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July 24, 2016July 24, 2016

Review: Star Trek Beyond

Let’s just start here: Star Trek Beyond is a good movie. It may even be a great movie, though I probably should see it again before I make that assessment.

In some ways, it’s better than it has a right to be. J.J. Abrams directed the first two movies in the “reboot universe,” Star Trek and Star Trek Into Darkness (both of which I was a fan of), but as he was busy with Star Wars: The Force Awakens, he wasn’t available to take on another Star Trek sequel. Though, Abrams remained as a Producer, Justin Lin stepped in to direct, along with a new writing staff that includes Montgomery Scott himself, Simon Pegg. Lin directed four movies in the Fast and the Furious franchise, and that influence showed quite a bit in this film. The action is fast and frenetic, the one-liners are quick and intelligent, and overall, the movie is just fun. Pegg, an unabashed Star Trek fan, co-wrote a solid story. It isn’t anything Oscar-worthy or anything, but it evoked a classic Original Series episode.

To back up a bit, the crew of the Enterprise is midway through their “five year mission” and you can tell the crew has settled into their routine. Kirk runs through his Captain’s Log toward the beginning, giving the viewer a feel for how life on the ship has progressed since we last saw them. They stop off at Space Station Yorktown when a mysterious alien arrives, asking for help in a nearby nebula. After the Enterprise heads off to investigate, the crew ends up stranded on a planet run by Krall, played by Idris Elba. The crew members are separated, putting Bones (Karl Urban) and Spock (Zachary Quinto) together; Kirk (Chris Pine) with Chekov (Anton Yelchin); Sulu (John Cho) with Uhura (Zoe Saldana); and Scotty (Simon Pegg) with another alien, Jaylah (Sofia Boutella).

This arrangement kinda makes the whole movie. In the first two reboot films, everything centered on the fact that this was a new timeline. The first movie brought the crew together, while the second still very much depended on the fact that a separate timeline was created. Star Trek Beyond, on the other hand, is the first one that really feels like it’s own, separate story, one that isn’t dependent on what came before. When you see Spock and Bones alone together, they act as you’d expect them to, not based on the previous two movies, but based on 50 years of those characters’ histories. We get to see them working together to solve problems, where it isn’t just Kirk that saves the day, but each character really gets their moment to shine this time around.

I have mixed feelings about the villain, Krall. He had legitimate motivation for going after the Federation, information that comes out toward the end that ties back into the series, Star Trek Enterprise. There’s nothing critical about that information, but it was a nice touch that the writers tied it back in for fans who are familiar with the franchise. Idris Elba is a gifted actor, and while he did pretty well (and improved as the movie progressed), it was obvious he found it difficult to get his performance past the prosthetics he wore to play the role.

I also thought the CG effects were good, but maybe not as good as the previous films. There were a few scenes that were pretty obviously on green screen. Perhaps that’s because so much of the film was outdoors instead of on the bridge of the Enterprise, but still, it was noticeable.

That said, there’s a badass scene toward the end that deserves all the Oscars. You’ll know it when you see it. And it involves the Beastie Boys.

The last thing I wanted to mention was that they did a good job writing the death of Leonard Nimoy into the movie. That’s really the only connection to the previous two films that may require explanation to a newcomer, but they handled it nicely and added some depth to Zachary Quinto’s version at the same time. Justin Lin also re-edited a scene toward the end of the movie as a nod to Anton Yelchin, who died recently after filming had completed. The word is that, in the next movie, Yelchin won’t be replaced and they will somehow write out Chekov. While it’s difficult to imagine the bridge without that character, I appreciate that this family sticks together and can’t simply exchange one actor for another.

Ultimately, that’s this movie: it’s a family, working together as a team, to solve an apocalyptic problem.

Just like Star Trek has always been.

July 16, 2016July 16, 2016

Traveling the Bourbon Trail

I met Ryan 8 years ago at a wedding and we soon started getting together “virtually” for playing video games. At the wedding, we found that we had some similar interests in various kinds of games and have been playing together ever since. In many ways, it’s odd that one of my best friends is one that I’d only physically met a single time, but there are even more people that I’d met through Ryan that, until recently, I also knew very well yet had never actually met.

Last year, our little gaming group (which consists of around 8-10 people) had discussed trying to meet up somewhere. We’ve got some people up in Minnesota, one in Alabama, one in Ohio, three closer to the East coast, and me here in Missouri. At the time, the Bourbon Trail in Kentucky seemed like the logical place to try and meet up, though some other options had been tossed around. We couldn’t pull it off for last year, but we made a bigger push to get something together this time. We couldn’t get all of those people together, but 5 of us met up in Frankfort, KY last weekend to visit some distilleries.

I’ve been brewing beer for quite awhile, so I had a handle on what the basic process of distilling entails. There were some interesting differences between the different distilleries we visited however, including their history, architecture, barrel placement, and so on.

One thing they’ll tell you at these distilleries is that “bourbon” is distinct from “whiskey” in that it must only be aged in new, charred oak barrels (there are a few other requirements, but it’s one of the things that sets “bourbon” apart from “Tennessee Whiskey” like Jack Daniels).

We stayed at an airbnb apartment in Frankfort very close to Buffalo Trace Distillery, which is one of the oldest continuously operating distilleries in the country. Unlike many others, they still produced bourbon during Prohibition because they had a Federal license to produce spirits for “medicinal purposes.” We took the regular tour and then a “ghost tour” that evening, learning a bit about various potential “spirits” that live amongst the other “spirits.”

Unfortunately, while we got to see all the barrel houses at Buffalo Trace, they shut down their distilling operation in July and August due to the heat. We got to see a working distillery at Woodford Reserve, our next destination. This place was quite a bit more “corporate” in feel, and though distilleries have been present on the property for quite awhile, the current product, Woodford Reserve, has only existed since the 1990s. Still, bourbon is made in the traditional way and it’s a large operation that you can see in action. This distillery was one of two locations where we saw the sour mash bubbling about, where yeast began the fermentation process. This part of bourbon-making only takes a few days, after which it’s distilled down (read: boiled to the point where the water is separated from the alcohol) and then loaded into barrels.

Those barrels will hang out for a period of years. At Buffalo Trace, some barrels are kept up in the top of their barrel houses, but they can only be kept there for up to 6 years because the heat ages the bourbon faster. The 10-12 year (or older) product is kept within the first few floors, where aging takes longer and the flavor profile changes over that period. Ultimately, this means that some bourbons are aged at the top, some are aged in the middle, and some are aged at the bottom. Woodford Reserve, on the other hand, rotates their barrels from the top to the bottom so the flavor remains consistent between each bottle they make.

That first day, we also hit up Wild Turkey, but we couldn’t catch a tour in the time we had. We did participate in a tasting, however. I can’t say the portions were great, and it was probably my least favorite of the locations, but I’m still glad we stopped by.

From left to right: Paul, Ryan and Mike.

The next day, we went to Maker’s Mark and found them to be pretty similar to Woodford Reserve in terms of their history vs corporate balance. They’re also a large operation and the tour was pretty cool, especially the part where they explain their trademark wax topping that they pull off for each bottle. Apparently, a worker can dip something like 100 of those bottles a minute before they pass through a cooling box that solidifies the wax prior to packaging.

Maker’s Mark was a really nice facility, though their buildings are all mostly black and sheet metal instead of brick. You can tell it’s a newer facility, and they’ve got a more “corporate” feel. Incidentally, they only had one or two barrel aging buildings on that portion of the property and, as we left, a few miles away, we saw 10s of more buildings where they were aging bourbon.

From left to right: Ryan, Josh, Mike and Paul.

The last place we went was Heaven Hill, a company I wasn’t really familiar with, but apparently they own Evan Williams (a bourbon I am familiar with). By the time we got there, they weren’t holding tours, but they were having a Bourbon Connoisseur’s Tasting of sorts. It was the most expensive of the tastings ($20…), but you got 4 healthy doses of different bourbons and you got more information about the barrels, the aging, the differences in how bourbons are produced (like, what grains you add to them), and so on. For example, we tasted a “25-year-whiskey” that, normally, I’d assume would taste really good…but this was apparently an accidental batch that was forgotten for 10 years in the wrong part of the barrel aging house. The distiller aged it a bit longer in a different barrel (one that wasn’t oak, so it didn’t count as “bourbon” anymore), but it was salvageable as a teaching tool. It didn’t taste nearly as good as it should after that much aging, which just goes to show that “25 years” isn’t necessarily great.

Of the places we went, I think we were universal in our love for Buffalo Trace and for the tasting we had at Heaven Hill. It isn’t that the other places were bad, but the corporate feel of Maker’s Mark and Woodford Reserve really showed. As I told the guys, it reminded me of the Anheuser-Busch tour in St. Louis: the beer isn’t that great, but the tour is still fascinating just to see it all at scale. It’s still valuable information, but perhaps didn’t have the “character” we were looking for.

We also heard great things about Jim Beam Distillery and their tour options, but unfortunately, we just couldn’t fit it in. Next year!

Ultimately, we had a great time. We fit some video games in at night and hit up some of the restaurants in the Frankfort area (Bourbon on Main was pretty good…great bourbon list, too… Buddy’s Pizza was also quite good.) Hopefully we can get together like this next year or the following year and get more folks to join us.

July 15, 2016

Hannibal Cannibal

A few weeks ago, I ran my first 5K! My first “official” one, at least (I ran more than 5 km per day for 5 days in a row before actually running this race…). Brooke’s family has run in the Hannibal Cannibal for the past few years, a fundraiser for the local hospital that always takes place on the Saturday morning of Tom Sawyer Days, which is held around July 4th. This particular 5K is notable because of it’s “Lover’s Leap” climb, which is a steep 100 ft elevation that kinda sneaks up on you. I’d never tried this course before (obviously), so though I knew how difficult the HW-79 portion would be (another hill, but a bit slower in grade), yet I wasn’t sure how Lover’s Leap would go. I didn’t quite make it up to the top without stopping, but I made it further than I would have had I not been training. Jogging around our neighborhood here gave me a little practice with hills, but for next year, I’ll have a better idea of what to prep for.

Again, the Baumanns (Baumenn?) run this 5K frequently and Mallory and Diana both placed in their divisions (yay!). We’re all running a 5K in Colorado (Mallory’s doing a half marathon), so in some ways, this was a good trial run for us, or at least for those of us that have never actually run a 5K before…

S Health's display. — S Health’s display.

Also, a brief aside, but I got a new fitness tracker in late June. The Samsung Gear Fit 2 has a built-in GPS function and barometer that I find particularly useful, as it’s able to keep track changes in elevation, as well as running times. For that race, my official time was 26:51 with an average pace of 8:39/mi. My Gear Fit 2 recorded 8:39/mi as well, though the distance was off because I started it before actually crossing the starting line. For the most part, I’ve been pleased with the performance of the tracker, though its battery life leaves something to be desired.

Overall, I placed 7th out of 18 in my age group, so I felt pretty good about that. A 27 min 5K is respectable, though I’d have to work quite a bit to beat the 19:48 winning time in my group… To get to the top 3 and win a medal, I need to shoot for 23:27, though, I’ll move up in age bracket next year where they actually ran a bit faster than those numbers this time around (ranging from 20:13 to 22:02 for the top 3). There probably won’t be a medal in my future for awhile, but I suppose that isn’t the point of running a 5K, eh?

Lastly, I should note that Brooke’s also planning on doing the 5K in Colorado, though she thinks she may have hurt her ankle and may not be able to actually run for it. The ankle’s on the mend, but while it’s been swollen, she hasn’t been able to go jogging all that much. Perhaps we’ll get her in the Cannibal in time for next year!

July 6, 2016

Review: Independence Day – Resurgence

Independence Day was a phenomenon in 1996. The marketing blitz was astounding. That movie was everywhere, and as a newly minted 14-year-old, I was the perfect age to eat it up. It had impossible stakes, fun and interesting characters, and mind-boggling special effects that were unmatched for the time.

Twenty years later, now we have Independence Day: Resurgence, a movie that has, in all likelihood, been bouncing around Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin‘s minds for 2 decades. In so many ways, Emmerich tries to re-capture the magic of the original, with old and new characters and even more effects. While I don’t think the movie is a failure, I also don’t think it lives up to its past.

ID4 took out the White House, the Empire State Building, and some random building in Los Angeles. These are epic, iconic moments in film-making that nearly everyone has seen (or, at least images of those scenes). The closest Resurgence gets to that is the picture above (spoiler alert?…it was on posters and in trailers…deal with it…). Don’t get me wrong, it’s a cool scene, but it isn’t iconic. In 20 years, no one will remember that scene. In this effects-driven era of movie making, something like that just isn’t as impressive anymore.

Speaking of “impressive,” I remember watching the special features on the ID4 DVD set, fascinated by how they used practical effects to make fire travel sideways down city streets (they ended up building a model set, turning it on its side, and using the small buildings as a chimney for fire to pass upwards through). Resurgence just relies on CGI. A lot of CGI. Granted, these effects don’t look bad in the least, but there’s so much of them, it just isn’t as impressive anymore. It’s almost lifeless.

With regards to the characters, we’ve got many old faces returning, including Bill Pullman, Jeff Goldblum, Brent Spiner, Vivica Fox and Judd Hirsch. For the most part, these characters are given the right amount of stuff to do, while still providing ample time for The New Class (Liam Hemsworth, Jessie Usher and Maika Monroe) to do their thing. Overall, they do okay, but they aren’t Will Smith (painfully absent), and they don’t have the chemistry that Smith and Harry Connick, Jr. had. Again, it just feels somewhat lifeless, that they’re trying too hard and not hard enough all at the same time. Sela Ward is a perfect example of this, playing the President…though not nearly as well as Pullman did 20 years ago.

That all said, Resurgence still had a decent story. It’s as simple as “more of the aliens return to Earth,” but also introduces a few new ideas that make it more than a re-hash of the first one. It honors the mythology of the original while also “expanding the universe” beyond its current borders, making it very obvious they want to franchise it out into more movies. Based on its current box office performance, that dream may be in doubt.

Ultimately, we enjoyed it. It wasn’t offensively bad, which compared with some of Emmerich’s other movies, it could have easily gone that way. Resurgence does its best to raise the stakes beyond what the original did 20 years ago and makes some obvious stumbles along the way, but it was still worth seeing.

June 26, 2016June 23, 2016

Garden Update: Late-June

The garden’s looking pretty good since Brooke and I spent hours last weekend weeding it, so I figured I should post something before it’s hideous again. Here in the forefront, the pumpkins are starting to look pretty good, but the squirrels dug out one of the hills, so one series of watermelon plants is down. Hopefully we get something out of the three plants that are still there, but again, they won’t be ready until September anyway. The tomatoes, on the other hand, are doing remarkably well. We’ve found three or four “volunteer” tomato plants that we’ve plugged in where we lost some to hail and, thus far, they’re doing pretty well. We’ve even got some tomato plants flowering!

Beans and peppers — Tomatoes and pumpkins

The bean plants are looking really good (the main reason I wanted to take pictures, really…), though some of the soybeans are smaller than I’d prefer. The green beans and soup beans, as usual, are going gangbusters, so we’ll end up with a good crop of them. I’ve staked two of the pepper plants, as they were starting to grow more “sideways” than “up-ways”, though two of the plants are still looking pretty small, so I dunno how they’ll ultimately turn out.

The herbs are looking a lot better now, after supplementing with some larger plants a few weeks ago. A few of Brooke’s original seed starts are still with us (cosmos, aster, basil), but I added oregano, lavender and lemon balm. The lettuce is looking awesome and we’ve eaten some of it already. The sunflowers, seen in the background, are also starting to really take off.

Lastly, the trees seem to be doing alright, though their growth has slowed down. We got 2.5 in. of rain a few days ago (finally), so I don’t feel the need to water them this week, but I had to run a hose out there to each tree the last two weeks due to lack of rainfall. I trimmed a few of their low hanging branches the other day too, as I’d rather them grow “up” rather than “out” at this point.

Everything’s still growing! I didn’t bother taking a picture of the popcorn, as there isn’t much to see yet. We’ve got some plants growing, but they look pretty sparse. It remains to be seen whether anything will come of them, but we’re treating them as more of a “test” than anything else.

Onward into July!

June 23, 2016

State Park #1: Katy Trail State Park

This post is part of an ongoing series summarizing each State Park in Missouri that our family has attended. We hope to visit each of 54 State Parks before the kids graduate from high school.

Katy Trail State Park is a 240 mile shared-use trail converted from the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad. Growing up in Columbia, it’s a site I visited multiple times with my family (at the Rocheport section), but Brooke and I made multiple visits to the St. Charles section of the trail shortly after moving to St. Louis. Now that we live in Marshall, we live about 30 minutes away from the Sedalia portion of the trail, ironically making it closer than it has ever been to the two of us.

As Brooke and I are the only two in the house capable of riding a bicycle (sans training wheels…), we picked up a trailer for my bike last year that we can put the kids in. It folds up in the back of our Forester pretty easily, though by the time you put our bikes on the roof rack of the car and the front tires of said bikes in the back with the folded-up trailer, we’re mostly out of room (i.e. we can go to Sedalia, Boonville or Rocheport pretty easily, but not much further, as we don’t have room for overnight bags).

For now, the kids like riding in the trailer and we use it on trips to the local playground here in Marshall. Meg is 6, but is still relatively small, so she fit in the trailer easily last year and this year – next summer may be a different story. Hopefully, we can get Meg riding her bike over the next year, but Calvin will still be able to use the trailer for years to come.

Honestly, there isn’t much to write about here. The trail picture above is what it looks like for 240 miles. It goes through/near some small towns, sometimes there are bathroom facilities available (though usually not), some sections are shaded while others aren’t. It’s a great State Park to visit, but personally, we like biking on it more than anything else. It’s a “mixed use” trail, so we see walkers and joggers frequently, though closer to cities – the further you get from the cities, the more likely you’ll find bikers. Some sections, especially near the State Fairgrounds in Sedalia, also allow for horses, but we don’t often see them on the trail.

Ultimately, it’s a really awesome resource that’s unique in that quite a few Missourians have been on it, likely without knowing it’s a State Park. It isn’t a “single destination” like the other State Parks because it spans the entire state (as in, you can live in Kansas City or you can live in St. Louis, and you can visit the same park while only driving for 20 or 30 minutes to get there). I suspect the kids will both have fond memories of this one.

June 22, 2016

Review: Finding Dory

I think it’s safe to say that one of the earliest movies my parents remember me liking was Ghostbusters. I somewhat famously watched on a nearly daily basis for one summer (a “sanitized” version, of course). In another 20 years, I suspect that the movie we will look back on that Meg watched constantly for a long period of time is Finding Nemo. Granted, she didn’t memorize each and every line from it like some of us did for movies in the mid-80s, but she watched it at home and in the car to a point where Brooke and I were getting a bit tired of it.

Fast forward a few years to the announcement of a new movie in the franchise, just at the age when Meg can appreciate it, but releasing 13 years after the original: Finding Dory. And it released on June 17th, right before my birthday, so Meg and I decided awhile back that we’d go “for my birthday” (awwwwww…).

The story centers on Dory and her journey from childhood as a young fish with short-term memory loss, on up through the events of Finding Nemo (there’s a brief flashback to when she met Marlin), and then finally to about a year later. A lot of the movie is told in flashbacks back to Dory’s childhood as she remembers specific events around the time when she lost her family. As each detail pops back into her little fish brain, she gets another clue to lead her back home and, of course, Marlin and Nemo come along for the ride.

It goes without saying that the production values are spectacular, from the animation to the voice work. Quite a few actors are attached to the movie, including some of the originals (Ellen DeGeneres and Albert Brooks, though Alexander Gould was replaced by Hayden Rolence because of, well, puberty…), and they perform just like it was 13 years ago in the original film. Newcomers like Kaitlin Olson, Ty Burrell, Diane Keaton, Eugene Levy and Idris Elba also make their marks, though in many cases, more screentime would have been great. They’re memorable new characters, much like the “aquarium crew” in the first film were, and they do a great job filling out the story a bit. Ed O’Neill as the “septapus,” Hank, steals the show in many respects, partially because of the intricate animation of an octopus sliding across the floor and using camouflage, but also because his curmudgeonly demeanor serves as a good foil for Dory’s otherwise sunny disposition.

The story itself isn’t quite as strong as Finding Nemo was, but perhaps it’s just because I haven’t seen it countless times (yet). Multiple reviews for the film have rightly pointed out that Finding Dory is really about living with disability, and on that level, I agree that it succeeds. At the same time, while Pixar pushes that boundary forward for kids to try and learn something out of their entertainment, I think it still goes over the heads of many kids. Meg really didn’t “get” Inside Out when we watched it last year, but over time, I bet she’ll understand it more and more, and likely, Finding Dory will also work on that level eventually. Right now, Finding Nemo is a show (for Meg) about a kid that gets lost, and the parent that does everything to find him. Finding Dory, as Meg said during the movie, wasn’t really about “finding Dory” because she doesn’t get lost the same way Nemo does.

Eventually, Meg will understand that “finding” has a few different meanings in this context. As an adult, I get that. As a 6-year-old, Meg isn’t quite there.

Still, she enjoyed it quite a bit and is seeing it again tonight. Can’t argue with that. 🙂

June 6, 2016

Garden Update: Early June

I’ve got a few things to cover here, so it may get kinda lengthy… The first thing that bears mention is the bees! We don’t have chickens here (yet…), but for the time-being, bees will be our means of extending this homesteading venture beyond growing stuff in the ground. Brooke ordered some bees a few months ago and they arrived in early-May. Since that time, we’ve largely left them alone, aside from giving them copious amounts of sugar water to keep them happy until more flowers are blooming. The hives are in the yucca plants underneath our maple trees near the garden, providing them with a decent amount of protection from the elements (more on that soon…). They don’t get a ton of sun, but I’ve trimmed the maple trees a bit to make sure they get it for at least an hour in the morning and in the evening. We’ll see how they do there, but right now, it seems like they get especially active in the early 10:00 hour and remain that way until the evening. In the picture above, Brooke was opening up the hive to make sure the queen was doing her job and, at least a few weeks ago, it seemed like comb was being laid and brood were present, so thus far, the bees appear to be doing their jobs!

Now, speaking of “protection from the elements…

Our ocean of bean plants... — Our ocean of bean plants…

A pretty big hail storm came through just before Memorial Day weekend. And by “huge,” I mean some pretty big hail. It was over golf ball size at our house, but larger stones fell just north of us. Thankfully, Brooke’s new car was on the other side of the state at the time and mine was in the garage…

The house is mostly undamaged, but we’ve got a few estimates coming in to see if we need to do anything. The garage roof needs to be replaced, but we need to look at just how much work we want to put into it right now.

Again, the bees were fine because of their placement under the trees, but the garden got hit pretty hard. Brooke had just planted green beans, soup beans, and soybeans in the garden plot above, where you see a small ocean forming.

Our tomatoes were mostly spared, but many of the milk jug covers were blown off as the storm came in. The unprotected plants were mostly decimated, but the ones that remained covered were fine. We lost a few plants, but the rest of them have bounced back pretty well by now. The peas got hit too, as they were probably the largest plants at the time. Since then, Brooke has harvested all the peas and pulled up the plants so we can make room for planting popcorn.

We still don’t feel like we’re getting all that many peas. This is the third time we’ve done it and it seems like we’re always getting enough peas for one or two meals. We can make green beans and soup beans like nobody’s business, but peas are always difficult for us. They tasted great last night! We just want more…

The carrots are looking good and probably need to get pulled soon. Again, the peas and radishes were to the left of the carrots, and we’re going to put some popcorn over there today or tomorrow. The weather looks to be getting pretty hot this week (highs in the low 90s), and no rain chance in sight, so we’ll get them planted and I’ll need to water them in the coming days.

We’ve been gone for the past few weekends, and any available time during the week has been taken up by Brooke traveling, or by rain, so we hadn’t planted the rest of the garden yet. Finally, yesterday, Brooke made some mounds next to the tomatoes where the pumpkins are going to go. This is a section of the garden that flooded last year, so we’re hoping the mounds keep the pumpkins out of the water better than the corn seeds were last year.

We’re also trying watermelons for the first time, but considering they were planted in early June, we probably won’t actually get any until September. Not exactly “prime watermelon season,” but hey…we’ll see what happens…

Thankfully, the beans survived the hail and flooding from last week! Since then, the green beans and soup beans all popped up and are looking great. The soybeans are moving a bit more slowly, but I think nearly all of those seeds popped out of the ground, too. We’re adding fewer green bean and soup bean plants than previous years because we’ve still got green beans canned from two summers ago. If the soybeans take off, we’ll probably keep using those in the coming years for edamame. Soybeans are good nitrogen-fixing plants, so we’ll rotate them around the gardens to maintain good soil health.

The herbs I planted in the plot in the background are kinda growing, but not all that well. Many of them got hit hard by the hail and a few of them weren’t looking great when we put them in the ground. We’ll just have to see how they turn out. In the extra patch to the right, Brooke planted some sunflowers yesterday. The bees will like them, too!

Lastly, I wanted to mention the hops we’re growing in Hannibal. Clearly they’re doing as well as they usually do! Mark and Diana got us a nice new vacuum sealer for Christmas this past year, so we’re looking forward to harvesting and saving some of these hops once they’re ready, hopefully earlier than we tend to harvest them.

...something's eating my hops...grrrrrr.... — …something’s eating my hops…grrrrrr….

Unlike previous years, though, it looks like somethings chewing on the leaves. I didn’t see anything obvious on them, but the evidence is pretty clear. I’m sure Mark will keep an eye on them, as he planted some new fruit trees near the hops, so he’ll be out there checking on everything frequently.

I think that’s about it for now! Lengthy post, lots of pictures…you know how it goes…

May 25, 2016May 25, 2016

Grand Tour of Missouri State Parks

We like to think of ourselves as “outdoorsy” types and, thankfully, we’ve got a really good Department of Natural Resources in Missouri to provide us with some great opportunities around the state. When we traveled the Oregon Trail last year, Brooke and I found that many other states out that direction had some very unimpressive parks to visit, especially with regards to how much they charge to camp there relative to the quality of the facilities provided. Thankfully, Missouri has cheap rates (even for non-residents), and some really nice places to visit.

Therefore, we decided it would be cool to hit every state park in Missouri before both kids graduate from high school. There are 54 state parks and another 33 historic sites, many of which are also associated with the parks. We’ve already visited a few of them as a family of four, so if we visit a few each year, we should be able to pull it off rather easily. We’ll probably camp at most of them, but some of them like Rock Bridge State Park and Van Meter State Park, we may just visit.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be making a few posts about previous visits that both kids have been present for, so you may see some old pictures showing up. Apparently, I didn’t post about many of those trips, so I guess I need to catch up. Still, this will be a lengthy series of posts, so enjoy!

May 15, 2016May 14, 2016

Review: Captain America – Civil War

As has become painfully obvious by now, I’m a fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and though Captain America himself isn’t my favorite, his third “solo” outing, Captain America: Civil War was an exciting prospect for me because it still brings in lots of characters from across multiple movie franchises. To be honest, I built this movie up in my head quite a bit because there have been reviews floating around for, literally, at least a month now. It’s been hyped up to such a degree that it was bound to be disappointing on some level and, indeed, it was…just a little bit.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s still good. Maybe even great. But I think I liked Captain America: Winter Soldier better. The Russo Brothers were back on-board to direct this one and while the pair of them were able to hold the movie together against all odds, I think the story, as a whole, suffered under its own weight.

Seriously. It’s easier to count who wasn’t in this movie instead of who was, because nearly everyone was in it. We had Captain America, Bucky Barnes, Iron Man, War Machine, Scarlet Witch, Vision, Hawkeye, Black Widow, Ant-Man and Falcon from the previous movies…and then introduced Black Panther and Spider-Man on top of all of that. The introduction of these two characters is intended to set up their own movies within the MCU, but they each had 15-20 minutes of screen time focused on them, which in a 2.5 hour movie means that you then only have about 2 hours to work with for all the other folks I just listed.

Taking a step back, the movie very loosely centers around the Civil War series of comics, where this time around, the United Nations and its associated world powers want to set up a hierarchical protocol where the individuals with superpowers are kept “in check,” under control of the UN. Captain America doesn’t want to give up his right to do what needs to be done to stop evil-doers, while Iron Man thinks they have too much power and need to be reined in a bit.

But this is all complicated by the villain, Baron Zemo, who wants to create a series of “Winter Soldiers” a la Bucky Barnes, and ends up framing Barnes for the assassination of King T’Chaka, the father of T’Challa (who is also Black Panther). Zemo has almost literally nothing to do with any of this, but they need a villain, so there he is. He’s incidental to the whole enterprise. Barely essential.

I could go on, but the “Civil War” storyline is complicated enough without also trying to bring in Black Panther and then Spider-Man. Both of these characters are awesome on screen, and in their own way, they make sense why they’d be there. But at the same time, I’d rather see the focus stay on the rift between Tony Stark and Steve Rogers, rather than bringing in all the extraneous story in service of the MCU.

The fight scenes are really cool, there are some genuine “cheer”-type moments, and good-natured Marvel humor injected throughout. The relationship between Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers is in full display in contrast to the strained relationship between Rogers and Tony Stark (which began in Avengers: Age of Ultron). But again, with all the stuff happening in the story, I feel like the plot suffered. Captain America: Winter Soldier had a focus to it – Bucky and Steve’s relationship – that was at the center of a feud between S.H.I.E.L.D. and Hydra. Both elements tied together very nicely, and even brought in some bigger “Government Control Is Bad” themes. But Captain America: Civil War doesn’t tie these elements together nearly as deftly, in my view.

I’m absolutely glad I saw it, and I’m definitely going to buy it. Spider-man was awesome to see on screen again, and his stand-alone movie will likely be really, really good. These characters are all in this conflict because of multiple movies’ worth of build-up, and that all makes sense.

I guess I just wanted a bit more focus out of it.