Saturday morning odds and ends

Fish Heads

I picked up ES from school yesterday afternoon. In the car on the way home, he told me he didn't have to take a lunch to school on Tuesday. In my typical silly-daddy mode, I tried guessing why ES didn't have to take a lunch to school. After guessing he was going to starve and not eat anything, I took a guess that they would be feeding him fish heads at school. "Fish heads?!?!" he said giggling. Then I started singing the chorus of the fish heads song.

I only sang the chorus once and then stopped and waited for a response from the back seat. ...Silence... Snicker... Giggle... Hee-hee-hee... Haw-haw-haw... He laughed the entire way home. He kept trying to sing the fish heads song himself, but he could only get one and a half words into it (fish he...) before he would spontaneously combust in fits of little boy giggling laughter. You'd think that was the funniest thing he'd ever heard in his life.

Wii Fit Update

LW is kicking my butt. She holds the #1 spot in most of the exercises on the Wii Fit. She likes to gloat a little bit, too. I was doing the pushups exercise and I thought I did really well. It gives you a score based on your balance, and I got a really good score. I was SURE I was going to get the #1 spot. After it shows you your score, then it goes to a screen at the bottom of the rankings and scrolls up the rankings so the last thing you see is who's in the #1 slot. I watched it scroll up... and LW was in the #1 spot. I heard a snicker from the direction of LW's chair behind me.


New Restaurant: Firehouse Restaurant on Ford Island.

Right across the street from the Pacific Aviation Museum and the old air traffic control tower (you know - the one where Ben Affleck valiantly charges up it and tries to single-handedly stop the attacking Japanese planes with a shotgun).

My Eng and ex-Nav recommended this place, so we went to check it out. When we first drove up, I was like, "Ugh... THIS is a RESTAURANT?"

Looks can be deceiving. This place is pretty old, dilapidated and not fancy, but it's clean and the food and service are excellent. There are a variety of things on the dry-erase board hand-written menu, but there's a heavy Mexican food influence. I had the New Mexico Pork Burrito and it was AWESOME.

Bread from Commissary

I don't remember if I wrote about this before, but this organic garlic bread they have for sale at the commissary is REALLY good!




John Adams

LW recorded the John Adams miniseries on our DVR a while back, but we didn't get around to watching the first episode until last night. (Primarily because we missed the first episode and we had to wait a while for the DVR to catch it on a rerun). It was REALLY good. Paul Giamatti (John Adams) and Laura Linney (Abigail Adams) are excellent actors and passionately brought the story to life. Aside: I also highly recommend David McCullough's book John Adams (nonfiction) and Jeff Shaara's pair of novels about the Revolution, Rise to Rebellion and The Glorious Cause. The books and the miniseries go very well together.

Everybody's Moving

I'm having flashbacks to Monterey. As a student at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, one has a tendency to forget that you're in the military. You wear civilian clothes to school so as not to let rank interfere with the free exchange of ideas in the classroom. Once a quarter though, you would get a reminder as all the moving trucks descended upon the military housing with big wood crates to take household goods overseas to the graduating students' next duty stations.

Anyway, it's not hard to remember you're in the military here, but usually the moving trucks are a little more evenly spread out across time. Lately they've been really busy on our street. There are four houses already in the progress of moving. Come September when we leave, I think our street will be a completely different neighborhood.

It must be genetic

Friday morning I went to the end of year "graduation" ceremony at YB's preschool. It amazed me to sit and watch as his entire class of cute little pre-schoolers sang a song about "ohana" and "family" and did all the clapping and hand gestures to go along with it... and YB stood there like a stone statue not singing or doing any of the hand movements.

We're making progress though. When LW and I went to the Christmas pageant at his preschool, he didn't even stand up there with the rest of his class. He got down off the steps and hid in the first pew of the church. Periodically he would peek his little head up above the edge of the pew and look at us, then lower his head and hide again. So at least this time he didn't hide, right?

I just don't understand why ALL the OTHER kids will stand up there and do the song and dance, but OUR kids won't. ES was the same way in pre-school. He refused to participate in any of the performances, but the result was he stuck out like a sore thumb because he was the ONLY kid NOT participating. I remember one performance where he wouldn't even stand up with the rest of his classmates until I gave him my cover to wear.

ES's Preschool Thanksgiving Show
Sterling, VA 2005

Note that all the other kids in ES's class above wore their cute little pilgrim and native american hats, but ES is wearing my khaki combination cover because that's the only way we could get him to go up there with the rest of the kids.

For any of you who would like to watch YB's statuesque performance yesterday, I uploaded it to YouTube. Sorry it gets a little shaky in the middle because LW didn't have a very good angle and passed the camera off to me, so it wobbles around a little bit while I get settled in a new angle. YB is the one in the red polo shirt in the middle of the shot NOT DOING ANYTHING.