DAY TEN

The day off! Yippee! Martha and I spent the morning eating apple pie and drinking yummy coffee for breakfast. We did other things, but I'm leaving that up to your imagination. Perverts! Anyway, there was a marathon of the show MONK and I had never seen it before. Great show! Sure, they don't get the Obsessive Compulsive Behavior 100 percent correct, but it's still a fun show to watch.
Then the kids got up so we made real breakfast and that was a good time. Of course since they were all home from school they wanted to play on the computer. I gave them each a half hour and used a timer. They were not pleased with it, but they all figured it was better than nothing. Dandelion was glad because she got to feed her NeoPets before they all died off. Delia looked for music for her MySpace page as did Dennis. Dan, on the other hand, just played violent online games.
Later in the day we grilled chicken and I made macaroni and cheese and stuffing to go with the BBQ chicken. It all turned out great. We finished watching a bootleg copy of the second Fantastic Four movie. For some reason, the DVD player downstairs gives me grief over some DVD's, especially burned ones. The one upstairs in our bedroom worked fine so we finally got to watch the end of the movie. It was a pretty good movie and they managed to capture the comic booky flavor, but all the DVD changing made it hardly worth the effort.
It finally got dark and we went out to watch the fireworks. We are fortunate in that we live on Douglas Avenue just north of Kalamazoo proper. Our big old farmhouse sits up on a hill and we can see the treeline of pretty much all of Kalamazoo. Because of that we can see four or five fireworks displays all at once. It makes me think that it must have looked like that the first Independence day that they fired off fireworks. The whole sky was lit up. OF course, the mosquitoes demanded their fair tribute so my wife, Martha and Dandelion, Dennis and Dan went it pretty early. Delia and I stuck it out the longest. She's a history buff like her old man so I quizzed her on Fourth of July stuff while we watched the fireworks. Her fifth grade class had been doing American history all year so she got most of it right.
She did ask me who invented fireworks and I explained that it was the Chinese. She thought that was nice and we should write them a letter or something to thank them. Yeah, I'll get right on that. Drafting a letter to a foreign country should be fun. Do they just pass it around until everyone has read it. They have a pretty big population so that might take a little time. I'm still not sure how I would do it.
After the fireworks Dan and I headed upstairs to play The Thing on the computer. The Thing is a video game that takes place immediately after the events in the film John Carpenter's The Thing, which is a remake of Howard Hawk's The Thing. Both are based on the story Who Goes There written by John W. Campbell Jr.. Great story and while the first film is a classic science fiction film, I think the remake does a better job of capturing the pure paranoia of the story.
Anyway, the game is one of those shooter games, but you have to think. Dan likes the monsters and it makes him squeal with glee when they jump out of nowhere and growl. The game likes to make you jump and it does a pretty good job of that.
After that it was getting late so I hit the sack at around midnight knowing that I would be paying for it the next day because I had to drag myself into work at 6:00 in the morning and I ride my bike to work every day.
Ooofff!