Category: bliefs

Teaser Trailer

We, by that I mean TheMermaids and I, spent most of this Labor Day Weekend plotting another movie and when we found out that JG was going to be in town…we had to include him.

I didn’t have time to finish all of the edits in the full movie this weekend but I told JG that I would have a short teaser trailer up no matter what.

This is for you JG.

[these actors I tell ya, and their demands? The next thing you know they’re gonna want a chance to direct]

Staycation Part III – The New Benders

Towards the end of my staycation, we fished around for some new ideas, made some future plans for a sleepover with friends, and began to clean the house in anticipation of a coming garage sale.

[tangent]
Now, several weeks later, the garage is clogged with all of that garage sale stuff – not the best promoters.
But I digress.
[/tangent]

One particular early evening The Mermaids and I sat down to a movie and I rebuffed the usual suspects; My Little Princess-Pony-Carebear-Mermaid-Barbie just wasn’t on my menu tonight – so I put my foot down and said (with that over-super-ultra-mega-mondo excitement meant to drum up support that is frankly…aaaaa bit transparent to The Mermaids. Or to any kid really; in this day and age of carefully architected marketing savvy? I must sound like I’ve only got one bar on my cellphone.

So I said, all ultra-mega like,

I know! Let’s watch The Last Airbenderrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!
Nooooooo – Daddy!?! We wanna watch My-Little-Princess-Pony-CareBear-Mermaid-Barbie!!

Sigh.
A little weaker this time.

Nope – Daddy is vetoing that one. Let’s watch The Last Airbender. It’s supposed to be good! 🙂

How the heck should I know?

But Daaaadddddyyyyy?!?!?!?……….does it have a girl in it?
No.

But am I hearing a spark of possibility in that question?!

Then I don’t wanna watch it!
ME NEITHER!

Drat! Guess I’m gonna have to go 1950’s on ’em.

Fine. Then I’ll watch it myself and you two can go do something else.

…and I hit play, on my little remote, with such…authority! I’m so 1950’s.

Only five minutes later I had two very engaged Mermaids on my lap, eyes wide, mouths open. In a phrase – they loved it.

You see, it’s a story about a young boy who can control the primary elements of Air, Water, Earth, and Fire. And he, and his children group of power-specialists, can “bend” those elements to their will. A mix of martial arts, fantasy, naturally a love story, and a healthy dose of kid power led to The Mermaids doing their usual – acting out their favorite scenes, picking out clothes that resemble the characters and reliving the movie.

Then one of them asked,

How do they do that?

I attempted a movie making explanation and since it was still light out I went the ostensive route and said

C’mon, let’s go outside and make a quick movie. Just a test.

With action movie eagerness, we spent about 15 minutes setting up and shooting the various scenes in our backyard, one take only, and then repaired to my Macintosh to cut it together quickly – maybe 20 minutes. It was understandably choppy and lame and actually, quite perfect.

They liked it so much, they must’ve watched all 45 seconds about ten times, huge grins and all. So I proposed,

Tomorrow, let’s do it full on – right.

So we did, The Mermaids picked their costumes, we manufactured some “weapons”, and over breakfast we spent a good deal of time (and I burned through some Mermaid patience) writing a scene storyboard. With all that, and more, in hand, we moved the operation to a small wooded section of our neighborhood and what you see below is the result – a crowning achievement to an excellent staycation.

All in all, there is probably 20 min of footage, which took about 2 hours to shoot, and 15-20 hours to edit into the three and a half minute movie you see here. This video also includes about 3.5 minutes of credits and outtakes for a total of nearly seven minutes.

Needless to say – I wasn’t ready with the final product until the aforementioned “future” sleepover several days later. 🙂

ON WITH THE SHOW!
Enjoy – The New Benders!

Bicycle Interlude

Yesterday I rode with TT, a fellow recumbent bike rider whom I met in Portland, north from his place up to Big Lake along the Centennial Trail and beyond. Total mileage was about 76 miles.

The destination was a 5.5 mile time trial up a hill held every year by the Skagit Valley Bicycle Club.
Thanks to Marshall the marshall who timed us and sagged.

TT handled this time trial (also known as a TT) quite well showing me and the other rider just how it’s done. I finished third 🙂 a full six minutes and change behind TT.

This picture is my meager iPhone-attempt at capturing the amazing view from the top of little mountain park.

A Bent With a View

I’m pretty tired today after all that riding. My 60 min, commute-based, conditioning doesn’t do much to prepare for an 80 miler with a Hillclimb sprint.

Thanks to TT for pulling me all the way back.

Hornworm caterpillar

One of The Mermaids noticed this caterpillar, after our latest kayak expedition, under the willow tree by the boat launch.

It was just chilling there on one of the paddles.

I’ve looked it up on whatsthatbug.com but can’t find an identified picture which matches the patterns and markings.

Could be a Tomato Hornworm or a Sphinx Hornworm.

I did see an exact match on a flickr site (google image search for [caterpillar “blue horn”]) but that guy thinks it’s a hummingbird moth caterpillar.
I think that’s wrong based on what I’ve seen.

Any takers want to identify this beauty?

20110822-122005.jpg

Staycation 2011 – Part II : Science

The second part of my recent stay-cation, and every bit as good as Empire, ended up being focused on things that might be generally categorized as “science”.

We began at The Burke Museum and saw lots of fossils, bones, stories, and pictures.
Now THAT'S a femur.

The Burke (hipsters like me shorten the name affectionately – not to be confused with the trail of the same affectionate, hipster-like name) is an amazing resource really, it is nicely sized for a short day-trip and amounts to a bit more than your typical childs attention span. And if you feed them appropriately, the children that is, it may stretch even longer.

It’s no Smithsonian but it’s also not a drive-thru tree with an attached gift-shop.

Still amazing to me is the beak on this prehistoric, and aptly named, Terror Bird.
Not your average Toucan
It was supposedly only about 9-10 feet tall – imposing sucker I tell you and I would have sworn it was 15 feet tall if it was an inch. I am rather glad we don’t have to contend with this beast in the modern day; lions and bees and bears and lunatics are quite enough for this slightly paunchy father of two thankyouverymuch.

At the Woodland Park Zoo we got to see “REAL” dinosaurs; this one even spit at us.
These guys woulda given the Velociraptors a run for their money in JP
The T-Rex actually caused LaGrande to recoil and cry – and I can see why; it was HUGE and imposing.

TheWeeOne on the other hand
[amazed tangent]
Ya know I just realized that TheWeeOne – if I were forced to resort to giving her an acronym – would be TWO…hehe, not bad.
I may have a natural fallback for when she isn’t so “wee” anymore.
[/amazed tangent]
…as I was saying…TheWeeOne on the other hand wasn’t as fearful and in fact several minutes later made sure that I capture a picture of her running away from the lion…that was chasing her.

Dah da Don da Daaa Da

I mean…THE LION that was chasing her.

Ro Raw Roh ra Rawwwr Ra

There.

Yet another day, we also saved a nice butterfly from death-by-vehicle as it fluttered haplessly about the roadway.

Saved by the Gamper

This butterfly spent two days coddled on fresh flowers in the playhouse and then finally flew away of it’s own volition. That made The Rescue Mermaids VERY happy.

All the while TheMermaids completed their swimming lessons, we swam, and played, and hatched some plans for our last adventure of my staycation, our swansong…which I will detail in the final installment, Part III, of my 2011 Staycation.

Never Fear

I’m still here – I’ve just been INSANELY busy at the office these days.
It isn’t likely to get better anytime soon.

I have some good stuff in the hopper, mostly pictures and a video, but for now I’ll give you something to chew on…a good WeeOne quote.

Daddy…you’re getting old.
What?! Why do you say that?
‘Cause you are…’cause you have grey hairs right here, in your beard!
But…but…you know UncuhJamey has WAYYY more grey hair than I do and he isn’t as old as me, so just because I have grey hairs doesn’t mean you can say that I’m getting old, right?!

[pause]

Daddy?
Yes.
You’re getting old.

She has yet to be accused of lacking persistence.

Staycation 2011 – Part I: The Camping Trip.

Usually I like to write little memorable bits about things that happen as I go – that way I don’t forget them.
This time, I have to condense all two weeks of my staycation into one post…maybe. Perhaps this will be my first multi-part post: stay tuned.

We started with our annual Dash Point camping trip.

Hammock Mermaid Number One
TheWeeOne actually decided to sleep in the hammock the first night – and except for that whole ‘getting cold’ thing at 2AM – it worked out swimmingly.

Hammock Mermaid Number Two
Of course – as you can see – the hammock provided hours of entertainment and screeching. I tried to endure it – but ultimately it was just too concerning: the possibility of a sprained neck and the possibility of a burst eardrum.

Forest Mermaids
We hiked both days. This year, the amphibians were mere tadpoles and the water levels were REALLY high. The huckleberries were in season though – and we even picked enough to make a good pie in the end.


Of course – there was a traditional fire – but this time we had HUGE marshmallows. Amazingly, their girth allows for better cooking. I am not clear on what makes them better but I got some amazing browning – that then allowed for removal of the outer layer and then another browning would do the inner layer again. I even managed a triple after I really perfected my technique – and pumped up TheMermaids blood sugar levels (see Hammock Screeching).

Ultimately, the beach was what we (read as they) were after. We went both days of the weekend and despite extremely high tides and cooler weather, we managed a nice sandcastle and even buried the girls to their necks in sand.
Right before they 'popped their tails'.

And of course – we finished it off with our traditional bench family photo.
Family Bench Photo

As you can see by the title, I have decided that this will be Part I of perhaps three parts.
It is really amazing how even though I was home for all of the two weeks, I didn’t have any significant time to actually blog any of this.

That’s good actually. 🙂

Extreme TV

Today – after a busy week of swimming lessons, camping, museums, zoos, and some housework with few breaks I felt like taking it easy and working on computer maintenance. TheMommy wanted to read and relax.

These are not usually short things – especially when I really haven’t done much of it for ohhhhh, about two years. What was I talkin’ bout? – Oh yeah.

So, when the girls got up and noiselessly started watching their latest Netflix infatuation I didn’t complain (like usual). Then TheMommy and I listened to Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, did some dishes, and…TheMermaids pushed on valiantly.

There isn’t much blow-by-blow to miss here but suffice it to say…it’s now 20:22 and they watched something like 11 hours of TV – with very little interruption (except for when Netflix wanted to go outside and play once).

Un-be-liev-able.
At one point TheMommy even opened the window

Look! It’s sunny outside! Go outside and play?!
Ahhhh? [shading their eyes] It’s too bright!

What are they becoming…moles?

Then, at about 18:30 I approached them, in the dark, deep basement TV room and said

Well? was it worth it?
Worth what?
Worth “it”?! You’ve sat on your butts all day long and watched ‘Charlie’ the whole time – just think of all you’ve missed?

LaGrande just squirmed a little bit but TheWeeOne, with the surety of a seasoned philosopher said blithely

What did we miss?

Oooooh, she’s good that one.

*coming soon – activities actually DONE on my staycation. Lots of pictures.