Fruit royalty

Dejah introduced us to Charlie the Unicorn and his "friends." Who couldn't use a little more absurdism in his or her life? I told Saffron she was the Banana King, but she set me straight; she is the Banana Princess and I'm the Banana King (Ian said he was the Orange Prince).



I think that being the Banana King is slightly better than my last gig as King Of The Echo People.



Who are you!?

Of boulders and weeds

This evening I was walking around the yard and noticing all the new heat loving weeds that have sprouted up overnight in the lawn. Sigh. Although I can't say I completely hate it, weeding seems like such a Sisyphean task. But as Camus says in "The Myth of Sisyphus" "one must imagine Sisyphus happy" as "the struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart."

I can sometimes find some enjoyment in weeding, though I can't say it exactly fills my heart. So for tonight I ignored the weeds and enjoyed the more floriferous greens in the garden.

Here are some purple coneflowers (Echinacea purpurea) flanked by a sprig of Russian sage (Perovskia atriplicifolia) and a some white yarrow (Achillea.)


I used to be such a flower snob and I always turned my nose up at petunias. But they are so colorful, fragrant, and they bloom so long that's it hard not to love them. Everytime I took Saffron to Millcreek Gardens I let her buy a pack. We planted them in a big pot around some Genovese basil. There's some flowering tobacco (Nicotiana alata) in the background.


Here is a cheerful combination of various common garden pinks (Diantus plumarius.)


Saffron saw me taking snapshots and just had to get in the picture of the fragrant night stock (Matthiola longipetala). Some golden tickseed (Coreopsis tinctoria) popped up in the middle.


Melinda really likes the fluffy seed heads on the Apache plume (Fallugia paradoxa) which is such a great contrast to the feather reed grass on the left (Calamagrostis x acutiflora 'Karl Foerster'.) I really like the unusual flowers of the Mexican hat (Ratibidia columnifera) in the front.


Maybe I'll get to the weeds tomorrow. Or maybe not.

The Police and Elvis Costello

Last night I went with Melinda, Miles, and my sister Carrie to the USANA Amphitheater for a rock show. It was The Police and Elvis Costello. Awesome!

We've took the kids to see Taj Mahal at Red Butte Gardens a couple of years ago, but this is Miles' first "rock concert." We subsidized his ticket, but he earned part of it by mowing lawns and weeding and other various tasks.

I really wanted to see The Police last year for their reunion tour, but they didn't come to Utah so I thought I had missed my chance. So when I heard they were coming this year I snatched up tickets as soon as they went on sale. Much to my surprise Elvis Costello was their opening act. I love Costello; I would have paid the whole price just to see him. Score!


He put on a great show, even without the elaborate lighting and set. He epitomizes the working class rock n' roller, even though his songs lean toward the cerebral and away from the all too common bombastic rock themes of parties, girls and drugs.

Between sets Miles and I ran into Melinda's cousin Jeremy and his wife Natalie. It was funny because the last big rock show we went to (Weezer in 2001) we saw them there as well.


The Wasatch mountains framed the stage, and we could see all the lights in the valley below. It was a beautiful summer night with a nice breeze.

The Police hit the stage at dusk and they were in fine form. It's amazing how much sound and energy they put out, being a trio. The audio was pristine and they rocked! They had an amazingly clear big screen that was great (especially for us clear out in the lawn section.) Their light show was spectacular as well.


Stuart Copeland has this incredible drum setup complete with a gong, a myriad of cymbals, marimbas, etc. He stood up and played just about everything for "Wrapped Around Your Finger." Amazing.


Andy Summers guitar playing was unsurpassed. No one else sounds like him. And what else can I say, Sting was Sting. They put on a great show.

Every time I go to a show it reminds me how much I love to hear live music, and how recordings, as great as they are, never quite capture the real thing.

It was a fun show, with people of all ages. Young kids, people our age, folks in their 50's and 60's. We even saw a few families there with their small children. Miles really had a good time and it was really fun to take him. I think I may have found a new concert buddy.

Before and after

Here are our dining room and kitchen floors when they were still candidates for the Hideous Floor Hall of Fame. I thought the kitchen floor still looked pretty good (for a barn.)


Here's the dining room floor. As you can tell we used to drive heavy equipment on it.


Here's our living room all empty and ready to be sanded.


You wouldn't believe how much an empty house with hardwood floors echoes.


Here is the dining room floor "after" photo. Oooohh. Aaaaahhh.


Saffy can hardly recognize this as her own beloved kitchen.


Here's our living room with some of the furniture back. It's so nice to be back in our own home and somewhat settled back into our usual routine.


Arden and Lorraine were so kind to let us invade their home and pantry (though Melinda made sure to hide most of the treats so the kids didn't OD on marshmallows, Pearson's Nut Rolls, and Fresca.) The kids really loved it, I think they thought it was just one continual party at Hotel Grandma and Grandpa's

It was so good to have somewhere nice to stay while our house was in construction mode. But it's good to be back home again. Just like Dorothy with the red sparkly shoes always says, "there's no place like home, there's no place like home!"

Summer is going swimmingly

Saffron and Lisette have been taking swimming lessons for 3 weeks now. Lisette is doing really well, learning new strokes, and swimming all the way across the pool. She does great and she's really improving.

We weren't going to sign Saffron up, but she heard about it and insisted on going. She absolutely loves it! She would live in the pool if she could.

She is getting very brave in the water, and while she won't be swimming laps anytime soon, she is learning valuable skills such as 'hold on to the side of the pool' and 'walk out onto the diving board'.

The boys just started taking lessons this week as well. They are not to thrilled about it, but I bribed them by promising to take them to Fat Cats to play some video games once their done.

We'll see how much longer Melinda can put up with shuttling them to and from their lessons everyday.

Little black cloud of home improvement

This is a boring post which I'm mostly writing for myself, so don't feel obligated to read it. I'll post some before and after pictures of our floor project soon if you want to skip this one.

It seems like every time we do some remodeling or other home improvement we get to this point when everything just seems wrong and depressing and overwhelmingly bad. The feeling eventually passes, and things have always turned out fine in the end, but that little period when the black cloud of doom is hovering over you is always disconcerting.

We wisely decided to hire a professional to refinish our floors, but inevitably that evil gloomy cloud materialized today. The floors overall looked pretty good, but there was bad streaking in the dining room, some round stain spots in the main room, and a bunch of "boogers" stuck to the floor in random places. It felt like we must have hired the wrong people to do it and that we were fated to have ugly floors and that the floor would soon rot out beneath our feet and cause our family cancer and/or blindness.

I came home early in the afternoon to look at it again and everything still seemed tragically wrong - kind of like you just realised that you'd forgotten to take a college final, broken the screen on your new PDA, and left your child at the laundromat all on the same day.

However, I took a nap and then the floor guy came over and we talked about the problems. He easily scraped off the "boogers" that were stuck in the floor. That was just mostly gunk that got in after the final coat was on. It was very reassuring to know that that is normal. The spots on the floor were stains that wouldn't sand out (I guess you can expect that from a 50+ year old house.) He also reassured us that the streaking was just from some moisture content in the wood before the finish was applied. We then saw that some of it had already faded out where the sun had hit it, and it should fade out completely when it fully dries under the surface in a week or two.

It's funny how something as small as a good nap and some good solid information can do to change your outlook. Now I am actually very impressed with the job they did, and I'm soooo glad I didn't attempt to do it myself; it would have taken me a month to finish what he did in 2 days. So we now have a very nice looking floor.

Now the only problem that presents itself is that I feel I need to repaint the baseboards, touch up the dinged up paint on the walls, paint the closet, finish painting the kitchen ceiling, paint the hallway, etc... Oh no, I guess that means I'll have a little black cloud hovering over me again sometime in the near future. Dang!

Cosmic screensavers

Melinda and the kids got a year pass to the Clark Planetarium. It's really great because besides the dome theater, they have an IMAX which gets the really good IMAX shows, plus all of the 3-D shows as well. Saturday Michel and Brent and their family rode FrontRunner from Roy to Salt Lake for a staycation. We met them at the planetarium and watched Deep Sea 3-D. It was really fun to see all the cousins reach out and try to grab all the fishes and coral that came popping out at them.

Tonight we went and saw one of their "cosmic shows" in the dome theater: Laser U2.


It was actually quite good. Saffy was really impressed with the lasers shining through the fog. I like sitting in the dome with the projections all around because when you see all the images with your perifieral vision as well, it seems almost 3-D and it starts to feel like your actually moving.

John (who had seen it 3 times) said it was worth it the first time, but the third time felt like watching a screensaver. At least it was a really cool screensaver.

Refinishing school

We've spent the last week trying to get ready to have our hardwood floors refinished. They should have been redone about 7 years ago, but hey, better late than never.

It's been quite the ordeal, and one thing I can say about the whole process is that I'm sure glad we're not moving. We dismantled two bookcases and moved all the books, the piano, and the long couch to the boys' room and put the rest in our room or downstairs. It's strangely liberating to see the upstairs so empty, not to mention how much it echos with nothing in it. But it sure was a lot of work.

I love how our house has an open flowing floor plan, and I really like the wood floors, but it makes quite the ordeal to get them refinished. I thought about doing it myself, but it seemed so overwhelming and I didn't think I wanted to have everything torn up for months, so we wisely turned to the professionals.

So Sunday night we left our empty house and moved into Casa de los Abuelitos to escape the construction zone. Melinda is trying hard to keep our schedule as normal as possible, so that the kids don't think we're just having one big party at Grandpa's house. Well, maybe just a little party.

Stars and Stripes and 7 dollar fruit

Last night we had a fun party at Grandma and Grandpa's place for Independence Day. Lots of Melinda's cousins were over and we had fun playing badminton, eating popsicles, and lighting fireworks.

Thursday night we went to South Salt Lake's firework show at Granite High. Connie was so nice to go early and save us a nice grassy spot on the baseball field. We brought some fried chicken, grapes, watermelon and cookies and had a nice little picnic. Joy came with us, and later Brian and Dejah came with Marsha, then Trisha and her family came and later one Karen and Wendy came. It was quite a fun party. The fireworks were spectacular as always. Melinda was glad that they brought back all of the old classics for the soundtrack; "America" by Neil Diamond, "I'm Proud to be an American", "Born in the USA" by Springsteen, and then they ended with a patriotic medley by Elvis.

Saffron liked the fireworks, but she made us cover her ears. I asked her if she liked the firworks and she said, "They were really loud." So I asked her if they were pretty, and she said "They were pretty loud."

I keep forgetting to take the camera with us, so I don't have any pictures of the event. Oh well, here are some pictures of something completely different.

This fruit is a cherimoya, otherwise known as a "custard apple. I ate these when I was in Chile and when I saw them at our local grocery store I knew I had to get one, even though at 6.99 a pound, it's more expensive than gasoline. I suppose nostalgia can sometimes nostalgia can be expensive.

This fruit is native to Peru and Chile, and it was a real treat to eat this when they were in season. I had bought one a few years a go and I let it ripen too long and it tasted kind of sickly sweet, so I was watching this one closely to make sure I ate it before it got too ripe.

I think it was Monday or Tuesday night at 11:00 and I looked and it and smelled it and it seemed just perfect. We had just gotten the kids to bed, but I wanted them to taste it so I got them out of bed and we all ate it.

They kids weren't overly impressed but they all liked it. It was tasty, but not as tasty as I remembered it. I guess it's like they say, you can never go home again.