Summer heat, swimming cooldown

Do you remember waaaaayyyyy back in June when we were all tired of the mid-70 degree temps? Well, we have gotten our wish and more...100+ degrees for the past couple of days.

Basically everywhere we go, if there is some kind of water feature then either the swimsuits go on or I take off their shirts and let them go crazy. They love Liberty Park and the Gateway because they get to be around a ton of other kids running around getting surprised by the water that shoots out of the ground. They love the Sportsmall pools because that is where Carter is learning to be a good swimmer. In this heat, much to all of neighbors' delight, I will whip off my shirt and just strut around the area as well.

They love going to my sister Eden's house because they get a beautiful hot swimming pool (when I say hot, I mean hot...this pool is smoking hot, hot tub like) with all of their cousins and various pool toys. Eden and her family truly spoil us by letting us go over anytime we want.

Kids--success. Parents--fail.

You gotta love the toughness of kids...even with parents can't hang in there and have to bail, the kids hold on for their lives (with a mixture of happiness and horror):

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Did he paint that lawn yellow?

It has been a rather strange summer for weather so far. During the month of June, it seemed to rain pretty much every single day. It was the rainiest June in the past 10 years. It would sprinkle in the morning and then rain at night. Almost every single day.

So, I was a little perplexed the other day when I drove by this home. Nice looking home with the worst lawn that I have ever seen. Now, don't get me wrong, I understand when some lawns can go a bit yellow as the summer progresses. A typical SLC summer will have weeks without a drop of rain and temps hovering around 100 degrees.

But now tell me thins--how did this lawn end up looking like this? It frakkin' rained every single day! You look up into our mountains and our mountains our green. I mean, even just plain dirt has green growing out of it here in the city. Seriously, for the life of me, I cannot figure out how the lawn could look like this after all of this rain.

There are really only 4 possible explanations for this happening:

1. This homeowner installed a reverse sprinkler system--basically instead of water coming out of the sprinkler heads, the sprinklers heads must be sucking up all moisture out of the lawn.
2. Covering the lawn when it rains--I can just picture the homeowner sending his kids out with tarps to cover the lawn every single time it rains.
3. Using hair dryers on the lawn--After each rainstorm, the homeowner goes out and uses a hair blower on the lawn to dry it out as soon as possible.
4. He has a dog that takes care of his business and is marking his territory over every single piece of grass.
   

These are the only possible ways that this lawn could look like this after such a rainy month. Now with all that said, I probably care too much about my own lawn and I am probably on the opposite extreme of this homeowner. And I can care less if he mocks me for the putting green lawn that I have in front of my house.

Hide and Seek...and seek...and seek...

Hide and Seek, with a very smart 2-year old:

GREENVILLE, Pa. -- A Pennsylvania toddler did such a remarkable job of hiding during a game of hide-and-seek that the family had to call police and firefighters to help find her. Two-year-old Natalie Jasmer was playing the game with her siblings Tuesday in their Pymatuning Township home. When the family couldn't find her, parents Dennis and Michelle Jasmer called authorities.

Emergency crews and friends frantically searched the neighborhood about 70 miles northwest of Pittsburgh for about an hour.

The family's dog, Copper, finally sniffed her out. She had fallen asleep in a drawer underneath the family's washing machine.

The little girl told her family she was sorry. Hide-and-seek is now banned in the Jasmer household.

I will have to keep my phone handy when Carter or Beckham go hiding. Though it would not be really fair to them if I have the police help me find them when they are hiding.

Fireworks, Danger, Internet Reunion, etc.

Sorry for the delay in between posts. A couple of random things:

Should I be concerned that Beckham was walking around our house with one of this hand held grill lighters? Should I be even more concerned that we had a huge bag of fireworks in the toy box in our family room? Yeah, I agree...I shouldn't be concerned at all.

Our internet best friend from Georgia came out and hung out with us on Tuesday night. If you haven't visited her site before, check it out, she has great stuff: ShellBell We had a good time hanging out and partying all night long. I think it is fair to say that she had a memorable night as she was finally introduced to Tab. As we all know, few things in life are better than Tab...she got to taste the goodness and if I remember our conversation correctly, she said something like: 'Thank you Sam for introducing me to Tab. This could be the turning point in my life.' Something like that. Glad to have you in town Shellie.

We had our annual Saturn Avenue raging 4th of July party a few days ago. Basically a bunch of families on our street and neighboring streets come on over to grill up some meat (I do have to say that my huge Ribeye steak dwarfed all of their puny hotdogs), cook up some s'mores at the firepit and set off fireworks. And when you get 8 families all bringing fireworks, well, you spend a lot of time hoping and praying that nobody will accidentally light one of the kids on fire. Thanks to the Jefferies, Tanners, Jankes, Deans, Pettys, Davies, Littles and Nielsons for the good times. We all survived. Can't wait for next year...

Dripping off fat thru sweat...

So, I am going for a drive with the boys a few weeks ago and guess what I found? OK, don't try and guess because you will never guess right--I found a Fat jiggling machine. Now, I don't know the real name of these machines but it is a machine that you put the band around your back and you stand on it and the machine just jiggles. Someone left this in front of their house...so I got out of the car, walked up to the door and rang the doorbell. I politely asked what they were going to do with this hidden treasure...when I found out that I could take it, I scooped it up and threw it in the back of the car realizing that my fitness and overall health was about to improve drastically.

You probably have seen pics of this but I decided to give it a try. It has to be a quality product--it is made by Sears! Since hooking it up, I have lost 27 pounds and I feel amazing. Ok, thats not the truth. In fact, the thing turns on but it doesn't jiggle, it just makes noises. I think it would be totally worth the few hundreds of dollars to get it fixed, while Brodi, for some crazy reason, doesn't believe it would help someone lose weight. Yeah, I know, she is a bit crazy (as you can see from the pic on the right, she is knocking this beautiful machine to the ground...don't worry, she didn't hurt it too much). If anyone is looking for a fabulous Fat jiggler from the 1950s made at Sears, let me know--I will swing you a great deal on it.

You paid what? For that?

I love Ping Pong. I play it like I play tennis. I take big swings with tennis strokes. I also make all of the appropriate grunting to be even more intimidating. We had an elders quorum ping pong tournament a few months ago and it brought out some laughs as people felt like we were playing on the tennis court.

We had a ping pong table in our house as well, so I would play 2-3 hours a week as well. I had a favorite little paddle that I used for basically all my life.

The point of this long, rather boring post on ping pong? I was doing a little research on a couple of tennis rackets and tennis shoes and I saw that I could also purchase a ping pong paddle. I thought that may be kind of fun to grab a paddle just in case I play again soon and I could use my own stick. I checked out the Stiga brand and guess what? One of those nice little paddles? $150. Yes, $150. Holy crap, are these platinum plated paddles (say that 5 times really fast)? Now, there were a bunch for $15-20...but they had more than 10 of those paddles that cost well over $100. And if you added up the three brand name ping pong paddles...you had a selection of around 50 different paddles to purchase from. Egads...