OUR LIFE IN 3D

01 Nov 2017

11 Comments

Have another Kit Kat

Well the emails have been pouring in…

“What did you wear did you wear for Halloween?”

“How did the door turn out?“

(Okay, I embellish sometimes )

Well, first things first (delayed gratification)

Here is what the closet doors ended up looking like:

The hinges from the real doors ended up being the hinges on the French doors.

You have to use your imagination about what the door knobs blend into.

She did a good job adding detail to make the waves distinct and took nearly half an afternoon making the detail and shells on the beach.

If you look real close at the bottom you can see what looks like Dylan wrote her name in the sand.

Very cool.

In a few years we can just say she painted the whole thing and signed her name to it. 🙂

Okay, as for the costumes…

Dylan was a kitty skeleton (see the ears?) and Skye was Jyn, the new Star Wars future-Jedi, soon-to-fall-to-the-Dark side girl (spoiler alert!)

And, to answer all your questions about what moi dressed as, well I didn’t feel like dressing up this year.

I was relegated to handing out candy at the front door to all the young boys and ghouls.

I was just my usual chatty, charming self.

Some friends and family had asked about what Halloween Decorations I put up?

You know, when I was a kid, back before the Internet…. and bubble gum, we never decorated houses for Halloween.

Now, at least in our neighborhood, it is starting to get competitive.

I put out old school decorations, stuff that I grew up with, like ghosts and scarecrows on sticks that you shove into the ground.

Boring! Boring!

…is what my kids call me, er, say.

So each year I pick up another $10 Halloween decoration to add to my landscape of chills..

The Fountain of Blood was the big hit!

Little kids kept pointing at it and asking, “what is that?“

“Well Its blood!…from the darn cat we got last year for Christmas” WhawHaHahaHa!

See that note on the door?

That is a Dylan creation. It is a note to trick or treaters to ask for certain candy if….

THEY HAVE FOOD ALLERGIES!

OMG..

Back in the day we worried about razor blades in apples. This day and age they worry about Food Allergies.

It is truly a new day.

HERE is what I tried to make the big scare up front

the risks of being a careless skateboarder

But the fierce wind the night before just shredded the cobwebs over the spider. (Le sigh)

Yes, the Pumpkin Head ghoul spoke as the kiddies went by….

“Want some candy boys and girls? Any food allergies? WhawHaHaHaHa!

Also, here is last year’s $10 HALLOWEEN bonanza find…

My last two good ideas… RIP

…glowing Styrofoam Tombstones

And the Blood fountain…

…with a hand left in it from last year’s Halloween from some teenager who reached one-too-many times into the host candy bowl for another Reese’s after I had told him No!

If you noticed, or maybe you didn’t, there is a large spider theme here at the front door.

Almost invisible on these pics are the 10-12 little black plastics spiders that came in the $5 bag of make-believe cob webs.

I dangle each spider on some thread from the ceiling at the front door so the little trick-or-treaters have to walk through them to get the candy. (WhawHaHaHaha)

The thinking is lots of people are afraid of Spiders.

We aren’t so much, except the ones that swim in the pool.

We actually had one as our first pet when we got married.

My wife named him ‘Boots’.

Meet ‘Boots’

He was shy, largely housebroken, and a real couch-potato.

Some people thought having a spider for a pet a bit odd and kinda left us alone back then.

What about you?

Are you afraid of spiders?

Do they freak you out?

Me? I kinda got used to them. You have to when you keep them as pets.

…and as the Man of the House!

I’m not afraid of them at all!

No fear. No fear

That’s about it for now knuckleheads. I will try to do a better job next time.

I hope you ALL had a fun time on Halloween and had both some scares and some sweets.

I hope you have an even better weekend! Take pictures.

I have to go throw my pile of Kit Kat wrappers away.

Ciao!

Posted in Archives and tagged halloween, hand me a kit kat, I said NO thats your last one!, No Fear.., sometimes I embellish, spiders, trick or treat, what the heck is a food allergy?

25 Oct 2017

15 Comments

Its your phantom blogger again in an attempt to resurrect a stale, cold, dying blog. After several summons to come back from the dead I thought I would treat you all to some scary updates from our realm of the world.

OK, here’s a word that will send chills down your spine,

School!

Report cards came out last week and our ghouls got straight A’s!

No loping off of fingers or toes this nine weeks!

Dylan made the A Honor Roll. Skye was all , 4’s as well. Adding another spice to the scholastic caldron, their Mom completed her last class for her MBA this past month too! She now has a bootiful new degree to hang on the wall and, AND is officially as smart as me now.

Frightening!

In a recent open house, in which the PTA did NOT ask for money, Skye had her picture of our local suspension bridge hanging in the main hallway.

She did it Van Gogh style

Yes, our little goblin draws better than moi.

Speaking of Art, the girl’s local Art teacher agreed to paint a sunset scene on Dylan’s closet doors.

Oh no!

…she has to see Dylan’s messy room!

It all started when Dylan said she wanted her room painted. Well, this dead-as-door-nails, motionless-as-a-corpse Dad of hers quickly diverted her idea to the closet getting painted due to my ailment and the bloody, ghoulish opening of my belly several times back in September.

I was having none of that at the bloody time.

Skylar even has an interesting teacher who has them growing produce in some areas of the school. Her Children of the Corn have raised, or at last planted and watered a harvest of vegetables.

Like these sweet potatoes below.

Which brings us to the nightmarishly spooky part of the year…

Fall Festivals.

We have been to a few so far this year but apparently we have chosen the lame, er, ahhh…cheap Fall Festivals so far.

Riding Sharks…

Trying to lasso giant bubbles…

a band with a grandmother shaking maracas…

Nothing really to stand up (or play dead) to write home about

(but apparently some sorry blog fodder)

Phew!

That is it.

Take a deep breath.

Good!

Did this inhuman Tick or Treat blog bore you

or relax you?

Have you been sufficiently lulled to peace and a deep sense of rest and relaxation?

Are you now open to suggestions?

Good.

Now you will look at D’s and S’s fund-raising videos from school where you are asked to pledge a dollar for how many laps they run. Vote on your favorite one, and then make a donation to that favorite video.

Understand?

Good.

Click on the videos then cast your vote for the most dreadful one…

Scary Skylar:

Devilish Dylan:

I know, its hard to pick which one is better than the other!

It’s a fundraiser for their school. It brings in needed supplies.

Just pledging a mousey $1 is GREAT!

The more pledges our girls get the cooler the prizes they earn along with a class full of notoriety and self-esteem…

I know…

Creepy!

Before you go….for those that are still reading. I would ask that you say a prayer.

You see…. this guy below… his team is playing the devious, merciless, scoundrels of Ohio State on Saturday. What ever team wins will most likely be crowned BEST EVER College football team and also the Big Ten Champs.

Poor Saquon. Millions of people are calling him the best player in college football this year (see the video) but if his team loses on Saturday it all means nothing. (le sigh)

So please pray for Saquoun (he’s such a humble guy or he would do it himself) to beat the pants off those Ohio State Buckeyes, for Saquon to have a BIG game, and watch all things right in the world come together

..as Good defeats Evil

We Are!

Anywho, before I leave you with my much-anticipated Halloween play list that all of you can play while sitting in the school line or in traffic on the way to work, I want to wish you the SCARIEST Halloween yet!

Have fun, be devilish, don’t be safe….. mhawhahaha..

…and take pictures!

Happy Halloween knuckleheads!

I will try to be scarier next time….

Posted in Archives and tagged come, gif me liberty or gif me death, Go Saquon!, halloween, I aint afraid of no ghosts, It was a graveyard smash, Penn State, scarey, trick or treat, We Are!!

01 Sep 2017

2 Comments

Building Beaver Dams

Well a month or so ago I dropped a big long post on you about our trip to the Biltmore House.

The post was too long and yet still did not capture the magnificence of this building.

I never got to the part about their backyard!

Yes, a trip to the Biltmore House only starts with the house. At one point Mr Biltmore bought all the land around him. The land was used up timber land at the time and he could get it pretty cheap.

So who do you hire to make the country’s largest backyard?

Well, Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of American landscape architecture and the designer of New York’s Central Park as well as several other urban parks in the US. But I am not going to go all Wikipedia on you today. Let’s just say our kids had a blast playing in this big backyard!

First of all Mr. Olmstead created, among many things in the outdoors of this American castle, not 1 but 7 gardens for the owners to stroll through as well as designing the trails down to the Bass Pond and Boat House where the Biltmore’s could fish in their own pond.

The gardens included an Italian Garden,

Diana, the Huntress

a shrub garden, the walled garden,

the mandatory rose garden, an azalea garden and a bright spring garden.

Behind the spring garden was my favorite place, what they called the Conservatory

…but what I called the Palm House, a green house full of specialized palm trees from around the world.

The brochure reads that this glass roofed building nurtured exotic orchids, ferns, and palms the Vanderbilts used to provide flowers for the Biltmore house

It was a very gorgeous place and indeed very exotic.

on first appearance it is a palm tree with scales

This 10 ft tree, known as a Pony Tail or Elephants Foot has little root system and is actually closer to an agave then a tree.

In trying to create a very smaller version of this in my home I could really buy in to the beauty of this concept.

Yes one day my sun room may look like this… nahhhh

After visiting this house, it was such a beautiful day, we decided to go for a hike down the fancy forest.

This was a real treat for me, taking me back to hiking and natural discoveries I had as a youth. I think the same went for mom. The kids loved the surprises of new things and following a little magical stream.

And it was at this point we realized our girls had never experienced this type of nature before. Things like skipping stones or finding frogs and tadpoles, or building beaver dams!

So we actually stopped for a few moments and built our own beaver dam there in Mr. Vanderbilts backyard.

The trail itself was a beautiful creation, not lined with but filled with displays of different types of trees.. again from all over.

And eventually this trail led us down to the Bass Pond.

Yes, can you imagine having these gardens and trails leading to your very own Bass Pond escape?

Well we kept following the trail around the pond, each turn wondering if we might spy something new.

It turns out this was indeed a man-made lake with some nifty man-made waterfalls at the back-end of it.

Do you think the kids enjoyed this?

It was clear our girls had never played in nature like this before since we live on the coast. It was a time for discovery for them and making memories. So we honkered down here for a few minutes while they played and made a few more beaver dams.

While sitting there watching the girls play we realized that the next part of our Summer Getaway was to be in a fancy tent along a river where we would be whitewater rafting the next day. Seeing how much the kids loved playing in this water and the discoveries they were making…

A wonderful afternoon of discovery

…here we decided to forgo the next part of our trip, a tour through the Biltmore Winery, and just make tracks down to where we were going to staying that night so the girls could play some more in nature and build some more dams.

Yes, through all this day of hiking and climbing the Biltmore House I did have however many hernias I had at the time. I was going slow and taking it easy. Walking uphill was no thrill! But as I sit here today with three new scars on my belly I have to wonder…..

Can anybody bring me lunch? I’m starting to get my appetite back..

It was as special, little-house-on-the-prarie day for the girls though. And any parent will tell you seeing those smiles makes it worth it.

Have a great weekend knuckleheads!

I will try to do a better job next time..

Posted in Travel and tagged bass pond, Biltmore House, can I sit down for a minute, hiking, I never promised you a rose garden, palms, pony tail palm, you go on ahead i'll catch up

29 Aug 2017

12 Comments

Feel My Pain..

First, I want to stop and give a shout out to all my friends and followers along the Caribbean coast and especially Houston. My prayers go out to you good people. I hear a lot of good stories of all sorts of people helping each other out amid the flood and destruction.

Second, I want to try something I have never tried before, writing a blog post on drugs.

You see I just am shedding my sedation from a scheduled double hernia repair this morning. It seems all went well in the out-patient surgery. I have about 3 days worth of pain medicine to take yet, including tonight. So if this post gets a little loopy or not proofed well, after I chased the meds with a Bud Lite, you know why.

Kidding!

No beer will be consumed this week in my house it appears. But I did get these stylish hose as a parting gift from my hospital.

If I only had some white flats to go with them.

Sooooo, with lots of time on my hands this week I thought I’d crank out an overdue blog post or two; and maybe leave some sordid comments around WordPress to kill some time.

Looking back to last week, I guess you all heard about our Total Solar Eclipse?

And we almost had one here.

And I was all prepped for it too! Here I am at 9am, ready and raring to go!

And then again around 11pm…

But you see the sky was starting to get crowded

By the time the Solar Eclipse was ready to take place, this is all I could capture with my handy-dandy android camera.

And we were about to get some real weather by solar eclipse time (with all due respect to Houston)

I don’t think the solar eclipse visitors saw this storm coming!

By the time the actual total solar eclipse took place in our area you could not even find the sun! Ah, in more ways than one.

Didn’t I tell you it would rain?

Still, it was pretty cool as it got completely dark eventually. Two minutes later all the nighttime creatures came out (toads, crickets, owls) and you could hear them singing their happy nocturnal songs.

Crickets!

Two minutes later, it was over.

Those toads and crickets must have been so confused.

It was really something to witness, from the eerie nighttime darkness in the middle of the afternoon to the rare celestial event to those poor confused nocturnal animals. It was sad that it didn’t last longer

But.. one of my peers did fare better with the weather up the road and captured these great photographs of the eclipse.

You know, if I had not witnessed the solar eclipse starting to happen I might take these pictures with a grain of salt. I mean we have all seen similar ones, right?

But there was something very, very special watching it happen through our fancy glasses that did make it really miraculous to me. You got to witness part of this great creation of God’s.

Anyway, that was my most recent overdue post. Stay tuned this week for more outdated events 🙂

Its about time for me to dose up again so I must go.

There were a few fun stories from my celestial hernia event this morning, like the nurse who wanted to give me a numbing shot….so I wouldn’t feel the prick of the IV needle go in….and then she couldn’t get the needle to stick, but not nearly as funny as my cancer experience. And, while I entered the hospital with a double hernia scheduled, I actually left the hospital with three hernias repaired. I begged them for a Bud Light in the recovery room after hearing that news!

But no deal.

So tomorrow I have some movies planned in the morning and then in the afternoon head out to my favorite chair

….with my margarita…

Thanks for dropping by 3D knuckleheads!

I will try to do better next time

Posted in Archives and tagged couldn't find the sun, God's creation, hernia repair. what do you mean you found another one!, pretty neat, Spud's McKenzie, total solar eclipse, you really want me to save these glasses for the next solar eclipse?

18 Aug 2017

13 Comments

Back To School already? Our summer seems to have been eclipsed…

Well my friends, we have been singing a lot of this song below in the car this week, going Back To School (que the music)

(sigh)

Yes Domino College…Back To School

C’est la vie!

Tell me, where did the summer go?

So with my girls going back to school on Thursday it had me thinking about,

“Did we do anything fun over the summer this year? it seems to have come and gone too fast.”

waiting for the bell to ring

I don’t know why they look so sad, I have to get up 45 minutes earlier everyday now! Geez! 🙂

Good bye summer vacation!

Well they were a little happier than they appear above. It looks like poor Skylar is dreaming about her time zip lining this summer..

While it looks like Dylan wishes she would rather be hiking and exploring new small streams…

Can you hear it?

She also did some hiking and camping that week.

That same week we did some white water rafting down the Nantahalla

After we took a train ride to the top of the Great Smokey Mountains

And that was after we saw some big old house…

that had gargoyles

and exotic palms

and fancy trees

The girls also met some good friends at Bible School this summer.

And caught butterflies on their toes too.

Truth is we had a hard time keeping up with the girls this summer.

One day they were here and the next day they were gone…

But you know what?

Summer vacation isn’t quite over yet!

You see next Monday they tell us we are getting a Total Solar Eclipse in our town?

I mean, come on!!

Some people will think up ANYTHING to make some money in this town!!!

Yes a “once in a lifetime” “chance of a lifetime” TOTAL solar eclipse is rolling through our state next Monday. The hotels are packed from stem to stern.

And I hear they are all coming HERE to watch it!

Some 2 million visitors are expected this weekend.

The place will be packed!

Malls are advertising it on their marquees, to what, watch it in their parking lot?

Well that is all well and good.

Schools are closed. Banks are closed. Beaches are closed (sorry NJ)

And leave it to someone (or one hundred) to try to make some money off this event.

Yes there are Solar Eclipse parties, specialty drinks, grocery store displays (Moon Pies and Blue Moon beer), t-shirts,

Specialty souvenir glasses (!!)

Why even a local semi-pro soccer stadium is having a band, kids and adult water slides and refreshments and

SELLING TICKETS TO IT!

Selling tickets to a natural occurring event that takes place up in the sky?

“Join us at MUSC Health Stadium for the best eclipse tailgate in the path of totality! We’ll have fun for the whole family including live streams of the eclipse as happens, astronomy related activities, kids zone, local food, full bar, live entertainment, and more! Tickets are $8 for adults.”

(le sigh) Anything to make a buck! 🙂

I guess if I were younger I would be thinking about partying there too.

But, yes, it’s a big deal in South Carolina. There are even those electronic message boards on our highways announcing it,

“Total Solar Eclipse August 21st; Be prepared!“

I guess that could be a real mess on the highways for our state police.

So what is going to happen?

Is the afternoon day going to turn dark? That is pretty neat I suppose.

I might just take the afternoon off too!

Want to join me?

While there are no hotels available in town (a fancy hotel just off of the prestigious Kiawah Island… that faces a grocery store is renting rooms for $600/nt this weekend) we DO still have one bedroom open at our house if you want to witness this event.

The standard fare for the room is dinner out and a case of beer.

Oh, and here’s one more piece of news for the event….

“Its going to rain!‘

It seems to have rained here everyday since the 4th of July. Boy, that would, ahhh, darken everybody’s spirits.

I was planning on working that day. My team should have their jobs rolled up pretty tight by noon next Monday so they can get out of the traffic.

Know what, I might just pop a Blue Moon that afternoon too (while its dark). It is a special day after all. Come join me! Celebrate with 2 million of my closest friends.

I hope to capture what everyone else is doing during the solar eclipse and report back to you sometime next week.

Deal?

As for my girls, while their school did dispatch solar glasses at orientation, they have the day off.

Thats all they care about.

That suits them just fine!