41

I turned 41 this week. I feel like I can remember a time when that would have seemed old. But now I just shrug and think “that sounds about right”.

Karen really rocked the whole birthday thing this year and made me saltenas and a tres leches cake. I married well.

The girls were both very sweet to me too. Diane painted a hedgehog statue for our garden, and Melina got me some bow-ties (which I’ve never owned before). She thought I’d look nice in them. Very sweet on both counts.

Formal-wear aside, poor Melina is having a challenging week. She’s got hormones flooding her adolescent brain and forcing a nasty Jekyll/Hyde effect. You know, if Jekyll constantly sang showtunes and gave hugs from behind, and if Hyde left mean (but hilarious) notes everywhere:

We love her very much.  But this had better be early onset teen angst and not a build-up to the real thing <shudder>.

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Blackberries are everywhere all of a sudden, and we’ve been picking/eating them while we walk. Diane got a particularly big batch this week, and wanted to make ice cream. So she and Karen made blackberry sorbet, garnished with lemon balm. Pretty swanky.

Note: this bird and Diane are competing to see who can eat more berries. Diane is winning.

Every time I think we are going to run out of fun things to do, someone (usually Karen) comes up with something new. This weekend she decided it would be fun for us to try geocaching. Basically, you use GPS to try to find containers that other people have hidden and left hints to find. Sometimes they have a log to write your name in, sometimes there are little goodies. It’s a low-stakes global treasure hunt. I think we are about 5-10 years behind on this one, but WOW there are a lot of things hidden, even just around our neighborhood.

Note: here we are after discovering our first cache!

One more thing I have to mention this week. Diane is so insightful. She comes up with really smart ideas/explanations/concepts that other people (including me) just don’t.

We watched Independence Day last week and had this exchange:

Movie (Jeff Goldblum): the aliens are using our own satellites against us!
Diane: <turns to us> they (the US Army) are going to have to destroy the satellites!
Karen and Zach: <dumbfounded> Ummm…yeah, that’s a really good idea.

Note: none of the screenwriters thought of this. I’ve probably seen the movie a dozen times and never thought of that. But…duh. We can’t destroy the aliens, but if the aliens need our satellites to coordinate a global attack, we can certainly take out our own satellites.

Here’s another gem from tonight:

Diane: I caught a firefly in my hand!
Zach: Awesome, is it lighting up?
Diane: No.
Zach: I wonder why that is?
Diane: It’s probably so his friends won’t fall into the same trap.

I mean…probably not, but if fireflies were smart and cared about their friends, that’s exactly what they would do.