Puttering in the Study

Grayson's 10th Birthday Party

Grayson celebrated his 10th birthday party yesterday with a pool party at the house.  The Waco cousins (with reinforcements) were in attendance, and a good time was had by all.

Kindergarten graduation

Collin and Parker successfully completed kindergarten graduation this morning, including saying their lines correctly!  (Collin did get a bit bored and laid down to take a nap during the ceremony - another ... memorable moment for Mom and Dad).   

First day in the pool

The boys have been in quite a bit the last month, but today was the first day it was warm enough for me to actually get in the pool.  Parker and I swam around and played fetch with Belle for about an hour, then I got out and took a few pictures.

Left is Parker practicing his cannonball, then right are a couple of shots of the pool from the house side.

Here is the pad for what will eventually be the grill/bar/outdoor kitchen (the title and use are still in the negotiation stages).  We have the various utilities sticking up where needed, but it may be a few weeks or months before we decide what to do here.  This picture shows the view from the back yard. 

This picture shows a neat little addition I came up with at the last minute.  We had intended to just berm up behind the waterfall, but they did such a nice job with the stonework on the back of the waterfall and the retaining wall a few feet behind it that I hates to cover it up, so I asked the landscaper to just put down flagstone behind it so the boys have a sort of secret room behind the waterfall.  It seemed kind of Tom Sawyer-ish to me, and I thought they'd like it.  They don't have any chairs or table here, but then neither do the grownups yet.

Collin getting homework done

Collin spent practically all evening the other night getting homework and classwork caught up, and I was so proud of how hard he worked I took a couple of pictures of him.

Jamie's cabinet and floors

The spring overhaul of the music and dining rooms continues with installation of new floor (white carpet turning out to not have been such a great idea, especially with small kids) and Jamie's display cabinet finally going in.  I took these pictures before they finished installing the glass in the doors, and I spent most of Saturday putting in the glass shelves and quarter-round molding on the baseboards.

Getting Ready for School at the Smith House

This is a typical morning shot of the boys engrossed in watching TV when they should be eating.  Well, except for Grayson being in coat and tie.  The school auctioned off "teacher for a day" in February and he got it, so he got to spend the day teaching K-7th grade students how to play games on the computer in computer class.  (Since he already thinks he knows everything, in retrospect that may not have been such a good idea...) 

Trinity Spring Show

Last week was the boys' spring program, which was a really neat evening of rock karaoke.  Hard to say who enjoyed it more, us or them!

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Blu-Ray)

I'm watching the boys for six days while Jamie vacations in Mackinaw with girlfriends, and last night they wanted to watch Star Trek on Blu-Ray so we picked up the Blu-Ray with the six original cast movies and settled down to watch TMP (and parts of VI, but not the whole thing - they just like to watch the Enterprise and Excelsior beat hell out of the Klingon ship).

I had read a review of the BR version of TMP, and it thought it was a really good transfer, with good blacks and a terrific sound, but it didn't mention if this was the 2001 Director's Cut.  I eventually figured out it was not.

Well, I have to agree that the blacks were good - visually the film looked really good and the special effects once you got into space were stunning.  The entire V'ger section the visuals were just amazing, aided greatly by the deep blacks they got.  The shots of the V'ger exterior were still good at best and awful at worst, though - but the interiors were unbelievabl.  I couldn't believe this film was made thirty years ago.  The greater detail also helped tell the story a lot better - I didn't really mind the missing parts added in the 2001 cut as much as I thought I would - what were there told the story well enough.  The flaws in the movie really had a lot more to do with what was left in that what was missing.  Well, aside from a decent plot.  Oh, yes, the drydock scene.  This was really pretty good, but the difference in quality depended very much on how complex the shot was.  The quality where it was a simple pass of the ship in dock was quite clear (as was the case with the space shots).  But where there were other elements composited in - an Earth background, or moving elements, etc. - the image quality dropped way off.  And the "over the shoulder" shots inside the travel pod were terrible.  But, again, that was the available technology.  It's amazing I still care about that scene after 30 years.

The sound on the other hand, was disappointing.  I probably don't have the ultimate sound system, but I still thought the sound was bare at best (until the end when they were at V'ger, and then it was pretty good).  I'll have to go back and watch the 2001 version, but I seem to recall the sound mix was better - helped a lot my not having the time pressures that caused the original to be a bit of a mess.

Anyway, even though this was just a higher res version of the film (it didn't receive the full restoration that Star Trek II did) I still really enjoyed it, and so did the boys.  It benefits particularly well from the larger screen and better resolution.  I saw a lot I'd never noticed before.  But I would still like to see a Blu-Ray version of the 2001 edition.  I think the film just needs more than to be simply cleaned up and presented in higher resolution.

Star Trek V

Parker walked in the other night and announced he wanted to watch Star Trek V, so we sat down and over two nights did just that.  I was reminded again that parts of this movie are really pretty good, especially when you've seen a younger Kirk so that this midlle-aged guy makes more sense.  It just has some achingly bad scenes, and suffers from grotesquely bad production values at times (shuttle bay, special effects in general, and the end scene in the "ribcage").  But I can't say that Shatner's direction was bad - the movie has some of my favorite visual images, the music is terrific, I like the actors... it just is very uneven.  But I kept finding myself watching the beginning and for twn or fifteen or twenty minutes wondering why I thought this was a bad movie.  Then the "beans and borbon" joke comes and I remember. 

Mister B. Gone - Clive Barker

Okay, there was a reason for this.  As much as I didn't like Clive Barker's fiction I've been reading on my handheld, when I ran out of books on CD to listen to in the car I saw this an HP Books in Dallas and thought it looked like a good short horro novel.  I generally don't like listening to the Teaching Company lectures in the car for the same reasons adolescent boys prefer to look at National Geographics rather than have them read - I like to see the pictures, unless it's some literary or theological topic).

I just didn't care much for it.  It was an imaginative story of a demon who gets into our world and ends up trapped in a book (and magnificently performed by Doug Bradley, by the way) but it got too convoluted to follow, and was rather disgusting in its descriptions at times (bit of blood and gore).  Barker can describe a scene really well, but the story that the scenes hang onto is just not real interesting.