The 43

Summer is my favorite time of year, and I loathe to waste a day during the summer. But sometimes, you just need a nada day. Today was a nada day. We had about our fifth consecutive day of temperatures in at least the high 90s and were coming off several busy days for all of us. It just turned into one of those days we didn't do much. Wife went for a run before it got too hot. She did a little shopping with Eldest. I took the boys to Target. I also blogged and played Wii Fit. We made a simple, easy dinner, then watched "Wipeout." Littlest played a game on the DS. Eldest and I played "Lego Indiana Jones." I watered the lawn and garden. And that was about it for a sunny but brutally hot (and a little humid, which is unusual for Utah) day. That was all we seemed to have the energy for -- we theorized taking the boys swimming, then decided we were all too tired (though I'm sure they would have found the energy). One nada summer day once in a while is OK. We get b...

I went for a walk tonight around dusk and watched the sunset from Sugar House Park near our house. It was a pleasant night here in SLC, and I needed a little exercise today and didn't feel like running, so I walked over the the far southwest corner of the park to get a view of the setting sun as it dropped below the horizon. I've written before on watching summer sunsets. Summer is my favorite time of year, and though I'm not going to pick a specific time of day I prefer every summer, dusk floods back the most memories. Actually, dusk floods back some early memories -- one specifically from 1975, when I was 4 1/2 years old. On a particular summer night, with the sun setting and the air warm, we as a family went the drive-in to see "Escape From Witch Mountain." I think we might have driven down Milwaukee Avenue and stopped at Superdawg on the way (which makes me think we saw the movie at Pal-Waukee, which would have been a long drive down Milwaukee from the city; I...

While living in Madison, before kids, before we were even married, I went for a walk through the far West side neighborhood we lived in and listened to a old tape of songs off the radio from 1984. It was a tape I hadn't listened to in years. It was at a time when I was getting serious about writing -- in a time before blogs, web publishing, NaNoWriMo , and so on. One of my possible projects was an idea I had in college to do sort of a written "Wonder Years" focusing on childhood summers (my favorite time of year). And I found unlikely inspiration from this cassette -- inspiration I've tried to recapture over the years. In the subsequent months, I wrote four "stories" for this project. I got some input from a friend, tweaked them, and never quite went back. Well, that mildly inspiring cassette/walk was from a cassette I had recorded about 12 years previous. And that was ... about 14 years ago. I look at the little victories -- semi-consistent blogging, the Na...

Today was a two-birthday party day. The boys went to one in the morning, then Eldest had one in the afternoon that Littlest was also invited to. The morning party was fun and low-key. About seven kids, with a lot of playtime and some cake. One of the dads who lived by the party house (and whose son is on Eldest's soccer team) invited us over to their house, where the boys played for about 45 minutes more. I didn't want to wear them out, knowing another party was ahead. I took the boys this morning while Wife got some things done, while she was going to take them to the afternoon party while I did some yard work and grilled dinner. The afternoon party was something else, according to the boys and Wife: three hours of kid-sanity. Eldest got to play with his school friends, while Littlest went on a giant inflatable water slide at least 50 times by Wife's estimation. He also jammed on some musical instruments at the party, and both boys got their faces painted. The boys came ho...

We are in the midst of baseball season No. 2 this year. The Salt Lake County rec league in which the boys play cram eight games into four weeks inside the University of Utah Fieldhouse. Eldest played coach pitch in the spring league and is playing again this summer; Littlest is playing t-ball for the first time. So far, so good! Eldest was fielding better this week, and though his hits weren't as impressive as last week, he's doing OK. Littlest is having fun and hit the ball better than any game this season. His problem is not understanding that he's not going to field every ball. It was funny -- last game, we had almost the whole team and he complained he wasn't fielding as much as he wanted to. This game, we only had four players, so he should have gotten the ball more, but in the first inning, he camped out on second base and didn't move, instead high-fiving the opposing team's runners as they came to his base. He decided to field in the next two innings, and...

I'm sitting on my front porch blogging on July 4 and hearing fireworks go off all over the neighborhood in what must be the most surreal Independence Day I've ever experienced. The fireworks in Salt Lake City were last night, July 3, because July 4 fell on a Sunday. We did all the holiday stuff yesterday -- rode in the neighborhood parade, grilled, went for a hike to Ensign Peak, saw the Sughar House Park fireworks -- and had a lot of fun. Today simply did not seem like July 4. We didn't do much all morning (Wife did make it out for a run), saw "How to Train Your Dragon" at the budget theater, ate a late lunch on our patio and let the boys play and watch them gradually get crabbier after their late night/early morning lack of sleep. They finally fell asleep tonight around 9, at which time I came outside with the laptop. Nobody is out on our block setting off fireworks, but I'm hearing it from neighboring streets. I guess it seems surreal because it didn't ...