Starting last year, some friends of ours, a couple who were on the softball team and who have two remarkably sensible kids, one in high school and one in middle school, got drafted to host the picnic. They even live in the same town we do. But last year we were out of town.
This year, in town, and it turned out to be a wonderful day. A bit too wonderful; just ask my sunburned scalp.
Was fun. Toxicfur made deviled eggs, which, rather surprisingly, were the only such things at the picnic.
Toys for the kiddies abounded, including a pump-action launcher with 4 nerf missiles, which actually flew pretty well, for twenty feet or more.
T says he mowed the lawn yesterday; they were away for a while and we've had rather a lot of rain lately. So it was quite a chore, even though their yard isn't all that huge. The remaining grass was still several inches high, and the ground a bit rough.
Which made croquet, shall we say, interesting.
I got in on the second match, the rector having unsuccessfully defended his title from the previous year in the first. Long story short, some rather aggressive play and capitalizing on missed shots by other players got me home first. You really have to whack the heck out of the ball to get it to go very far on such a surface.
The wife of one of the young clergy (just ordained a couple weeks back) is an artist, and she put together a cake in the form of a croquet ball and mallet. It was quite tasty, and just the thing for that sugar rush needed to finish the match in style.
What else? While toxicfur was out mowing (well, string trimming) our meadow that passes for a yard, and then poisoning weeds (with the lm-approved mixture of vinegar, salt, and dishwashing liquid), I found my way upstairs to play, for the first time, with the copy of Logic Express which toxicfur bought me for Christmas.
This is a music program recommended by clock among others. I never got around to working through the tutorial; somehow there never seems to be both time and inclination for that. But there's this very cool piece I heard at Easter, Crucifixus à 8 of Antonio Lotti, filled with yummy suspensions and such...
So I scattered commands off of Logic Express for a while. I figured out how to create a project with tracks for audio instruments, how to tell it to pay attention to the iMic audio system I had plugged in, and got it to record my voice. Yay.
I never found anywhere to tell it, no, I don't like 120 beats per minute. Or to change it after the fact. Or even to tell it what the tempo is going to be at the start of a new project. It's there someplace, I bet.
Nor could I figure out how to add a new track beyond the ones you told it you'd want when you started the project. Or to mix audio tracks with midi ones. Which is probably just as well, because while it was happy to record my midi keystrokes (silently), it wouldn't make sound when it played them back. Again, I'm sure there's a setting someplace I missed.
By this time it was getting quite dark for the afternoon thunderstorm. And since the one dog hates getting rained on, and the other barks at thunder to make it stop, they came in with toxicfur behind them just as the rain started.
There are tomatoes and peppers and black-eyed susans and hydrangeas in bloom out there. It's really quite amazing. I took some flower pics the other day; I should read them in and post them sometime. Who knows? Maybe later tonight.
OK, dog puking in the kitchen; they insist on eating the grass clippings even though it makes them sick. But they feel fine almost immediately, and it's Lucky Dog Time, so we should prolly feed them.
And I'm out.
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