Monday, February 23, 2009

Mini Golf with Riley

Saturday was a Father-Son day.  Riley and I went to this cool minigolf place downtown.  It is in the basement of the Hilton hotel, has a Pirate theme and a LOT of blacklights.  We had a BLAST!!

Riley did better than me on many of the holes.  I'd watch him hit it and couldn't believe how well he did.  Then I'd grab the putter the correct way, line it up, stand correctly, all those proper golf things, and not hit the ball anywhere as good as he did.  LOL!  It was a great way to spend the afternoon.

Then we walked up to Finneggans Toy Store, looked around, agreed we needed to bring Maddie & Marci here, then went home to some great homemade pizza.  After, we played a fun game on the Playstation 3.

All together, a wonderful day and lots of fun. 

Marci and Maddie went shopping and had fun of their own.  It's wonderful to do stuff as a family, but also nice to do stuff one-on-one now and then.

Monday, February 16, 2009

Monster Truck Show

Yesterday Riley and I went to the Monster Truck show.  This time we went with his Cub Scout Pack.  The seats were at one end and I was worried they wouldn't be as good as ours last year (down close on the 50-yard line).  Fortunately, the Rose Garden is small enough that there really isn't a bad seat.  Not great for the trucks because they can't do a lot, but good for us.  I'm glad about that because these tickets were part of a group rate which means they weren't as expensive!  WOOHOO!

We had a great time!  Some trucks just seemed to be going through the motions, others really put on a good show.  This year instead of the dirt bikes, they had two robot transformer cars, one good, one evil.  They did battle by shooting each other.  We were glad we had our Bose noise canceling headphones on, those canon shots were LOUD!  I took some photos, though it was VERY dark.  I set my camera to ISO mode and let it figure out what to do.  The good news is I got some photos.  The bad news is many are at 3200 which is horribly grainy.  BUT, as I've come to realize over the years, I'd rather have a photo like that than no memory of the event at all.  AND I got lucky - I got a photo of the evil robot getting a hole blown in it, lots of sparks flying all over.  I'll upload it later (need to sharpen it up a bit).

We also got the Pit Pass which means we got to see the cars up close.  That was fun, Riley likes that part.  It was just the right amount of time because as it got long and Riley was getting bored, it ended.  And what an ending.  Grave Digger was last, did a few things, then was going to do a big jump and ended up crashing his car on its' side.  It was great!

I downloaded my photos and saw I took 706!!  That's because I changed the setting to sports mode and continuous, so as a truck took off over the cars and went high in the air, I took anywhere from 5-15 photos.  That worked great!  I was able to get some very cool photos.  But of course with that many photos, it means it's going to take me some time to edit them and decide which ones I want to upload.  I don't think I'll send all of them to Flickr. ;)  When I do get them uploaded, I'll be sure to blog about it.

Sunday, February 01, 2009

Pinewood Derby & Chocolate Festival

This weekend was Riley's first Cub Scout Pinewood Derby. His car didn't do as well as he wanted, but he still had fun building it and racing it. We were very proud that he didn't throw a fit because he didn't win anything!

Not doing well was partly my fault. It has been a LONG time since I built one of these and forgot a lot of things, like adding weights to get the car as close to 5 ounces as possible. We weighed in at 2.5! Fortunately, someone there had some weights, a drill and a hot glue gun. We got it back to 4.75 ounces. Still too light, but MUCH better than it could have been. This year I've been remembering all of these scout things I did and forgot about. Next year he'll do better with his car. :)


The Chocolate Festival
We've got to this the past two years and had a great time. This year it was AWFUL!! It looked like they raised the admission, there was only about half as much as there was last year, a lot of the places didn't have many samples, several of the vendors were quite rude, and there were a lot of non-chocolate booths, like soap and pit powder. Yes, someone at a Chocolate Festival was selling power to put on your armpits to make them smell better and not sweat. Um, what does THAT have to do with Chocolate???

Anyhow, it was really bad, we were majorly disappointed and probably won't go back next year. At least we had a great time at Red Robin's for dinner after. :)