Are you a member of the cult of Fireball? John never mentioned I’d be receiving an Official Membership Card — or if he did, I forgot. Anyway, it’s an amusing surprise. When do I get my packet of Kool-Aid?
It’s nice, when you’re home alone, to have a day where you get a lot of mail that isn’t junk. Along with my Daring Fireball membership card and T-Shirt, I received the latest issues of TapeOp and Wired, and some bills. Bills aren’t fun, but at least they’re informative. The magazines, on the other hand, are much fun.
Back to work.
Congratulations to our friends Liana and Ralph on their wedding! We went to the greater Detroit area this weekend for the great event, and they are off on their honeymoon now. This photo is from the unity candle lighting portion of the service.
Read on for one more photo of me as a muppet, and a bit more story.
Continuing to backtrack, I’ll say we had a good time in New England last week. It was, as always, short. There are people in Boston and other parts of New Hampshire that we didn’t have time to see, which is really hard. We did get to Vermont to see Stephanie and Morgan and their cats. Stephanie is quite pregnant (due in a month), and it was good to see her again after a lapse of two or three years.
I took a few photos, more than half of which are their damn cats. So hard to resist.
We ate lots of ice cream, almost as much pizza, and managed not to get eaten too badly by the bugs. We marveled at the huge numbers of crickets and grasshoppers at my dad’s house, and listened to Daniel either catch or squash those he could, depending on his mood. At one point we heard him saying “Yuck yuck yuck yuck…” over and over and he tried to smash one of the grasshoppers, which was gross because “it has juice” inside.
While visiting my mom, we went canoeing. That was a great success — we saw snakes, an otter, a great blue heron (we saw several of these nesting over the course of the whole trip), a snapping turtle, a box turtle, a dog, some hu-mans, and more. We somehow got very burned on our thighs, the only areas on our bodies where the sunscreen didn’t work. Now they itch itch itch.
First of all, I should mention once and for all that our second trip to Ravinia was much better than the first. The train ride back was still a little louder than I would call perfectly comfortable, but it was just fine. And the show was great.
Today Lisa and I puttered around, reading and cleaning by turns throughout the house. My room is not quite the sty it was before, and maybe that will help me get out from under this massive pile of work that’s weighing on me this month. I hope.
Once the cleaning was done, she went shopping while I played softball. Jason organized it, and it was really fun. I hadn’t played softball in several years, and I don’t know if I’ve ever played the kind where the ball is really big and kind of squishy, and you don’t use a glove. Amazingly, I did fine. Afterward, we did what every professional athlete does after a hard day at the office: ate ice cream. We went to Zephyr, which has been recommended to me as a place to get a really good milk shake. Indeed, the chocolate milkshake Lisa got was quite good, as was my strawberry shortcake a la mode. Yum.
I have this idea that when I turn 30, when being slim should start to be more difficult as my metabolism continues to slow down (right?), I’ll start exercising regularly. Question is: can I still eat ice cream?