Hey mom, a little bit of Lily stuff!

I've been trying to get enough material together for a post my mom might enjoy, but it never seems to gel, so I'm left writing about zombies and video games.

At the dinner table last week, Lily said "That scared the HOUSE out of me!" It was clear what she meant, but she had apparently misheard someone swearing. Dave was there and he asked "Someone scared you out of the house?" so hopefully her nascent profanity will transform into something unrecognizable.

Lily's picking up some good phrases too. When she tells us that she loves us, sometimes we'll respond, "Well, I guess that works out!" and she did that yesterday, but the other way around. I said, "Come here. I've got a secret to tell you. I love you!" and she smiled and says "I guess that works out! Cause I love you too!"

Jen had a girls night out with her sister on Friday and they had some exciting adventures, but I'll leave her to blog about that if she's so inclined. For my part, I just stayed home, watched a little TV and played video games. I decided that I wanted some Chinese food, so I figured I'd just use my smart phone to order it on the way and then pick it up when I got there. Everything is integrated on my phone. I push the voice search button and it recognizes what I say and performs a Google search from it. Then I can click on the phone number in the listing and make a call.

So I said "Chinese Food" and since the phone has a GPS and knows where I am, it just does a search for all the restaurants in the local area and pulls them up on an interactive map. Maybe twenty places popped up, little pushpins on the map. I was driving at the time and I couldn't give this my undivided attention, and I was suddenly struck by something a friend had said.

My buddy Tim keeps a blog too. One of his posts has the observation: "I love Chinese food but let’s face it, most Chinese restaurants have name issues. They use so many of the same words for their names that eventually you forget what that place around the corner is called when somebody asks the name of your favorite spot."

I blinked and thought "China Wok? Golden Bowl? Great Wall?" I was suddenly struck by how apt Tim's observation was. When we want to place an order at home, we grab the duck-sauce stained menu, pick up the phone, call in an order and then get in the car to go out to pick it up.

I think Tim is right that there's not a lot of point coming up with a clever name because people are just going to call it "That Chinese Place on the corner." It reminds me of something that I heard about That 70s Show. I'm told that the producers came up with any number of clever names before deciding that people would just call it that 70s show anyway, so why not go with the flow?

Anyway, if you want to buy me some Chinese food, the local place is called China Fun. (Amusingly, Tim made a rather exhaustive mix and match list in that same post, with words like Golden/Jade/Peking/Szechuan/Hong Kong etc in the first column and Palace/Treasure/Blossom etc in the second, but Fun is not in fact part of the list.)

We watched "Looney Tunes: Back in Action", which I am convinced that is a movie that is impossible to be enjoyed non-ironically. I happen to like Brendan Fraser, Steve Martin and Jenna Elfman, but the movie never seemed to rise above a level of abstraction.

It has cartoons interacting with real people, but the toons never seemed a part of the environment. There's a scene early on where Daffy was moving across the table. Also, some pencils spilled where he was. It didn't seem like he had knocked them over, but rather they fell over on their own. So that was crappy.

On Sunday we were supposed to meet Jen's friend Sandy for fireworks near where she lives, but we couldn't find her there. We had a good time though and Lily enjoyed the fireworks. It was a bear getting home though. It was like escaping from a rock concert. We were parked 15 feet from the edge of the lot, but it took us a good half hour to get out of there because of the way the traffic patterns had formed around us.

Eric dropped me a line on the way home last night, and he and his oldest son braved the hundred degree heat to walk down to our house. Lily had a ball, though they insisted on gravitating inside to the parts of the house that don't have any air conditioning. She incorporated some of his vocabulary expanding her phrase of cuckoo head to "Silly goose cuckoo head."

Everybody's a cuckoo head.