Sunday, April 29, 2007

Ah, thirty four.


It's the end of April and time for the annual convergence of the Moseley-Schenck-Lefcourt households in celebration of Scott's birthday. Much fun was had by all, especially Erin, who had already attended a birthday party and was hopped up on soda and cotton candy and cake and will not be allowed sugar of any kind for at least a month. Scott got a new pair of shorts, a six-pack, a Crock-Pot, a gift certificate which will probably be used on more shorts, and a GPS (and Will, I promise they make them better now). All good things.



Simma, of course, went straight for the beer. Little lush.

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

The Agony and the Ecstasy




Okay, so it's not quite the Sistine Chapel, but we did paint our ceilings today. Scott got rather significantly messier than I did, since he was the master of the paint sprayer, while I was just the lowly backroller. Sprayer or no sprayer, though, painting isn't very fun. Building your own house certainly teaches you to be grateful for your own cozy job that doesn't involve painting or drywall mud or PVC cement or pulling wire or lifting asphalt shingles on a daily basis. Aaaah, slinging wood.

Friday, April 20, 2007

The Old Man and the Yard


Will's fame will come posthumously when critics discover the text of his spare but touchingly human novel about hooking of a particularly giant and vicious bunny and being hauled around his unforgiving backyard for several days on end. And with that fame will come public knowledge of all the fistfights in Sicily and drunken revelry in Cuba. I'm sure of it.

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Grandma Beth and Grandpa Will need second jobs


Mom has taking to spending her every other week off trolling for bunnies.




Will is a little more drastic in his bunny-luring attempts. This here Barney Loves You fishing pole has been rigged with 8# test line and the new hotness in bunny jigs: The Flashy Carrot. Both methods have apparently met with great success.

Friday, April 13, 2007

I'm with a T!

Scott and I went to see Miss Makita tonight. Granted, the sole purpose of our outing was not to see Miss Makita, but she happened to be the center ring in the circus that is the Contractor's BBQ. While I was standing in line to get a signed poster for a friend, a little boy of about three jumped in and said, "I'm Tanner. I'm with a T," and walked away with a big grin and a personalized Miss Makita poster. Hmmm.

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus


Erin and Shackleton played a nice game of Wit's End this evening. They were neck for neck until Shackleton had a planetary size question. He was pretty sure uranus was bigger than anything else in the universe.

Are you gay?

So I was interested in which topics Google would pick out of my blog on their Blog-crawling expeditions, and so I set up the ads on the side (ignore them, this is merely a fun experiment) . . . The first ad that came up said "Are you gay?" I'm still trying to figure out where that came from.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Don't touch that dial!

For those of you just tuning in, this is what our house looks like from the outside. Big thanks to Kevin, Carole and Jim, Uncle Scott, Billy McKinney, and hugs (and maybe sloppy kisses) for the G&G boys for all their help. I'd hug the drywallers, too, but I hardly know them.


The front!



The back...



...and the artsy-fartsy shot.


Well Hung Drywall

Our rock is hung, and our house is starting to look like a house. Next we get to call the "Screw Inspector" (no kidding), and he will come and inspect our drywall to make sure it has enough screws. "Do you have enough screws?" he will ask. "Oh, yes," we will reply, "plenty of screws."



This is the living room/dining room big open area where we will live.



This is the kitchen from about the middle of it. It's ridiculously huge.



This is the master bedroom. Enjoy the lovely clerestory windows.

Sunday, April 8, 2007

Merci beaucoup, Grandmere et Grandpere!


Les chats, the pigs, and Bob the Immortal Goldfish (he's older than all the cats - it's bizarre) would like to express their gratitude to Grandma Carole and Grandpa Jim who fed them and gave them attention while we were gone. And Lion and the Orange Ball would like to thank Rorschach for bringing them to the oasis.

Saturday, April 7, 2007

Home Sty Home


Ahh, no more car. And Moggy and Sir Walter were certainly happy to see us, squealing and begging for carrots. Haven't seen hide nor hair of Shackleton yet (he's in a snit because we didn't tell him we were going to be gone for a whole week), but Chicken and the girls have been begging for attention and getting underfoot ever since we walked in the door.

Coulda won a Grammy, buried in his jammies...


Went to see King Tut this morning at the Museum of the Rockies. All replicas, but still very cool. No flash photography permitted, and Erin was a little too excited to hold still enough to get clear pictures. Guess we'll have to go back with a tripod...

Ericka is ... ahem ... right.


Hey look! It's the only other decent extant picture of the two of us, and Ericka took it and we love it. (This was last vacation, halfway up Flattop Mountain in Anchorage.)

Friday, April 6, 2007

"I'll gladly pay you Tuesday . . . "

NEW THEORY: Monsieur L'Explorateur may have actually experienced womanflesh: but, like Wimpy (y'know, the hamburger guy from Popeye) or any other cartoon stranded on a desert island who invariably mistakes his/her companion for a giant hotdog or ice cream sundae (with jimmies and cherries!), he had been so long without the company of the fairer sex that everything he came across reminded him of this lack; this glorious, firm, well-balanced and rounded (?) mountain range could appear to him as nothing but an extraordinarily erogenous topographical feature. Ah, les tetons.

Now stripper- and bestiality-free!


Erin claims that these Carl Hiaasen books are the best - I guess they'll have to go next on my list.

Time for an anatomy lesson


Whichever Frenchman decided that these mountains should be called the Grand Tetons had never actually seen a female breast. Sadly, most of the National Park was closed (as was Yellowstone), but we were able to drive about 30 miles in to see this lovely breast, I mean, mountain. Eesh.

Thursday, April 5, 2007

Dino ate your baby?


Camarosaurus. 100%.




There's a big ol' sauropod femur in this picture. It took us a while to find, too.




If you look carefully, under the dark overhang-y looking thing, there's a whole bunch of vertebrae. Also cool. The great thing about this park is that you can walk right up to this stuff and trip over it and rap your knuckles on it. The sad thing about this park is that it's horribly understaffed and there is no, I repeat, no trail maintenance.

The New Dr. Horner



Erin successfully completed the Junior Paleontologist program at Dinosaur National Monument today and received this fancy new patch. She got to do all sorts of fun things like math, and vocabulary, and critical thinking (all things she was very excited to practice while on vacation). And just ask, she could tell you all about the Morrison Formation.

Don't discriminate against the enthusiasm disabled

Fishy, fishy, on my foot


I got bored on the drive to Jackson. They're supposed to be fish. You can tell, right?

Rednecks 'R' Us



Admittedly, all of us forgot sunscreen somewhere. Erin toasted the backs of her legs, my nose is a little pink, but Scott... Oy, Scott will come away from this vacation with an enviable farmer's tan.

Wednesday, April 4, 2007



The trail maintenance in these parks is tremendous: working directly with nothing but sand, slickrock, and dead juniper bushes doesn't leave the trail crew a lot of options. Props for ingenuity.

Where's Karen?


We've spent much of the last few days chasing these cairns through the desert - except where some schmekel (doesn't even deserve the name schmuck) knocked them all over. Then we spent a while putting them back up. There's been much searching for the elusive Karen, and sometimes we think she may have gotten terribly lost.

Tenacious Tree



(and flower).

Guess I'll go eat desert worms


One thing we've learned about hiking is that it's much more difficult when you're stomping and pouting.

"Sir, you have debauched my sloth!"

Grandpa Will will be happy to note that Captain Aubrey has made an appearance on our trip with my Christmas surprise, the H.M.S. Surprise. Scott just finished up with the cheery and uplifting Americans at D-Day, and I finally found the way to the end of the equally not-depressing new book about ALS (it's what Steven Hawkings has, yech) by Jonathan Weiner. Erin is simultaneously attacking Black Beauty, Nancy Drew, Blood Red Horse, and the Carl Hiaasen kids' books. They're not quite as raunchy as the ones for grownups, I promise.

Old Ironsides


These two are known as the Monitor and the Merrimac, which is funny because they don't look much like boats. And they're nowhere near water (unless you count the Colorado, which is a little trickle a couple miles south). And they're probably not going to sink. I hope.

Don't jump!


There is such a thing as a good picture of us. See, Ericka, it can be done.

Dead Horse Point





We almost didn't come to this little State Park. Best $7 I've ever spent.

Erin the Photog


We gave Erin the camera and let her run with it on this trip, and so far - aside from a few moments when we were sure that it was going to disappear over the edge of the canyon - she's done a great job. Most of these pictures are hers.

Flora

These Juniper trees are ridiculously old. They're almost as cool as everything else around here.



Tuesday, April 3, 2007

Why have you destroyed my Earth Destruction Modulator?


This year on our Annual Drive in a Southerly Direction, we ended up in Moab, Utah. In the middle of the "Jeep Safari", no less, which has been the source of much drooling on Scott's part and much confusion on mine ("Is it supposed to make that noise?" "Where's the rest of it?" "What's the point?"). Apparently there's a Jeep allele on the Y chromosome, and so - being female - I have no sense of the import of this thing they call Jeep. Near Moab, though, there are other cool things which do not in any way involve diesel, winches, or spider gears. Like Arches National Park. Which is pretty much like Mars.