My daughter is so much like my wife, it's scary...

They say that the mother's curse is that you will have a child that will act just like you did when you were a child. In my case, there are a few things that Julia does that it totally me. Like my inability to get out of the door without a prolonged getting dressed process that involves me taking an insanely long amount of time to get ready.

Julia seems to have that ability in spades. The speed that this kid moves is scary in that now I know how my Mom and Dad must have felt to watch me move so slow. You don't know how often I have to restrain myself from vocally urging her to move faster. I end up taking a deep breath more often than not and then, after a few more moments of inaction, I'll vocally urge her to move it or lose it.

Laura goes nuts trying to get her ready because Julia is the exact opposite of her getting ready. She'll moan at Julia to hurry up and then point at me as if to say, "This is all your fault. She got this from you!"

Julia also has my love of all things electronic. She's a gamer. She started by just watching me play video games. She would sit there and watch me play the same game, Rayman 2, over and over. I got so good at the game that I could play it while watching TV.

Unlike me, she's a girl, but besides that she seems to be a mirror image of Laura not only for facial features, but with her attitude as well.

I think, if you've ever read my notes here, that I've mentioned that my wife, Laura, is rather direct and strong willed. She's not afraid to stand up for herself or vocalize her true feelings, which sometimes gets her in trouble. That happened a lot more in the past when she was all young and spirited. Now that she's older, she's mellowed a bit. Thank God... Just kidding, honey!

Laura say that Julia is learning bad road rage habits from me as I'll voice my displeasure at the various stupid people that cut me off or are being slow. I counter back to Laura that there have been many times when we'll be behind a slow person in a parking lot. I'll mutter, "Come on!" Julia will add, "Honk at him!"

Now I'll complain, but I never honk. "She didn't learn that from me!" I retort.

Laura smirks at this.

Recently, Julia went to play with a friend at the park. I told her to be back by sundown, but she walked through the door about 15 minutes later. She looked upset. I asked her what was wrong. Apparently, when they had gotten to the park, Julia's friend decided that she wanted to play another game with some other friends. Julia didn't like this. She's very much an alpha female when it comes to playing. She generally likes telling kids what she wants to do.

Julia vented about not wanting to play the game by adding, "I came over to the park to play with her. I didn't come to the park so she can play that stupid game with other kids. She needs to understand that!"

Suddenly, Julia had an idea, "I'm going to take Mommy with me to the park and we're going to tell her what's what!"

I had to work hard to not laugh. That reminded me a lot of Laura.

Saturday, we were at the mall. We at at the food court. Julia went to Burger King. I went to a Japanese grill. Laura got Taco Del Mar.

Julia and Laura had to wait a long time for Julia's dinner of chicken nuggets and fries. I was already starting to eat when they showed up. Laura left to go get her dinner while Julia ate hers.

Julia grabbed the bags and opened the kid's meal.

She looked inside and muttered, "Thanks a LOT lady! She dumped my fries all over the bottom of my bag!"

She sighed, shook her head and added, "That is NOT very nice."

I have heard many horror stories about Laura's teenage years. We feel that we are in for an entertaining teenager.

My daughter doesn't take checks...

Julia gets paid on Sundays. We decided to give her an allowance a few years ago at an huge two dollars a week. I thought she'd scoff. She was thrilled! Then she was even more thrilled when I upped it last year to four dollars a week.

Her allowance is dependent on her doing chores and cleaning up after herself. On the weeks where she makes no attempt to clean, I tend to forget to pay her. If she remembers, I'll make her clean.

Yesterday, she had cleaned up a lot of toys and had even gone through some old ones to put into storage or to give away. Laura told me to pay her.

I looked in my wallet. All I had was a twenty dollar bill.

I said, "I can't pay you."

Julia's face sank.

"Unless you have change for a twenty?"

She shook her head.

"I could write you a check?" I asked.

I was kidding, of course. Being eight, she doesn't have a bank account. I'd have to cash it for her anyway, so it would be redundant to cash a check that I wrote in my credit union when I could just withdraw the money when I'm there.

Julia wrinkled her nose and said in a very serious voice, "I don't take checks."

"Oh, you don't?" I laughed.

"No. It's cash only. Or I'll take change, too."

She's young, but she has her priorities.

Laura was the main character in my crazy dream...

The comedian Daniel Tosh said in his stand up CD "True Stories I Made", which by the way is highly recommended by me if you are not easily offended and can stand jokes that go on a stream of consciousness where you're not sure how you got to his end point.

Wait... I forgot to mention what he said. He said something like on whether or not it's possible to describe a dream without sounding mentally challenged.

I had one about Laura the other night that was so vivid that I actually remembered most of it. Usually, a lot of my dreams involve crazy action that never resolves itself. They seem so real and disturbing, but when I wake up, I realize that I can't remember what was so disturbing in the first place.

My dreams usually run through several incarnations.

- The 'tornado' dream - This type of dream happens a few times a month. In this dream, I or my family and I are stuck out in the middle of nowhere while tornadoes on every side of us/me are closing in. I/we take shelter, but usually in some place inappropriate like a basement with nothing but windows. The dream never resolves itself and I usually wake up anxious to get out of weather that isn't there. This particular dream started when I was a kid when my family and I would stay every summer weekend in a small trailer that was centered perfectly on both sides between the Platte river and the small lake in front of us. There was no tornado shelter, so if the weather hit the fan, there was no place to go. My dreams then usually ended with our dinky trailer getting picked up and chucked in either the river or the lake.

- The 'new location' dream - In this dream, I am in a mystery city living in a mystery house. In this dream, I'm usually by myself without my immediate family, although some people I know inhabit the dream.

- The 'I'm Rich!' dream - In this dream, I hit the jackpot! This is always followed by the crushing realization that I am not rich when I wake up. That sucks.

- The 'I'm getting fired!' dream - In this dream, I do something really stupid like steal from my employer, surf porn at work, or piss everyone off.

- The 'I'm naked' dream - Good God is this one frequent. It's not that I'm totally naked, just usually naked from the waist down. It's either at school or at work.

- The 'what the frak?' dream - A dream that defies all description and logic.

This dream I had the other night seemed like a 'what the frak?' dream, but it actually made a little sense.

So here's what happened. My wife, Laura, was planning a heist on a department store. For some reason, she chose to rob the Scheels sporting goods store. I'm not sure why she chose this, but it seemed to make sense to her. My brother, Bill, was also in on the heist.

Each day, we'd drive down to Scheels to stake it out. On the way, we'd pass a stretch of road where we'd see a cougar just walking along the road. Each time we saw the cougar, Laura would have me take the wheel and she'd get out her rifle (which she doesn't own, by the way) and start shooting rounds at the cougar. Each time, the cougar would scatter and so would all the people in the neighborhood.

I'd chastise Laura for this reckless behavior because 1. I'm pretty sure shooting a rifle in a crowded neighborhood is against the law and 2. it's not exactly being on the down low for staking out a robbery target if you're firing rifle shots on the way there.

Because of the constant firing of Laura's rifle, Bill and I decided that we needed to go in disguise. So of course, we decided that we would dress up as Jedis from Star Wars. I was dressed up as the Liam Neeson character from the God-awful Phantom Menace film.

One day, Laura hit the jackpot while on the way to our stake out. She saw the cougar again and decided to act. She pulled out the rifle and fired at the cougar, which was just about to pounce on a man and his child. The cougar dropped dead and the man thanked Laura profusely.

Because I had been worried about being caught, Laura had to rub it in.

"See?" she sneered. "I didn't get caught. The guy even thanked me for shooting it!"

It was right about this point in the dream where I decided that I couldn't go through with the heist. For one thing, I was worried about getting caught. If both of us went on this heist and we both got caught, who would watch Julia? Besides, why Scheels? Did they have a massive amount of cash on hand?

Laura was sure of the target because they didn't have security guards. I was thinking more of the security cameras and silent alarms.

I backed out. I told Laura that I couldn't do it.

She asked me, "What are you, a pussy?!"

That's about when I woke up.

Laura loved the dream by the way.

Hot Rod and Space Chimps...

I just finished the movie starring Andy Sandberg called "Hot Rod". In the movie, a guy named, Rod, has always been trying to do stunts to emulate his deceased Dad, who used to set up stunts for Evel Kenieval. He rides around on his moped in a stunt suit wearing a fake mustache and generally fails at every jump he tries.

All that changes when his step-Dad, Frank, who Rod longs to beat the crap out of, is stricken with a heart defect diagnosis and needs a transplant, which the family can't afford. Rod resolves to do a big jump that even Evel couldn't do to raise money for the operation so he can get Frank better so he can kick his ass.

The premise is funnier than the movie. To be fair, it has some hilarious sequences that make little sense in a logical movie, but feel at home here. Like when he finds out that Frank is dying before he can kick his ass, he goes to his 'happy place' in the forest and proceeds to dance verbatim the Kevin Bacon construction site solo dance from Footloose. Things like that are sprinkled through this movie.

The movie stars Sissy Spasek as Rod's mother. Bill Hader and Danny McBride appear as his two buddies. Will Arnett plays a rich jerk that is dating Rod's secret crush, played by Isla Fisher of Wedding Crashers.

I was asking my brother, Bill, if he had seen this movie, but he had not.

"But I've seen Space Chimps!" he said, which also starred Andy Sandberg as the voice of the lead chimp whose grandfather had been the first chimp in space.



I laughed because Space Chimps is not awful, but it's really kind of embarrassing to watch. It had some definite potential, but it's as if they stopped trying halfway through and just tried to shove it out in time for Summer. Want proof? Rent the movie. You'll notice that the first part of the movie, which takes place in the space training camp for the chimps is fairly detailed and had some good jokes. Then there is the second part, which is set on a distant planet. It's one of the ugliest planets that I've ever seen. It's as if the programmers showed the pre-rendered version of the planet's surface and when told how long it would take to render with effects like textures, shading and what not, the producers on the film balked and told them to cut some corners. That is how ugly the planet looks.



The "villain", and I'm using that term very loosely here, is voiced by Jeff Daniels. Yes, that Jeff Daniels. He's hardly recognizable playing the incredibly annoying, effeminate and high-pitched alien, Zartog, who finds a piece of space equipment that made it to his planet and is using it to torture and terrorize the residents of the planet. All of whom look like squishy, shiny aliens crossed with gummy bears. The chimps make it through space and apparently the last bit of rendered graphics and make it to the ugly planet. Once there, they encounter a helpful glowing creature that screams a lot and looks like a running boob. And when I say a boob, I mean it looks like just that.

I saw this the first time at our really crappy dollar theater on West Center. I took Julia to it and was treated to a constant buzzing from the arcane speaker system. The movie looked like absolute crap because it was grainy and scratched from the constant showings. Turns out, DVD does it no justice. It looks bad...

Top Story: Chinese food befuddles old couple. News at 11.

A new chain restaurant just opened in our neighborhood, Panda Express. When we first saw it being build, Laura thought that it would be a Wendy's because it had a Wendy's color and shape. Soon it had a sign up announcing the new Panda Express restaurant.

I had been meaning to try Panda Express, but I just hadn't had the right opportunity because Laura generally doesn't go for Chinese food and Julia has never tried it. So if I want it, I have to go and get it alone.

The other night provided a perfect opportunity for me to get it. Julia and I had been coming home from a school function, and Laura was at work, which provided me the opening I was waiting for.

I told Julia we'd get her meal at Burger King after I got mine, so we stopped at Panda Express first. The drive in wasn't working yet, so we had to run in. Immediately, it was as if I hit a brick wall decorated with indecisive old people.

There was a couple there that appeared to be in their early 60s or late 50s. Either way, it was clear from the start that they had never ever set foot in a Chinese restaurant before. The woman behind the glass was explaining the process which is simple enough. If you order a 2 dish entree, you choose one of four "sides", which include fried rice, steamed rice, noodles and something else. Then you choose two of the main dishes to go with it.

They were startled by the myriad of choices in that they had never seen any of these dishes before. The next several minutes consisted of one or both asking, "What is this?" or "What does this taste like?" Pretty much any and all dishes had to be explained to the couple. I tried not to look at them. Instead, I was just looking slightly up and sometimes back at the menu board.

I looked down at Julia, who was clinging to my leg and placing her head on my stomach in utter boredom. She said, "Let's go!" in a whisper.

I explained that I still hadn't ordered and that she was just going to have to be patient.

It was at this moment that the wife turned and said to me, "I'm sorry that you have to wait for us."

I smiled and lied, "Oh, it's no bother."

Finally, they had decided that they were going to get started, but soon enough, there was a snag. The wife had just told the woman behind the glass that she wanted rice for her side. Just as she was scooping up steamed rice and placing it on her plate, the husband asked incredulously, "Since when is rice considered a side?"

Now I can understand maybe why he was confused. To be fair, their use of the term 'side' is more like calling it the bed of the dish. It's generally what the Chinese food rests on in most restaurants.

Finally, they started to get going, but when I finally got my say in my first side, I had hit another snag. The couple was stuck in the second half of the food tables. They again started to ask what every dish was like, what crab rangoon was, and what egg rolls were.

Julia at this point was about to exit this world from boredom that was fatal. Again she asked to leave and again I had to remind her that I had not yet gotten my food. She sighed and moaned, "I'm so hungry!"

"Well, if you only ate Chinese food, we'd be in the right place."

I got to go around the couple since they were holding up the whole line. I paid and motioned for Julia to come.

"Finally!" Julia exclaimed.

Watched 'Zach and Miri Make a..."

I just watched the newest Kevin Smith film called Zach and Miri Make a Prono. I'm purposely misspelling the title so it doesn't get stopped by internet filters. A lot of chain stores stocked it with just the title of 'Zach and Miri', which is shown above.

Kevin Smith is the guy who directed Clerks, Mallrats (loved it), Chasing Amy (meh), Dogma (loved), Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (loved) and Clerks II (very good).

His movies are generally dialogue driven with a lot of character back and forth. Usually, there's a lot of cursing and a lot of vulgar discussions. In Zach and Miri, Zach, played by Seth Rogan, and Miri, played by Elizabeth Banks, are two friends who, on the eve of their high school reunion (in the middle of winter for some reason), find their utilities turned off. In danger of getting thrown in the poor house and realizing that they haven't done anything of value, Zach gets the bright idea to shoot an adult movie to pay off their debts due to the fact that all the people they went to high school would probably buy it.

They scrap together a coffee shop co-worker as the producer, a hockey goalie as the camera man, and get some enthusiastic locals to be in the picture with them. The original idea is a Star Wars rip-off, but bad luck occurs the night before shooting and they are forced to shoot in the coffee shop.

The main conflict in the movie is 'Are Zach and Miri going to follow through on their love scene?' and 'Will it ruin their friendship?'

It has some big laughs here and there, but I would only recommend it to people that are not offended by some very raunchy humor in places.

Water world

Water World in Denver was pretty fun. It's the largest water park in the country and features many speed slides and raft rides.

On the web site for Water World, you could rent a cabana for the day. The cabana has a table and chairs, free wi-fi internet if you have a laptop, a cooler with ice and two sun chairs.

Laura insisted, for her sanity since she hates crowds, that we rent one. For an extra 99 dollars, you could also get the deluxe cabana purchase, which included 5 rental tubes, a fan, some meals, 10 drinks and various other things. I crunched the numbers and opted not to get the deluxe cabana since you are allowed to bring your own drinks in as long as they are sealed, so that was covered. I then checked the prices of the food stands next to the cabanas and they weren't that expensive either.

When we got there, we were met at our cabana by 'Bill' and 'Ted', our cabana boys. 'Bill' was our main cabana boy, but 'Ted' was tagging along until 2 in the afternoon. It was immediately funny to us that they both looked like unshaven stoners, which was quite the contrast from the rest of the staff, which were shaven at least.

'Bill' told us the basics of the cabana, which wasn't much, and handed us a "menu" of five items.

He said in a stoner droll, "You can order these off the menu, and I'll bring them to you. Or... you can just walk over there (points at the food stands across the way) and get it yourself for a lot cheaper."

We opted to walk across and get it ourselves.

Laura spent some time sunning herself and reading while Julia and I did some rides and reported that she was quite entertained by 'Bill' and 'Ted' walking by periodically to check on the cabanas.

The first slide we went on was just up the hill from us. It was a pretty conventional slide that was fairly tall with several hills. I went down first. I was moving so fast by the time I hit the home stretch toward the bottom that I was literally afraid I wasn't going to slow down in time before I ran out of room at the end. Thankfully, it did.

I got up to watch Julia's plummet and kind of laughing to myself about it. She was NOT going to like this.



She slid down. I could tell that she was trying to slow down because she had her legs spread wide. She got to the bottom, got up and said, "I am never going on that again! It's so scary!"

So for the rest of the day, Julia, Laura and I settled for rides that were fairly benign. Usually, they involved getting a small inner tube and going down a fairly speedy twisting and turning water track. We went on those quite a few times.

The first time we went on a tube ride like that, we didn't know which way to start from. We thought we saw where to go, but when we got to where the ride started, we saw no inner tubes. Instead, we saw a kid standing under a sun shade guarding some red inner tubes. We didn't see any other people walking toward the ride with red tubes. They were carrying tan inner tubes.

I asked the girl there, "What are these tubes for?"

"These are our valet inner tubes. You get a wrist band when you buy the valet service and you don't have to carry a tube up the hill."

"How much does that cost?" I asked.

"22 dollars."

Ouch.

Most people looked like they opted to save the money and just carry up the inner tubes.

This wasn't as easy as it looked.

We walked back down to the start of the line, if there was one, and picked up an inner tube. It was fairly heavy. I consider myself decently strong, and yet I was having a hard time carrying these things up the hills. A lot of the time, it was just me and Julia. Considering Julia is only 8 years old, I didn't get a lot of help out of her. I started to sing slavery songs as I was carrying the tubes up the hills to get to the top of the ride.

I started to think that they were wasting some good free labor at Water World. They could stop people who were walking up the hill anyway and make they carry something else up to the top.

By the end of the day, I thought my calves were going to fall off. For days, the very act of walking became an ordeal. I thought I was going to scream every time I stood up.

Julia really enjoyed Water World. She especially liked a ride called "Lost River of the Pharoahs", which was a multi-person raft ride in the dark with all sorts of ancient Egyptian-like effects and decorations. We also liked one called "Voyage to the Center of the Earth" which has the story of a construction crew accidentally poking a hole in a big warp in the Earth's crust that leads to dinosaurs. It had some decent thrills, especially when the strobe lights hit and I couldn't tell which way we were sliding.

One of the things we tried was "The Wave" which was a dual 30 mile per hour wave pool that simulated surfing on a body board. I saw some people trying it and it didn't look that hard to me.

You take one of the body boards and you kind of fall into the wave from the top. You can either enter on your stomach or you can enter on your knees. I chose to enter on my knees. The next thing I knew, I had flipped over and was thrown around the wave to the end. I felt like my body had been twisted in several different directions.

I got up, pulled the wedgie out of my bottom and looked up to see Laura laughing her head off at me. Even Julia was laughing at me.



I decided though, that I wanted to try it again. I walked back with the body board to the top of the wave and the life guard said to me, "This time, I think you're going to want to lay on your stomach."

"Thanks," I muttered.

I managed to get through this try without wiping out.



Later, Julia said that she wanted to try it. She was pretty nervous trying it out. A few of the surfers who had basically camped out there all day were giving her tips. One man was telling her to hold onto the sides tight. Some teenage girls near the ride were yelling encouragements of "You go girl!" and "You can do it!"

Julia fell into the wave on her stomach and managed to get ride the wave without wiping out.

The teenage girls cheered for her. Julia was excited that not only had she made it without wiping out, but she also loved that the girls cheered for her.

Before we left that day, we all applied sun screen. I had urged everyone to put it on every 90 minutes or so, which Julia and I did. Laura, on the other hand, refused because she wanted to get some sun.

I tried to reason with her because we go through this all the time. Laura has very fair skin, and it doesn't take much sun for her to turn from shiny whiteness to shiny redness befitting a boiled lobster.

When she refused to put on the sunscreen, I said, "Here's how this is going to end. 'I hurrrrt! Owww! Rub some Aloe on me!'"

I mimicked Laura every time she gets too burned. It looks bad when she finally gets out of the sun and then it starts to get worse and worse as it reddens even more and then gets blisters on part of the skin, which I'm sure is very healthy for her.

When we left Water World, it was with this same problem. We got back to the hotel and Laura felt sick. It was as if she had a fever. She had the chills, but at the same time felt hot and begged me not to turn off the air conditioner.

I kept saying to her, "Gee, who was it that was predicting this was going to happen? Oh yeah, it was me!"

"Shut up!" she moaned.

I didn't escape unscathed, either. I had some mysterious rashes in several private places. There were the two long red rash streaks on my inner thighs from all the walking. Also, there were squared shaped scabs from where my mesh-lined shorts had constricted. It looked like I had been punched in the trunk by someone I was so bruised. To top it off, my back was burned. I didn't think I was burned because of my front, but when I took a shower, I felt the burn.

The day ended on kind of sad note, though. A man drowned in the large wave pool that Julia and I had swam in several times that day, which was right in front of the cabana area.

I had walked over to the locker room at 5:30 to change close before the park closed at 6 pm. As I walked out of the locker room, there were medical personnel running around and lifeguards were ushering people away from the wave pool area. I walked around the area to get back to the cabana and noticed that there were people huddled around the other side of the pool from our cabana. Laura informed me that while I was in the locker room, the lifeguards had pulled a man out of the water. She said the man's face was gray and when they turned him on his side, water and foam oozed out of his mouth. They performed CPR on him for a long while before the ambulance took him away. We found out a few days later in the paper and on several Colorado news web sites that the man had died.