School's Out

Yesterday, at about noon, officially started the summer vacation in our not-so little house on the not-so prairie. For No. 1 Son, it technically started on Tuesday, at 11.:30 when the high school ended he 2007-2008 school year. The k-8 school the other two attend went until after Mass on Thursday.

Earlier this week, No. 1 Son's best friend, and what feels like my fourth kid, left for his summer trip to California. His father lives there, and he spends the summers there. He, of course, comes back with such fantastic tales. You just know 98% of it is complete shoeshine. But sometimes he gets some entertaining stories going...as long as he doesn't try too hard to make them sound convincing.

A dangerous thing happened on Wednesday though. No. 1 Son went to spend the day at his old middle school. He went there to see his old teachers- who put him to work immediately hauling boxes and getting things picked up so the school could be closed down (natch!). But that isn't the dangerous thing. It seems that No. 4 Son's girlfriend went to the same middle school as No. 1 Son. So the day after No. 4 Son leaves to spend the summer in California, No. 1 Son and the girl end up going to lunch at a great little diner downtown called (appropriately) "The Downtowner." Then spend the rest of the afternoon just wandering around downtown.

I told the 5/8 that this was a dangerous situation for No. 1 Son to be in. His best friend leaves for the duration of summer vacation, and the very next day, he goes traipsing around downtown with said best friends girlfriend. The 5/8 didn't seem to get the significance of that. She thinks nothing is going to happen between the two. But I remember being a teenager. And being a teenage boy at that. When you're a teenage boy, you don't think about consequences like that. You don't think about your best friend, who's 1/2 a continent away. You don't think that if you spend too much time with that girl, your setting yourself up for a scuffle when your friend gets back. Looks like I'm going to have to have a talk with No. 1 Son before he gets himself in too deep.

The 5/8 has pledged to take No 2 Son and Little Sister to the YMCA during the summer to exercise. We'll see how that goes. But both of the kids want to go. So if they pester her enough, she'll give in. She always does.

We were going to go to Cancun this summer, but Uncle Sam put the kibosh on that with the dismal tax return we got. So we put our vacation savings back in the bank, and we'll try again next year. With gas prices kissing the $4 mark, we probably won't be going anywhere for vacation. It sucks, but that's the way it goes sometimes.

As always...thanks for reading.

Movie Thoughts: Iron Man

What surprised the living begeezus out of me was Mother's Day. The 5/8 requested that the family to and see "Iron Man". Now, she isn't against movies, but her wanting to see a movie, made from a comic book character clad in metal, with ginormous explosions aplenty...well...I'll tell you this, I searched the basement for pods before we left for the theater.

I liked the movie. While I used to collect comics religiously, I never collected much in the way of Marvel comics. I know most of the main characters; Spiderman, Hulk, X Men, Submariner etc. But I've never read them with frequency. So my opinion is somewhat skewed from that of the (as Stan Lee would put it ) 'True Believers'.

When I first heard that Robert Downey, Jr. was playing Tony Stark (Iron Man's alter ego), I wasn't certain how good the movie was going to be. I mean, come on...this is the guy from movies like "Weird Science", "Back to School", "The Pick-Up Artist" and "Less Than Zero". Okay stuff, but certainly not anywhere near the character he took on this time. But then I figured, if anyone can play a hopeless drunkard...he certainly has the real life experience for it.

So, coming from the perspective of one who knows who Iron Man is, and has some idea of his origin and the like, but not being a complete fanboy, I have to say, I thought that movie ROCKED! Almost from the start. It never got slow or boring. And some of the scenes where Stark is upgrading/testing his armor are down right laugh out loud funny.

Of the recent crop of super hero movies, for pure entertainment value, I think I would even put Iron Man above Spiderman. With Iron Man, you have a great concept, but not a gigantic fanboy base like with Spiderman, so they didn't have to spend so much time on the creation, and could spend more time just having fun with it. And it shows.

Even if you're not a super hero movie fan, but like just good raucous fun, this movie is great. You could pretty much walk in at any point, and be entertained by it.

Motivation

I started this blog a couple of years ago for no real reason at all. I didn't have any set goal in mind when I did. I wanted to document some of the things happening in and around this part of the nation that is referred to as 'fly-over country' - that is to say the Midwest. It is amazing to look at the analytics and server logs and see that people actually stop by my little home on the range here. That people not only stop by, but that some continue to come back time after time. What it is that makes you come back, I can't figure out. The musings of some unknown guy in some nigh desolate area of the country that the vast majority of people think is still being kept in line by a guy named Matt Dillon.

I was fairly gung-ho about it in the beginning, but then slowly began to wane in the frequency of my posts. But then something happened. A friend of mine...well, really, my best friends wife to be exact started her own blog. And she wrote about her life and her families adventures up in the (even more) desolate area of Minot, North Dakota. For those of you not in the know, if you had a good arm, and a new baseball, you could probably through a baseball from Minot, and have it land in Canada. That's how far north it is. You can't get much more north and still be in the good ol' US of A.

At any rate. She started her blog, and it was good. I was an avid reader. Always interested in seeing pictures of her kids, and seeing what was going on up nawth. And she gave me inspiration to post more frequently, and (I think anyway) more quality stuff. To improve my writing skills as it were. To make something that wasn't just a ho-hum rambling of some faceless guy, in fly-over country. She had blessed me a couple of times with praise in her blog. For which I still am not fully certain I deserved. One simply has to wonder if she did so because we know each other. Our families actually shared a house for about a month up in Alaska (when both she, and the 5/8 were about 7 months pregnant), but that's a story for a different post entirely (and one that I promise I'll get to - eventually).

But, she recently quit took a hiatus from posting. She had a long, informative post about it all. Seems that she just ran out of things to say, or at least, things she wanted to talk about. Maybe she felt like she was getting whiney, or like she was maybe boring people. She wasn't, on both accounts (at least, she did neither in my views), but she made the decision.

Without even realizing it was happening, it seems that my own posts started to dwindle. And you can probably tell, the last couple have pretty much been nothing much at all. A movie thought or two. But looking back, I realized that this started about the same time that Military Mom quit posting on her blog. I think seeing her post so much, actually gave me some sort of motivation to post more myself. Not that it was a contest or anything. But part of it, I think, is that I knew for certain at least someone was reading this, and at least one person was actually enjoying what I wrote (or, at least, went through the trouble to 'claim' to enjoy it).

I've got some things I'm working on now, and hopefully I will soon feel they are ready to post. So I'm certainly going to make an effort to post more frequently. Seriously, I am. I know I've probably said it before, but I really mean it this time. Or maybe I just mean it, but like the 50 new people we see at the gym just after New Year's, it will go good for a while, and then peter out again. And what do I know anyway. Maybe that is like a cycle with people who blog as a passion. Maybe every six or eight or two months, it just gets pushed to the back burner for a while, while the old cranial batteries regenerate, or recharge, or whatever else.

There is a lot coming up. School is about to end for the summer. No. 1 Son was promoted to Corporal in the USMC Jr. ROTC program at his high school. So there should be plenty to write about - at least for the near future.