Mother-daughter time (9 hours)!

Mama and I (Abigail) have been planning for a couple weeks to go see the new movie Stardust, and yesterday, we decided, would be a great day to go. We planned to go to the one o'clock showing, so we ate lunch a little early so that we could get there in time. We got the tickets, went in and sat through 35 minutes of pre-movie stuff (music, ads and trailers), before realizing that we had come in the wrong room; this wasn't the showing for Stardust, it was the showing for Hairspray, Stardust had already started in the adjoining room. We didn't want to miss the first 15 minutes, so we found the manager, told him what had happened and he traded in our tickets for tickets to a later showing. By then it was 1:40 and the new showing was at 4:00 so we had some time to kill. We had a few errands we were planning on doing after the movie, so we finished those, and at 3:00 went to a gas station to fill up and buy some sodas. For the first time since I got my license, I locked the keys in the car. Mama used the gas station phone to call triple A, then we stood in the gas station store for an hour waiting for the locksmith to come. By the time he got there and opened the car door, we were too late to make the 4:00 showing, but we were desperate by this time. We called Jesse at home and he told us that the next showing was at 7:00. We went back to the theater and traded the tickets in again, then tried to come up with creative ideas to kill 3 hours. We listened to the radio, visited an aquarium store, pet store and novelty store, then bought some drinks at Edgar's bakery and looked at bridal magazines until 6:45. Then we drove back to the theater, carefully entered the right room and settled back, telling ourselves that this had better be a fabulous movie! It was a great movie and it was the right one which made it even better! We keep telling each other that we're going to laugh about this experience some day, maybe when we're telling our grandchildren, but I hope some of you will be able to laugh about it now!

Legos (by Abigail)

Well, the heat has moderated some since the last post thanks to several thunderstorms that came just near enough to tantalize us last night: no rain, but it is cooler! We're still spending most of the time indoors, though, and the boys have been building some wonderful Lego creations.

Samuel has been reading the Aubrey-Maturin books, a series set on board the British ships in the Napoleonic wars. This is what he built after reading the series: a ship at harbor. The sails are furled and a small boat is crossing to the ship, loaded with men and new cannons.

This is a better view of the ship, see the man in the rigging?

This is the harbor, you can see the cannons in the fortress wall and more down on the shore ready to be transported to the ship. Jesse added the palm trees in back.
At the moment, Sam is out back, leafblowing. Yes, it is August, but the drought is killing the leaves. If we don't get rain soon, the trees will start dying.

This is the living room of Jack's Lego house. His big screen TV is the size of his couch!

This photo didn't turn out very well, but you can see that it is the kitchen and dining room. The kitchen is the blue room and the dining room is red.

Yes, that is a polar bear in Jack's stable. And yes, those are apples for him to eat. And the door leading into the house is open. Hey, it's Legoland!

This is a garden that I built.

Heat wave (by Abigail)

Well, today's the day! When we get to 100 degrees today we will have broken the Alabama heat record. Nine consecutive days of 100+ temperatures! We tied the record yesterday with eight days, and we'll probably break today's record tomorrow...

It's pretty hot. And dry. The trees are really starting to suffer, sometimes it looks like Fall outside with all the dead leaves. The dogs are spending a lot of their time in the garage now, but the other animals are having more trouble escaping from the heat. A couple of months ago we had a pretty good rainstorm and I put some buckets outside to collect rainwater for my plants. But the frogs got to it first, so now it's become my tadpole pond.

Just a plastic tub with water and plants, but it's become an oasis to all sorts of interesting creatures.

No, the tadpole's haven't hatched yet. These are tiny little tree frogs that I've seen in my garden before, but they really love the tadpole pond. They're so small that it's really hard to get good pictures of them, it's like trying to photograph the detail in a dime. Plus, they don't stay in place for very long!

This beautiful male dragonfly believes that he owns my whole garden. When I try to get close to him, he sticks his tail in the air to look bigger and glares at me!

This picture didn't turn out very well, but you can see that it's a small lizard on the top leaf and another tree frog down below.

Some of my guests are more dangerous than the others. This is a red wasp, they're big and pretty scary looking, but they carry less poison than the smaller yellow jackets. They're pretty cool to watch, because when they want a drink they can fly down and stand right on top of the water and take a drink.

This is a bloom from one of the water plants I have in the pond. The markings remind me of peacock feathers.

Yesterday, of course, we celebrated Maddenholiday. For those of you who have not heard of this classic holiday, it was invented two whole years ago, as a day to celebrate the release of the new Madden football video game. Maddenites, as die-hard fans of the game are called, have their own website to talk about the game; songs, based on classic Christmas songs, with lyrics about the game; and a blog to discuss new ideas to introduce to the game!

No, we are not Maddenites and do not often play video games, but we did enjoy last year's version of the game and we will use any excuse to have a holiday! We bought the updated version yesterday afternoon and we really enjoy the improved animation. We had been planning on going out to dinner that night, so I made a football cake to eat when we got home.

Update from boiling Birmingham

We have been so busy the past 2 weeks. We haven't really been doing anything interesting; nothing big, just a whole lot of little stuff. As you've probably seen on the news, we're sweltering down here. Yesterday, we had temps at 106 with a heat index around 113. We spent most of the day right where you belong in weather like that: in the pool! The heat isn't the worst part though; we've been in a pretty bad drought the past couple months. Everything is drooping and dying. The water restrictions won't let us water except two days a week, however, are grass isn't dying like everything else. Please pray for rain down here, we need it bad and there isn't much hope in the weather forecasts for the near future.
Most of our time has been spent in the A/C or in the water. Abigail has been busy knitting a hat. Of course, right now it seems wrong making a nice warm hat. Tuesday, Mama, Abby, and I (Jesse) went to see 'The Bourne Ultimatum'. We're big Jason Bourne fans, and we all gave the movie 2 thumbs way up (actually, Mama gave it 6 thumbs up). If you like action movies rent 'Bourne Identity' and 'Bourne Supremacy' then go and see this one. Well, I've run out of things to say. I'm going to get my swimming suit on and hit the pool.

Trip Days 5-13a

Days 5-13

June 1-9

White Sands, NM to Phoenix, AZ

Over the next few posts I'm going to go through our time a Grandma and Grandpa's (The point of the trip, remember). We arrived Friday, the 1st and left Saturday, the 9th. Most of the time we spent swimming and eating and talking.

We always build at least one jigsaw puzzle when we go to G&Gs.

Finally...Pictures!

I finally figured out how to get the pictures compressed, so here are pictures of the trip to White Sands National Monument. I tried to get a video of us rolling down a hill of sand but I got an error. I'll try again later.

Video Test

This video is a little test. It may not work for all of our readers. It's of the New Mexico Forest I mentioned in the last post.