Friday night I got outta Dodge with a small group of guys for a short Y chromosome bonding getaway in Athens Texas.  One of the guys in the group has a friend that was gracious enough to let us use his lake house to do, well, manly getaway things.  7 of us bunked up (seriously, they had anough bunk beds for 15) for a night and just hung out.  The house was fantastic and came with anything we could've wanted, including a private dock, boat, Sea Doo, fishing polls, 20+ board games, foose ball, pinball, about a million spiders, volleyball, ... the list goes on and on.  Oh, and did I mention beautiful scenery?  Beautiful is not a word you hear a lot at a men's getaway, but I'm goin' there because, well, it was.

This next one was a misfire, but I thought it turned out pretty cool... I meant to do that.

Go ahead.  Sing it in your head.  Sittin' on the dock of the bay... Your welcome.

Farkling... I could try to expain it to you, but I - and you - haven't got that kinda time.  Just know that you need 3 of a kind, a 1 or a 5 to keep your turn going.  Oh, and a piece of advice... whatever you do, keep the dice on the table.  Bad things happen if you don't.  From left to right: Jeff (barely visible), Johnathan, Brandon, John, Jordan and Ray).

A game you will never see XX chromosomes playing at a lakehouse getaway... ever.

Ahhh.. remember the days you could play arcade games without needing a credit card?

Ray was pretty passionate about his "little red men".

Jordan on his way out to the dock to sleep for the night...

Yes... that's a light on his head.

... and here he is again a couple hours later.  I have to admit, I'm not this much of a man.  Given the choice of sleeping in doors with AC and a bed vs. outdoors with heat and bugs, I'm choosing the first option everytime.

Ray and Jeff takin' advantage of the incredible morning weather we had.

The previous owners of the house were 'nice enough' to leave us no less than 8 bird houses hanging on or around the joint.  No biggee, right?  Sure, they're not exactly art pieces, but this problem is easily solved;  Step 1: Take down the bird houses.  Step 2: There is no step 2. Well, after I first moved in, I got kinda used to looking out the kitchen windows into the back yard and seeing a few birds chillin' and singin' some tunes.  Kinda relaxing, actually.  Eh, I'll take down the bird houses in the spring. Spring comes and low and behold our bird houses have become baby bird production plants.  Seems like every couple weeks there's a fresh batch of baby sqwaukers waitin' for momma to bring 'em some fresh, juicy worms.  [I'll skip over the unfortunate part about 2 or 3 falling out of their houses on windy days and ending up in Mia's stomach]  Well, I can't get rid of them now... there's babies in there!

Fast forward to summer.  Kylie and I planted our first mini-garden a couple months ago with edamame (soy beans), green peppers, red peppers, and our most anticipated prize  - a roma tomoato plant.  We almost lost her a couple weeks back when we had some nasty storms and a tornado in the area, but we were able to do a little emergency surgery to get her back on her feet, and she's flourished.  Last week Kylie noticed a couple of tomatoes turning red and we were excited and a littel proud.  I could taste the bruschetta with fresh tomatoes and basil already.  Next day... red tomatoes were gone.  Apparently our fine feathered friends enjoy free rent and tomatoes. Man down.

[insert photo of Kylie rolling her eyes at me and asking "Now can we get rid of the bird houses?"]  Not yet, honey... there's still babies in them there houses.  (Wow, I just got a hillbilly accent outta nowhere).  We'll get rid of them as soon as this next crop of little ones have moved out. In the meantime, we've stepped up our line of defense by adding some netting over the plants.  Kylie also read in several places that hanging a CD will keep the birds away, too, because the movement and reflection scares them away.  I'm doubting that one 'cause we still see them hovering around the plant (probably checking themselves out in the CD), but we'll stick with it a little longer... besides, I've got plenty more back-up CD's with client images on them to hang out there if I need to. [grin]

It's been a while since little Mia's made an apperance on the blog, and she'd chew my shoestrings off if she knew I was putting this unflattering photo up for her comeback image.  Not her best work, but our poor girl's had a rough week.  She's almost six months old, which means Bob Barker was about to be knockin' on the door any day now asking us to do our part to control the pet population.  Nobody wants to see Bob Barker at their door these days, so we went ahead and scheduled her to get a little snippy snippy action last week.  Fortunately I was outta town in Portland, so Kylie got to play the role of bad cop this time.  So far, Mia's been a bit more of a mama's girl, so I'm hoping to gain a few points on the favortism scale by not being the one who carted her to the snipper. Poor girl decided to remove her own stitches the day after the surgery, so back to the vet she went the next day to get a staple in her belly and this stylin' fashion accessory snow cone to wear on her head for a week.  (BTW, Kylie was also the one that took her back in for round 2 at the vet, so I'm hopin' Mia's thinkin' daddy's awesome right about now.)  Not only does she look scraggly (groomer's the next stop after the staples come out), but she keeps getting her snow cone caught on the ground and catching it on every corner and door.  It's pitiful.  Seriously.

On a lighter note, my friend and colleague, Maribel, is celebrating a milestone birthday today...in Portland... away from her family.  To top it off, her birthday will now forever be marked as an anniversary of Michael Jackson's death (which, btw, she seriously almost shed a tear for earlier this afternoon).  Very unfortunate, but what are you gonna do, right?  Maribel just rollls with the punches, though.  What a trooper.  Several of us went out to dinner tonight and acted as her surrogate family for a mini celebration.  Happy birthday, Maribel!

First off, since everyone look sat the photos first, lemme clarify... unlike the cartoon, no lips ever touched in the first photo below.

Now that we've got that behind us... Happy Birthday, Jerry!  Jerry and Tina came over on Friday night to cook some home-made pasta to celebrate Jerry's birthday.  And, as happens more often than not lately for reasons I don't quite understand, Jerry and I ended up posing for images like the one above that would make first time readers of the blog question a few things. For more evidence, check the images from our last get together.

My ginsu skills got a litte outta control when cutting up some veggies for our pasta sauce.  Took me a few seconds to find the rest of my fingernail... turns out it wasn't in the pile of chopped carrots, but instead was still stuck to the back of the knife... a nice little calcium bonus for the guests if you ask me.

After dinner, Tina and Kylie conveniently wandered into Kylie's scrapbook room.  Jerry and I were on to their subtle ploy to get out of cleaning up the kitchen, and in fact, we called their bluff and raised them by going into my office to pretend to be watching interesting YouTube videos.  Turns out we got sucked into an eclectic collection of videos covering Britain's Got Talent, fantastic HS football finishes, broken bone videos, and a finally of Andrea Bocelli singing Elmo to sleep.  We fought the man card police to maintain ownership after being caught watching the Elmo footage.

I believe this is our first family photo with the dawg.  She's lookin' a little shaggy here (the dawg people, the dawg), and she's goin' under the knife later this week to get - ahem - snipped.  (still talkin' about the dawg here).  BTW, Tina used the D3 at ISO 5000 to grab this image in the living room with next to no light.

Happy Birthday, Jerry!  Next time we all get together, it'll be at your new house so Kylie and I can take advantage of the pool and I can show off my 6th place junior high back stroke skills.