Monday, June 21, 2010

The best Father's Day ever!

It's worth noting that a lot of my guy friends got my Jem and the Holograms reference in an earlier post ("Truly, truly, truly poutrageous"), but my wife did not.

We had a nice little weekend. On Saturday, I was helping Lily with her coloring. She's got a little coloring book with cats and dogs. She took the right hand page and gave me the left. I was so impressed with how nicely my doggy came out that I couldn't stop talking about it, finally prompting Jen to snark "That's great. We'll go to Friendly's and they can hang it on the wall." It was awesome, though. I'd totally be the star of the twelve and up wall.

Lily was cute. She colored her kitty's nose in and said, "I colored his nose green because I know that's your favorite color."

I like how we can be driving along and Lily will just spontaneously say "I love you, daddy." (or mommy). I think she gets that from Jen and me, because that's something we'll say to each other, and it's nice to see her emulating one of my few good traits.

On Saturday morning, we walked downtown to Easton's Farmer's Market and ran into Eric and his family down that way. The website claims that the Easton Farmer's market is the the oldest continuous open-air farmer's market in the United States, going back all the way to 1752. It's really a short, pleasant walk and I think we'll be doing it more during the summer.

Later that day, we streamed Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs through Netflix. A friend said it was pretty good, but I didn't have much more to go on other than that vague recommendation. I was a bit wary, because it seemed pretty recent to be available for streaming, and as a general rule, stuff you can stream tends to be either A.)old or B.)crappy. However, we had considerable success with Up the other week, so we gave it a shot.

The water effects were beautiful. I read somewhere that Finding Nemo (if I recall correctly) had to dial down the water effects because they were too realistic.

Despite being an animated movie, I think it was aimed more squarely at adults than kids. But that's fine. Lily will watch anything we put in front of her, so I figure we might as well play something we'll enjoy.

Bill Hader and Anna Faris voiced the leads. Faris is actually a really good voice actress, which is a surprise because she's just a mediocre actual actress. I like her, but she's kind of forgettable. How often does a casting agent say Anna Faris is perfect for this role? I mean, she's pretty, but as has been observed elsewhere, on the Periodic Table of Hollywood, "hotness" is not exactly Raretonium. She did play my favorite character in Lost in Translation, however and I have a far amount of general goodwill towards her. She gave a pretty great performance for Cloudy.

Later on in the movie, there was a spaghetti tornado onscreen and I was twisting myself into knots, trying to explain the concept of a tornado to Lily without using the word itself because I didn't think it would have any meaning for her, when she interrupted me with the question "Is that a spaghetti tornado?" I asked her where she had learned about tornadoes and she told me, "The Dorothy movie!"

On Sunday morning, Lily gave me my Father's Day present. It was a green lunch bag (because she knows green is my favorite color) and it was decorated with stickers and Jen had written a message with a sharpie on it. It was very nice, but I wasn't allowed to take it into work today because Jen wanted to cover the stickers with packing tape first so they wouldn't get all cruddy.

Jen and Lily went to church, then they picked me up and we drove up to my father's house, where we had our monthly family get-together. Jen wanted to give a Father's Day card to my unmarried brother. I don't think she gets this whole Father's Day concept. I got roped into computer maintenance, which is par for the course. He claimed that he doesn't show up on Google when one searches for our name, so I typed it in and the first result was the obituary for the uncle I never met, but who was featured in a movie that got the MST3K treatment. He has apparently died last week.

Lily only wanted to play with Nana, and was completely blowing off her cousin, who wanted to play with her. She was so terrible that Jen was ready to pack up and go home. Then twenty minutes later she was playing with Joey like nothing had happened.

We took Lily up to Oma's and then Jen and I took a walk around town. I love cemeteries more and more. I think someday I'll wind up dragging the family along on some weird Sarah Vowell-type roadtrip where we visit a bunch of cemeteries. I want to go back to DC so I can see Arlington again. Anyways, we were there after dark. Just us and the headstones and about a million fireflies rising up like mist. It was beautiful.

Speaking of beautiful this address by Al Franken kicks all kind of ass.

Video, with a bunch of other speakers.

Transcript of his remarks

Lily's talking about having long hair, but not any longer than down to her feet, ("because then I would trip"). I mentioned this to my friend Karen, who brought up Crystal Gayle. My mom had always been a fan, and it was funny to hear the name in 2010 because she seems like such a creature of her time.

To make Lily's rice more appealing the other week, I added a drop of food coloring and mixed it in. When she asked me how I had done it, I told her that I used "Fairy Juice". She called me on that, saying "Fairies aren't real," then she paused and added, "Did you make them real?"

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