The last time I participated in the Bloggy Giveaway, I was overwhelmed with responses from people telling me the most bizarre details about themselves, often-body part-related, like a missing toenail, or the like.
So for this Bloggy Giveaway, I’ve decided to make you work for it a little bit more. If you would like to be entered into a giveaway for a $20 Amazon gift certificate (I will email the gift code, so international participants are welcome), then you must link up to my blog on your blog – please use the main blog URL (http://allrileyedup.com) and leave a comment with the permalink.
If you don’t have a blog but still want to participate, you can either subscribe, Stumble, or Digg this, and leave a comment letting me know.
If you do both of these things, then, obviously that’s two entries (double double your enjoy-oy-oy-ment!).
If you don’t want to do any of this and you still leave a comment, hey, be my guest, but if I draw your name, you will never know…
MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Oh, and please, leave me another interesting detail about your life in the comments. Those were fun to read!
Hi, I’m Junior the Fearless Robot. I’m a 5.9oz hand-carved (by Husband) boxcar that was painted and decorated by The Boy (see other handcrafted works by children at Magic Marker Monday). Over the weekend, I raced down this track in THE PINEWOOD DERBY:
Allow me to tell you about the magic that is THE PINEWOOD DERBY as we meander through the many categories of this week’s carnival.
Education
The Pinewood Derby is a boxcar race wherein men and their sons put together what they hope is the fastest car. Knowledge of physics, aerodynamics, and gravitational pull help, while the ability to answer the question ‘how do you get the wheels on just so in order to make the car roll in a straight line?’ is imperative.
At the Pinewood Derby, you might be able to snack upon burgers and french fries from the In-n-Out van parked outside. It’s a swell way to comfort sad little boys (and sometimes sadder fathers) when their cars don’t win.
Other cooking posts:
Cyndi Lavin presents Vegetable vindaloo posted at Busy Family Meal Planning. “Vindaloo sauce can be used to flavor meats,” Cyndi writes, “but we like it best as a vegetarian delight!”
Preparation for the boxcar derby includes wood-carving, painting, drawing, then realizing the paint wasn’t dry enough, then fretting over smeared graphite, then repainting and waiting several days for the new paint to dry, then accepting that, in the end, dry paint is overrated. Then attending the event where everyone else’s car had no problem getting their paint to dry?
The Pinewood Derby is a realtively inexpensive way to have a good time with your children. To put it in a MasterCard ad:
$20 - supplies to make boxcar
$10 - In-n-Out food at Pinewood Derby
$1 — band-aids applied to children’s bodies after a little too much exertion in the bounce houses
$3 — vending machine waters
Free - comforting hugs to the fathers and sons whose cars didn’t advance on to the finals
David presents Citi PremierPass Elite Review posted at Credit Card Offers IQ. “My family and I recently took a trip to Guatemala and saved thousands using a travel rewards credit card,” David explains. :The Citi PremierPass Elite is one of the best travel cards available for family travel.”
A healthy family is a happy family and it’s good for the family to do things together, like check out the competition together and analyze how to sabotage them:
I’m definitely worried about that one on the left.
Other posts about family health and wellness–
Matthew presents Home Safety Information for Alzheimer’s Disease posted at Fast Medical Information. “If you are caring for someone with Alzheimer’s disease, you face many challenges everyday life,” Matthew observes. “These tips will help keep your loved one safe and free you from worry.”
I suspect that if the dogs had been allowed to participate in the Pinewood Derby, they would have carved a boxcar of the animal services truck and made sure it went extra s-l-o-w, so that they could laughingly outrun it.
Y Guides is a great way for Husband and The Boy to spend one-on-one time together sans ladies. They camp, they carve, they sing, they howl (or so I’ve heard). I hope The Boy always has fond memories of spending this time with his Dad.
Isaac Yassar presents How To Realize Happiness posted at Isaac Yassar’s Overture. “People study and work to achieve success. Is happiness achieved by amassing money and massive personal consciousness?”
And since this is Y-Guides and all, the Pinewood Derby began with a man wearing a headdress reading an invocation to the Great Spirit. All the kids go by special Y-Guides names, like Howling and Growling Wolf Who Carved The Winning Boxcar.
Jason Isbell presents Interview with D. Barkley Briggs posted at Tired Garden. In this interview, Dean Barkley Briggs talks about his life as a pastor, husband, father and widower and how he has forged a career as a writer.
Family Travel
The Pinewood Derby didn’t take place too far away from my house, but attending it and seeing how happy it made The Boy was otherwordly.
In the event should you ever attend your own Pinewood Derby, make sure you are *very* clear that the fact that your car won a heat DOES NOT mean you’re taking home a trophy. Much sadness upon this realization… I cheered The Boy up by reminding him that he would receive a patch to put on his vest.
Hope you enjoyed learning about my little Pinewood Derby excursion over the weekend! Thank you for participating in and supporting this edition of the Carnival!
Next week, the Carnival will be making a stopover at The Expanding Life! Susan will be hosting for the first time, so click here to submit the link to and relevant information about your post. Should you have questions, be sure to review the Carnival guidelines before submitting your post.
Would you like the Carnival to pay a visit to your site? Check out the hosting schedule, select a date, and then drop a line advising what week you would like to host.
I want a vacation. I want one so bad. And I sort of took in a mini-one when I went to that wedding over New Years. But everyone knows that leaving town for a wedding is not the same as going on a vacation, no matter how cool the city.
Why am I babbling on about wanting a vacation instead of going on one? Unfortunately for yours truly, the economy has been rough on the House of Riley. So instead of going on a vacation, I look around online for sweepstakes to win a vacation.
Which brings me to Park City Mountain Resort, Utah. Skiing, baby, skiing.
Or, snow eating, baby, snow eating.
Skiing is sometimes a difficult vacation to go on when you have children or a family in which half the members don’t ski, which is why a place like Park City Mountain Resort is so cool (literally and figuratively).
For starters, their kid programs guarantee no more than FIVE kids per ski lesson. They also have (for that aforementioned half the family who doesn’t ski) tubing, snowmobile rides, and tons of local bars and restaurants (score!). Park City hosted the 2002 Winter Olympics (when Michelle Kwan went from Gold to Bronze in mere seconds), so they have an excellent public transportation system (yea for no car rentals!).
The Park City Mountain Adventure Blog, where you can read other moms’ thoughts on the resort from a been there/done that perspective AND enter the contest to win a free trip for a family of four (must enter by Jan 30):
And if you dare win that contest, I hereby propose you bring me as one of the children. Because I really, really want that vacation…
Wings. Glitter. Tassles. An array of pastel colors. It’s time for a faery hunt, at least that’s what’s on the minds of fifty-some kids and their parents standing around Fern Dell at Griffith Park.
Three British-accented women in floppy hats call the children to attention and we begin the hike. Faeries smell like perfume, they tell us. Look around and above, they say –
“Shh! Shh! There! I see one!”
A faery.
A faery in Griffith Park.
Her purple dress gives sparkle to her body. Psychedelic tights turn her legs into a swirl of colors. She tiptoes down from the hill, blinks her wide eyes, and states: “Are you friend or foe?”
The adventure has begun.
A Faery Hunt in Griffith Park is an audience-interactive show that takes kids to the Land of the Faeries, where we seek out the Queen Faery and are given the task to help her retrieve her faery light. The adventures walks us around Griffith Park, with a cast of characters that includes the troll Grendel and the Half Man Half Bird.
Cletus loves corn.
Day light come and me wanna go… GNOME!!!!!!
Holler if you see him! No! Only if you SEE him!
There’s also a Mermaid Faery, whose main purpose seemed to be to cause all the girls to whisper, “She’s part faery AND mermaid… WOW.”
Mermaids + Little Girls = Can Do No Wrong
The whole show takes about an hour and once the troll and his hodgepodge band join the picture, the laughs abound.
While this was a girl-saturated event, that didn’t stop The Boy from oohing and aahing over the Queen Faery, shutting his eyes and making wishes, clapping his hands and singing along, and like the good big brother that he is, making sure Little No Limit could see.
“Can you see?”
“How about now?”
After A Faery Hunt ended, the be-hatted British-accented women passed out papers for the children to collect autographs from the cast. I figured my kids were too young to want to do that. But as the Colonel said in The Waterboy, “Momma’s wrong again!” We waited for every one of those faeries’ signatures, and this one took a picture with Little No Limit because they have the same exact name–
(or as the other little girls put it, “The same name? WOW.”)
A Faery Hunt in Griffith Park ends right next to a picnicking area with a playground, so bring a packed lunch and call it a day of fun.
The Boy went in for his six-year-old well check yesterday and like a fool, I forgot to bring the school form that I needed the doctor to fill out. Which means I’ll be making another visit to the doctor. Not that going to the doctor is such an uncommon thing for me.
When your child has severe eczema, your child is an easy target for infections, which means you visit the doctor. A LOT. I saw my doctor’s admin at the community center over the holidays and she totally knew my name. I hate to say it, but this level of recognition isn’t really par for the course any more in doctors’ offices, so you KNOW I’m there a lot.
The good news is that Doctor thought The Boy looked pretty good at his well check yesterday. He’s growing, getting taller, gaining weight, has normal blood pressure, and she proclaimed his skin “not bad for The Boy.”
Happy dance!
So, of course, Doctor wants to talk about how we’re treating his skin. A combination of obsession, dietary changes, advice from alternative health practitioners (chiropractor, naturopathic, acupuncture), and limited use of topical steroids.
I’ve unfortunately been through many prescription drugs in the past six years to treat eczema. For those of you with drug use history, you might relate well to the uncomfortable moments when you asked for a refill only to find out that such-and-such drug has been recalled. This has happened twice to me in the past, once with a topical non-steroid-but-prescription-strength cream (now available again on the market) and an oral steroid that I enjoy administering about as much as I might enjoy eating the dirt cleaned out of my toenails.
If you haven’t been in this situation, here is a brief reenactment:
Me: Why was it recalled? Former Doctor: Hmm. I don’t know exactly. Something like causing cancer in monkeys? Or something like that. But don’t worry about it.
While you’re at it, why don’t you give me a nice paper cut and pour lemon juice on it?
Now, between you and me (and, you know, the internet-reading public), I think it’s best to avoid prescription drugs whenever possible. I’m always making an effort to use as little steroid as possible. But sometimes, it just happens that that prescription drugs come in handy, like when I had a MRSA infection that wouldn’t go away until I took crazy antibiotics. But I’ve always been paranoid about how to keep track of drug information, like recalls and bad reactions, which is why it was even more upsetting to not once but TWICE be caught unawares by a recall.
And this is why I’m glad to be a member of MomCentral. I recently received this message from them about Drugs.com and MedNotes:
“MedNotes provides a free online personalized medication management program that can be used to track the whole family’s medication profiles… you can enter the names of all the medications being taken and then register to receive drug safety or interaction alerts to ultimately help reduce dangerous side effects and avoid unwanted drug interactions. In addition, MedNotes will send you new drug and specific condition news released by the FDA or drug makers related to the medications your family members take.”
Thank you, Drugs.com and MedNotes, for relieving my worries. Now if I could just get everyone in the house to a point where we didn’t have to use the drugs at all…
I am currently reading The View From Mount Joy for book club and I’m still in the early pages of attending high school with Joe. Joe works for the school paper and during a staff meeting, one of the guys suggests an interview with the school’s exchange student, whose name is Gisele, and the editor replies, “Go ahead, Myers. But don’t try to wangle a date out of it.”
What is it about exchange students? They are often portrayed to be hotties that everyone wants to get with, or completely out of touch with all the ways of American high school and therefore subject to ridicule.
My mother, as a side job, used to help with finding exchange students placement in American homes, and I’ve interacted with countless exchange students. I’ve lived with several of them. Admittedly, there are a couple notable (and one smelly – seriously, it was a problem) exceptions, but for the most part, exchange students fit right in with the space-time-high school continuum. Nothing like these guys:
American Pie. Everyone’s favorite exchange student, Shannon Elizabeth catapulted to stardom after she got naked and pleasured herself in Jason Biggs’ bedroom. I’m SO SURE that happens all the time.
Can’t Hardly Wait. No idea what that exchange student’s name is but he says “Would you like to touch my penis?” to a lovelorn Ethan Embry at a very opportune moment.
Sixteen Candles. Long Duc Dong, baby. Long. Duc. Dong. Sure, it’s funny when he says “That you?” (Yeah, that me.) but what really cracks me up about Long Duc Dong is the way Grandma and Grandpa clap at him to get his attention. “Dong! Dong! Grandpa is talking to you!”
Better Off Dead. Exchange student meets girl next door. Cute, sweet, skis well. AND can fix cars. Is Monique a keeper? All signs point to YES!
Not Another Teen Movie. That forgettable spoof with Areola, the naked exchange student from an ambiguous country. Her whole purpose was… um… did I already say she was naked?
With exception to last one, I still recommend those movies. They’re funny. But when it comes to exchange student portrayals, I’m going to have to give props to non-American films. Try these two:
Linda Linda Linda. This is a Japanese flick wherein three Japanese high schoolers draft the school’s Korean exchange student to be the lead singer in their punk rock band after getting into a fight with the original lead singer, and they have to two days to rehearse for their performance in the school variety show. Honestly, this is what I imagine it feels like to be an exchange student. Doo-na Bae is the exchange student, and she wins my heart in the scene where she meets the guitarist’s ex-boyfriend. Here’s the preview (the preview isn’t in English, but it’s pretty self-explanatory):
l’Auberge Espagnole. In this one, they’re ALL exchange students! Seven college students from different European countries participate in a study abroad program in Barcelona, where they live together in an apartment. The universal language of hilarity ensues. And just wait until you see how they portray the American. (Although, really, I think the British got it worse with the visit from the brother.) Here’s the preview:
So, what about you? Any movie exchange students you thought were superb or superbly ridiculous?
Written by Riley on January 13, 2009 in: Musings |
I threw a grenade once.
I’ll never forget the first time I had to tell a guy his wife was dead.
Putting a condom on a banana is not as easy as it sounds.
Got a breakfast burrito.
Which of these above lines was the least attention-grabbing? The breakfast burrito line, right?
I caught wind of a meme where you take the first line of the first post of every month and string them all together in a single post. It sounded fun, until I actually started doing it. That’s when I realized that I write incredibly boring opening lines. “Got a breakfast burrito” for example. What could you possibly want to know about my breakfast burrito? “This is Graham Roumieu’s fourth or fifth book.” Another bright shining star in the sea of dumb opening lines.
Frankly, I have no idea how I have readers. Clearly, you’ve all been tricked into visiting my blog, or maybe you know me and you’re reading on because you love me for who I am, not what I write. Well, I say bully to that. I’m a writer, and I want good opening lines.
So, um, if anyone has some suggestions, I’d be happy to take them.
