A weekly note

This kid though. Fireworks booming all around on the 4th and he passes out in what seems like minutes.

At some point the fireworks were loud enough to turn the baby monitor display on and he was snoozing away.

Extremely thankful for an uneventful first fourth!

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Also very much digging July on the Palouse this year. I’m not sure the weather could be more perfect: upper 70s, nice breezes, cool nights.

We’ve had most windows open almost all times, just letting the house breathe.

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(We are the Tuscany of America after all)

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This week I learned about Vardavar, an Armenian holiday (July 24 this year) where “people from a wide array of ages are allowed to douse strangers with water”.

I was trying to see if there were any water holidays and I found one.

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Me: singing All Star by Smash Mouth

Michelle: Do you think people ever need a reboot?

Me: What do you mean?

Michelle: Like if an android started singing Smash Mouth, you would probably know it was time for it to reboot.

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Zing.

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We watched The Usual Suspects this weekend. I don’t remember ever watching it a second time. It always seemed knowing the reveal would make the movie less fun.

It was good, though very indie feeling. We were blown away by how young Benicio del Toro was. And it made me look up Giancarlo Esposito to see that he’s basically never taken a vacation since he started acting. And Gabriel Byrne does a funny job of having an American accent through most of the movie, but falling into Irish from time to time.

It’s wild that Bryan Singer goes from directing this low budget indie movie to becoming the franchise X-Men director. He also directed Valkyrie, which starred Tom Cruise…

And it’s even more wild that Christopher McQuarrie wrote the screenplay for The Usual Suspects and Valkyrie and then basically became the person who writes Tom Cruise movies.

Good fun.

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I posted a magical photo of what July on the Palouse is like.

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Now that my new theme iteration is live I’ve been comfortable pushing small changes. I’ve fixed a few things and broken a few others. But I can feel the progress and it’s great!

I’m hoping to clean up my Likes page next and maybe extract it into a plugin like Shortnotes.

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A’s army crawling skills are growing exponentially. I always imagine his post-jaunt naps as a period of extreme neural pathway construction. He can’t answer a question like “did you have any dreams” when he wakes up, but he sure can surprise the crap out of you by suddenly spinning in place on his butt.

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Today was the first day Michelle and I truly lost it in front of him. At some point during dinner he suddenly grabbed his bib full of water, waffle, steak, strawberries, and yogurt, lifted it straight up above his face, and watched it all rain down.

We laughed very hard in the way that you probably aren’t supposed to laugh at the risk of encouraging more.

But it was fun. 😂