MichaelandChrissy.com

Grandma and Grandpa got Aiden his very first bike as a birthday present.  They gave it to him a bit early so that he could enjoy it for the rest of the Summer (by the time his birthday rolls around, Summer will be over).  He has plenty of riding toys, but this is his first bicycle.  It has a Spiderman motif, and Aiden loves that.

So far, Aiden can sit on his bike, propped up by training wheels, but can’t get the pedals quite right yet.  Pushing the pedals clockwise makes the bike go forward, but pushing them counter-clockwise makes it stop.  Unfortunately, that’s all he does.  You can’t even push him on it, since he continually hits the brake.  He’ll get the hang of it!

Aiden will be three years old next month, but he has now mastered the hallmark of the “terrible twos”: the WHY question.  It has become his new favorite word, coming in immediate response to anything that we say to him.

Tell him to do something and you get, “Why?” I very quickly resorted to “Because I said so,” but I know that this is a bad habit.  Chrissy, on the other hand, will play the game for a few turns, or at least until it gets ludicrous.

“Aiden, come back into the house.”

“Why?”

“Because you don’t have your shoes on.”

“Why?”

“Because you didn’t put them on before you went outside.”

“Why?”

The proper answer here is: “Because I’m a bad parent that lets you run outside without first putting on shoes, and why is the front door wide open?”  The actual answer is, “You just got out of the bath and you will get a beating if your feet get dirty.”

I toss the term “beating” around very loosely, but in our house this generally means “a stern staring at”.  Aiden is a good kid and knows when to back down from a stern staring.  We’ll just have to wait and see how long it takes for his reasoning skills to kick in.

Our family (including Auntie Felice) went to the St. James Festival this weekend.  This is the first year that the church has brought in carnival rides for a while.  There was a lawsuit in 2007 between the town and the father of a boy who died falling from a ride, so St. James decided to avoid that altogether.  That lasted a couple of years, but turnout is pretty low when your main attractions are bingo and a beer garden.

Local festivals have been our thing this summer, so we took Aiden to try out the newly-reinstated rides.  Aiden enjoyed all of the kiddie attractions, but Gavin had a meltdown on the carousel.  It was his first time on one of these, and I guess it was too much for him.  Felice carried him off pronto and tried to cheer him up.  Aiden also tried a whiplash-inducing racecar ride that he really liked.

Once Gavin was cheered up, we started to worry about the weather.  It looked like it was going to rain.  We ducked into the building to ponder the draw of Bingo and buy up some goodies at the bake sale.  We then packed up to go home, but not before a trip down the Fun Slide (Aiden and I have done at a dozen different festivals now) and a turn on the Tilt-A-Whirl.  Aiden liked that a lot more than I thought he would!

Target and Mars Candy teamed up to do a promotional item for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.  I sent in my receipts a couple of weeks ago and I got two M&M candy dispensers in the mail over the weekend!  The dispensers are pretty neat.  Each stands about a foot tall, which is bigger than I thought it would be.  They’re made of plastic, but seem sturdy enough.  Not sure how long these would last if I actually used them though.

There’s a knob on the front that looks like it could accept a quarter, but I don’t see how that would work since there’s nowhere for coins to go.  I guess it’s just for show. The knob still turns without any payment, however, and it then deposits M&Ms into the return chute . The downside is that there’s nothing to block the chute, so you better have your hand ready to catch them! The M&Ms in the picture are actually a paper insert (no real candy in there yet).

I’ve been holding off on writing anything about the new Transformers movie until everyone had a chance to see it. I know that some people really don’t like “spoilers”, but the movie has made about $600 million world-wide by now, so all of the people that care about this have already seen it. Chrissy and I saw it on opening day on the IMAX.

I enjoyed “Revenge of the Fallen“. It had even more giant robot action than the first, but it was a little too long. I drank two huge colas (free refills) before the movie even started, so I was hurting after two and half hours. There were plenty of bits that could have been removed for time. Which parts, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you.

The movie could have done with less dog humping. I told some people this over the Fourth of July weekend, and inevitably I got raised eyebrows: “Why is there dog humping in a Transformers movie?” Your guess is as good as mine, but Mojo scored a recurring role with a love interest, as well as five minutes of makin’ sweet love down by the fire.

I support our military completely, but some scenes bordered on recruitment video. Michael Bay claims that no stock footage was used, that every shot was taken with real military vehicles and personnel at his whim, but it looked an awful lot like stock footage to me. About twenty minutes of it, all told, none of which had any giant robots in it.

For some odd reason, John Tuturro’s ass made a cameo in the film. He just dropped trou right in the middle of the movie, with only a thong underneath. And to add insult to injury, he then turned around. This was in closeup, mind you. If they were trying to offset the female sexuality in the movie, this was the wrong way to do it.

And when I say “female sexuality”, I mean Megan Fox. There’s actually a line in the movie: “You’re hot, but you ain’t too bright.” It’s true. The girl can’t act, but she’s hot and she spends most of the movie bending over things. The newcomer, Isabel Lucas, is arguably hotter, shows off her panties, and then turns into a Terminator.

I don’t want to give the impression that I’d rather have those scenes cut, because they were hot. Oh wait, no, the Pretender character (a robot disguised as a real person) is just lame. The gimmick didn’t fly in 1988 and it still doesn’t fly. I’d hate to see Alice the Horny Co-ed Robot go, but it just doesn’t add to the movie at all.

Who else could go? They introduce Sam’s college roommate in this one, and he pretty much just eats up screen time that could have gone to giant robots fighting. He tags along for the rest of the movie and ends up being the butt of Skids and Mudflap’s offensive jokes. It’s rumored that he’ll get a bigger role in the third movie though.

Speaking of Skids and Mudflap… I wasn’t offended by their stereotypical personalities and appearances (this happens all the time in cartoons), but many other people were. Their bad language and crude humor should have been curtailed. I love crude humor, but it didn’t work here for me. Many other Autobots had no lines at all, so what gives?

That’s about it for parts that could have been excised from the movie. Don’t even get me started on plot issues or breaking with established canon. At about two hours into the movie, when my bladder was uncomfortably full, I was wishing for a more concise story with less expositional scenes. I smiled the whole time though.

With the siding finished on the house and the garage, Uncle Glenn and Chrissy’s Dad turned their attention to the deck on the back of the house. Or more to the point: the lack of a deck on the back of the house. We’ve had several pallets of lumber (both real and plastic) sitting on our driveway for a couple of days. These were moved into the garage and the back yard as building commenced.

It took a couple of days to plot out the post holes, dig the post holes and then fill them with concrete, but things went quickly after that. The deck will have two tiers, an upper level and a lower level. The frame for the upper deck went up rather quickly, and the decking was put in place within two days. The lower deck was framed out a few days later.

It’s really coming together now. I spent a few hours shoveling pea gravel from our walkways in the yard into the deck foundation. We’ll plant grass over the old walkways later. The deck itself will be covered in Azek decking (plastic wood) in a shade of brown that compliments the new siding. We can’t wait to see the finished product!

I taught the E-Commerce class again for the first summer session at Indiana University. I did things a little differently this time though: I didn’t accept late homework. I used to accept late homework, but things got crazy at the end of the semester with students dropping six weeks worth of hastily completed assignments in my lap.

I would assign one or two small items for the next class period (depending on which book we were using at the time), and most people turned the homework in on time. Everyone else got a zero on the homework. This didn’t happen often, but it helped me since I got to grade each homework assignment at once.

I still made sure to point out which pages would have exam material on them during lectures. So if you pay attention to what I’m saying in class, then you get a bunch of study hints for the test. This boosts attendance and alleviates the need for a test preview on the day before an exam. It didn’t seem to help the scores though.

The problem with summer sessions is that there are only six weeks of class. It’s three hours a night, twice a week. Absorbing the material is like drinking from a firehouse. With no information technology background at all, I don’t blame the students for being overwhelmed with the subject matter. Overall, I gave a lot less As than usual.