lunch today
1. Sweet potato pie
2. Vegetable tempura
3. Sesame beef on a stick
4. Cumin-dusted fries with mango sauce
5. Fruiti de Basco sorbet
6. Water
summer solstice
Yesterday was the summer solstice and so we will receive one second less light than the day before. Tomorrow: 9 seconds. The march to the maximum rate of change at the equinox has begun.
Length of Day - 15h 16m - Tomorrow will be 0m 9s shorter
Source: http://www.wunderground.com/US/IL/Crystal_Lake.html
I always get a little melancholy around the summer solstice because it seems like I'm just getting into a summer stride when our evenings begin to peel away like that of the skin of an apple. Slowly as we revolve and rotate, the length of our day is stripped and discarded. And so I have striven to celebrate our summer solstice each year. I want to revel in the maximum amount of light afforded us on this day.
Sunday I was awake close to, but not at, sunrise in order to view (and photograph) the last event of this years Great Galena Balloon Race. The weather did not afford us much sunlight, however, and we had to make due.
After arriving home in the early afternoon, we hatched a plan to eat an early dinner and headed out to a CL institution: The Freeze. Nate had his very first ice cream cone last night and I think that is celebration enough. He enjoyed the ice cream and was amazed when I took a BITE of my cone. (He actually said "wow!" when I showed him what I had done.)
We followed up ice cream with a visit to Veteran's Acres for swings and playground equipment and a pond with various bull frogs, turtles, fish, ducks, and one confused goose (who seemed to treat a mated pair of ducks as friends, if not parents).
While we missed the actual sunset of solstice, this was a very successful solstice celebration.
swing low, sweet chariot
A couple weeks ago, I completed my one really big task for this summer.
It feels really good to have it done. I, of course, couldn't have completed this without lots of help from my father and the fathers-in-law. They were all quite patient with my "measure ten times, cut once" assembly procedure.
It was completed in time for the Big Visit of 8 adults and 8 kids. We had fine weather and even a little rain didn't keep us from the back yard for too long.
Yay! 
mixed media
Nate was given a gift recently: a big book of Thomas the Tank Engine stories. It has little illustrations around which the text flows. Nate doesn't recognize any of the engines though and keeps asking again and again what their names are. Having only experienced Thomas on the TV I can imagine the images on the page are off just enough to cause confusion.
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The other night he was asking in a very earnest (and not whining) way to watch "Lightning McQueen" and specifically "the race and the lady singing and Lightning McQueen comes out of Mack." (By which he means the beginning of the movie which features a Sheryl Crow song.) But we were eating dinner and were not going to be watching tv any time soon. So I thought I would offer a treat/compromise. I grabbed the soundtrack (a recently acquired item that he had not heard) and started to play the Sheryl Crow track.
Poor guy, he was so confused. He was looking around and around for a TV thinking I had put the DVD in somewhere and he just couldn't quite find it. When I explained to him it was just the music he wanted none of it. And I can't blame him. I should have know that it was not a good substitute. It would be like asking for ice cream and instead being shown pictures of someone else eating ice cream.
Notes notes notes
- lots of people coming later this week. lots to do around the house. i should buy charcoal...and beer.
- swing set is finished (save the anchoring of the swing arm legs). i certainly could not have done it without the help of my father, and fathers-in-law, and nate. he helped by keeping us on task: "wait wait, you forgot the slide!!"
- moved rocks for a fire pit. hopefully we'll be able to try it out this weekend. lots of branches (some very dry, some green) to use up.
- having a new 1TB hard drive for photo and video storage has lifted a big bundle of stress. we have enough external storage for backups (for now) and should be set for a while.
- in a related note: i really need to do something about hellophotos.com. the load times are getting pretty long. i don't know if migrating to the latest version of the software is going to help...but the thought of migrating 11,000+ photos is daunting.
- 42 days from now we'll have the same amount of light during the day as we are having today. while i do enjoy celebrating the summer solstice, i'm also a little melancholy at the thought of the light beginning to retreat so soon. we're just now getting consistent warm temps...
- i've started using a twitter account (which updates facebook) to note positive things that have happened to me. i don't think it's going to last very long (by that i mean i'll get busy and find excuses to do other things than update twitter) but i hope that it combats some of the cynicism that has been hanging around my brain for far too long.
- somewhat ironically: i cannot keep up with the amount of information being thrown at me. between facebook, twitter, and flickr, i just can't keep up. this is not an aggregation issue, this is an absorption issue. for example: i have just finished watching the dvd's from season 1 of a canadian tv show called Intelligence. i could only tell you a couple of the characters names. the sub-plots fly like falling maple leaves in the fall. it's a good show and i like it...but i just don't have the capacity to absorb it all these days. so i don't try. the problem with this is the effect spills over to other areas of my life. i get so full that i don't remember important dates or items on my to-do list, let alone what my friends are up to.
- our anniversary is this weekend.
that is all...for now...
