Saturday: reading cat

 Been came out of the bedroom after nap time, saw Isaac and Joshua reading, and so say down on the couch to read.  I wasn't going to pass up family read-together time, do I say down to read.  Then Horizon settled on the couch, so I gave him a book too. He was surprisingly engrossed in it.

Friday: weekend-ish

 This morning Isaac set up a Dominion game.  Horizon, aka game cat, played on my team.

I donated blood today.  It went about normal...not perfect but no major issues.  I'm going to try power red next time and see how that goes.

Ben was putting a Lego set together and showed us a new color piece we hadn't seen before.  (Reddish orange, if you really care).  We called it pumpkin orange.  We had finished our conversation and Isaac comes out with, "it looks a little blue to me."  

Thursday: forth of July

Happy Forth of July!  We didn't do anything too special, although there were some fireworks at the end of the day.

Joshua spent two hours this morning reading all the Super Rabbit Boy books.  I'm not sure what prompted the goal, but he read them well.

A little later we were looking at our bruises, because Ben actually had some.  I always have some bruises and Joshua often has some, so we looked up how to prevent bruises.  Mayo Clinic has the following helpful tips: use good lighting and avoid clutter.  We all laughed about the help.

This evening were fireworks.  Two neighbors to our left put on a huge show.  Two neighbors to our right put on a large show.  We decided to watch the fireworks inside for comfort and no bugs.  It was a little weird, but worked well.

Wednesday: off

The day was slightly off.  It started with rain during a playground trip with friends.  Then the kids were a bit off at our house.  Then Joshua wasn't enjoying racquetball like normal.  Nothing was wrong and there weren't any real complaints, besides the rain, but things weren't flowing like normal either.

Since we're talking about complaints, I'd like to complain about on-line recipes.  

1) What is up with the time estimates.  Yesterday I made (a delicious) cajon pasta that estimated 20 minutes.  One hour later I'm finally finishing up.  Now, I know that there are metrics and views and what-not based on that time, but can we please make it a bit closer to reality?  Chicken does not almost cook through in 3-4 minutes, even when in small pieces.

2) Why aren't the amounts of the ingredients put into the recipe?  Again, it seems like they're following tradition from when cookbooks wouldn't do that to save space/paper.  I get that.  But scrolling up and down to find out how much of something I need to put in drives me nuts.  There is no reason the amounts can't also be part of the instructions.

XKCD

Tuesday: pretty normal day

We didn't have anything all that special today.  So we started by getting groceries.  This was the third week at Aldi and it's almost working for me...but not quite.  I think I'm going to try an every other week Meijer/Aldi switch, because most of the time I think I can handle thinking about two weeks of grocery needs.  And I can get just get milk and fruit at each location.

We also went rock climbing today and several walls had just been changed out and there was a take-away game going on in the alcove and so we stayed longer than normal.  But it was fun.  I'm getting better at my (very easy) routes.

Last night in karate we were doing knife defense.  As in, someone comes at you with a knife and what do you do?  We did it for almost 35 minutes and I keep finding hurts on my hand today.  (Nothing major.  If I had been exercising it'd be the equivalent of sore muscles.)  First a place where the skin rubbed off because I was holding the knife too hard when I was the attacker.  Then a random bruise on the side of my thumb.  Then some soreness on the back of my hand where the metacarpal takedown was held.  During practice I found myself talking a lot..."pinkie over the arm" or "pull up, push down, twist" or "let go already!"  If someone actually comes at me some time my plan is to scare them off just through my knowledge.

Monday: Pier Cove Beach

One of Isaac's summer requests, and there weren't many of them, was to go rock hunting.  Hmm.  I have no idea where one would do this, so I googled it, of course.  There was a random reddit post that said we should go to Pier Cove - but watch out, there are only 10 parking spaces.

We got there at 9:30 and it was in the 60s and sunny.  It was busier than we expected, but there were still about three parking spaces.  We walked down the steps and it was perfect.  There were piles of rocks.  Piles!

Cheryl came with us and brought shelling bags.  Joshua immediately started collecting the big rocks to make a mountain.  He could only fit a few in the bag before needing to add to his mountain.  Isaac enjoyed looking through all the rocks.  I enjoyed looking through the rocks.

This was Joshua's mountain.  Happily, he decided to throw them all in the water so there were a lot of wonderful plop sounds.  I love the plop of a large rock in the water.

Sunday: instagram

We started an instagram account for our Lego builds.  Joshua is the most prolific, but I've been trying to get others in too.

Find us at itsjustanotherbrick

Its = Isaac
Just = Joshua
Another = Amanda
Brick = Ben

We were contemplating names for a little bit and poor Ben always got stuck with 'brick'.