Elmo hangs out with cool people
I was going to lie and say I was watching these Sesame Street video’s on YouTube with the kids but that’s just not true. I like them. There I said it.
Elvis Costello with Elmo
Natalie Portman with Elmo
Jason Mraz with, yes, Elmo
Ricky Gervais with Elmo
Doesn’t anyone else on Sesame Street get to sing with these people?
And our old favorites, Feist and Norah Jones and India Arie sing songs with Elmo too. Check ‘em out while you’re over there.
Camping on the Arkansas River
We took a family camping trip last weekend, to the Railroad Bridge campground just North of Buena Vista, CO. It was really, really beautiful and we enjoyed our three days there a lot. The camping there this time of year is awesome because of the nice dry weather (no rain dripping into the tent), smaller campsites equals fewer people, really gorgeous views of the five fourteeners which are visible from that point on the river, the river was running low so we never feared for the kids’ safety and well, you get the idea. It’s our new favorite Colorado campground. Click the image below to see some pics we took.
Railroad Bridge Campground, Buena Vista CO
Garden update
Here’s the mid-Summer garden update, I’m sure you’ve all been waiting for. The lettuce is all done now. I’m letting it go to seed just because. We’ve had two nice yellow squash so far and two more are on the way. We have two big green things I *think* are zucchini’s and one more that I know is a zucchini. There are about 8 yucky tomato plants with little green yucky tomato’s growing right now. Oh, and a few carrots and sunflowers which are left over from last year are doing well too. Oh, and the red bell pepper plant up on the deck is still doing well.
Garden in July
Garden in August
Stuff my Dad says
I want to write about my Dad today, it being Father’s Day and I love him. He lives in Southern California now and I live far from there, so this is my present, such as it is, since I can’t go hug him in person.
My Dad grew up in a mostly German neighborhood in Chicago in the 1930′s and 40′s. He married my Mom and lived and worked in Illinois, Alaska and California in the 1950′s. He raised me and my sisters in Southern California in the 1960′s, 70′s and 80′s. He’s been playing golf, volunteering and relaxing near San Diego since the 90′s. I don’t think he ever wrote anything which was critically acclaimed or painted any pictures of great renown, but he did have some great sayings which have stayed with me all these years and I’d like to share a few of my favorites. Some of these come from his German family and the place and era he grew up in but I’d like to believe some are his own creations. They just have to be.
cattywampus – This word means askew or off-kilter. My Dad would look at a painting hanging on the wall and say it was “cattywampus”. I think he even occasionally threatened to make us cattywampus if we didn’t settle down. Ha!
“Got a hot date?” – This is my Dad’s way of saying, “Are you in a big hurry for some reason”? I say this to my kids now and they just stare at me blankly. The alternative version of this was “Where’s the fire?”.
“Gotta see a man about a horse” - This makes me laugh just to type it out. It means you need to use the men’s room. I have no idea where it comes from. Maybe it was some old radio comedy bit?
“It’s not funny” – This one is all about the context. This was said at the dinner table whenever my sisters and I got in an especially giggly mood. My parents would be trying to have an adult conversation and we would start playing see-food or just generally being silly and then my Mom or Dad would try to quiet us down. We would try to be quiet as long as we could, but eventually one of us would give the other a funny look and then someone would start giggling. My parents would get madder, tell us to be quiet again and that whole cycle would repeat a while longer. Eventually, my Dad would lose all patience with us. He would say, very seriously, that whatever we were laughing at was not funny. That would make us laugh even harder though. My poor parents. I hope they got to have their conversations away from that table every now & then.
“Pahk the cah aroun’ the cornuh” – I think my Dad thought Chicago accents sounded a little odd after we moved to Southern California so this was his go-to phrase for how Chicago folks would say, “Park the car around the corner”. Also in this category was “You’s guys”. I remember this always made me laugh as a kid.
schmuck – Certainly my Dad didn’t make this one up, but it was used on occasion for various people who had done something wrong to him or my family. We’d be sitting at the dinner table, trying not to laugh too much and he would tell my Mom about the ridiculous thing some guy had done at work that day. If the act was bad enough, then the guy would be called a schmuck and this just made us giggle even more.
shloparsch or sloparsch or something like that – I’m not sure where this comes from, but this word is used to describe a dog sitting sort of sideways, with its legs off to one side of the rest of its body. We had dogs the whole time I was growing up and they all were eventually criticized for sitting shloparsch. I heard my wife use it a little while ago and just had to laugh.
“Someday I want to be an engineer and now I are one” - This was some sort of funny thing he heard that I suppose just stuck with him. I’m sure it was some piece of comedy from his youth or later. It was supposed to be a way of trying to sound like you are well educated when you’re not really. I may not have the exact words here but this is the best I can remember.
warsh – This is apparently the standard mid-west way of pronouncing “wash” but still gives me the giggles even now.
“Your horse has diabetes” – Seriously. This is just something he says whenever he sees a yellow-ish drink like lemonade or Mountain Dew. Again, no clue where this comes from but he thinks it’s hilarious, so I do as well. My son, not so much.
Happy Father’s Day, Dad.
I love you,
Peter
