Thursday, July 31, 2008

Our favorite new blog...

Agi and I stumbled onto a new "fake" blog that is hilarious. IF you've ever encountered newlyweds at BYU, than this blog is for you... Because Seriously, we are So Blessed....

Its a worthwhile investment of time on a lazy Saturday afternoon, to read the whole thing, from first post to present. IF you aren't laughing hysterically after two minutes, then you don't have a funny bone.

The posted comments alone are also worth the read...

http://seriouslysoblessed.blogspot.com/


My only regret is that I didn't think of it first...

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Best. Advert. Ever.

Poor Kirby Heyborne can't catch a break. Aghast Mormons everywhere turned on him for showing up in the background of a Miller Lite commercial. And now his positively awesome new Snickers commercial gets yanked in the UK for being allegedly homophobic. Say Whaaattt?? I guess I had no idea all speed-walkers were gay until they protested this video and got Snickers to pull it... Too bad, since Mr. T hasn't been in anything this good or funny since the A-Team. I could imagine a whole series of these commercials...

I totally want a Snickers Gatling Gun now.

GET SOME NUTS! :-)

Thursday, July 24, 2008

To all those who would use Germany's adoration of Obama as a reason to make him president....

...don't forget, Germans also love DAVID HASSELHOFF!



I 'specially love the high leg kicks, tight jeans, and the coup de grace... KITT THE TALKING CAMARO, LIVE ONSTAGE! Bear in mind this video is only a few years old... :-)

Like I said, lets not get all hasty in judging German adoration of someone as worthy of our attention just yet :-)

Monday, July 21, 2008

the Kitty post....A sop to my children...

Just a quicky post. After enduring 3 hours of caterwauling from my whiny kids (this following the posting of their new & improved job charts) I decided to give in to a long-standing demand of theirs and post a few pics of the them with their brand new kitten. SO I suppose I am 40 years early. I didn't expect to begin telling funny "cat stories" until I was half senile.

I'll try to keep it to captions and pics. Here goes...


Here's Ali's portrait of the new kitty "Cosmo".



Wide angle view of the little cutie. Just give her 6 months. I'll be ready to dump her in the woods by then... :-)



Livid "I HATE YOU!" kitty. Immediately following flea-dip shampooing.



Pic of our other cat. No longer cute. Has perpetual serial killer look about her. This is her "I will murder you in your sleep" face.



Andrew's contribution to the group. This is from "Kitty-toss Olympics on Sunday afternoon".



And this is Aidan's "Just for the Ladies" pose. Awwww.

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

I especially liked Barack & the unicorn...

The little Palmer soldier...

As a by-product of cleaning out & moving our storage unit, we came across my old duffel bag of army gear. Andrew's wildest dreams were thus fulfilled. He's obsessed with going to an service academy or at least BYU ROTC and then joining the Special Forces. You can imagine how happy he was to be able to parade around the house for three days kitted out in my old gear...


I don't know what is more depressing--that Andrew can now fit into BDU's I wore only 5 years ago, or the the fact that five years ago I ACTUALLY COULD FIT INTO THESE BDU's!

I think I am off to do a few more pushups now :-) ...

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Aidan's a deacon!

Oh yeah--in my haste to bore the world with my insomnia-based garage story, I left out the best part of the weekend... Yesterday Aidan received the priesthood and was ordained a deacon. I'm proud of him. He's a good young man, with a firm conviction of what's right, and a great example for everyone he comes in contact with. I can even overlook the spider-on-Ali's-bed hijinks.

He's excited to finally have the Aaronic Priesthood, and is looking forward to passing the sacrament for the first time next week.

Garage capers...

I hate being up at 4 AM. While there are worse things in life (ha-believe me I know), being awake when you'd rather not be awake is still a mildly irritating form of suckitude. My fault though. I conked out on my bed at about 8PM last night, thus ensuring that by around 3 AM I'd be wide awake.

What was I thinking? Oh yeah, I made the mistake of lying down to thumb through an old "Punisher" comic of mine that I'd unearthed via my just-completed three day garage restoration project. Andrew really wanted to read it, and I figured I should go through it again just to make sure there wasn't any inappropriate language in it (there wasn't). Ha. Never mind Frank Castle's endless and hugely creative methods of eliminating gangsters and other assorted "unpunished" criminals splotched across the glossy pages, I'm worried about the language :-). Stems from me being a profane little punk as a teenager, and me wanting to save Andrew from that particularly odious habit (trust, me, hard to break, even after 20 years)... In a nutshell--no, he's not going to get to read it, even though the language was charmingly innocent--(seriously!) along the lines of "stop it! You jerk!" coming from the from the supposed hard-core mobster type, just prior to being tossed into the bear pit and getting wacked-via-hungry-polar-bear at the NYC zoo... Funny! Just how I imagined the Sopranos verbalizing their inner frustrations when facing imminent death at the paws of a furry white disembowler.

SO. Apparently the Punisher's Methods of Mayhem have a tranquilizing affect. I was out like a light, and thus up at 3 AM.

Natch, this is only about an hour after Agi had rolled into bed, ensuring that waking up and doing some light emailing/net surfing/news reading in bed is not going to fly. I tried to just lay there and will my eyes back shut, but was treated to a charming late nite/early morning visit from Ali, who just woke up from a nightmare involving spiders. Thanks Aidan!

Apparently, knowing his sister has quite the aversion to our friends of arachnoid persuasion, he laid out a fake one on her bed last night. Super.

So Ali's now climbing into the center of our bed, meaning there are now TWO women ensuring I am confined to an ever-shrinking 7 inches of bed space on the far left hand edge of my Serta. Thankfully, that lasted only 5 minutes. Ali noticed the kitten in our room and decided that with its protection, she'd be safe from the Furry Ones in her own bed. SO back she went. Leaving an even more awake dad behind and a pretty grumbly Agi.

WHere was I? O yeah. Sleepy, Punisher, garage project. That';s actually where I wanted to focus. My just completed three day garage project.

Before:



During:





After:



Starting Friday, I moved (with nominal help from me boys) all of our accumulated stuff from the garage out onto the RV pad. It was nice to see the newly spacious garage bare to the walls. Then, later that evening, I picked up a U-haul trailer and spent a couple hours finally emptying out our Spanish Fork storage unit. Saturday morning , all of THAT stuff was unloaded and added to the pile next to the house. Our yard now looked like THE white trash yard sale to end all white trash yard sales. All we were missing was Ashton sitting on the porch, banjo pickin'...

I spent the rest of Saturday painting the garage. And by paint, I mean TRY TO KILL MYSELF. Holy crap, that was a lot of real estate to cover with a brush and a roller. You know that flimsy top rung on a step ladder? THe one that always says in big white letters "DO NOT STAND OR SIT ON THIS AREA"? YEEEAAAAAh. Now picture a sizable dude like myself balanced on his toes, on the top of said step, straining upward with a roller in one hand and a paint tray in the other slapping paint on the ceiling. Good times, good times.

At that point I had pushed through to Saturday evening, where, after a full day of hauling heavy garbage and painting, I was looking at the finished walls and decidedly UNFINISHED ceiling, and trying to rationalize how good the place would really look if I just went ahead and left the ceiling coated in spots of primer, spackle, & finishing tape...

It was tempting. Agi was particularly evil about it too--purring--and I quote: "It is just the garage. IT looks fine. Just leave the ceiling for a later project...". But noo! I girded up the proverbial loins and spent the next 3 hours, until 11PM, doing the ceiling too. Happy I did.

I spent all day yesterday moving our crap back in, nicely arranged, maximizing space, organizing, etc.... you know, all that TLC-channel twaddle, and now I have by all accounts a pretty decent looking garage. WIth my own white-trash cracka office in the far corner, and neat walls of organized boards & hooks. I still have a huge pile of yet-to-be-unpacked luggage, but at least it is a well-organized, feng-shui-ish pile...

And this takes me back to the present-- wide awake at (now) 530 AM Tuesday morning, after crashing way to early Monday night.

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Nozzle Rage....



I know its a vastly simplified overstatement, but still....

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Family weekend...

Had a blast this 4th O' July weekend with the family--as previously noted, the CA palmers jetted up I-15 from Menifee, CA and graced us all with their humorous presence--they stayed over with us in Nephi on Wednesday night. We had fun hanging out and catching up, while the kids all roughed it in the backyard tents. Couple days later came the aforementioned wigged-up Stadium-of-Fire awesomeness, followed by a Sunday evening of food, fun, & frivolity at the Kieffer's, where we pulled the Hungarian drinking game "Snubli" out of mothballs. We only went one round, and Matt lucked out as the final "winner" getting to down a raw tortilla, wrapped up with peanut butter, ranch dressing, and salsa. Wrapped up the night with a killer round of (as it's known in the extended Palmer/Kieffer clans) "the divorce game" otherwise known as Settlers of Cataan.


Sleepover city!

Later that night a good chunk of the kids piled into the Nephi Palmer van and headed south for a sleepover. Aubrey, Sarah, Emma, and Ali slept out in the tent, and David stayed inside with Ashton.

Naturally they all went to sleep at 130 AM (following a late-nite showing of "The Santa CLause 3" on DVD in the tent), and woke up 4 hours later. I drew the short straw and slept on the couch in order to be within earshot. And take the brunt of the early-morning melee.

Later that morning we all headed up to Magleby's Fresh in Spanish Fork for brunch with the group, and for final goodbyes to Jared & Em, prior to their heading back down I-15.




It was a blast, and we'll repeat it all in November, come Thanksgiving... Or perhaps earlier! --should my job search go so poorly that I finally give in and go to California, for a fun and exciting career within the uniformed California Penal System--breaking up prison yard gang fights, and hunting for contraband all the non-fun places....

Budapest reunion fun...

Getting away from my funky Miley Cyrus wig below, we also had a great mini-reunion with friends from Budapest. We got together at Rock Canyon Park for a few hours Thursday night and shot the breeze (does anyone still use that phrase?). It was great catching up with the Belka's & Thorstensen's (both families here locally now in Springville & Provo, respectively), the McCotters (on their way to a new post in DC) and The Gatrell/Polizotto's (on loan from the UK for the holidays).

Good times! For a minute, it was just like being back at our little sacrament meeting in BP. It was GOOD to catch up...

A few pics of the group...

Group Pic of the kids....






Lansing Gatrell, Cade & Ashley McCotter



Ashton and Hunter Thorstenson

Stadium of Fire! Miley Cyrus! YAY!!!!

Tuesday morning--I have a little catching up to do. That, and I am under orders from the Boss to post something-anything- large enough to push down the disturbing photo of my 8 week old Vizsla attempting to get it on with our poor lab's face. Mission accomplished, babe. But no guarantee you'll iike the replacement photo:



OHHH YEEEAAAHHHHH. THat is me and my brother Jared in our Hannah Montana wigs, getting ready to take our two rabid-Miley-Cyrus-fan daughters to the Stadium of Fire show. We both decided months ago, when we bought the tickets, that merely buying tickets to the show that would fulfill all of our daughters' dreams, was NOT ENOUGH. They'd have to pay for it. And what better way to embarrass our 9 year olds, than taking them to the show in HM wigs and making general arses of ourselves...

....and here are the Palmer cousins, Ali and Aubrey, decked out and ready for Miss Cyrus....

Yep. We wore these stinking wigs for the duration--from the time we left the house until Miss Cyrus wrapped up her encore. Whoo Hoo! Needless to say, we were pretty popular with the masses. We were stopped for pictures in the stadium too many times to count. Everybody wanted a photo with us and our daughters. The girls were good sports and really got into it, and we got a lot of vocal kudos (all from the ladies) for doing this for our daughters. DUdes looked basically uncomfortable--especially when they were being poked vigorously by their respective mates and told, in no uncertain terms, that THEY WOULD MOST DEFINTELY BEING DOING THIS FOR THEIR DAUGHTERS IN THE FUTURE. Ha.

Sadly, we did not make the Jumbo-Tron, which had been our main goal for the evening.

Apparently Lavell Edwards Stadium has taste standards, or something.

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Somebody read the Kama Sutra backward....


Call me crazy, but of our two 8-week-old puppies, I'm guessing one didn't didn't read the procreation manual properly, and the other is about to be scarred for life...

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Good news/Bad news...

Today's bad news is that, as my Spidey sense indicated over the weekend, I did not get the Colorado job.

In the good news department, I saw Hellboy interviewed by James Lipton on Inside the Actor's Studio...




BOOO-YAAAAHH!!