Fun fun fun in the sweltering hot sun...

Saturday was declared a beach day and we all packed up and headed out to Fitzroy Provincial Park.  We headed out around 9:30am just in time to catch John Foley humping it on his pimped up riding lawnmower along Carp Rd.  Man he looked hot.  I actually thought I might finally get to see somebody spontaneously combust.  But no such luck.  Not that I wish John ill, not at all, but how many of you blog readers out there can actually say you saw somebody spontaneously combust?  Yeah, I thought so.

Sand monkeys ... the sand really sticks to you when you're all greased up in 30 spf sunscreen.

BBQ for T-bone

Here's a shot of me "getting ready" for Brick's and T-Bone's birthday bbq party thang.



It turned out that they were NOT going with the Hawaiian Cowboy theme as per usual.  Boy did I feel silly.  But not as silly as this guy...





The next one is a shot of the birthday boys together with their gi-mongous Black Forrest cake from Costco. I don't know why they choose to light the entire top of the cake instead of using birthday candles, but hey, it made for a great pic.

The big sting

Poor little wasp didn't know what hit him.



If these were killer bees (aka Africanized Honey Bees) I'd be dead.  And for those of you wondering, here is a list of do's and don'ts for you in case you ever find yourself in close quarters with an AHB.  I like the one that says "DO NOT try to remove bee hives without professional help.".  It reminds me of the time that my cousin and I decided to remove a bee hive from his garage door up at his cottage.  We didn't have any "professional help" so after a couple of beers we settled for an aerosol can and a match.  Man did we create a commotion.  Let's just say one of us was running and the other was waving a 3 foot flame around while spinning like a top.  Ahh, good times.

Solar glow

Shout out to Mark Uhrbach for suggesting to put something in the bottom to reflect the glow of the solar powered light.  Works great!  In fact I bought another for my wife on mother's day... not sure how that compares to the 30GB Dell DJ I scored on father's day though.

Barrhaven bullies

This is the second pair of hanging footwear that I've spotted wrapped around Barrhaven power lines.  Although it was somewhat amusing when we spotted the first pair about 3-4 years ago (yes, they are still up there - Greenbank south of Malvern) they are now just another BBQ-haven eyesore.  The second pair (see photo below) have been up for about a month now. 

Urban legend has it that this is a sign of gang's marking their boundaries.  Well I'm telling you right now, if I spot a group of shoeless youths in my neighborhood I'm gonna open up a can of whoop-ass on them mo-fos.  No questions asked.

Walkin' on sunshine

Pulled pork

This weekend was the International Chicken and Rib Cook-Off down on Sparks Street.  Amazing.  The smoke of the slow burning wood and the sweet smell of bbq pork was simply too much to handle.  After some free samples and a stroll down the entire length of Sparks Street we all agreed that our number one choice was Billy Bones BBQ.  We bought $30 worth of pulled pork sandwiches which may seem like a lotta dough to you blog readers out there, but how do you put a price on fine piece of pork?



This guy was smooth.  Flipping ribs, pulling his pork, and shouting out to the drooling crowd in his southern accent he managed to keep a steady flow of customers at his booth while others only saw a trickle.  Personally I think the guys were more drawn to the hot chick with the free samples.  But hey, we all know sex sells.

Weekend scene

Weekend was crazy hot.  40 degrees with the humidex is just stupid.

Friday night we hit the Barrhaven Fair again for a ferris wheel ride.  Ride fares were jacked up from Thursday's opening loonie night.  I managed to sneak on for free.  There seems to be some unwritten rule that parent's can ride for free in order to watch over their children's safety.  I must have picked it up from watching HBO's Carnivale.  Most parent's didn't know about this and were paying their fare.  Wankers.

Saturday a friend and I checked out the Cowboy Junkies at Westfest.  They tore the house down.  Margo sure can rock.  Beers sure tasted sweet in the sweltering heat.

Sunday was pretty mellow.  I watered my garden twice.

Frog fest

Today was a jam packed, hectic day.  I volunteered to help out with the insect and reptile field trip at my daughter's school.  Pure madness under a 30 degree sun.  I loved it.
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I was teamed up with the biggest girl and the smallest girl in the class (and my daughter of course).  We won the coin toss and called the pond first (the others got the meadow).  What luck.  Those other poor bastards would have to sift through our muck after we tore up the joint.  We scooped up frogs, tadpoles, dragonfly nymphs, beetles, water scorpions, minnows, teeny tiny perch, red-bellied leeches, ... you name it we found it.  After a morning in the pond the afternoon in a blazing hot meadow just didn't compare.

Arachnids attack!!

My wife and I were sitting out on the back deck enjoying the nice weather (and I a beer) when Emma noticed some teeny tiny spiders on the wall only centimetres (yes, I'm trying to go metric) from the back of my wife's head.
"Ack!", shouted Paula.
"Quick dad, get the camera!", shouted Emma. (apparently she's caught on to the fact that I like to take pictures of everything and anything)
When I returned with the camera and moved the chair that Paula was sitting on only moments before we found yet another nest of these little guys.
"Ack! Check my hair!", shouted Paula.
"Hee hee", giggled Emma and I.
"No.  Seriously.  Check my hair."
But by then I was much too busy taking pictures with my camera's awesome macro feature.  Later Emma and I squished and squashed the little creatures with wads of toilet paper supplied by mommy (who by now had combed her own hair to free all the spiders that had temporarily made a home there).



PS: Being the inquisitive statistician that I am I quickly calculated how many spiders we were dealing with by selecting a 1" by 1" sample and counting the spiders therein.  We were looking at 316 spiders (+/- 32).  In turn, this implied that we would need no more than 46 sheets of two-ply toilet paper to "clean them up", so to speak.  Stats sure comes in handy sometimes. Math is everywhere!!

Garter ssssnake

Found this cool pic of a garter snake on the geocaching.com site.  I like it.  Definitely a money shot.

Sunday slip'n'slide

How else to battle a hot hot afternoon?

Buckethead the dog

He looked hot.  I wanted to fill him up with water. <evil grin>

Dickie Dee on water

Yesterday at the beach we spotted this inventive entrepreneur. He was hovering like a dirty seagull, swooping in whenever he spotted a new kid with parents in tow.  Needless to say, we held our ground and did not fall prey to this money sucking machine. However, word on the beach was that the Rollo cone was damn good...