Sarah's 6th

There were 16 kids . . .

. . . the horror . . . the HORROR!!

(I'm only kidding. Everything went very well actually.)

I'll try to get more detailed later this week, but for now here are two pictures of Sarah's big birthday party on Saturday.



The big activity on the hot Saturday afternoon was playing in the backyard. We set up the inflatable pool and provided many small buckets of water and lots of sponges. The goal was for the kids to mercilessly pelt each other with sponges, hopefully cooling each other off and not causing grievous bodily injury. The parents that hung around stayed up on the porch to watch.

Everything went well. Only one instance of crying. The kids tended to hoard sponges and unleash a great deal at once against a lesser protected opponent, a sort of sponge arms race. Mutually assured destruction?

In an interesting twist, all the girls gathered in the pool and left the boys on the outside looking in. That later changed as strategies (what there were of them) and alliances (where there any?) declined.








After the water play, everyone came in, dried off, and commenced to eating the cake (which turned out great by the way). The look on Sarah's face in this photo is priceless.

Even I will admit that this is going a bit too far . . .

See other accessories here.

Playing with toys

Sometime last spring I saw an Internet article about a toy/memorabilia company that was hopping on the LOST bandwagon to produce "action figure" like items for the main characters of the show. But don't think these are cheap Mattel 1970s era Star Wars toys.

These are high end sculpture-like figures. They aren't exactly something that you play with, really. You just buy them and signify your nerdiness with their mere presence.

You can read more about the figurines via this EW.com Popwatch article, but don't worry. I've got you covered with all the important stuff you need to know.

The first picture they provided a while back was of the Charlie figure.

As I promised, these are high quality items. The level of detail is impressive. But it gets even better. Each figurine also has a voice microchip that delivers dialogue relevant to each character. And each figurine has a character-specific prop. (Charlie's is a Driveshaft ring.) But it's the dialogue chosen for each that I find as funny as anything else about this entire enterprise. I think they really did a good job selecting lines that truly capture the person's essence.

For instance, Charlie sings "You all everybody... You all everybody..." and says: "Guys... where are we?" -"You don't know me! I'm a bloody Rock God!" Perfect Charlie--annoying, self-centered.

Hurley is shown from Season 1 at the makeshift golf game. He comes with a lottery ticket and speaks such pearls of wisdom as: "Dude... I'm starving... I'm nowhere near that hungry." -"You got some... Arzt... on you." -"Stop! Wait! The numbers are bad!" -"Welcome, to the first... and hopefully last... Island Open."

Our main man Jack is shown here in closeup. The figure seems to be depicting him on the beach in episode one as he decided how to save 15 people simultaneously while the plane's wreckage burns around him. Isn't he dreamily authoritative? His prop (for some reason) is a mug shot of Kate. Why? Don't know. But his voice chip tells us that: "If we can't live together, we're going to die alone." -"Everybody wants me to be a leader, until I make a decision that they don't like." -"There's something that you need to know... We're going to have a Locke problem, and I have to know that you've got my back."

Lovely Kate is here shown escaping from Lostzilla after Greg Grunberg's (the Flight 815 pilot) death in episode one. Her prop, naturally, is the mysterious toy plane that she kept in the bank's safety deposit box. As you might guess, her microchip produces stupid and pointless remarks such as: "Jack!" (thunderclap and rain) -(frightened) "One... Two... Three... Four... Five..." -"If you're thinking about going for the cockpit, I'm going with you." -"I only made-out with him, because torturing him didn't work." Sad, really.

As usual, Locke is looking pretty awesome. The detail in this figurine is very good, right down to his multiple knives and water bottle. Keep in mind that this is season one bad-ass Locke, the one that would do anything to get in the Hatch back before he became Hatch-bound and sad. His prop is a walkabout brochure and he says mysteriously sinister things such as: "I've looked into the eye of this island, and what I saw... was beautiful." -"Don't ever tell me what I can't do! Ever!" -”Do you want to know a secret?"

The company even provides a Shannon figurine, but really, this could be anyone. Her face isn'textremelyy distinct. Her prop is a map of the island. Did she have one? Is it the Rousseau map with the French song lyrics? However, her microchip dialogue is priceless: "What's a four-letter word for 'I don't care'?" -"The plane had a black box, idiot... I'll eat on the rescue boat." -"You want my information? Name: Shannon Rutherford. Age: 20. Address: Craphole Island." A perfect Shannon mixture of disdain, disgust, and rudeness. Bravo on that one.

I am sure they'll eventually get around to Sayid, Zombie Boone, Claire, Ana Lucia, Rose, Bernard, Henry Gale, and the traitor Michael that does nothing but scream "My Boooy!" and "Waaaaaalllt!" until you go nuts and throw it against the wall. And of course, there has to be a shirtless Sawyer figurine that looks extreme angry and recites each and every nickname for each character.

So, keep your eyes open for that.

Thanks to McFarlane Online.

Decked Out: In which Burb details how he has begun refurbishing his backyard deck

Already you should be worried, since this involves home repair and that never seems to work out that well for me.

But, I am determined to learn (either that or I refuse to learn and am denser than most).

So, those of you that have visited my house are aware of my deck. It's approximately 24 x 12, opens off my back door and provides an expansive view of my backyard. It has served its purpose well, but in the last year the paint has begun peeling.

The peeling has gotten worse, but I managed to ignore it and do nothing all of last summer and most of this summer. But for some reason (and I don't recall the specific thing that caused this) Lynda and I decided to tackle this project starting last weekend.

Since the paint was well on its way to peeling off, we decided to remove the existing paint and then put some new stain/sealant on the newly exposed wood.

That's all fine and good. We even borrowed a pressure washer from one of Lynda's coworkers who lives down the street from us, figuring that it would be able to remove the peeling paint.

Last weekend I went to Home Depot and bought the stain/sealant and a sprayer to apply it with. But I also decided to buy a few gallons of a chemical stripper that claimed it would help remove existing paint. Once that was done, I would use a second cleaning agent to condition and clean the wood before applying the new stain/sealer.

The mechanisms of all this aren't very complicated. On Sunday afternoon I put the stripper in the pump sprayer and began laying it down. I waited for it to do its thing and then used the garden hose to spray it off and magically strip the offending paint away.

The chemical had a pleasing offensive smell, signifying that microscopic enzymes or nanobots or something else was breaking down the paint. But then . . . well, it's didn't strip off like butter. Maybe, maybe 65 percent of the paint was removed after a few attempts of application and water spray.

This was frustrating, to be sure, but not debilitating. I hadn't used the pressure washer yet, which would surely crank up the power and blast off that stuff, no problem. The REAL problem was the extreme heat under which I was working. You might know (unless you are one of my overseas readers) that much of the country is under a strong heatwave. You might NOT know whoever that I am mildly to moderately polyhydrotic.

This means that each day that I have been trying to get this deck in shape, I have had to take two showers--one in the morning and one at night.

Yeah, trust me to pick the hottest time of year to take on this task.

By the way, I did use the pressure washer this evening. It did help remove more of the paint, but it didn't take it all off. I am not really sure what I should do at this point. But it'll be tomorrow evening (after shower number seven) that I find out.

Idea rescinded

I have removed the post that I wrote last night.

A reader pointed out (kindly and indirectly . . . but clearly) that it wasn't in the best of taste.

So, easily deleted and I'll try to do better next time.