Richard’s projects – Page 7

I’m loving this

The winter rye has arrived! It is beautiful. It will be green all winter. I love to look out the window and see the color.

Isn’t this beautiful?

I love autumn but I need to watch movies with New York City in the fall to experience it fully.

Do you have movies that you watch every year to inaugurate the seasons? I do.

Do you have a target date when you allow yourself to listen to Christmas songs? I usually begin in October, but I’ve been listening to folk tunes for the Thanksgiving feeling.

I try not to admit that there is a holiday called Halloween. Mark and Timothy have decorated their bedroom with spiders, bats, black rats, and pumpkins since I won’t decorate the house with such stuff.

Well, enough of this nonsense. Or is it? Holidays are so fun to anticipate and plan.

Faster than Fast

Angela mentioned in a previous post that Mark had learned to ride a bike. I thought I’d show a little video of him in action. The bike without pedals is Mark’s. The bike with pedals is Timothy’s.

Pinewood Derby 2011

Here’s the shiny Pinewood Derby track from last night. I filled in for our Cubmaster at this Pack Meeting. We did the cheese grater cheer, the race car cheer, the rocket cheer, and the big canary cheer. These photos were taken by Phillip Flores, one of our den leaders.

Here is Timothy with his awesome car. He has a Lego man inside.

Richard’s computer program kept track of race times and generated the order of races. We projected the race stats from the computer to a big screen. It was very cool.

Trying to contain his delight…

This boy won 4th place!

He earned his Bobcat, too!

Robin Hood

For today’s post Daniel brings you a night at the movies. This is a stop-motion animation video that he created. He has produced about a dozen of these little clips so far, and they are delightful.

The sound on this video is quite low, so turn up your speakers/headphones. Notice the details such as the staff and hat floating down the river, the bubbles, and Robin Hood almost falling backwards but catching himself. Enjoy.

By the way, this post allows comments. If you would like to comment, click on the post title (“Robin Hood”) above, then find the comment box at the bottom of the page.

Garden surprise

A heart-shaped tomato for your grilled fajita?

Yum.

On Set with Audrey Hepburn

As we learned this weekend, we’re not on-the-set, up close and personal fans. We like the silver screen flat and fake.

I will explain.

Our t.v. stopped working last month and we had to make a decision. We still wanted a television in our house, but WHAT KIND? Richard did endless research, took a trip to Costco, and finally bought it on WOOT. (If you are wise you will ignore the name WOOT. Hey, I’m pretty sure you just Googled it. I can tell. Stop before you start!)

So we’ve entered the high definition world. We pulled out some of our most colorful movies. We watched My Fair Lady.

As I learned, high definition makes you feel you’re in the same room, but I was surprised by our negative reaction. High definition images rob us of the experience we are looking for in a movie. Truly, we felt like we were on set, but that kind of realism has less escape value than a flat, colorful image of non-reality that we have come to enjoy. It will be something to get used to.

Now, the thing that high definition is good for is a World Cup soccer match. Wow!

Spring Ballet Recital

Please enjoy one of Paige’s dances from her recent recital.

A Good Night at the Ballpark

Daniel played a great baseball game the other night. A few of the highlights:

His team won decisively (10-3 or something).
Daniel pitched the entire game (4 innings, 73 pitches!).
In the first inning he struck the first two batters out and the third batter was thrown out at first.
The second inning was a repeat of the first with two more strike outs and a quick out at first.
At bat, he hit a double and two singles 🙂 and struck out once 🙁

Would you like to see him in action? See below for a video recap.

Austin Now

Yes, that’s Richard in a field of Texas wildflowers.

Richard was in Texas last week. Most of the time he was in Dallas, but he took a day and a half to visit our family and a few friends in Austin. He visited our old house and the trees we planted in our yard. He ate a Freebirds burrito and went to Chuy’s (whoa, boy; lots of Tex-Mex!) and rehearsed the finer points of dry, sarcastic humor with his brother, Rob. He’s still serving out that brand of humor a week later.

Scout-o-Rama

Before you read on, here are some helpful definitions:

o-rama: a greater-than-usual number, volume, or variety of a specified thing: used to form commercial names and other words for events and displays. (Dictionary.com)

Dutch Oven Dump Cake: 3 ingredients. 45 minutes. Bliss. (7-up, cherry pie filling, chocolate cake mix)

Council: Boy Scouts are organized in geographic areas called Councils. There are 2 Councils in Arizona: Grand Canyon and Catalina; we are a part of Catalina Council.

Today we went to the Catalina Council Scout-o-Rama. Our Pack did a booth on cooking. We had 4 Dutch ovens going at one time and we cooked biscuits on sticks. The hit was the dump cake.