Monday 8 October 2007 @ 1:51 pm
Every few years I get talked into going to the Kansas City Renaissance Festival. For the uninitiated, imagine an outdoors Star Wars convention populated by hippies and D&D players. You more or less wander around yee olde English Village watching shows, buying food, and shopping. The entire thing is a fund raiser for various not-for-profit organizations. When I was younger I was really into this sort of stuff. I’ve found these days I enjoy it mostly for the people watching opportunities, and the boys have fun so it works out. Much like any sort of themed gathering like this, some people come out dressed up. The level of sophistication in said dress up varies greatly. You have anything from very expensive looking period costumes that are truly impressive, to “elves” that appear to the untrained eye to be escapees from a pokemon convention, to teenagers wearing a sheet carrying around a light saber while they talk on their cell phone. There was even a Ghostbuster and a guy dressed like a taco. It’s an odd experience for sure. However, the beer stands serve Fat Tire, which made my day. Logan got some marbles from Uncle Don for his birthday. All things considered it was a good time.
Speaking of Logan’s birthday, he turned nine on the 4th of October. Nine. One more year and I’ll have a child in double digits. My God, he’s almost a teenager .. how did this happen? Riki organized an overnight party thing at a place here in town called “YES”. It’s a sports themed youth center. They had a big basketball court and batting cages as the main attractions. They also had a game room with a couple XBOX 360’s and a Nintendo Wii, which I have a feeling dominated most of the night. Logan purportedly stayed up until 3am, finally passing out on the couch. He had about four or five friends there, although only one actually stayed the night. Still, it was good enough for him. Riki bought him a little cheapo digital camera which he has been sneaking around the house taking stealth pictures of things with ever since. Maybe he’ll be a paparazzi reporter one day and can stalk the Brittney Spears of his generation! A father can only hope. We have a bunch of pictures from the party but I haven’t downloaded them off the camera yet so they’ll have to wait.
Fluffy has been replaced. We are now the proud owners of a baby rat named Brian. Not named after me mind you, but rather Logan’s uncle Miller. Thanks son! The thing is actually a great little pet so far, rats are very calm and people friendly. It will happily sit on a shoulder for hours. They’re very intelligent too, they can be liter trained and can be taught tricks. Some people even walk their rats around on leashes. We’re probably going to go back to the pet store later today and pick up another one as Brian seems somewhat lonely and everything I’ve read says they do much better in pairs. He appears to have a bit of a flea problem which isn’t surprising coming from a pet store. I’m going to need to talk to a vet and get a prescription for a product called Revolution. All the online rat forums claim it’s the bomb. Here’s to hoping this pet lasts a bit longer than the last one.
Finally, I upgraded a bit of software on the website. The picture gallery has a new feature called “Lightbox”. It’s basically a fancy way of displaying pictures, they pop up in a neat little overlay when you click on them. I’m not sure if I like it or not though, so please let me know if you have any problems with it.
