Vince had field day on the muggiest day yet this year. He participated in the honorable sports of: squeezing a sponge into a bucket to send a ping pong ball out of the pitcher.
There was also this odd feat of sport – how long a team of 4 can be suspended in the air like:
Spent the evening talking about what makes Jason Beaver, no, I mean Justin Beiber famous. Also, we are spending time enjoying the following videos (I know, we are like 4 years behind, but we don’t have cable and just figured out we don’t even get CBS and we don’t get out to the Apple Store that much).
This weekend we: went out to a Chinese restaurant where I met my 2nd cousin (our grandparents were siblings), bought tubing to make a siphon and gravel for an aquarium (have I mentioned we are raising tadpoles?), visited a friend in the hospital with a burst appendix, bought a ping pong table at a yard sale of one of Ruby’s doggie pals who is moving to Geneva, went to Target to buy ping pong balls for said ping pong table, played ping pong, Vince partied with neighbors at a Mexican restaurant until 10:30pm, Edda partied at our local block party and had a BBQ/bacon/onion ring cheeseburger, went to McDonald’s, hosted a moon bounce at church, took a nap, went to a pool party, went to a goodbye dog party for Ruby’s pal who is going to Geneva (we got their ping-pong table), went to Sunday night family dinner where the Justin Beiber was discussed and where we ogled the new Toyota Sienna (video below). Also managed to do the weekly laundry.
A friend of mine has recently reported success making his own sourdough bread and I have been inspired! Making sourdough bread means making your own sourdough starter and collecting native yeast from the ambient air. This is why they call San Francisco sourdough bread “San Francisco”; because the yeast they use is from the SF air itself. The regional differences in the yeast means that the bread should taste different from different places.
My sourdough starter; the bubbles comes from the yeast.
Kneading the dough:
Forming the loaves:
After rising, they spread more sideways than I expected.
After final baking:
The sourdough did turn out a bit dense, more like a bagel than like what I think of as sourdough. I’ll have to try again. Jeremy mentioned that it is a poor poor time to start a bread baking habit as it is 85 degrees outside and turning on the oven is just not prudent.
Edda sporting her silly bandz! The latest (and probably already over) kid craze!
This was the first year since Edda’s diagnosis that I did not go to the Rett Syndrome family conference (it was in Colorado this year) over Memorial Day weekend, it has now been almost 4 years since the day we found out that Edda had a missing guanine that made the connections in her brain go haywire. I did not make a conscious decision that I would not go, it was more like that the weekend was upon us and all of a sudden I saw a lot of Facebook updates and I realized, hey! I guess I’m not going.
Here is what a package of silly bandz look like. I don’t really get the allure, but you can’t argue with a crazy craze.
I wanted to post this video which talks about the present state of the research for finding a cure for Rett, it’s almost 30 minutes, but the whole thing is worth watching, I found it informative.
Rena & I just came back from our Taiwan, Kinmen & China trip. We stayed out-of-country for ~ 5 weeks. Had fun and also glad to be back.
In China, we had no access to our family blog. All blogs are filtered out by the Chinese government. Don’t know why? But, that is the way it is.
Our neighbors invited us over to their house for the traditional Memorial Day BBQ. There were 4 or 5 other families there and we didn’t know any of them and they all knew each other which sometimes can result in feeling left out, but that scenario didn’t happen and I really had a great, great time. Everyone was funny and gracious and tender to Edda (who got goodbye kisses on the top of her head) which, you know, always makes me happy.
It was hot. It was hot. It was hot.
Waiting for the parade to begin:
Our congressman who I’ve met before:
Our float!
Our scout!
Stopping by the cub scout fire hydrant.
