"Where you were? Why you not come when monster made bad-bad?!"

This was another full weekend. On Saturday, we kicked around for a little while and watched a new episode of Scooby Doo. It was about an explorer named Rick Spartan and his sidekick, the Oxford educated Charles, whom he calls Cachinga, and speaks to in a pidgin dialect. (Hey, I see Charles was voiced by Greg Ellis, who did the voice for Drax in the Legion of Super Heroes!) Lily was tickled when the Charles enters after just missing the monster attack on Dr. Spartan, and Spartan berates him for his absence, "Where you were? Why you not come when monster made bad-bad?!" She was quoting that all weekend. Heh heh.

After that, I took off for Frederick's house. He, Ancker, Eric and I all have such disparate schedules that we have to set things up well in advance. We did manage to carve out a couple hours for some time and we're trying to put together a superhero RPG Campaign, so we did a test run of the system. Even though we were playing DC Adventures, we decided to go the Marvel route and stress test the system by having our heroes slug it out. I happen to like the system a lot and I think we understand it a bit better after our exercise.

Frederick grilled up some yummy burgers and we had a yummy little feast. Then we watched all three of the Family Guy Star Wars movies. I'm only an irregular viewer of the show, so I didn't get all of the in-jokes, but it was funny as a straight-up Star Wars parody too.We discussed our philosophy of zombies (fast zombies don't necessarily ruin a zombie movie, but they're often a crutch) and had a goof time hanging out.

I also caught a little Fullmetal Alchemist. I knew of the property, but had never caught an episode, and it occurred to me that this is how anime is described by people who hate anime. It was nothing but 22 minutes of incoherent brawling between a bunch of superpowered weirdos. And I don't know how representative of the series as a whole that one episode is, and as Frederick pointed out, of course it's going to seem incoherent if I jump into the middle of a season as I did. It was interesting. I'm not sure if I like it or not, based on that one viewing.

I slept over and we hit a Friendly's for breakfast. We played a little of the new Mortal Kombat game on our return (it looks beautiful) and then I headed home because I was really running out of steam at that point.

Sunday was pretty quiet. We picked up a kiddie pool and did some grilling (I probably made the best burgers of my life on Sunday) and caught some fireflies in the evening.

Monday, we headed to a cemetery to walk around. Lily really liked it and I got some nice pictures, except they were all taken at a kind of skewed angle,

because I wound up holding her snacks (a snack-pack of hard little breadsticks one dips into soft cheese. Lily coined the portmanteau of Steese (STicks of chEESE) to describe them.)

What child doesn't remember her halcyon days frolicking in the cemetery?

And up top for references

We got a last minute invite to Jen's family for a cookout, so we did that for the afternoon. We had asked Lily why we celebrated July 4th. She thought a minute and said "Mmm...because it's God's birthday?" and we replied that it was closer to the country's birthday. I suppose Constitution Day actually corresponds more closely to America's birthday, but it's barely a holiday. I took a cute video of her singing "Happy Birthday, dear America!"