo

The next day, Kristie had to work. So Cass took us to the zoo.

You can see that Will finally decided to wear the jacket that was part of his zoo keeper outfit.

One of the first animals we encountered was a meerkat, sleeping in the shade.

The zoo had all manner of animals, from alligators to lions and sea lions to ibex. Here is a quick montage. Men, try not to be too intimidated by the zebra.

Cass told us how the tallest male giraffe occasionally wanders to one side of their enclosure and does his best to feed off of a very tall tree using an amazingly prehensile tongue. While we were there, we got to see this endeavor in action.

There were also a very fair species of ungulate named Gerenuk (sound like made-up words from a viking poem, don’t they?)

What would a trip to the zoo be without apes? They had many apes, but the best photos we got were of chimpanzees:

On the way back out, the meerkat had finally woken up:

There was also a petting zoo. Before leaving, Will got to pet the goats and sheep that were there. We got one last picture – Will and Cass standing outside the petting zoo:

Unbirthday Party

The next day, Cass and I went to the UPS facility to pick up the homebrews. They had not been delivered on Monday either and were waiting for us at the facility. That evening, a friend of Cass’s came over to help us sample some of the homebrews – which was fun for me since, even though I made them all and have tasted them all before, they tasted better and new with a few months age.

During the day on Tuesday, we had an Unbirthday Party:

Ours was held at the Travel Town Museum – a large field with old steam engines and train cars in it. Will had lots of fun wandering around the trains.

After playing in the train cars, we sat down at a picnic bench and ate lunch. After lunch was the obligatory balloon animals. It is an unbirthday party after all! Instead of animals, however, we made things like helmets, swords, and small intestines:

Before the picnic was finished, we had to have cake. It is an unbirthday party after all! Will calls it “red vulva” cake. Red Velvet is how most of us might refer to it:

After the picnic and balloon-sword fencing, we took a trip around the museum on their miniature locomotive:

When the tour rode around to the back of the park, we could see a train car with a wonderful exclamation painted on it.

Before we left, we got one last picture – this one of all five of us:

Santa Monica

On Wednesday, we decided to drive to Santa Monica. Cass had some things to do, so K accompanied us and drove us about. We first hit up some shops along with way. Among other things, we got Will some cool, new, blue shoes – his LA Shoes. Unfortunately, I don’t have a picture of them when there were still new and clean, but there is what they look like today:

We went to the main pier at the Santa Monica Beach, had some ice cream, and rode on the ferris wheel.

The main point of going to the beach was for Malin to get a shot of the sunset:

Will was misbehaving on the beach, running off, not listening to us, and so forth. So he was looking pretty glum at this point.

After the beach, we went to do some more shopping and eat some dinner. We ate at a small bar/restaurant called The Library Alehouse, which served decent food and a had a nice selection of beers – from California and otherwise.

There were some cool murals on the walls in the area, too:

Sushi With Uncle Uncle

On Thursday, we went into LA to visit Little Tokyo. While there, we visited a Japanese bookstore, and we also went into a Japanese market. Will got some interesting/odd Japanese toys from the market. We also got the obligatory pack of Pocky.

That evening, continuing with the Japan theme, we had a delicious dinner at a nice sushi restaurant. Cass’s uncle came to dinner with us. Cass and K just call him “uncle”, so we figured Will could call him “uncle uncle.” So we ate dinner with uncle uncle. Will did pretty well, but eventually got quite bored. So he climbed under the bench (our table was against a bench, so half the party sat on the bench and the other half across the table in chairs) and began playing with the arrangement of rocks thereunder.

Returning to Atlanta

The next day was are trip back home. Cass and I dragged a box of stuff that wouldn’t fit into our carry-on suitcases (we never check luggage) to a shipping store to have it FedEx’ed home.

I also had a bunch of interesting and rare brews that I bought while in LA. But we didn’t have boxes and packing material on hand to safely send them on their way, so Cass offered to pack them up after we left and send them to us.

The trip home was uneventful.

Post-Trip Activities

The day after we got back was Saturday. That evening, friends of mine from college visited us: Desmond, his wife Jessica, and their one-year-old daughter Alexis. They left the next morning to the airport to go on their own sort of vacation in Florida.

The following week, we drove through the Carolinas. We spent a couple of nights with my parents in Greenville, SC. We also visited Durham, NC to see our friend Audra and her husband Jon. They had just had a newborn baby daughter named Madelyn. Finally, we had a stop in Charlotte, NC to visit with some of Malin’s relatives and to see Desmond and company yet again.

Our night at Desmond and Jessica’s house was fun. We played Rock Band 2 on their PS3, and Will had a lot of fun banging on the drums. Surprisingly, as much fun as he had at Desmond’s and again at Best Buy playing Rock Band, he has yet to ask for a copy. But we won’t be surprised when he does.

Stay tuned for the next and final chapter of the photo backlog – Halloween. It will be a much shorter post than this one, so it should go up pretty soon.

Malin’s birthday was in September. She turned 30. We had a small party. Unfortunately, I did not really get any pictures. Birthday girl wasn’t taking pictures that day either. We had food from Star Provisions (thin crust pizzas, focaccia pizzas, and soup) along with some usual party food (wings, chip, dips…).

The week before Malin’s birthday, Malin busied herself with a new crafty enterprise: canning.

First on the agenda was fig jam. Malin had a craving that week (early pregnancy does a number on women with respect to cravings – late pregnancy, too, sometimes – heck, maybe even mid-pregnancy).

The fridge was full of figs. Most of them were black mission figs, but I think we got some green kadota figs mixed in there, too. Our neighbors across the street, Joe and Frances, provided some of the green figs – fresh from the fig trees in their backyard.

Before we can can the figs, we must first turn them into jam. This is made easy with the help of sugar and heat. Apparently the first step is peel the little skins off of the figs. Then you toss them into a big pot (the figs, not the skins) with the aforementioned sugar and finally apply the aforementioned heat. It’s so simple, right?

A little stewing on the stovetop

After you have jam, you fill the mason jars. You then “process” the jars to seal them via partial vacuum. When you’re done, you have cute little jars of jam like in the picture (above right).

We still have some to this day. We eat it on toast with breakfast regularly.

Second on the agenda was everyone’s favorite: a piping peck of pickled peppers.

The peppers were courtesy of a friend and co-worker who grows peppers as a hobby – including some really nasty hot peppers like Habaneros.

And now, to break up the monotony, how about an oddball picture of yours truly:

I don’t know what I was doing. The face is unlikely authentic – probably hamming it up for the camera. I don’t know. Don’t ask.

And now on to the end of September. The last week I brewed a truly terrific double IPA:

Sack o’ grains, waiting to be turned into beer

That same day, before brewing began, Malin had a photo shoot: she was taking pictures of baby Nye, the young daughter of our friends Kevin and Patricia. Before the shoot, Malin showed Will how to take pictures using her old D50. He has been taking them ever since. Here are some of his first images:

Later that day, Malin got this picture of Will playing with baby Nye:

He’s already practicing to be a big brother. And look at those curls. Who the hell let him grow his hair out like that? Amusingly enough, he now prefers to keep his hair very short and occasionally even asks if he can shave it, “I want no hair! Like Randy!” (Randy is my mother-in-law’s boyfriend).

And thus concludes yet another chapter. The next chapter will be the longest and the most interesting: California! We’ll write all about what we did in LA in October. Lots of pictures, too. And I have a busy weekend coming up (plans for Friday and Saturday), so I won’t get a chance to post the next chapter until Sunday at the very earliest. I’m sure you will all be on the edge of your seats, losing sleep for days.

À bientôt!

But when I was collecting photos to post with those write-ups, I found some other stuff that could go on this blog. So this is part 1 of 5. These posts will be mostly in chronological order – so the oldest photos are found below. There will actually be a part 6, but I’m hoping that won’t be backlog. By that point in time, we’ll have finally found ourselves caught up and will be posting recent photos – like the adventures of Gimpy and Grumpy the elves.

This post really contains the miscellaneous photos that weren’t associated with any particular event – around the house, here and there, this and that… That means there aren’t as many words associated with these pictures. There isn’t really a story to tell or a trip or other tale to recount. So this might be the shortest in this series – which is probably good since it mainly consists of all of our funny-looking mugs, which some of you may be tired of looking at :)

This image is one that Malin took of herself over a year ago:

More recently, she needed a self-portrait to use with press releases. The two below weren’t actually used in print, but I thought they were good. I actually clicked the button on the camera. But aside from that most mundane of actions, I had nothing to do with the photography. Malin setup the lighting, the camera, and the idea in advance and just needed my help actually capturing it:

Speaking of Malin’s photography, this is a cool picture that she snapped from our front yard after a rainstorm – a wicked-looking double rainbow:

Here’s another photo that she took of Will last Fall. He helped her draw the angel wings on the pavement with sidewalk chalk – kind of like a “rock’n'roll” angel, eh?

What post of portraits would be complete without one of yours truly? I think we have lots of pictures like this since I am often the guinea pig for Malin’s test shots. If she’s playing around with some new setting on her camera, a new idea for lighting effects, or a new lens, I am usually the subject. I don’t know if there was actually any photographic experimentation going on for this pic though.

This recent one shows me beating Castlevania for Will. He occasionally likes to play the game, but he prefers to watch since he gets frustrated with his own still-developing levels of fine motor control. Having said that, he’s gotten pretty good at his latest video game acquisition (Lego Indiana Jones).

And last, but certainly not least, are some images of Will’s toys. My brother-in-law Cass got him a Super Grover construction set when we were in Los Angeles this year. The set comes with extra pieces, and you can assemble everything to look like Super Grover or in crazy ways to look something else.

This was Will’s favorite creation: Darth Grover.

This might be his second-favorite: R2-Grover.

More recently, I bought him a Snap-Tite model of a Star Wars spaceship. As it turns out, he isn’t quite ready to build these. I didn’t realize just how small some of the pieces were and how much manual dexterity in your hands was needed to snap all of the pieces together. I knew he wouldn’t have the patience or reading ability to follow the instructions, so I was prepared to help out a lot. I think the age recommendation of 8 years old is a bit old, however. He’ll probably be putting these together himself by age 6. So he helped me sort out the pieces, and I let him help with some of the snap-together assembly where I thought he could. He mostly played with the plastic Jedi figure that came with it while I assembled.

The finished product, sitting on our space-age carpet – designed to resemble the lunar surface of Kashyyyk:

That wraps up this episode of the photo backlog.

Please stay tuned for the next episode: Independence Day 2008.

And now, you’re moment of zen:

Before the show, we went to eat dinner at Holeman & Finch  Public House – a gastro-pub that cures their own meats. It was a good dinner, but a bit pricey:

• The cheese plate was good and reasonably priced. We had the plate offering five cheeses – a really nice blue, a somewhat-interesting cheddar, a mellow and very creamy goat cheese, Humboldt Fog (sorry, I only remembered the name of this one), and another creamy and soft cow’s milk cheese.
• The house-cured meat was very tasty – but incredibly over-priced. Before ordering, we asked how much would come, and the server said that it was a pretty good amount. I don’t know what he was talking about. There was very little meat. And for $15, I definitely won’t be ordering it again if I ever return to the place.
• We also had fried sweetbreads served over grits. This was a delicious dish – the highlight of the evening. The grits were very creamy, and the sweetbreads were good. We’d never had sweetbreads served this way: all in a big, fried hunk. Usually they are broken into morsels and then cooked, but this was a big ol’ hunk of ‘em. Yummy.
• The fried oysters weren’t bad. The fried pickle chips that came with them were probably the best part. They were very soft and gelatinous which I did not particularly like. I’ve had raw oysters and fried oysters in the past that were much more firm and think the texture is much more pleasant when it’s less mucilaginous.
• Another pleasant dish was the hen of the wood mushrooms with polenta. I don’t know if I’ve ever had this type of mushroom before, but they were good. The only regret: not enough polenta.

It felt odd coming home Tuesday night knowing that we had to return to normal life the next day. Midweek events feel kind of strange that way.

And then yesterday, Hump Day, was another highlight of the week. Will was well-behaved all day, so he got to take advantage of a special privilege reserved for well-behaved boys: video games.

A couple of weeks ago, he bought Lego Indiana Jones for the Wii using his allowance. He’d been saving up for a few months. We went to GameStop to look at used video games, and they were a complete rip-off: a new copy was $50, a used copy was $45. Will was very upset that he didn’t have enough money to buy the game, but we found a copy on eBay for a reasonable price that he could afford: $29. And for some reason eBay gave us a 10% coupon that brought the total down to around $26. Will had only saved up $22, but we gave him an advance on his allowance.

So yesterday while I was at work, Malin and Will finished the second of the three parts of the game: The Temple of Doom. After dinner last night, Will and I played a couple of levels of part three: The Last Crusade. For any that might be interested in the game, I highly recommend it. It is very fun, and knowledge of the movies can help you beat some of the tricky parts – which makes it feel authentic.

On Tuesday Will told us that he wanted John McCain to win the election. We asked him why that was (”did someone at school tell you that?”). He replied, “I like his hair.”

He was devastated on Wednesday to hear his favorite head of hair had not won over more voters. We tried explaining that there are other factors that people consider when casting their ballot (some people anyway…).

Speaking of casting ballots, the Libertarian ticket, headlined by Georgia’s own Bob Barr, appeared on the ballot in Georgia on Tuesday, but neither the Green Party nor independent tickets appeared there. It struck me as a little odd considering the Green Party’s candidate was Georgia’s own Cynthia McKinney. Apparently the Green Party primary was a landslide with Ralph Nader (famous – or perhaps infamous – for being the Green Party’s candidate in 2000 among other things) placing a distant second. The results of their presidential convention can be seen here. I’ve never heard of any of the possible candidates in the list other than Ms. McKinney and Mr. Nader.

As I mentioned above, Mr. Nader, running as an independent this year, was missing from the ballot. A friend and coworker informed me that Nader was an “official write-in” in Georgia. I’m still not sure what the heck that means. What distinguishes an “official” write-in candidate from an unofficial one? My coworker and I mused about this: do they discard write-in votes that aren’t cast for “official” write-in candidates? Hopefully (dare I say “probably”) not. I couldn’t find any online source that described an “official” write-in in Georgia nor could I find any online source that confirmed Nader’s status as “official write-in”. The closest thing I found was this. Read a certain way, it could seem to imply that Georgia voters can write in Nader’s name but not necessarily anyone else’s.

The Taste of Taste

Lately, Will has come to really enjoy a couple of TV commercials. One is a Campbell’s soup commercial.

Man Eating Soup: What is that taste?

Man in Chef Hat: Taste.

Man Eating Soup: Hmmmm. I like the taste of taste.

Man in Chef Hat: It’s very tasty.

It is a surreal and mildly amusing commercial. Every time it comes on, Will can be heard repeating “I like the taste of taste” afterwards.

Unfortunately, I haven’t yet found the commercial online. The closest thing I can find on YouTube also features the Man in Chef Hat and is titled “Mike Huckabee Soup Chef” due to the character’s resemblance to the former Republican presidential candidate. You can see it here.

His other favorite commercial features a talking baby espousing the wonders of E*TRADE. If you haven’t seen it, take a look here. His favorite part is the hurling at the end.

Today he and Malin engaged in a rather disgusting conversation. He saw the other talking baby E*TRADE commercial (featuring creepy clown instead of spit up), but he thought it was the other one. Mystified at the absence of puke after the commercial ended, I explained to him that there are two different but similar commercials. Somehow the conversation turned to Will’s baby brother (not due until April) and how Will will get more than his share of spit up after he arrives.

Will then joked, “I’m going to eat the puke.” At mom’s horrified expression and dad’s abrupt and incessant giggling, Will continued, “I’m going to swallow it! Ewww!”

During this rather repulsive interchange I could only laugh to myself thinking “at least he got the Humphries sense of humor!”

This anecdote won’t likely surprise my sister or brother-in-law in LA who got earfuls from Will about the “puke robot” when we were there last month.

Era of Change?

And to think, we have another one on the way. How will we handle two insane, hyper boys, running around, pretending to be Darth Maul, talking about retching automata?

We do have a few ideas of where we’ll be next year. It’s a cozy place in which we’ve become quite comfortable thanks to our precious little monstrosity of a mini-man :)

Come and join us sometime, won’t you?

Malin took her camera along, and Will loves being in pictures (several times, he stopped and insisted that Malin take a picture of him right then and there). So this post has a decent number of photos…

Getting There

We had a bit of a rough time getting to the airplane. First, on auto-pilot, I drove towards the airport instead of towards our park-and-ride facility of choice. After doing a loop around Hartsfield-Jackson, we finally managed to get to our park-and-ride facility. And… naturally… it was full. I’d seen them full before only once – during spring break. I wasn’t sure why they were so busy now. I suppose it was just after school got out for summer, so perhaps a lot of families decided to fly to an early summer vacation destination, much like ourselves. They gave us a coupon for one free night at another facility up the road (same owners of course).

We drove up the road and parked, hopped on the shuttle to the airport, and made it all the way to the airport before realizing that we had left something in the car: Will’s booster seat. We didn’t need his seat for the airplane so much as for the rental car once we landed in Boston. The shuttle driver was nice and happily drove us back to the car and then back out to the airport.

We were finally at the airport – all of our junk in tow! The next bit of fun we had was getting our boarding passes. We had Delta e-tickets, so the shuttle driver dropped us off at the Delta terminal, and we walked up to an available kiosk for check-in. As Murphy’s Law would predict, we were unable to get our passes from the kiosk. As luck would have it, our seats were on a “partner carrier”: Continental. Even though we booked the flights through Delta and Delta and Continental are “partners”, we still had to lug all of our junk to the other side of the airport (Continental and Delta are not on the same terminal) to check-in and get boarding passes.

Thankfully, we had left home early enough to allow plenty of time in security lines. That meant we were early enough that all of the mishaps so far didn’t cause us to miss our flight. In fact, since we were lugging around so much stuff (a three-year-old and a booster seat is what really did it), we were let into the special, short security line that is intended for disabled passengers, passengers traveling with infants, and others with special needs.

This, of course, is the view from the plane – somewhere over the U.S. eastern seaboard, between Atlanta, Georgia and Newark, New Jersey (we had a connection at Newark, continuing on to Logan International in Boston).

Before long, we arrived in Boston, Massachusetts.

Getting Acquainted

After we landed, we took a shuttle to the rental car facility. Very shortly after we got everything squared away and had packed the rental car, my brother, Jake, showed up (he missed us by a few minutes meeting us at the airport, so he took the same shuttle to the rental car facility to meet us).

We got on the road to go to the hotel and unload the car. Traffic was rough – rush hour on Friday. We finally made it to our hotel (which was not really close to anything – about 10 miles north of Cambridge up I-93). We chose an out-of-the-way hotel, in Woburn, because of the price (the amount we saved on the hotel was more than enough to pay for the rental car to allow us to get from Woburn to everything else). After being buckled into an airplane for a few hours and then in a car for an hour, Will was ready to expend some energy, as you can see from the photo on the right.

We decided to go to Cambridge Brewing Company for dinner, and Jake invited a friend of his to meet us there. We had a little difficulty getting to Cambridge because of the fact that our hotel was nestled in between I-95 and I-93. To make things more confusing, I-95 and I-93 have the same exit numbers in this area. Unlike other cities where you can tell you’re on the wrong interstate because of the direction it runs (North-South instead of East-West or vice versa) or because the exit numbers are way out of range, in Woburn I-95 and I-93 both run North-South and intersect one another at exit number 37. That’s right: the exit from I-95 to get onto I-93 is exit 37, and the exit from I-93 to get onto I-95 is exit 37. So naturally, we started down the wrong interstate in our journey to Cambridge. After some frustrating time had passed (”How could Google maps be so freakin’ wrong!?!?!”), we discovered our mistake and were finally on the right way.

Dinner was good, and the place made a nice variety of interesting and tasty ales. Since we were in Cambridge, Jake walked home, and we drove back to the hotel.

Getting Around Town

Saturday was a busy day. We woke up and ate breakfast at the hotel. I think this was Will’s favorite breakfast place because they had make-your-own Belgian Waffles and fresh apples – two of his favorites. After breakfast, we went to pick up Jake, and then we stopped at the Samuel Adams Brewhouse for a tour. After the tour, we ate tasty sandwiches and cookies for lunch at Flour Bakery, near the kid’s museum.

Before we could eat, however, we had to find it. This would prove challenging as Boston has to be the very worst city in the country for driving around. The roads are not on a grid. At first, I didn’t think this would be a big deal. After all, downtown Atlanta isn’t on a grid either. But Boston is really, really not on a grid. Typically, in a city with a lot of one-way streets, the directions alternate: left turn only, right turn only, left turn only, etc… but not in Boston. If you need to turn left, you can count on coming across three right-turn-only streets in a row. You can also frequently count on a complete lack of street signs. Need to turn right onto some particular street? Then you better know what the intersection looks like because many intersections are signage-free. For many reasons, driving around Boston was a huge pain… So out of total frustration, we decided to park and just walk to lunch. Because we planned on going to the park after lucnh, we parked in Chinatown. It is centrally located: lunch to the southeast and the park to the northwest.

The restaurant was close to the kid’s museum, but we didn’t actually go to the kid’s museum. Will had seen the one in Seattle, and they were similar enough that we didn’t feel the need to go to another one. Instead, we walked around Boston. We walked a very short part of the Freedom Trail.

The part of trail we walked ended at the Boston Common park. We had walked around a good bit at that point, so we took a rest in the grass:

After our walk, we decided to eat dinner at a Thai restaurant near where Jake lives in Cambridge. We then called it a night.

Getting Into College

Sunday was Father’s Day. To celebrate, we left the hotel to meet Jake for brunch at the Exchange Street Bistro. The place was pretty fancy but reasonably priced. The meal was good, but not perfect. The French toast I ordered was way too decadent. It was stuffed with (i.e. layered with stuff in between each slice of toast) peaches and blueberries, which were good. But it was also smothered all over with mascarpone – which tasted good but was simply too much. I think a light dollop of mascarpone on the top and some more conventional topping, like butter pecan syrup or maple syrup, would have been more to my liking. Malin ordered Crabcakes Benedict and Jake ordered Eggs Benedict. Their meals looked good (and from the few bites I had off Malin’s plate, tasted good too). Unfortunately, however, one of the poached eggs served on  Malin’s plate was way overcooked (it looked more like a hard-boiled egg than a poached egg – dense with a dry, chalky yolk instead of a runny yolk).

The rest of the day was spent in Cambridge, touring colleges for Will :)

First we drove over to the MIT campus and visited the MIT Museum. This place was very cool. The bottom floor hosts The Mark Epstein Innovation Gallery. The day we were there, this gallery included interactive exhibitions on MIT’s City Car concept and their engineering contributions to oceanography. The latter featured a simulator allowing visitors to control a robot (an unmanned, remotely-controlled, undersea vehicle) that was, by far, Will’s favorite exhibit.

Upstairs features a very large space with some very cool exhibits. The first gallery focused on robots. This gallery was a big disappointment: don’t get me wrong, it was interesting. But when you have a three-year-old that has really gotten his hopes up for seeing robots, this exhibit simply couldn’t fulfill that level of expectation. The robots were all behind glass cases, and none of them moved. Will was not impressed. The next gallery featured two exhibits: one on holographs and the other featuring intricate, mechanical sculptures/artwork from a mechanical engineer named Arthur Ganson.

These sculptures are phenomenal. I wish I could describe them better. They ranged from spindly, wiry contraptions to elegantly moving machines, and all of them were very cool. You’ll just have to check it out for yourself to understand what I mean.

After MIT, we visited the campus of Harvard University. The campus is quite attractive and makes for a nice walk. We walked past the library and the law school and took pictures of ourselves on the steps in front of the buildings:

We were also obliged to visit the statue of John Harvard – and rub his toe for good luck:

In one of the buildings (can’t remember which) they had a very old mainframe on display – one of the first big computers, complete with a large array of knobs for defining the inputs to your program (in decimal) and a punch card reader. Will was mesmerized by it, wondering, “How does one play Lego Star Wars on this gigantic contraption?”

After a thorough trip through campus, we finally decided to meander back to our car. During the walk back, Malin snapped this amusing shot:

Will fell asleep in car on our way to dinner. This night we stopped at a staple for tourists visiting Boston: Legal Sea Foods. It was okay. The food was decent, but overpriced. It reminded me a little of Cheesecake Factory… Will woke up just in time to eat some dessert. After dinner, we called it a night.

Getting To Waltham and Back

The next day, Jake had to work. We were to pick him up from work in the afternoon. There was shops and such at which Malin wanted to shop, so we drove from the hotel down to Cambridge for some shopping.

The first stop was supposed to be a quick stop at IHOP. We had an extremely aggravating battle with squirrelly roads, unlabeled streets, and traffic. It took forever to finally find the place, and everyone was thoroughly irritated with one another by the time we finally got out of the car (both from hunger and from arguing about how the hell to get to the restaurant). Big honkin’ stack of flapjacks to the rescue!

The next stop after breakfast was a vintage fabric store. Will and I played at a really cool playground (the Gore Street Playground) while Malin searched for cool material.

After that, we drove up to Somerville to hang out at Davis Square. There were several shops that Malin wanted to visit. We rounded out that trip by picking up some desserts from a place named Kickass Cupcakes. With a name like that, how could we not go in?

We split one of our cupcake acquisitions in the car on the way to go pick up Jake from work.

We then had even more fun with the Boston area roads. For instance, on-ramps from the surface streets in Boston onto I-90 are very poorly marked. Many of the signs don’t even indicate that it is an interstate – they say “Massachusetts Turnpike” instead. We never did exactly figure out the next steps. We had directions, from Google maps, for getting to the Watch City Brewing Company. We got off the interstate and then went in search of the streets it indicated – to no avail. We finally decided to just drive around, taking streets that lead us in the right direction. We did finally cross a street whose name we recognized from the directions, and we were able to get to our destination from there.

Watch City had a tasty selection of ales and quite good french fries. After a short time there, we were off, back to Boston. Our destination this time was The Barking Crab for a spot of dinner. Dinner here was good. I think it was just as good as Legal Sea Foods, but a little more reasonably priced. I also really liked the fact that they didn’t take themselves too seriously here; the restaurant was much more casual than Legal Sea Foods.

After dinner we drove to the North End – home to Boston’s Little Italy. We parked and walked around. It was very crowded, and there were a slew of restaurants that all could have made great dinner destinations had we not just eaten. On the recommendation of a co-worker who used to live in the Boston area, we made a stop at Mike’s Pastry shop. Will and I split some delicious gelato, and Will and Malin split some chocolate-dipped, puffed pastries.

At that point, it began to rain, so we called it a night. We said our goodbyes to Jake, since he’d be at work the next day when we’d be on our way to the airport.

Getting Ready to Leave

Tuesday was our last day there. We had some time, however, before we had to get to the airport to leave. So we revisited a few places in Boston before going home.

Our first stop was the Boston Public Gardens. Here we are, standing at the gates just outside the gardens:

While in the gardens, we took Will on a swan-boat ride. I do not recommend this. It is a very short, boring, slow ride around the pond. You’ll have just as good of a view, if not better, for free by simply walking around the pond. After the boat ride, we did just that:

After a swan-boat ride at the gardens, we drove back up to the North End to get a daytime view of Little Italy. We walked around and got a delicious sandwich from a Salumeria. Will and I decided to wait outside while mother dearest went inside to grab some grub:

Will didn’t care for the sandwich, so on the walk back to the car we let him pick out a slice of pizza from a deli/bakery that was on the way:

Getting Home

Our ordeal getting on the plane back home was even more stressful than on the way up to Boston.

First, we had to return the rental car. This should have been easy: our paperwork from the rental car facility even had a photo with arrows on it. Unfortunately, I found the text beneath the photo – pertaining to when I would see this – to be a little confusing. So I ended up getting off the highway too soon. Then, after arguing a little bit about how the heck to get to the place from the surface streets where we now found ourselves, we headed off and did, in fact, manage to find the place.

A quick shuttle to the airport and we were ready to go! This time, we knew to check-in at the Continental counter, not Delta. Their kiosk system wouldn’t accept my e-ticket number, so I had to ask for assistance. The woman that helped us informed us that our flight was a little late. That meant we would miss our connecting flight (through Newark again was the plan) and have to take the next one which would put us back in Atlanta about three hours late. I was visibly irritated by the situation so the lady did a little extra to help: she moved us to a direct flight on a Delta plane that left nearly an hour earlier than our original itinerary (we were early, so we figured we could make it without a problem).

Unfortunately, we had to walk over to the Delta counter to check-in. We were able to check-in at a Delta kiosk, but unable to choose seat assignments. This was bad news because none of our seats were together – the boarding passes had us spread out all over the plane. So we decided to rush to the gate to get the seat assignment fixed before the plane took off.

Naturally, as Murphy would have predicted, we hit another snag: Malin and Will got tagged for the “extensive” search at the security line. So we had to wait a bit longer than everyone else as Malin had to stand in a big, dark box that scanned her. And then they had to open all of her carry-ons and inspect everything. They were rubbing around the luggage with a tissue and then running the tissue through a scanner (I assume to check for dust or residue that would be left behind had we packed explosives).

Just as the security folks were finishing their scans, Will’s backpack broke. The zipper completely failed. Malin had to clutch it tightly to prevent its zipperless opening from dropping all of its contents as we hurried to the gate. As we arrived, boarding was about to begin. I was pretty pessimistic about our chances of getting our seat assignments fixed this late in the game… Luckily, I was proven wrong. The lady at the gate heard our situation and printed new boarding passes in the blink of an eye. Just as we were handed our new boarding passes, the call to board the plane was issued. We immediately jumped in line and had a smooth ride home.

We brought a big Tonka dump truck for Will to play with in the sand. We also brought his “tools” – a plastic toy shovel and rake, made for sandbox play.

He made several trips from the house to the beach. The first afternoon we were there, shortly after arriving, Donna took him and Catrina (Audra’s and Jason’s young cousin) to the beach to play. We returned again the next morning, and again in the evening, and again the next day, etc…

During some down time before the wedding, the three of us (Malin, Will, and me) went for a stroll on the beach. Malin took many pictures of us on the beach. When we walked under the pier that was near the house, she handed me the camera and asked me to snap some in order to get herself in some pictures. The first photo up there on the right is shy Willie getting a piggyback ride from mommy. The one below shows the two of them looking for shells under the pier:

There were actually lots of seashells to find down there. Just a few feet away from where they’re standing was an alley of crushed shells that seemed to run the whole length of the beach:

Tiring of my photography skills (or lack thereof), Malin eventually reclaimed her camera to prove that I was actually at the beach with the two of them:

She also got some great shots of Will playing in the sand. This one is my favorite:

The rest of the vacation centered around the wedding and our preparation of food for ourselves and the other guests: a low-country boil on Saturday, crab cakes and fish’n'chips on Sunday.

Unfortunately, we had to leave the beach on Monday. I can’t wait to go back… perhaps later this summer?