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Puerto Rico Vacation – Part II

The Airbnb rental was exactly what we needed for this trip! It had 3 bedrooms (one king, one full, one with twin bunk beds), an open living space with a small kitchen, washer/dryer, hammocks, hot tub, and plenty of deck space.

Oh yeah. And it had a great view!

The house is kinda off the beaten path, so we had to drive to get to beaches, but no more than 10 minutes. First thing’s first, though: Walmart trip.

There were a few Walmarts close to the house, but the nearest one was about 20 minutes away in Isabela. That place was packed, and not just with people. There was also just a ton of stuff packed into a Walmart that wasn’t really large enough to handle it. We were able to find most of the stuff we needed and spent less than we thought we would (though, in retrospect, we should have grabbed more snacks…). The kids were difficult to deal with, mostly because they’d been cooped up in a car and were tired of shuttling from place to place, so there was a challenge to lock them down. After we got back to the house, we had to tell them to stay in their rooms for a bit and leave us alone……..

Brooke picked up a rotisserie chicken and some rice for dinner that night and it was really good (though we were so hungry, it probably didn’t matter what we ate…).

After dinner, we hopped in the hot tub for awhile as it rained lightly. Overall, it was a really lovely evening!

The next day, we got up and headed to Playa Hermanita, a beach rumored to have harbored pirates centuries ago. It was a relatively small beach, but we were the only ones there, so it was nice to just chill and let the kids play in the sand. Meg has been to a beach before in Mississippi, but that was before we had Calvin, so it’s been a long time. The closest Calvin has been to a beach was on Madeline Island, and the water temperature on Lake Superior just isn’t quite the same as the Caribbean…

After spending the morning at the beach, we knew rain was coming for the afternoon, so we went back to the house to rinse off and otherwise chill for the afternoon. Brooke took a drive to a nearby Walgreens for a few other incidentals (read: snacks) before coming back to make spaghetti for dinner.

And because we visited a pirate beach and kept making “the rum’s gone” references, we had to rent Pirates of the Caribbean so the kids could see it for the first time. 🙂

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Puerto Rico Vacation – Part I

I think it’s safe to say that Brooke has something of an obsession with Lin-Manuel Miranda, so after he (and many others) implored people to visit Puerto Rico (as tourism is one of their major economic drivers) to help support the island’s constant hurricane recovery, we seriously considered it. Late last year, we started watching for cheap plane tickets and looked at Airbnb options for the island, and things sorta fell into place. We were looking at late-May as it would avoid hurricane season and the kids and I would be out of school, so we bought tickets and made reservations for May 22nd through June 1st.

At the time, little did we know that Winter was going to hit Marshall particularly hard, leading to the kids’ school year to be pushed back a week! So technically, they missed their last week of school, but most pre-K and 3rd graders aren’t doing all that much at the end of their year. Missing a few field trips, I suppose. Oh well.

We stayed at Mallory’s house in St. Louis Tuesday night and took a Lyft to the airport Wednesday morning to catch our 7:51 am flight to Charlotte. It was the kids’ very first ride on an airplane, so they were pretty excited! Then, they got bored when they realized that flying on a plane isn’t really all that fun… Still, we brought plenty of entertainment (read: tablets and the Switch…), some snacks, and had just enough time at the Charlotte airport to grab a few more provisions before boarding the plane to San Juan. The second flight was over 3 hrs long, so the boredom really set in, at least for Meg. For both flights, we were in rows back to back, with Brooke next to Meg and Calvin next to me.

Brooke rented a car when she booked the flights so we’d have a means to get around the island, so our first task was finding the rental agency. Little did we know that the agency wasn’t actually located at the airport, so we found some other “mainlanders” who told us that there was a shuttle coming by to pick us all up and take us to where we’d get the car(s). After a relatively lengthy paperwork process, we had our blue Hyundai Accent and we were off to find our hotel in Old San Juan!

The room at the Casablanca Hotel was very nice, including a king-size bed and a futon the kids could sleep on (Calvin ended up joining us in the bed because Meg rolled around enough in her sleep and effectively took over the bed). We went to a pizza place called Pirilo just down from the hotel and that was awesome. The sauce was a bit sweeter than we expected, but the kids didn’t notice, so oh well. After dinner, we headed back to the hotel and were crashing around 9:00 after a long day of traveling.

The next day, we ate breakfast at Cafeteria Mallorca, where we were hoping to get donuts. Apparently they only have mallorcas, which aren’t exactly donuts. They were a flaky pastry of sorts that you could just eat with powdered sugar and butter, or get sliced in half with ham and cheese in it, among other things. They were quite good, though the kids were unimpressed.

Brooke and I also had some coffee before we got started on our long walk to El Castillo de San Cristobal, which has been there for about 500 years and has changed hands from multiple countries in that time period.

The kids very much loved going through the dungeon, but other than that, we took the opportunity to see the city from a higher vantage point and see some old architecture. We also walked to another fort, Castillo San Felipe del Morro, passing lots of folks flying kites in the ocean breeze. It was a beautiful day!

After finishing up at San Felipe, we quickly walked back to our hotel to check out, then struggled to find our car in the parking structure (seriously, it took 30 minutes to find…dunno what to tell you….) before heading out of town toward Quebradillas, where our Airbnb was. The drive took about 1.5 hrs, the majority of which was divided highway driving, so it was a pretty uneventful trip. Eventually, we left the highway and took a few narrow, paved roads to our final destination.

More on that next time!

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Garden Update: 5.19.19

This’ll be a quick update, as I just posted something a few days ago, but we needed to pull out all the spinach so I wanted to record how much we got. Seems like we have multiple Aldi-sized bags-worth of them, so it was worth the effort! Brooke thinks this is substantially more than we had last year, and I agree. Thus far, we’ve clocked 4 gallon-size bags full of it. The lettuce is coming on pretty well, too, but we haven’t harvested any of it yet.

We’ll freeze most of the spinach to be used for smoothies. We’re hoping some of the spinach continues to grow for a few more weeks so we can have some fresh stuff for salads, but the majority of it will be saved for our smoothie habit.

Other than that, we’ve got a few more things moving along, including some little strawberry-lets, so hopefully we’ll get a few of those in the near future, too! We weren’t anticipating that we’d get all that many strawberries this season yet, but we’ve got at least 5 moving along. Fingers crossed!

We’ve also got some buds on the raspberries moving along, so Calvin’s excited to start going out every day and stealing them before I can get one…

Brooke also put the next hive body on the bees today. She saw plenty of bees in there and some new brood, so the nuc appears to be doing what it’s supposed to be doing.

And last but not least, Brooke spent the week working on macrame so she could hang up some plants on the front porch. She’s very proud of them. 🙂

That’s enough! Looking forward to fresh strawberries! …so long as the squirrels lay off of them…

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Garden Update: 05.13.19

We finally got some garden time in this weekend, between having an available day and also not having constant rain… It was kinda a “make or break” day for us to get things in, so we went by Orscheln to get some tomatoes, pepper plants, and some flowers for the front porch. This was after we visited the Birds & Bees festival in Arrow Rock to see some…er….birds and bees….but also to pick up some native plants and herbs. More on that later…

Regardless, the radishes and spinach are doing quite well! We’ve had about 3 rounds of radishes in the quantity pictured below. The spinach pulled is our first official harvest, but as you can see in the image above, there’s plenty more where that came from. Also, the open part of the plot pictured above is currently housing volunteer tomatoes, but is destined for cucumbers once we get around to planting them.

Otherwise, we also planted about 8 pepper plants (mostly green, one yellow), and a pumpkin plant that Calvin wanted (I said “no,” but was overruled…). Next to that set of peppers, we will be planting green beans, probably mid-week when the ground dries out a bit more.

The carrots are doing dramatically better than last year (which is to say, we have more than one carrot plant). They’re pretty small and took forever to pop up, but so long as it continues along this vein, we should end up with a decent number of carrots…er…eventually…

Again, the tomatoes end up doing well for us usually, but this year, we didn’t end up with freebies from the Botany class on campus. We grabbed mostly “beef-type” slicers and some Italian roma varieties. We didn’t plant many (any?) cherry tomato varieties because we always get volunteers, and lo and behold, we totally do.

We spent a decent amount of time cleaning out the herb garden, as there were tons of weeds and waaaaaaay too much mint growing. We think we left the flowers that have been growing from year to year, and also bought a few milkweed plants from the Birds & Bees festival to help the butterflies and bees. The kids also scored a free shining blue star that should do well in that spot in the coming years. Regardless, the mint, lemon balm, and oregano (that I forgot was even in there…) are all doing crazy well. I’ll probably need to pare those back a bit as the summer continues…

Lastly, the lettuce is finally getting to the point where we may be able to pick some of it. Brooke moved the chives to the raised bed, and also planted some sage and basil. Brooke dug in the raised bed a bit and we can’t say we are particularly impressed with the dirt we laid down awhile back, as it’s become kinda compacted and “layered” in the bed. It sure seems like the dirt in the garden is far blacker and healthier than what the raised bed has, so we’ll have to see what ends up happening in the next few years.

And last, but certainly not least, we’ve got some peaches and apples growing in our trees, which is in keeping with what we got last year (minus the Japanese beetles…), so that part isn’t all that surprising. What is exciting is that we’ve got about 6 pears growing finally! Our first crop of them! Woo hoo!!

That’ll do for now!

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Review: Avengers – Endgame

Avengers: Endgame came out two weekends ago. I saw it that Sunday night at 9:20 pm. It’s a 3 hour-long movie. I didn’t get home and in bed until 1:00 am.

I don’t regret any of it.

Granted, it’s taken me over a week to actually type this up, partially because last week was Finals Week at work, and I’ve been busy with All The Things since school was done. At the same time, having a few days between seeing it and writing this has yielded enough time to digest what I saw. There were countless spoiler-laden articles available to read in the intervening days, plus YouTube videos, reviews, and more. The Russo Brothers have been hitting the interview circuit post-release, even going so far as lifting the spoiler warning ban this past Monday so that social media feels more free to brazenly release images, memes and headlines that are more brazen in exposing the key plot points (they had previously implored fans to not post spoilers…)

Again, definitely glad I saw it when I did. Endgame is a movie that is best seen with as little foreknowledge as possible, aside from a deep exposure to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This movie does more than just revisiting the “greatest hits” of the MCU: it toys with the viewers expectations, pushes them to their limits, and then does exactly what you want to happen while still doing the unexpected. And for being a 3 hour-long movie, it still leaves you wanting more.

If anything, after it was over, I think it felt like I binge watched a miniseries. It was long enough that they fit multiple complex story threads together while also tying up loose ends from 22 other movies in the MCU. And physically revisiting aspects of those movies and making them feel more relevant – seen from a new perspective.

Endgame was awesome. It was sad. It was powerful. It was emotional. It was everything you could want after that many movies. It lived up to the hype and then some.

And that’s all I need to say. I pre-ordered it right when I got home. I look forward to watching it again and again.

Did I mention it was 3 hours long? And still awesome?

P.S. They totally do the whole “signatures” thing like they do at the end credits for Star Trek VI. Yes. This movie is that good.

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Garden Update: 04.27.19

We have been gone every weekend for the past month and a half, so thankfully, our first weekend in town for that long ended up presenting us with a beautiful (albeit windy) day.

As you can see, we’ve got some lettuce coming up in the new raised bed, though they aren’t growing as fast as I’d like. The radishes and spinach in the plot further on in the frame are moving along a bit nicer, especially the radishes. I haven’t put any grass clippings between rows yet, but for now, we’ve been able to keep the weeds out by hoeing between.

Brooke picked up some strawberry plants at Stark Bros two weekends ago, so she planted them in the plot we’ve been using for sweet potatoes. I’m sure we’ll still plant some in a few weeks when we inevitably get some plants from my Aunt Marie, but we can put them just about anywhere. The strawberries are all varieties that should start producing in June, but realistically, we’re talking about next Summer on that front. We’ll see!

Other than that, we haven’t planted anything else. Tomatoes usually go in the weekend of graduation, which is next week, so that’s probably next on the list. Brooke did plant carrots in another plot, but we still haven’t seen anything pop up from them.

We did, however, start another project yesterday…

We’ve been talking about moving the gardening implements out from the garage to a small shed closer to said garden. This year, we finally pulled the trigger. The plan is to put a patio in the back yard sometime this Summer, so this was a good trial run to work out the kinks. Brooke ordered the stuff (sand, pea gravel, bricks, shed…) from Lowe’s and it arrived this week.

Brooke took care of this part last night while I was at a school function, so that sped things along for this afternoon pretty well. The Rubbermaid shed was relatively inexpensive, though it still didn’t go together as easily as we’d like. It took a bit to figure out where to put the screws and how to get the thing assembled properly. We ended up having to find one of our own screws that was long enough to hold the wall down to the floor of the shed, but other than that, I think it turned out alright!

We’ve got the garden tools, some of Brooke’s plant pots, and a few other small trinkets in there now. We’ll need to pick up a padlock in the near future, but other than that, it’s all done! As we were putting the thing together on the pad Brooke built, we realized we need to caulk the bricks a bit to hold them in place better, as the pea gravel and sand shifts enough that pushes the bricks out just a little bit.

Onward, Summer!

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Garden Update: 03.17.19

Relative to 2018, we’re a bit behind. We’ve had so much rain, freezing rain, ice, snow, blizzards, and glaciers this year that it’s been too wet to till up the garden, let alone burn the brush off of it from last year. In the meantime, we’ve had it in mind for awhile to add a raised garden bed between our new patio and the rest of the garden, so we took advantage of one of the first nice days we’ve had in 2019 to get started on it.

We went with cinder blocks to get it started, along with PVC pipes to not only lock it down to the ground, but also serve as places to stick some re-bar hoops in to let us cover the plot in winter. Brooke also saw a post online where we could just put down cardboard to kill off the grass, while letting it biodegrade slowly. We also had some leaves and brush around so…we threw that in there… Why not…

Brooke had me pick up quite a few bags of dirt to throw in this plot. We put 5 bags of topsoil on the bottom layer, directly on top of the cardboard.

This was followed with a layer of peat moss. That stuff was a bit more “solid” than we expected, likely because it was so compacted in those giant bags. Believe you me, that 3 cu. ft. bag took up more space in the car than the 5 bags of top soil did…

Lastly, we put four bags of compost down, followed by a final layer of 5 more bags of top soil.

Finished product! The plan is to put lettuce and some herbs in it as soon as we can. We’ll put the re-bar in the PVC pipes this Fall and then find some thick plastic to cover everything, hopefully to keep things growing into January 2020. As I’m sure you know, more pictures to come as 2019 continues!

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Review: Captain Marvel

Marvel Studios’ CAPTAIN MARVEL..Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel (Brie Larson)..Photo: Chuck Zlotnick..??Marvel Studios 2019

There have been 20 movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. 19 of them have centered on a male lead. One of them (released last year, no less…) at least had a female character listed in the title.

The 21st movie in the MCU, and the first one that features a woman as the lead and title character, had big shoes to fill. Lest we even get into the fact that Avengers: Infinity War ended with 50% of all life in the universe being destroyed, and Captain Marvel being the potential solution…

So, to back up a moment… The character of Captain Marvel goes back a long way, but the version being portrayed in the movie, Captain Marvel, is a more recent addition to the comics. Carol Danvers’ version is described as one of the most powerful heroes in Marvel comics, one that apparently was difficult to bring to the MCU because the whole thing had to be grounded in some semblance of reality first, before the space-faring characters from Guardians of the Galaxy, or Thanos, could really be brought into the fold.

And so, it was decided to hold off on the power of Captain Marvel until later in Phase 3 of the MCU, giving time for stories of Captain America, Iron Man, and the other Avengers to come to a close (and end some contracts along the way). In some ways, I think this was probably the right decision, as her entrance onto the scene is given a great deal of weight: literally reversing Thanos’ “snap” and fixing the events of Infinity War as no one else could.

Oddly, they had to spin things back to the 1990s in order to set things up, so the movie is something of a “period piece,” complete with landing in a Blockbuster Video and waiting for a CD-ROM to load on an old Windows machine. As a child of the 90s myself, I very much appreciated this, though I could imagine many of those details flying over my kids’ heads someday.

The trailers didn’t inspire me with a ton of confidence for Brie Larson‘s performance. I can’t put a pin on why, exactly, as I’d seen her in other movies and thought she did a great job. Perhaps it was knowing that Brie Larson and trying to square that with the characters across the MCU I’ve grown to love over the last 20 movies. Still, those concerns were dashed aside early on: she did a great job and Marvel Studios can absolutely build a franchise around her. Her comedic timing was quite good, despite the fact that she isn’t known for her roles in comedies. Her buddy-buddy banter with Samuel L Jackson was also very good (and the make-up job they do to “de-age” him was really, really impressive).

The other characters were pretty good, though somewhat predictable. Ben Mendelsohn has been in a lot of stuff recently and was good here, despite having his face covered in a prosthetic for most of the movie (and he was surprisingly funny in the role, too). Jude Law didn’t have much heavy lifting to do for his role, but he did alright. Annette Bening hit the interview circuit over the past few weeks and was able to hold back spoilers regarding the nature of her character, which was actually pretty good from a story perspective. Let’s just say that, among these three characters, there was a lot of bouncing back and forth between who is bad and who is good, and it kept the audience guessing to an effective degree.

Ultimately, it was a good movie. It got predictable at points, but again, it’s the 21st movie in a long line of films, so it’s to be expected. Still, the acting was great, the movie was funny, the build-up to “letting Captain Marvel” loose at the end was earned, and she proved herself to be a bad-ass.

Good thing Avengers: Endgame comes out at the end of April…

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New Furniture!

I’ll be honest: I don’t exactly remember what sparked this. It definitely wasn’t me. Perhaps it was Marie Kondo…

Brooke wanted to re-arrange the living room a bit, and as she thought more about how that would look, she also started looking at furniture. When we moved to Marshall, we picked up a really nice wooden futon that was just fine for our needs, but wasn’t particularly comfortable. We could have just picked up a new mattress for it, but it also kinda felt like it wasn’t “Real Furniture for Adults.” At the same time, having Sam has meant certain…compromises…with regards to furniture. The cat has claws and has taken them to our couches over the years. We got a pleather couch for Iowa that he made short work of. We had a microfiber couch in St. Louis that lasted a bit, but he still ripped up…

Thankfully, Sam’s a bit older now and doesn’t seem to be scratching at furniture as much. There’s no guarantee he won’t do the same thing to this furniture that he did to other pieces, but Brooke inherited a couch that we’ve had in the music room and, for the most part, it has survived shockingly well. Brooke also ordered a carpeted cat scratching tower, so hopefully Sam will eventually use it. To date, he has hopped off of it every time I’ve put him there. Figures.

Anyway, Brooke did some shopping and decided to visit one of the furniture places here in town. After looking around a bit at prices, talking with the sales folks at the furniture store, etc. she settled on a Lay-Z-Boy couch covered in blue velvet upholstery. So far as we can tell, it should hold up to cat claws relatively well (because the fibers are so tightly woven…he shouldn’t be able to get his claws in there…shouldn’t) The velvet is a “low pile” variety so it feels really nice, but doesn’t seem to catch much cat hair…yet.

Originally, the plan was to just get a couch, but for awhile, Brooke was looking at sectionals for additional seating. After thinking over it, she decided just getting another chair would probably be fine, so we got one of those, too, under Lay-Z-Boy’s England brand. She went with a gray fabric for that one that turned out really nice. I’m not sure how often we’ll actually sit in that chair (as it’s probably more likely to be used when we have company over), but Sam, so far, has liked falling asleep on it. And it definitely doesn’t catch cat hair all that badly…yet.

Anyway, it’s taking some “getting used to,” as the new couch sits up quite a bit higher, making it harder to use the coffee table as a foot rest. I’m sure we’ll make the necessary adjustments eventually, but at least for now, I can say they’re all quite comfortable!

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When Is This Going To End……

So, as I write this, we’re going on Day Three of no school in Marshall. As in, Meg, Calvin and I are all off school. Brooke even canceled their office’s activities for Thursday. We had a Winter Storm warning for Wednesday that even included thunder and lightning that evening.

The town has been mostly dead, though we have seen a few cars go by here and there. Trash/recycle service was canceled, power was knocked out on at least one street (though we weren’t affected), and mail didn’t come yesterday. We did venture out to the YMCA on Wednesday, but their Kid’s Gym staffing was reduced because workers couldn’t get in.

So yeah, we’re on a 5 day weekend, at this rate. And if the post that precedes this one is any indication, it’s been a ridiculously long winter. Meg and Calvin were sledding back on November 26th, so it feels like we’ve been dealing with this for far longer than we’re used to. It’s a good thing Brooke pushed for the YMCA membership this year, as I’ve used the treadmill more in the past month than I’ve been able to be outside. It isn’t even that it’s been that cold (though it’s been really cold…it’s 8 F outside right now…), but the icy conditions, the foot+ of snow that lingers on the sidewalks, etc. all get in the way of outdoor exercise.

That and it’s hard to get in a rhythm at work, where we were supposed to have our first exam on Wednesday. Then it was pushed to today. Now it’s pushed to Monday. I ended up sharing YouTube videos of my lectures to make sure the students keep up with everything so we can stay on track prior to Spring Break in early March.

Yes, “Spring” Break is in less than a month. Letting that sink in, too…

I’m so done with this…ug…