New subject! For the past few days, I’ve been amusing myself by reading the Cakewrecks Blog. I’ve been making my way backwards in time through this blog, and I might even do it again. It’s funny like the facebook group, “I judge you when you use poor grammar,” but it has even more to offer. There are atrocious grammar mistakes, misunderstandings, and completely tasteless cakes that are all meant to be seen. I have laughed at so many of the posts. And you should, too.

And here is another funny link shared by a friend that you should read: Historical moments ruined by technology.

Ok, now I’m really going to work on those backlogged posts. Here I go!

This is the last of my previous summer blogs (I think!). This one was in a more incomplete state than the rest of my post-summer summer blog posts, so I had to choose some of the pictures. It was really hard! Oxbow Park is just a beautiful place. And it makes me miss summer! But only one more month of winter to go, right?

June 29, 2008

Here I will share some of my pictures from our hike (today) through Oxbow Park (and zoo).

We went through the zoo first. We saw the bear, the coyotes, and the prairie dogs. Everything was pretty much the same as last year. For the most entertaining animals, it was a tie between the wild turkeys and the porcupine. As you can see here, the turkeys were being turkeys.

And this porcupine was doing a dance. He was either happy or very disturbed.

Then we went hiking through the trees and out to the meadow. It was beautiful, as always. Here are a few pictures of some of the flowers we saw.

One important thing to note is that it is almost black cap season. We saw a lot of almost ripe black caps, and we actually found one ripe one.

This blog is mostly a random smattering of stuff I’ve done. Yeah, and I’m feeling concise today, so hopefully pictures are worth a thousand words.

It’s fall and going on winter. Here are fall colors at Good Earth Village.

While I was at Good Earth Village, I stained eaves and underhangs. This fulfills all my desires for painting and home improvement in general. And I didn’t get stain in my hair!

We made a trip to the Mall of America. We had to take Andy’s mac book pro back to an apple store. His first one was a dud. It takes a considerable amount of time for them to conclude that a mac book pro is a dud so I was very hungry. We then had dinner at the first restaurant at MOA we could find with no wait, Tiger Sushi. Below is a caterpillar sushi.

And here is our first snow.

• American Idol has started again. I’m so glad the WGA[EW] doesn’t consider the reality TV writers to be WGA[EW] material, because if they did I wouldn’t get to watch American Idol. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are now booked for me.

• We broke a chair. This is an office chair with like 6 legs, and one of them broke when someone was going to sit down. It is hard to believe. We threw away the bottom half of the chair, but the upper part is now our new video game chair.
• I’m knitting a sock. Lots of my friends knit, and I’ve finally caught the bug. This isn’t my first time knitting, but I haven’t done it since I was like 12. And I love knitted socks — I have enough for a few weeks worth of them. I may never knit anything other than socks.

Andy and I decided to move the PS2 upstairs, and consequently we have rediscovered Katamari Damacy. In the past week, we’ve rolled up stuff into the moon, made the stars Virgo, Taurus, Gemini, and Pisces, and all in all we’ve made the king of the cosmos very happy. He’s wanted to cry after he’s seen some of our katamaris. We find ourselves with the Katamari music stuck in our heads quite often. We’re going to look into investing in We Love Katamari, the sequel. If I remember correctly, XPlay loved We Love Katamari so I’m guessing we are really going to like it!

• I have fallen off the picture a day wagon. I’m trying to get back on it. Stay tuned.
• I’ve read a lot of books. Maybe someday I’ll tell you what they are.

The food was spectacular. We were instructed to eat 2 lbs of ham each, and ha ha…we didn’t do it although some people tried. Andy and I brought spanikopita triangles. And Lee made me realize that I do not, in fact, hate cream cheese. She made a dip, I tried it, and I liked it. And later she called me and told me what was in it. As many of you know, I have an aversion to several dairy products. I may have lumped cream cheese into that general aversion unfairly. Since then I have tried one wedge of laughing cow (the garlic and herb kind), and it wasn’t bad either.

Lee’s dip	Blurry ham	Dessert

We listened to N Sync and other unlikely candidates sing Christmas songs. And then we moved on to the white elephant gift exchange. There were no magnetix this year! And most of the presents were fun.

Pile of presents.	Patrick opens a present.	Lee shakes presents.

Andy stole a weather station from Patrick, something we had been talking about getting for a while. No one else must have wanted it because we kept it until the end of the game. And Lee got the angel. This is the neon angel that has been making it around the white elephant parties for a while now. I’m glad we didn’t get it.

The angel no one wants.	Our weather station.	Patrick’s gift.

I vote for no white elephant next year, if anyone out there is listening.

The next book is Lake Wobegon 1956 by Garrison Keillor. And to the right is an actual book club member trying to finish the book at book club!!!

It is cold. It has been both colder and warmer than when I took these pictures, but I can tell you now that there is still snow and everything looks pretty much the same. It was the first shoveling of the season, but not the first snow. The snow was topped off by a nice layer of ice so you had to crack it, then shovel. Fun, ya?

War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. Well, this one is no surprise, especially if you’ve seen the movie. Except that the story in the movie is completely different than the one in the book. But the main idea is the same. The Martians tried to take over the world (I mean Great Britain). And as we all know, they were defeated by the common cold. One thing that annoyed me was that the narrator is completely reckless with his life in this book, but I guess that makes it exciting. I think this one got no stars on my book rating scale. The movie was better, but I didn’t like that either.

Charmed Life by Diana Wynne Jones. I was just browsing through the library and picked this one up. It was spectacular! It is a book for probably…young adults? But it is a completely enjoyable story that is not too scary and has a pretty good plot. The plot is this: there is a boy named Cat who is an enchanter with nine lives. His has an evil sister, and there is a plot to unbalance the force of good. And one other thing: There is a magician who appears when they call him by name so they call him “You Know Who.” Sound familiar? I checked and this book was written in 1977. So its quite original. Five stars.

The Ill-Made Mute by Cecilia Dart-Thornton. This one was recommended to me by Ms. Kira Foken. And I must thank Ms. Kira Foken because I did indeed enjoy this book. The heroine’s face is poisoned (and extremely ugly), so this book follows her adventures, and they are pretty entertaining. It was a little scary, but most of it was “fantastical scary” which I would define as “couldn’t happen to me.” Someone else has the next book in this series checked out, but I’m so excited to read it when it comes in again. Five stars.

The Briar King and The Charnel Prince by Greg Keyes. These are the first two books in a series, and I have no idea how long that series is. I hope that it is a completed series! This book reminds me of George R. R. Martin, but without a lot of the morbidity. It is still morbid in some parts, but its not horrible. And I do want to find out how the battle between good and evil goes so I really want to read the next one. So the sad thing is that the library doesn’t own the next book in the series (this always happens to me). Five stars for both of these books.

The Lives of Christopher Chant by Diana Wynne Jones. I didn’t love this one immediately like I did Charmed Life, but in the end I really enjoyed it. Four stars.

Myst, The Book of Atrus by Rand Miller. I’ve read some very convincing reviews of this book, and it didn’t really live up to my expectations. It was kind of boring, which was possibly due to the lack of changing scenery. The plot is this: the main character and his father live in a city (whose inhabitants are dead) and they create worlds in the books those people left behind. People who played the video game seemed to understand what was going on, but it didn’t do much for me. Two stars.

Magic or Madness by Justine Larbalestier. Here’s the plot: The heroine discovers latent magical powers, and she was deceived by her parent. Nothing new there in the world of fantasy. The one unique thing was it was set in Austrailia and had a lot of Austrailian phrases which were interesting. But the story didn’t entertain me. Lots of other people like this book, or so I hear. No stars.

Smoky The Cow Horse by Will James. Forgive my generalizations, but I’m sure there is a 6 year old boy who loves cowboys and would love this book. I hated it. This book is written in the dialect of a cowboy (or that’s how it appeared to me). And the subject-verb disagreements in this book were an abomination. The book is about the life of Smoky the horse and a cowboy named Clint. Smoky goes from running free on the range, to becoming the best cow horse ever, then to becoming the best bucking bronco show pony ever, and then finally after many difficulties he goes home with Clint to spend his retirement on the range. Negative stars?