A very good one!

Days - they don't get much better than this one. Unless you're Charlie Sheen and you've just found yourself in a slightly downtrodden hotel bar, but I digress... This was a fantastic day.

First, Red's last soccer practice/JAM and I run around the lake this morning. I've been feeling less than svelte lately so I wanted to take the opportunity during Red's last soccer practice (which would usually find me standing on the sideline tending Pudge and messing around with JAM) to take a run around Greenbelt Lake. Yessir, JAM and I ran all 1.73 miles (yes, I measured... using Google Earth thankyouverymuch - see the end of this post) around Greenbelt Lake! Didn't even stop running once (except two short times to try to explain to JAM how to run without stomping and digging his feet into the ground on every step and to let Pudge - who I was pushing in the jogging stroller mind you - throw his rock into the lake). So, mostly 1.73 miles without stopping. I know... and no one was even chasing me with any sharp kitchen utensils!

When we got back to Red's soccer practice we were in time to see some final games being played:

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After the games the coaches called us all up to the Community Center for an end of season shindig - and by shindig I mean cupcakes and cookies and apple slices (thanks to Wifey) - to give all the 3 and 4 y.0.'s their medals. Yes, medals. Red was so proud of her medal!

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And Pudge was happy as a pig in slop to get a cupcake of his very own.

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After lunch, JAM and I took off for his baseball game. (I really need to bring a camera to one of his games because poor Wifey, when she does get to make it to a game, is saddled with the two little ones and she can't do both jobs of cameraman and playground monitor for the other crazy kids on the death-trap playground.) JAM's team has gotten soooo much better in the 10 weeks we've had them all together. They've gone from a team of all brand-new-to-this-level-of-ball kids (who most of them didn't know where first base was - honestly) to now I've got the whole infield moving on each pitch, they know where they're supposed to be and they move without hesitation. I'm so proud of them. They were even in the game today until the end of the third inning (thanks to the other coach putting in their "project" pitcher we were tied at 7 after the 3rd)!!! But then the other team got tired of us being close and put in their real pitcher and shut us down and they scored another 7 in the 4th so we lost 14-7. But HEY - we were tied after 3!!!!

Then, we had such a fantastic time tonight when we had some long-lost friends over for dinner. Alright, not so lost, but we've owed them an invite to our place for a long time and I finally nipped things in the bud and somehow the planets aligned and we were able to make it work. Certain people, who were supposed to join us, were either in another country or tied up with previous engagements so our party was slightly less populous than originally planned but we had such a fantastic time reconnecting with these good friends. The kids all played so spectacularly in the yard, with no problems to speak of - even after not seeing each other for so long - so we were blessed with being able to enjoy the fire pit unmolested for quite some time before we had to relent and break out the s'mores. :)

Yes, from exercise to soccer party to a grand day for baseball to a wonderful evening with friends..... they don't get any better than this!



The run:

Oh how I love thee...

What or who ever you happen to thank for the creation of this here 'verse, there are few things that can truly be praised worldwide. Pizza, Angel Falls, the Grand Canyon, James Cameron (seriously, did you see Avatar? Totally made up for Titanic), the Great Barrier Reef, Firefly... not a whole lot else though. Oh, except for one more thing....

It's strange the things you find at work. I was minding my own business, trolling through our internal social network, checking out blog posts and reading people's bookmarks when I came across this...

Yes folks, it is a handy dandy how to choose a beer chart. Where have you been all my life? Funny as hell and helpful to boot! Especially so considering a certain plan some friends and I are concocting for the Super Bowl party - a beer tournament. 64 beers (maybe 32, we're getting old), bracket style, best beer wins. I'm way more excited than I should be. I understand this and I embrace it. Don't judge me.

Hmmmm... Beer....

This probably isn't my place, but...

...I need to say something about it. Something really sad happened last night to a local family and it has grazed our family in a very unexpected way. A little boy in JAM's class, not someone I knew other than in passing at some events here and there, but according to all reports one of the sweetest little kids you'd ever be lucky enough to meet, passed away last night. Apparently this fantastic little guy had been born with some health problems and the fact his family got to be with him for 9 years was something of a miracle in itself.

So here we are, on the periphery (at best) of this tragic event, and it's amazing the effect is still so great. Wifey related to me that she can't get the image out of her head of the time, just last week, when she's helped him down the stairs off the school bus on JAM's class' field trip. Although I came home too late for the big talk with him and I missed it, JAM had his own feelings to work through regarding his interactions with his friend. Without going into too much detail, apparently his friend had some mobility challenges due to his illnesses and at times this year JAM had decided not to play with him while on recess in favor of playing kickball, which apparently did not include this young guy. It sounded like JAM was hard on himself for what he characterized as his being mean to his friend, but even though I wasn't there I don't think I'd go as far as saying it qualified as being mean. But, I wasn't there so I have no idea what was said or how it was said. We just have to help JAM think about the times he did play in the sandbox with his friend, the times they did have fun together.

I told JAM about the time I was in high school and a good friend of mine passed away. I told him how sad I was and it was good for me to be able to relate to him that way I think. We'll keep talking to him, and I'll make more special time for that tomorrow. Tonight I let him have something special that he's been wanting for a while - we let him watch two episodes of the animated Star Wars: the Clone Wars off the DVR. Hadn't let him watch that before - the violence is a bit much but I thought he's getting to the point of being fine with it (he'd probably already been there - it was us that was lagging) and he deserved something fun to get his mind off of the day. We all need that sometime right?

There are these life lessons that I know we'll have to go through, with all the kids, but that doesn't make it any easier to anticipate or to deal with. And again, we're so out there on the periphery of this sadness, I can't even come close to imagining how the family is doing right now. They are great people, and we're looking forward to doing whatever we can for them but we know they've got so many people who are closer than we were looking out for them. I just hope that some good comes out of this - the kids work to realize that life is short, that they need to be as good to each other as possible (one thing JAM said - this little guy was just nice to everyone, even if they were mean to him because of his disabilities he still just wanted to be every one's friend), and hopefully we're all surrounded by people who love us.

I'm not particularly religious, to any one deity or dogma, but I will pray that God's looking out for that family tonight and in the future. And I'm going to hold on to my little ones just a little tighter.

I'm not alone, but I might not want to admit it

I adopted the whole blog writing thing late, after Wifey had been at it for at least a year. As I've said, I did it to create a space for me to look back at later in a way that I could never have done with a written journal. I'd tried a hand written journal before and could never stick with it. I'd even tried keeping a journal on the computer but I couldn't stay with that either. I know, big surprise - me not remembering to keep up with something. There is something about the public nature of this space, the fact that "it" is "out there" that makes me want to stay up to date with my posting. There isn't a single person who looks to this space with any expectation (including Wifey - I mean, she lives this with me!) but just being public makes me want to do my best.

Other than this blog though I just haven't gotten into the whole social networking arena. I've been gently (or sometimes not so gently) mocked for my resistance to joining Wifey and friends on Facebook, I haven't had any interest in tweeting, and you can take your My Space and shove it. But amongst my own age group I seemed to be a lone island of sanity in a sea of ridiculously addicted socialites. That is, until Wifey pointed out this article:

In a Generation That Friends and Tweets, They Don't

Yuppers, apparently we're such a well defined group that the Washington Post decided to write an article about us. It was an interesting read too, especially since I've been wavering in my devotion to remain unplugged. You see, although I've been thinking how nice it might be to have another means to keep up to date with people I have a very addictive personality and I know it and I don't want to feed it. That's why I'm very careful about my drinking, I don't gamble, and the only thing I allow myself to fall deep into is whatever game I'm playing on the computer. :) So I know that if I jump into Facebook it's inevitable that I'll be one of those goofs who get all wrapped up in whatever those games are on there, the ones that Wifey says she's always blocking. I'll be updating things all the time, adding info, searching for people that I've been perfectly happy not seeing or thinking about for years.

The bottom line - I think I'm just happy with the way things are going right now so it's pretty nice to hear that I'm not alone in resisting joining the hordes of automatons flocking to those sites.

My only problem? This from page 2 of the story...

On a broad level, there might be differences between those who tweet or issue status updates and those who don't. Pew researchers point to a new but very small study they conducted to show that resisters and adopters 18 to 29 have demographic differences: Social networkers are more likely to have an annual income of $75,000 or more, and nonusers are more likely to have only a high school education.

I'm wondering how quickly I can sign up for a FB account. And, how I can convince the MVA that I'm really 29 again.

Boy's Weekend

It's almost too good to be true but this past weekend Wifey momentarily lost all control of her senses and gave me a pass to go camping with the fellers. Yup, that's right - boys weekend. Very simply put, it was an excuse to get away from it all (including all the crappyness I've been feeling lately), make large fires, sleep in a tent, eat lots of dead animals and drink copious amounts of liquids you don't normally find at play group.

Life was good.

After literally months of going back and forth about locations, dates, who could and couldn't come, more locations, etc., etc. we finally made it happen at Cunningham State Park. After waiting so long to make up our minds about where we wanted to go all of the 130+ camp sites were booked at the Houck area so at first I thought we were out of luck. But, I've been watching and learning from my world-class planner Wife and I had a backup plan all set. CSP has a secondary camping area separated from the main part of the park that is first-come-first-served so I thought that if they still didn't have any room at the inn on that day I'd just head up early and grab a space for us in the Manor area. If that still didn't work for some reason we had the Catoctin Mountain Park campground to fall back on but that was a last-ditch choice for us. Why you ask? There's no drinking allowed in National Parks. :)

I got up to the manor area of Cunningham around noonish on Friday, found a great site with an electric hookup and mostly put up the borrowed tent (thanks G&K!) by myself. Then, I settled in to wait for the rest of the guys to arrive. One by one they (almost) all showed up and I had dinner already cooking. I was seriously domestic for this weekend. I ran the planning (with way too many emails - I just didn't want to plan something that anyone objected to!) planned a menu, did all the shopping, did almost all of the cooking, cleaned the place up each morning before the hungover/lazy b-tards even got out of their sleeping bags... it was impressive if I do say so myself. But don't tell Wifey - she's not a huge fan of me doing crap like that elsewhere when not much of it gets done around here.

The weekend was literally fantastic. It rained some on Friday night but we were drinking enough that we didn't even notice much. By the time we all passed out it had stopped so the weather Saturday was absolutely perfect. After friend #6 showed up, and making breakfast for some hungover chaps, it was time to sample some of the local flavor. Not wanting to just sit around all day I dragged a few of the guys up to the main part of the park where we took a short (and slow thanks to my still messed up knee) hike up to see the falls. They weren't as impressive as I'm sure they are in the spring with more water coming over them but they were cool to look at anyway.

A pic via the cell phone -

Then we took a drive through Catoctin Mountain Park, a National Park Service park. My only goal was to try to check out Camp David which is surrounded by the park. As you might imagine, we weren't even able to get close. We saw the road that led up to the Camp but it was flanked by some hard to mistake Do Not Enter signs. Instead of adding ourselves to the daily news cycle by storming the Bastille we just drove on by. I had to be comforted by a fleeting view of one of the watch towers that are a part of the perimeter of the facility.

Yup, that's the tower. How doofy am I that I thought that was so cool?

Anyhow, after we got back it continued to be a lazy and totally relaxing day under beautiful mountain weather. A lot less liquids were consumed which was a good thing. Especially since this is how certain people were feeling on Saturday morning....

Not to poke fun at someone else's misery but... :)

We did stoke up an excellent fire, played some cards and listened to C play his guitar for a while. A nice relaxing night.

FIRE!
J & D
C & M
The Big D

Camp was struck after a truly mesmerizing breakfast feast prepared with love by D. I had packed a few pounds of hamburger which I had seasoned with some Worcestershire sauce, garlic and Italian seasoning (YUM for hamburgers!) but not so much for a breakfast meat wouldn't you say? Someone came up with the idea that it would be great to turn that into a breakfast meal with the dozen eggs we still had. Um yeah, I didn't try it. But some other crazy men did and they even mentioned that it was even borderline good. I took their word for it and ate Saturday's left over normal eggs and bacon. Look at me being the smart one huh?

By noon the camp site was cleaned up really well, the cars were packed and we were all on the road. Didn't want to say goodbye to a fantastic weekend but I knew Wifey was eager to not be a single mother any more.

All in all it was a hell of a weekend. We're definitely going back next year (and a certain someone better get off his thespian-ish back side and join us! and another certain orange colored luzer better tell his wife who's (or should that be whose?) boss and ask really nicely if he can join us too.).

To top it all off the park is also already on the agenda for a family camping outing next spring too. I'd highly recommend that park - loads for the kids to do at the main part of the park... we just need to get off our duffs and make a reservation in time. :)

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And, just to provide definitive photo evidence of something never before seen - and it's bigger than getting a picture of Nessie or the Abominable Snow Man..... it's a large angry Asian being domestic!

That's right folks, the big D was doing dishes. I know, I couldn't believe it either. Hence the picture.

A happy day to me!

The hammock is hung, Wifey is in the kitchen making a brunch to end all brunches for some fellow Dads and their kin coming over, and I'm sitting in the living room watching some Backyardigans with the 3 Amigos. Life is good.

Happy Father's Day to all!

Wonderful day

Another wonderful day in the house of Mooney, we're feeling very lucky nowadays. Not sure what it was like where you call home, but for us it was in the low 80's, crystal clear sky, no humidity - a remarkable day for suburban DC. We got off to an "early"departure (if you call just after 10 early) out to Brookside Gardens and Wheaton Regional Park. The plan was to go walk on the trails, see the butterflies at Brookside, walk back to the playground, have a picnic lunch, then home for nap. Yup, whirlwind tour and still on nap schedule. Did it get done???

Oh yeah baby! And a really good time was had by all.

Witness...

I also took a bunch of pictures to add to my Panoramio account. What's Panoramio you ask? I'm sure you've heard of Flickr, and other photo sharing sites. This is just another version, but with one cooler additive. When you geolocate your picture (you have the option of letting the site know where you took the picture) it gets synched up with Google Earth, and if its deemed worthy, your pic becomes a little blue dot in Earth for everyone to see. Like this...

The image above is a screen shot from Earth of my first picture accepted to be included. It is a pic of the trail that runs along the Youghiogheny River in Swallow Falls State Park, close to Deep Creak Lake where we had been visiting with our friends the DaB's. Back when I was teaching that one grad class I created an assignment for my students where I had them practice uploading an original pic, geolocate it, then they were eventually all posted into Earth. Pretty cool I thought. Anyhow, I've played more and more with this, and now I've gotten a bunch into Earth already and pretty much everywhere I go I take more to add. I like thinking that I'm adding to the world-wide knowledge base that floats around out there. Maybe it helps someone someday, who knows. A lot of my pics are pretty well viewed, so that's cool to see too. You can see my whole list, including a few I hadn't tagged for inclusion into Earth (they don't take pics where the primary subject is a person) at http://www.panoramio.com/user/1599791 if you're so inclined. Some pics from today, that I'm hoping to be added, are up already and more will be soon (what do you want from me - it's already 12:15am!).

After we left the butterfly exhibit (way too crowded for real enjoyment - even after shelling out some good money to get in), and while on our way back to the playground, JAM and Red had fun walking through the Labyrinth. I bought Red a new butterfly net earlier and she wouldn't let it out of her grasp for the rest of the walk - that is my attempt at explaining what you're about to see...

The kids had a blast on the huge climbing structure at the playground, and as usual, Wifey and I were there to capture some of the fun. And, as I've said before, and I'm likely to say again - we make some pretty good looking kids...

After nap, we were lucky enough to have the DaB's and BCJ join us for an impromptu cookout. D was home earning some cash so missed the festivities, but after a fantastic day with the fam we ended it with a great time with good friends. D was able to join me later to watch the Lakers close out the NBA finals, so it was great to be able to see him today too, even if it was a bit later than everyone else. :)

Yup, a wonderful day.