Aside: I chose the shoes that I wore to prom because they were like Ducky's in Pretty in Pink. The Pretty in Pink soundtrack has always been and will always be one of my favorite albums of all time.
I totally had a crush on Lea Thompson in Some Kind of Wonderful and could relate with Eric Stoltz being the unpopular kid admiring the prettiest girl in school from a distance.
Again, there's that common theme of the unpopular kids wishing they could go out with the prettiest girls in the class.
Then there was Ferris. I think every teenage boy of my generation worshiped Ferris on some level as the epitome of teenage boy existence. We ALL wanted to be the super-cool, carefree, never-get-in-trouble, always-have-fun Ferris Bueller with a smokin' hot girlfriend like in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
- "Look, kids! Big Ben, Parlaiment!" - "Lips and assholes" - "Those aren't two pillows!" - "Yeah, 220, 240, whatever it takes..." - "Kevin!"
John Hughes' flicks have always been my favorite movies (well, at least since those formative years in high school), and I will forever be grateful to John Hughes for the memories and the laughs.
First, let me just say the new Star Trek movie was AWESOME. I went to see it on the IMAX screen at the Udvar-Hazy Center tonight. It was very cool to see it up on that big IMAX screen and the sound system was amazing. I'm not convinced it was worth the extra expense in ticket price, and they don't allow food or drinks in the IMAX theater. Even so, the movie itself was SO cool. Totally unpredictable and shocking and action-packed.
Aside: If you're in NoVA and inclined to go see the IMAX show, be sure to order your tickets in advance online. They have been selling out days in advance. The show we went to tonight was sold out, too, and a few people walked up to the counter in front of us, asked to buy tickets, and were turned away. I bought our tickets on Saturday.
They also showed a preview for the Transformers sequel, and that looks awesome, too.
Looking ahead to this coming weekend, we've got a tough call to make.
For me, I will always have fond memories of air shows. My parents started sending me off in the summer to spend some time with my Grandma and Grandpa in Grand Junction, Colorado when I was 9 years old. Every summer, the Blue Angels would come to Grand Junction and put on an airshow, and my Grandpa and I loved to go every summer. I was really into WWII history, and I especially loved seeing the B-17 that usually came to the Grand Junction air show.
However, I can picture my boys being miserable at the air show - complaining about the heat on the tarmac, complaining about the jets being too loud, complaining about how long the drive is, complaining about not being at home playing video games... When we stopped to visit my Aunt Ruth in Missouri and went to Wightman AFB for a B-2 tour, the boys didn't last through that visit and complained of being bored and hot on the tarmac - and that was just like an hour.
I was tentatively planning on taking the boys to the air show until I found out the farm tour is the same weekend. We've been on the farm tour a few times before and always enjoyed it. At least with the Farm Tour we would still be here in the same county and when the boys get tired and cranky we can just come home. Plus, on the Farm Tour we're driving from farm to farm and the boys are comfortable in their car seats in the air conditioning in the car.
I've mentioned the air show a few times over the past few days to put the topic on their minds and see if they want to go to the air show. Still to be determined...
Sorry the blogging has been light. In previous weekends, I have done a good amount of setting up my blog posts for the week and prescheduling them for posting one per day through the course of the week. The past couple of weekends we've been a little busy though.
No, no, no, not just playing Castle Crashers (although that contributed).
Aside: A few funny little tidbits about Castle Crashers: - I love the opening sequence where it shows the knights partying in the castle. Perhaps because it reminds me of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. - If you play multi-player and one of the players loses all his health, he lays motionless on the ground with a beating heart symbol over his body. One of the other players can go over and push the Y button repeatedly to give him CPR and resuscitate him so he can keep fighting. You don't "lose" the game until such time as ALL of the players are laying on the ground with nobody left to give anybody else CPR. - At the end of various levels, you have to beat these boss characters to rescue one of several princesses that were kidnapped at the beginning of the story. After you defeat the boss, if you are playing multi-player, then it launches a new stage of the game. Instead of cooperating with the other players, you now have to compete with the other players in a battle for the princess. Last man standing gets to kiss the princess. :-)
Last weekend we worked on both the boys' bathroom and the guest bathroom. My wife and I painted the bathrooms, and I replaced the light fixtures in both bathrooms (two above the boys' sinks, one above the guest bathroom sink). Behold the finished product...
Guest Bathroom (My wife chose the paint color to match the shower curtain.)
This weekend was an absolutely beautiful weekend in Northern Virginia. It was like 70 yesterday and like 75 today. Not too hot. Not too cold. Just right.
Yesterday (Saturday) we went to an open house to welcome our friend Liz back from her mission trip to Ethiopia. She brought some AWESOME coffee beans back with her, too. :-9
YB was looking pretty stylin' wearing his boots with his shorts, so we decided to take advantage of the nice weather and went to the outlet mall in Leesburg to shop for some spring shoes for the boys.
...Yyyyyeah, we and a few other BAJILLION people thought going to the outlets was a good idea on Saturday. Can you say CROWDED? Anyway, the mission was a success. We picked up YB some new sneakers that look surprisingly familiar...
Sorry, I should have taken a better picture of the shoes. The firetrucks on the side of his new sneakers are the EXACT same light-up firetrucks that are on the side of his boots.
Making pizza for family movie night.
Saturday night we had pizza and family movie night for the second week in a row. Last week we actually MADE the pizza ourselves and it turned out pretty good. The movie last week was Dudley Do Right, and this weekend's feature was Madagascar 2.
My wife insists we had seen Dudley Do Right before. I most definitely had NOT seen the first half to two thirds of it, but I did recognize the ending. Not sure what happened there. Usually when that happens, it's because they were playing the movie on crew's mess on the boat and I happened to be walking through and just catch 10 minutes or so. It wasn't a great movie, but it was pretty silly and good for a few laughs with the kids.
I was a little worried that Madagascar 2 might be one of those movies where they gave away all the funny parts in the previews, but that was nowhere near the case. It was a good flick.
Today after church, we went to have lunch at the new Johnny Rockets that just opened in Brambleton. It was... meh... good food but very slow service and very noisy. Oh, and yes, that is a Johnny Rocket's hat on YB's head in the picture above. :-)
After lunch we went for a geocache walk to find a new kids' cache that was recently hidden.
My family wasn't very cooperative with my traditional Blunoz self-portrait.
I've been making a conscious effort to set my computer aside and spend time with my boys when they ask to do something with me, and for some reason they wanted to play Stratego this weekend. We played about 4 games over the course of the weekend - each time with YB trying to find some way to spy for ES and pass him information about where my pieces were. He seems to think as long as he whispers, then it's okay - I won't hear him.
Even so, ES isn't exactly stealthy and doesn't have any sort of a poker face. He doesn't yet understand the fact that the game is about deceiving and confusing your opponent and NOT letting them figure out which piece is which on your side of the board. So when he moves a knight, he sort of whispers a "nnnneeeeeigh!" and when he moves a beast he makes a sort of growling, grumbling noise.
Anyway, that was our past couple of weekends in a nutshell. I had one other thing I wanted to write about, but (a) it's late and I need to hit the rack, and (b) this post is long enough, so I'll save it for tomorrow.
In case you didn't know, the makers of Halo are making a new version of the game, Halo Wars. You can download the free trial version on the XBox. It's pretty darn cool.
Unlike the original Halo, Halo 2, and Halo 3 which were first-person shooter (FPS) type video games (you run around with a gun in your hand shooting at the bad guys), Halo Wars is a real-time strategy (RTS) game. In RTS games, you have an eagle's eye view of the battle field, and you command groups of units to move and attack. You can gather resources that enable you to construct buildings, and the buildings will give you the ability to construct new military units or research new technologies to make your military units more powerful.
Anyway, if you like RTS games and have an XBox, I highly recommend checking out the free download version of Halo Wars. Now I can't wait for the full version of the game to be released.
I looked for a trailer of the new game on YouTube to show you what I mean about the game, but it seems like all the trailers for "Halo Wars" are totally useless. They make it seem like you're watching movies of people playing the first three installments of the the Halo FPS shooter games and don't give you ANY feel for what the Halo Wars RTS game is really like.
Oh, here we go, this trailer on the XBox website was a mixture of fantasy FPS footage and some glimpses of what an RTS game is like.
2. Battlestar Gallactica
Okay, alright, I'm ready for the barrage of I-told-you-so's from the peanut gallery. The "new" Battlestar Gallactica came out while I was on sea duty. Since I figured I would miss a bunch of it, I didn't see any point in trying to watch it when it was playing new on TV.
Yes, yes, yes, I know they started in 2003 and they're in like season 5 now, so it's not exactly "new" anymore. By "new" I mean NOT the Battlestar Gallactica I used to watch when I was a kid a couple of decades ago.
Many friends of mine have raved about how awesome the new BSG was though, so when I saw Blockbuster had the first season available on HD DVD, I put it in my Blockbuster queue. I've watched the first three episodes now, and WOW. What an awesome show! I'm really putting my new surround sound speakers to use and making the family room floor reverberate, too.
Oddly enough, even though the "new" BSG doesn't have any real sort of a theme song, I keep getting the OLD BSG theme song running through my head all the time now. Bizarre. I can think of worse songs to get stuck in my head though.
So is getting sucked into BSG going to raise my score on the Geek scale?
Recap of Weekend Entertainment Part I: Blasts from the Past
1. Family Movie Night
I'm always looking for movies for us to watch on Family Movie Night. We've exhausted most of the recent movies, so I've been digging back through the archives for movies that are fun to watch and "safe" for the family.
I dug waaaaaay back (1977) and found a Disney movie that I really liked when I was a kid: Candleshoe. I was surprised LW had never seen it before.
It's pretty weird seeing Jody Foster as a teenager, but it's a good fun movie. Both my wife and ES were laughing throughout the movie. It was a little over YB's head, but he sat through the whole movie (usually if he gets bored with a movie, he'll get up and go play in the play room). So if you're looking for a family movie night recommendation, add Candleshoe to your Blockbuster and/or Netflix queue.
2. Video Game Flashback
I was on the X-Box looking for the new maps to download for Halo 3, and I happened upon the download for R-Type. R-Type was one of my favorite video games back in the late 80's. I downloaded it, and sure enough the copyright date was 1987.
It's pretty cool though. They've spiffed it up. If you hit the Y button, it toggles between the old 1987 graphics and newer, cooler 3D graphics. The boys and I had some fun playing that on Saturday this weekend.
They gave it an "infinite" mode, too. It was a pretty challenging game to try and get as far as you could on just 3 lives. Now, you can put it on infinite mode and it just lets you keep playing, although each time you die you loose all your weapon power-ups.
More to follow on weekend entertainment, but figured I'd break it up into two posts.
Except for my poor wife being sick, I declare today a resounding success.
A) We spent over 5 HOURS OUTSIDE the house NOT playing video games or legos.
B) Although they protested before we left the house, the boys actually thought it was really cool. I was absolutely floored when YB said at lunch time, "I want to come back here TOMORROW!"
Where did we go?
Well... a really cool place with a three-letter acronym.
Sorry I don't have any personal photos to show you, but cameras weren't allowed.
At the visitor's center, they issued the boys these cool visitor badges.
According to this open source website, we might also have gotten to see a robotic dragonfly (insecto thopter), a robotic fish ("Charlie"), and a spy pigeon with a camera strapped to its chest among MANY other really cool gadgets. SO many, in fact, that we looked at about half the museum before we stopped and took a break to eat lunch in the cafeteria. The food in the cafeteria was delicious! When asked if his chicken sandwich with honey mustard sauce was good, ES replied, "No... it's AWESOME!!!" After we ate lunch we went back and checked out the other half of the exhibits and the gift shop.
After we left there, I also took the boys by my office today so they could see where I work. Nothing terribly exciting there, but at least they can picture in their minds where Daddy is going when he goes to work.
As for the rest of our New Year's Eve festivities (if you can call them that), the boys and I played some Mario Kart on the Wii (the intro video at that website is cute). I like that we can play four people at once on Mario Kart - it devides the screen up into quarters just like XBox games do. After that, I went and picked up a pizza and some chinese food, and we had a family movie night and watched Horton Hears a Who on Blu-Ray. It was pretty darn amazing in 1080p (high definition video in case you don't speak "1080p").
Now the boys are in bed and my wife and I are watching TV in front of the fireplace. The winds are howling and rattling the house outside. We're the types who won't usually last until midnight on New Year's Eve. We would normally at least have some champagne, but my poor wife is sick today, so I don't even think we'll partake of the bottle of champagne I picked up at the Henderson Hall package store.
Looking back on 2008, I think it was a pretty darn good year for us. I had trouble picking out what picture to put on our Christmas card this year because we had so many great family pictures from all sorts of different places - snorkeling at Oahu, snorkeling at Maui, snorkeling at the Big Island, Volcano National Park and the black sand beach on the Big Island, hiking Makapu'u Ridge, hiking Diamond Head, hiking to Manoa Falls, swimming under Waimea Falls, kayaking around Chinaman's Hat, the Submarine Birthday Ball at the Turtle Bay Resort, Dave & Jess' wedding in Oregon, Crater Lake National Park, the Humbolt Redwoods State Park, Sequoia National Park, Legoland, hiking in Utah, Grand Canyon National Park, the Great Wolf Lodge in Kansas City, seeing the B-2 bomber at Wightman AFB, and our new home in Ashburn. (You can see pictures of all of the above if you just scroll back through my blog posts over the past year). We successfully finished the decommissioning of the Mighty MSP on schedule and without any major problems.
Yes, 2008 was a very good year for us. We certainly needed it to make up for the tough year we had in 2007 though.
I offer you all my warmest wishes for much joy and happiness in the coming new year.
It's been one of those weekends where nothing is so drastically wrong that I should be upset, but enough little things have pissed me off that it's just been a grumpy weekend in general. I keep wondering if there was a full moon out this weekend, but the lunar calendar says it's a waxing cresent moon right now.
Saturday, I was excited to get OUT of the house to do something. There was a model railroad and toy show going on at the Dulles Expo Center. Unfortunately, the boys have new toy syndrome and don't want to hear about anything that doesn't involve legos, video games, or both, much less getting dressed in REAL clothes instead of wearing their jammies all day.
I eventually convinced ES to go with me to the model railroad and toy show. Overall, I thought it was pretty cool and certainly worth the price of admission. I went there expecting to pay $7 for tickets for both me and ES, but I was pleasantly surprised to find out kids under 11 years old were free.
Passing steam engine at the Dulles Expo Center.
There were about six or seven regional model railroad clubs that had put up large displays of running model railroads. Each one of these displays was about the size of the main display at the Brunswick Model Railroad Museum, so there was a LOT to see.
One of several active displays at the Dulles Expo Center.
Most of those active displays were in the back of the expo center though, and the floor area was filled with aisle upon aisle of vendors selling model trains and toys.
ES pushes the button to catch the mail on the mail car. (It's the third train that comes by in the video.)
We got to see a lot of unique displays like a cattle car that loaded little cows onto it and a mail car that picked up the bag of mail off the hook as the train drove by. Plus, there seemed to be a pretty popular military theme with some sort of Army train on each of the displays carrying tanks and artillery.
So please tell me... What's NOT to like about all that for a little boy???
I expected to be dealing with a lot of, "puh-leeeeeeeeease Daddy won't you buy me this and buy me that and I REALLY WANT THIS ONE!"
Nope.
ES didn't ask for a single thing. He complained most of the time we were in the expo center that he was bored and wanted to go home (interpretation:I'm obsessed with my Christmas Lego winfall and want to go bathe in my Legos). Thbbbbbt! :-P
After we got back from the model railroad show, ES was in a mood and a half and trying to convince us to lock him in his bedroom until he turned 21.
It started out with YB making some annoying noise that ES didn't like (shocking, I know). ES decided the proper thing to do was to pinch YB's lips shut. Much crying and wailing followed, first by YB due to his hurt lips, then by ES over the injustice of being put in time-out for something he said was "all YB's fault."
I tried explaining to ES that he was in time-out for HIS actions and that if he didn't pinch his brother's lips shut, then he wouldn't be in time out. If he didn't like the noise that his brother was making, then he should have LEFT the room, not physically harmed his brother.
He didn't buy it. In the angry temper tantrum that followed, he declared that it was all my wife's fault for ever giving birth to YB in the first place. My wife extended his logic a few steps further and told him, "Well, then it's all God's fault." ES's eyes got really big and he said, "Huh???" She told him if him being in time out was her fault for having YB, then it was God's fault because God gave us BOTH ES and YB to us as our children to care for and God gave ES and YB US as their Mommy and Daddy. That made him stop and think for a minute and he eventually calmed down.
Since Grammy, GG, and Papa were leaving Sunday morning, they offered to watch the boys Saturday night so my wife and I could go out for a dinner without kids. For a while there, I thought we weren't gonna be going anywhere because I wasn't going to inflict ES and his attitude on Grammy. He eventually calmed down to a point where we felt okay leaving, but I was in a pretty bad mood by that point and worried it wouldn't be a very enjoyable dinner.
On the contrary, my wife and I had a really very nice dinner together at American Flatbread. We did a half-and-half flatbread (pizza) of the two specials on the menu. One was a brie and cranberry concoction and the other was sausage, apples, and carmelized onions. Both were fantastically delicious, and neither of us had to cut up anybody else's food or tell anyone else at the table to wipe their face, chew with their mouth closed, not to talk with their mouth full, not to interupt, to sit down in their seat facing forward, and to not bang their utensils on the table. That being said, it was a downright AWESOME dinner with just me and my wonderful wife.
Sunday morning the boys enjoyed one last game of garbage with Grammy before we packed up her car and she and GG and Papa headed north.
We all went to church kind of grumpy and spent a lazy afternoon at home playing video games and/or legos.
I was pretty excited to have a family movie night tonight. We were going to watch Horton Hears a Who that the boys got for Christmas. Then ES was whining and being a pain insisting that he had already seen Horton Hears a Who. My wife, YB, and I all insisted NONE of us had seen it, and we all wanted to see it, so we outvoted ES.
I put the movie in the DVD player, and a message came up on the screen informing me that I have to upgrade the firmware on our Blu-ray DVD player in order to watch the movie. WHAT?!?!?!
It didn't look like that was going to be a quick or easy task to get done and get the boys to bed on time, so we went with ES's choise of movie - Elf. Elf is a funny movie, don't get me wrong, but I'd seen it before, and I hadn't seen Horton Hears a Who.
So that's about it for our weekend. Kind of anticlimatic.
I'm going back to work tomorrow, but the boys are still off of school. Please pray for my wife that the boys' attitudes improve and they don't drive her mad tomorrow while I'm at work. Oh, while you're at it, would you also pray that the boys will sleep peacefully through the night and NOT wake my wife (or me) up? That would be splendid, thanks!
Getting caught up on my blog of our trip across country...
View of the bright morning sun through the splattered bugs on our windshield.
We left St. Louis this morning. The boys had previously not expressed any desire to go see the arch. We drove by and took some pictures, but continued on eastbound because my wife and I had already seen it from the inside during our drive across country in 1999.
Driving east on I-70 with the Arch in the background.
Then it was strangely quiet in the back seat for a while.
I looked back to see ES hiding under his blanket. I asked him what was wrong.
No response.
So I left him alone. Then he took the blanket off his head and sat there sulking. So I asked him what was wrong again.
He grumbled that he wanted to go up in the arch.
He was so mad about not going up in the arch, that he lashed out with one of those angry tantrum statements, "You never do anything for me! We never do anything that I wanna do!"
At that instant, my wife earned sainthood, and I earned a couple of very nasty bite marks in my tongue. My instinct was to lash out with anger against anger and start listing the things that we've done for him and call him and ungrateful little snot.
Luckily for all of us, my awesome wife was much quicker on the draw. While my blood was coming to a boil and steam was about to spew forth from my ears, my wife spoke in the sweetest, nicest, most gentle voice possible, apologized to my son for not taking him up in the arch and used some expert parenting skills to divert his attention to other things like his Nintendo DS.
Lunch in the Middle of Nowhere, Illinois
We stopped for lunch at a DQ off the freeway in Casey, Illinois. Walking into the DQ in Casey was similar to walking into the Crazy R back in Goodland, Kansas. The place was PACKED with locals, and there were two and three way conversations going on back and forth between tables about deer hunting, chopping wood, combine harvesters, and local sports. When we walked in the door, it got a little quiet and they all sorta stared at us for a few seconds before carrying on their conversations.
My poor wife was sitting with her back to some people talking about deer hunting and got to listen to them describe the shooting, following the blood trail, and other gorey details she didn't care to hear while she tried to eat her lunch.
The rest of the drive across Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio was pretty uneventful. We stopped for dinner at Panera in Columbus, Ohio, and spotted an unusual dinner guest there.
Who me?
This guy was looking for handouts from people sitting on the patio, and when nobody would give him any, he went and helped himself to the trash can next to the front door of the restaurant.
Tangent: He made me think of RJ from Over the Hedge. Man that's a funny movie! If you haven't seen it, I HIGHLY recommend it! End of Tangent
Tomorrow is THE BIG DAY. It's our LAST long day of driving across country and we finally get to see the house that we've been the proud owners of for one month now. I'm actually surprised my wife fell asleep - she's SO excited she's beside herself! I expect she's going to be up at the butt-crack of dawn and kicking our butts out of bed to get on the road as soon as possible in the morning, so I need to go to bed.
We've had a splendid weekend in Utah with Jud & Jill and their sons E & M. Each evening we got to stay up late sharing tasty beverages and good company. Each morning, Jud and Jill cooked us awesome breakfasts. They treated us like royalty. They should open a B&B!
The view from Jud's front yard.
Jumpin' Jacks Saturday we went to Jumpin Jacks, and the boys had a ball. I'd never seen anyplace like this. It was like a huge warehouse filled with big inflatable bouncers and slides. The kids had a ball.
Jumpin' Jacks
Sweaty ES
I've created a monster...
When we started to discuss lunch options for after Jumpin Jacks, ES heard "In N Out" listed as an option and went nuts. He declared that In N Out has "the best fries in the UNIVERSE!" He threw a fit that we weren't having lunch there. You'd think he had been taking lessons from Loping Squid. We decided to have lunch at another old favorite of mine before leaving the southwest.
Dinosaur Discovery
After lunch, we went to the Dinosaur Discovery. Some guy was starting to clear this land for construction and discovered a bunch of dinosaur footprints.
These were the largest footprints.
It used to be the side of a lake, and the dinosaurs left their footprints in the mud.
Artist's impression of what the lakeside used to be like.
It's a habitat for the desert tortoise, but Jud said they rarely see them. Lucky for us, we found one within about 5 minutes of starting our hike.
Desert Tortoise
The terrain was mostly hard sandstone with only periodic spots of loose sand.
The scenery was fantastic. Thank goodness for digital cameras. Electrons are free. I was going trigger-happy with my camera, and I would've burned through several rolls of regular film.
Four boys on a rock.
Cavemen.
Jud straddling "Fat Man's Misery."
ES and E squeeze through Fat Man's Misery.
E had been through Fat Man's Misery before, so Jud said it was okay to let the boys go down and we met them at the exit on the other side.
This is the where Fat Man's Misery ends.
I walked up inside the end of Fat Man's Misery and used the panorama feature on my camera to take this shot over my head.
The boys said this rock looked like a submarine.
The boys on top of the submarine rock.
We found four geocaches along the way during our hike today.
Another panorama shot of the scenery.
ES and E on the trail 2008.
Flashback: ES and E after Sea World, 2002.
Toward the end of our hike, we had snack time on top of the Sugar Loaf (more photos of Sugar Loaf below).
YB, me, and ES on top of the Sugar Loaf.
I am SO pleased with this picture. The boys NEVER cooperate with posing for a photo. I had to drag them together to ask Jud to take this picture, and they weren't looking at the camera until Jud said, "Look! My hair's on fire!" Then he snapped the picture at just the right instant.
Sugar Loaf from the car. I think it's about 50 feet tall.
Sugar Loaf is the large rock on the left side of this panorama.
Snapshot of the GPS Receiver and the 4 geocaches we found.
As a reward for doing so well on the hike today, we took the boys for one last trip to In-N-Out and then went to see the movie, Igor. It was okay. Nothing I'd rave about. The boys enjoyed it though.
Tomorrow we continue our trip across country. Up next: Grand Canyon!
From September 2007 to September 2008, this blog started out as a journal of my family's adventures around Hawaii. Then from 2008 to 2011, we lived in the Northern Virginia (NoVA) suburbs of Washington, DC. From the spring of 2011 to 2013, we called the Pacific Northwest "home." In June 2013, we moved back to the DC suburbs again. I like finding cool things for us to do that get us out of the house, so I will continue to blog about our adventures around the DC area, as well as periodic musings about whatever else strikes me as funny or odd. Note: These are my frank and honest opinions. Nobody is paying me to write anything in my blog.
Gouge Index (a.k.a. Links to Common Topics in My Blog)
My name is Kevin. I'm 40-something. I have a lovely wife (LW) and two great little boys, Eldest Son = ES and Younger Brother = YB (in older posts, I previously referred to him as Youngest Son or YS). I'm a submarine officer, and I've been in the Navy for 21+ years.
I started this blog to document our family adventures around Hawaii for family and friends. After that we moved to DC and then to Bremerton, WA. We have since moved back to the DC suburbs and I continue blogging about my random observations of life.
If you would like to contact me, you may email me at blunozblog at hotmail dot com.
Geocaching!
My wife refers to me as a "crack addict" when it comes to geocaching. Geocaching is like a scavenger hunt with a GPS receiver. People hide stuff in the woods and post the GPS coordinates on the geocaching website, and techno-gadget geeks like me go hiking in the woods looking for them. My wife calls it "Geek-meets-Nature."
It's the only magazine I have consistently kept a subscription to and read every month. Although I don't agree with the magazine's recurring theme of agnosticism / anti-religion, I skip those articles and soak up all the cool electronic gadgets and technology articles.
Outside Magazine is another new favorite of mine. One thing I really like about Outside Magazine is the photography. The pictures are absolutely amazing, but there's more to it than just the picture. Outside Magazine includes a short description of who the photographer was and how he/she got into position to capture the shot at just the right moment.
What I'm listening to...
KLOVE - contemporary Christian music
or First Wave - 80's alternative music on Sirius channel 22.
Where'd I get the name "blunoz" from?
On my first deployment as a junior officer on USS PROVIDENCE (SSN 719), I had the awesome experience of going north of the Arctic Circle. The Navy has many customs and traditions, and when you cross a significant invisible line in the ocean like the Arctic Circle or the Equator, you have to go through an initiation ceremony. When I returned from that first deployment, I got a new license plate on my car, but had to fit it into 6-letters, so I condensed blue nose into "blunoz."
I totally had a crush on Lea Thompson in Some Kind of Wonderful and could relate with Eric Stoltz being the unpopular kid admiring the prettiest girl in school from a distance.
John Hughes
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