Memorial Day Weekend Roundup A-Go-Go
Yeah, yeah, I know. No Weekend Roundup got posted last night. But hey… it’s a long weekend. Monday is officially part of the weekend on Memorial Day, right? I mean, that’s what the gubmint says. If the mail isn’t delivered and the banks are closed, then I say Monday was part of the weekend, so just shut up already, you big baby. Don’t make me come over there!
So let’s take a look back at the weekend that was Memorial Day 2008. Mostly we will do so through the magic of digital photography, which I predict will be the next big thing. I think soon everyone will be taking digital photos. (Note to self: everyone is already taking digital photos, stupid, so shut up and get to the pictures.)
Friday night found us hanging around the house and watching I Am Legend, but I dont’ have any pictures of that. What would be the point? “Look, people watching TV! Fascinating!” So let’s just skip ahead to Saturday.
Saturday found us at the first annual Kansas City Jiggle Jam with our friends the Gambardellas. It was basically a big family festival held at Crown Center in downtown KC, with crafts and inflatables and face painting and kiddie bands and such. (They Might Be Giants was the headliner Saturday night, but we had to leave before they took the stage. Bah!)
Steven and Maya struck a pose with some alien standup thing… the Jiggle Jam mascot, I guess?
They couldn’t wait to run through the obstacle course inside this inflatable train…
Until they came out the other side soaking wet…
It seems that the overnight rains had seeped into little cracks here and there to turn it into an inadvertent water ride. Thankfully, we had packed extra clothes for the kids; we just didn’t expect to have to use them five minutes after we got there. (They closed the thing down not long after our kids were done ruining their clothes. Thanks, Jiggle Jam.)
The kids got their faces painted: Maya as some kind of bizarre fairy princess/tiger hybrid…
… and Steven as some horrifying abomination that frightened young kids all day.
And what would a street fair be without balloon artists? Just to make things more confusing, Maya added “butterfly” to the fairy princess/tiger mix.
Steven decided to go with a fire-breathing dragon headpiece that everyone had to dodge all day.
Also there was a duck?
Note that we do not have any pictures of the Gambardellas. That is because we are very selfish people, so focused on ourselves that we did not take any pictures of them. It’s all about the Horns, baby.
Okay, enough of that. Eventually we grew tired of the thing and made our way home. Church Saturday night was followed by dinner out with our friends Doug and Linda. Again, we didn’t really take pictures of that. “Look, people eating Mexican food! I must see more.”
And the next say, Sunday, was pretty uneventful. It was mostly spent at church (had to go to all three services because I was acting in a drama), napping at home, doing laundry (it is the weekend, you know), watching cottonwood seeds fly all over the neighborhood and cursing the owner of the tree and realizing that it was all coming from the cottonwood tree in our backyard*, and spending what seemed like three weeks in a Kohl’s while Shannon tried on some new clothes. I just about despaired of ever leaving that place, but finally Shannon decided to release from our retail purgatory.
Monday, of course, was Memorial Day. A day for Shannon to clean house while Steven and I went to see Iron Man. Ha! That’s the price you pay for trying on every piece of clothing at Kohl’s. Just kidding, of course. I helped clean, too, but credit where credit is due, Shannon did the lion’s share. This time.
(Also, just so you know, Iron Man was eight kinds of awesome. See it. Twice.)
We were cleaning the house so that a bunch of friends of ours could come over and trash it! (By friends, we mean Jon and Jessie, David, Laurie, Michelle and Irving, and a bunch of wee ones that belong to one or another of those people.) Memorial Day = Cookout, after all. And what would a cookout be without a bunch of weiners?
Whoops! Wrong pic. David, Jonathan, Irving, and some loser there at the bottom.
Here are the real weiners:
Delicious beer brats! Also hot dogs. After a dinner where we had so much food that a dozen of us barely put a dent in the buffet line, we retired to the living room for some Wii Bowling.
Now let’s wrap this up with some more guest pics! Here’s Maya, Steven (holding the Crows’ new baby Eli), and our friend Laurie.
Adri (Irv and Michelle’s) and Liam (Jon and Jessie’s) share a moment of bewilderment.
And finally, the ladies (except for Laurie, who left before we took the pic)… Jessie, Shannon, and Michelle…
Okay, that’s it. I’d say more, but what else is there to say? We had a cookout, we cleaned it all up, we’re exhausted, and we have to go to work tomorrow. Meh, at least it’s a short week, which is to say that the four-day workweek gives me one less day to completely ruin my company.
Good night, everybody!
* If any of our neighbors are reading this, I am so sorry.
Weekend Roundup: The One-Sentence Edition
It’s 11:00 on a Sunday night, tomorrow morning’s coming early, and so I’d like to get this all out of the way in one sentence, which is admittedly a big task because the weekend was absolutely jam-packed with activity, which is not to say that all that activity was necessarily enjoyable (for example, cutting the grass and picking up canine fecal material is never a highlight), but the weekend was productive at least, considering that my buddy Tom and I finally put together Maya’s completed loft bed—an activity that took about two hours longer than it should have and produced no small amount of frustration and teeth-gnashing in everyone involved—and also considering that Shannon was putting together a charity auction for the student ministry at church, and I was directing and acting in a sketch in all three services, and Shannon was working with a videographer to produce a promotional video about the church, and I was recording the voiceover for that same video, and Shannon was planning and hosting a celebration dinner for a bunch of her volunteers, and we still had load after load of laundry to do, just like every weekend (vacuuming, too, although I was so busy I never really got to it, which means yucky carpets for at least one more day), but I don’t want to leave the impression that we didn’t have any fun, because we did have a nice, leisurely brunch with our friends the Crows on Saturday, and we did—as usual—watch Battlestar Galactica Friday night, and the aforementioned celebration dinner, held at the Granite City Brewery in Zona Rosa, proved to be a great time for all, and Maya got to spend Saturday swimming and playing at the house of a friend (a day filled with running and screaming and swimming that wore her out and led to a major, fatigue-fueled meltdown that meant I had to leave church early to go pick her up), but all in all, as you can tell, this weekend was just plain exhausting, with very little down time to just unwind, relax, and enjoy a few minutes or hours free of obligation, and the fatigue brought on by 48 hours of non-stop activity caused me to just crash Sunday afternoon for a nearly two-hour nap, which totally threw off my schedule and is one of the reasons I’m up so late writing this very long sentence, which also means that I won’t get enough sleep tonight and that tomorrow will probably be a very long day, but I can’t complain too much, because I’ve got food in my belly and a nice soft bed and clothes to wear and beautiful children and a wife who is willing to put up with me, and it’s May, and when the sun shines in May and the sky is a brilliant powder blue and there’s nothing up there except a few wisps of cloud and the fine silhouettes of singing birds, and the trees are green and the flowers are bright and fragrant, and you know deep inside that even on days when you can only steal a few minutes to catch your breath, a few minutes of warm, sun-drenched stillness in the heart of May can be lovely, lovely, lovely.
The Mother of all Weekend Roundups
What’s a better Mother’s Day gift than filth-encrusted fingernails and a wrenched back? Answer: anything. But that didn’t stop Shannon from availing herself of both on this, the day we celebrate the ultimate bad news/good news situation: yes, she had to marry me to make it happen, but a couple of cool kids got a great mom out of the deal.
As for the dirty fingernails and wrenched back I referenced just now, those came from Shannon’s decision to spend Mother’s Day afternoon planting flowers in the pots we have sitting in front of the house. So you can see the origin of the filthy nails, but the wrenched back happened at the store when she was bending down to pick up a bag of potting soil or a rack of flowers or some such. This happens to Shannon from time to time; for some reason her lower back is weak or sensitive or whatever, and if she hits it just right she is sore something fierce, and has to lie down and use the Ben-Gay and all that jazz. (As I type this she is sleeping it off.)
But it wasn’t all dirt and searing back pain. We also did some nice stuff for her. Seemed nice to me, anyway. We ate her favorite pizza Friday night, hanging out with out friends the Crows. That’s got to count for something, right? And we took her out to breakfast Saturday morning, at her favorite breakfast place, Roxanne’s Café in Parkville. And that was good, too, right? And she got to go do a little clothes shopping on Saturday, which she had wanted to do for a while. Good again! Except for the fact that Maya insisted on going, too, and being four years old, she would much rather hide in the racks at a clothing store than try on clothes. So maybe that wasn’t so good.
But hey, while they were gone I finally got started on finishing Maya’s loft bed! (And only six months after its maker, Shannon’s dad Jack, hauled it over from St. Louis!) Everything else in the whole set is done. All that was left was the lower part of the bed, the frame that would elevate the bed to its ultimate lofty status. So anyway, I got all stuff put together, and only had to take it apart once when I realize that I had the bedposts turned the wrong way and that they wouldn’t fit when I put them together with her already-finished bed! But that was nothing a little under-the-breath swearing, ripped out bed rail hangers, and wood filler wouldn’t fix. So yeah, that thing is almost done. I got the stain on it and one coat of polyurethane; one more coat plus some drying time and it’ll be good to go.
But enough about that bed… back to Shannon. The kids made Shannon some nice little homemade cards. And while we were out buying wood filler to correct my numerous woodworking mistakes, we also picked up some roses and a nice card and a Starbucks gift card. So we got that going for us, too. The wife is always complaining that I never get her flowers. And justifiably so; I haven’t bought her flowers since before we got married, which was 14 years ago. Well, her complaining ended today, baby! By my reckoning, that means I don’t have to buy her flowers again until 2022. Or, now that she’s gotten a taste for them, I may have to buy them everyday. But hey, she just planted flowers out there underneath our living room window… maybe I can just rip some out of those planters.
And finally, I made Shannon’s favorite meat-and-potatoes feast, my Famous Pot Roast with Carrots and Potatoes. And I even cleaned up the kitchen. (Of course, I almost always clean up the kitchen anyway, but tonight it meant something.) And then later this week I’m taking her to see the touring production of Wicked, which means I’ll willingly sit through a musical with her. Now that’s a Mother’s Day gift!
(Okay, technically the Wicked thing was her birthday present, but it’s happening so close to Mother’s Day I’m going to go ahead and give myself credit or it. If I don’t, who will?)
The Weekend Roundup loves a rainy night, but this is ridiculous
When a weekend begins with widespread chaos and destruction, there’s nowhere for it to go but up, right?
That’s what we’re telling ourselves, anyway, as our little suburban Kansas City community recovers from a massive storm that struck Thursday night and wreaked a buttload of havoc.
Thing is, it wasn’t a tornado, or maybe it was. The news people are saying everything from straight-line winds to a microburst, and occasionally someone will let slip the “T” word. Whatever you want to call it, it woke us up around 2 a.m. Friday morning with a raging tempest, the likes of which I’ve never seen. It was like a hurricane in the Midwest: 135-mile-per-hour winds, rain blowing sideways, lightning flashing and hail pounding the roof. When morning dawned, it looked as if we had been pretty lucky; there weren’t even any limbs in our yard. (Turns out we do have some hail damage to the roof, so we’ll need to start wrangling with the insurance company, and our cable was out for a couple of days so we missed some of our favorite shows, but still, we were pretty lucky.)
Others, not so much. There are trees down all over the older parts of the neighborhood. Some businesses on the main drag just a few blocks west of our house were pretty much leveled. A neighborhood north of us was hit really hard, with house after house demolished or otherwise uninhabitable. And close to home… Maya’s preschool lost its roof, and the water that poured in pretty much ruined everything: the library, the computer lab, all the projects the kids had been working on all year. They’ll be using a nearby church for classes for the rest of the school year (just a few weeks), but after that, everything’s kind of up in the air.
Shannon spent much of Friday—a day she was supposed to be using to prepare for the church’s Big Annual Rummage Sale™—to muck around the school with the teachers, trying to salvage whatever they could. And it was a sad scene: the sun shining in through dripping, gaping holes in the roof (including a huge one in the bathroom where the kids would have been sheltered had the storm hit at 2 in the afternoon instead of at 2 in the morning). Water standing in pools where the kids would normally have circle time. Playground equipment blown up against the fence in a jumbled plastic pile. Computers and books and wooden puzzles and stuffed animals, all to be tossed in a dumpster.
They were able to salvage some stuff, of course. The toys made of Space Age Plastic can be cleaned and dried, as could the little kids’ bedding for afternoon nap time. Since I was watching the kids all weekend and could not really help much with the cleanup, that was my job. I washed load after load after smelly, rain-soaked load of Hello Kitty blankets and Thomas the Tank Engine pillowcases and the odd stuffed animal here and there. I know it’s not much, especially when some dads were no doubt over there ripping up ruined roofing materials and such, but I did what I could. And when the kids get back to school on Tuesday, it will be amidst the chaos and the unfamiliar surroundings, so maybe a little something familiar like their very own blanky—laundered and April fresh!—will provide a small amount of comfort.
That’s what I tell myself, anyway.
Well, after writing all that, I don’t really feel like telling about the rest of the lame weekend. Pretty standard stuff, really. I’ll just summarize it all in a handy-dandy bulleted list.
- Shannon worked pretty much all weekend at that blasted church Treasure Sale and is therefore pretty much exhausted
- I took Steven to the Bodies Revealed exhibit at Union Station, and he was fascinated by the preserved dead bodies on display, as were we al
- I cut the grass, which was getting so tall that my neighbor told me that he had thought about mowing for us because he assumed we must have been out of town
- Steven ran the Weed Eater and was intoxicated by its power
- Shannon and I went out with a bunch of friends to the Power Plant brewpub in Parkville and oh it was so yummy, etc.
- I went to the grocery store and vacuumed the floor and it’s so boring I am falling asleep writing about it
Okay, that’s basically it. One night of sheer terror followed by two days of sheer tedium. Usually it’s just three days of tedium, so at least it was something different.