If you can't stand the heat, air condition your kitchen.

So it hasn't been crazy hot here, but it's been warmish. Also aras came over to visit with his special lady and special baby. So we were going to go out to do some yard work to celebrate his being in the states for the first time in 3 years. At first we thought we'd do some chain sawing. But our dad hadn't decided for sure what he wanted us to do or something. Plus it was pretty hot for chainsawing. When we talked about it later that night with a friend of our parents he exclaimed immediately that you couldn't do chainsawing in this this heat. So does anyone want to guess what we did instead?

That's right, we had a big brush fire. Basically just piling all the brush i had cut down into a big pile and burning it. It probably took between 1-2 hours of burning with the flames up to 20 feet high. And we had to get in nice and close to put the brush on. So that was fun. On the plus side i actually only burned myself in one small spot. At one point i clearly smelled burning hair and was wondering if it was from me or aras. Neither one of us thought we had burned off a significant piece of hair, so we just let it pass. Half an hour later we saw our yellow lab, she had a big black on her. It turned out and ember had fallen on her too and it was probably her hair we were smelling. I think it only burned her hair though, she had enough to keep it from reaching her skin.

So obviously the best part of the day was going swimming right afterwards. I like swimming in general, but man was that delicious.

p.s. despite a sizable rain storm that night, the embers were still burning more than 24 hours later the next day.

The dream was over. Coming up: was the dream really over? Yes it was. Or was it?

So I'm sure everyone will be shocked to find out i've already seen the Simpsons movie. I thought it was quite excellent. There were several interesting tidbits that only an avid simpson watcher would notice. Maybe it was just because i had recently been to a wedding, but i thought it was quite funny that the song marge and homer dance to on their wedding video was why do birds suddenly appear. As many of you may recall, that is the song marge wants for her musical doorbell, and when it malfunctions claims no one could ever get ever get tired of that song. It's not the best movie ever, and not as good as the very best simpsons episodes, but it's probably better than any other movie showing this summer.