Monday, August 18, 2008

Boys Weekend

Gloria went to Colorado for the weekend, and you know what that means: boys weekend.

We started off Saturday at Krispy Kreme, trying to pull off what we now refer to as the Great Krispy Kreme Caper. When you walk into Krispy Kreme, an employee will pull a hot glazed doughnut right off the rollers and hand it to you. No charge.

We both eat three donuts, and one Saturday I said to Eli 7.0, "if we just dressed in different clothes each time, I think we could come back in and get all three donuts." For some reason, that seemed unimaginably fantastic to him, and we've been planning the caper ever since. I was hoping that last Saturday would be the go day, but unfortunately, Krispy Kreme was almost empty when we walked in, so the great heist has been delayed for one more week. We need crowd cover to pull this off.

We do, however, have a bag full of clothes in the car, just in case. Plus, every time we see the bag, we start laughing.

Next stop: a birthday party at the entirely awesome West Austin Athletic Club. Three different swimming pools and a diving well, and one of the pools even had four 50m lanes. It was amazing, and there were only about half a dozen kids at the party, which meant that the kid to lifeguard ratio was three to one. It was such a secure environment that I actually wound up swimming a mile while the party was going on, which felt great.

Eli has turned into a very good swimmer for his age--he can now do a proper freestyle stroke, and even does his breathing correctly. He's also fearless, and when he saw that the diving well had a high springboard, he immediately wanted to take a dive. Which he did, and I got a picture:



Sunday: The Clone Wars. I don't know who is responsible for this particular entry into the Star Wars canon, but it's dreadful. It's basically a 90 minute battle scene, and it's as bland as bland can be. Also, in one of the most bizarre character decisions in film history, Zero The Hut had a voice that I can only describ as the ghost of Truman Capote. It was unsettling, vaguely disturbing, and I regret that Hunter S. Thompson is no longer alive, because I believe his drunken take on that single character would have been better than anything in the movie itself.

I also think this film is going to be a box office bomb. We went to a Sunday afternoon matinee, at the largest theater in the cineplex, and it was less than a fifth full.

Eli enjoyed it--it was his first "Star Wars film" in the theater-- so I was glad about that, but for a grown up, it was cringeworthy.

Gloria mentioned that if we had time this weekend, we might go shopping for school shoes. This is like the President giving Mr. Bean the launch codes for the nuclear missiles while he's away. So we went shoe shopping, and here's the understated selection we agreed on:



It's officially called the "The Snot Rocket," and I'm not kidding--if you look closely, you can see "Slimers" written on the side. And yes, those bad boys glow in the dark.

The fellow who waited on us at the shoe store asked Eli where he'd gotten his shirt (a gorilla shirt from the San Diego Zoo). Later, at the register, he told me that he'd been a football player on scholarship in the 1960s, then left his summer job (set up by the football coach) to go to California for the Summer of Love, and wound up in San Diego.

I think that was the end of his football scholarship.

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