Grandkids and The Boy goes topless

Mrs Notthat and a shopping buddy headed off to Portland for the weekend to visit mislocated friends. This means a number of things:

1) I had to take Friday off to watch the grandkids. This meant I missed a free showing of the new Star Trek movie at work. (Don't tell Mrs Notthat, but I probably would not have gone to the movie in any case - I'm hoping to use this to my advantage later.)

2) The Boy and I have been eating well. Pizza on Thursday night, steak from the grill on Friday. I think we are having ice cream and popcorn for dinner tonight.

3) I can watch a lot of sports guilt-free. Friday night was a great Giants-Dodgers game. Today was an awful Giants-Dodgers game, some golf, and a bad basketball game.

The first picture shows Darci with some feather-based dress-up stuff from one of Mrs Notthat's friends. A little disturbingly, even Riely seemed to have fun with this stuff, so I took Riley out back and got him to use a pair of vise grips to do manly work.


Special note for Mrs and Weird Haired Mom: Note that he is wearing a hat. This was my idea. Yes, I can be a responsible adult, as long as you don't have too strict of a definition for "responsible." ("When was his diaper last changed" WHM asked when she picked up the kids. "Ummm, diaper?" the responsible adult replied. "Look! He's wearing a hat!")

The Boy has been determined to take the top off his Jeep, especially now that the weather has turned fairly nice. One of the biggest issues is working out where to store it. After poking around on the internet we saw that people generally store the top on its back on a dolly, which we could buy. I voted that we make one.


This is what we came up with (minus a few bits of carpeting in the contact points).


And here's the dolly with the top on it. It is remarkably stable and rolls easily with the casters we added. The top itself was not nearly as heavy as the top from my old Landcruiser. The two of us easily slid it off and set it on the dolly.


A proud Boy and his Jeep. If you look carefully you can see my extremely tacky temporary mounting for the side mirrors.


We should start taking bets for when it will start raining. (For those of you not familiar with our weather, starting at about this time of year and going until October or so we will get no rain at all. There will be some fog and morning dew, but no rain. This makes taking the top off of something like this a fairly safe thing to do. Except for the sunburn.)

Mrs Notthat comes home tomorrow, which means I need to start tidying things up a bit.

And trying to sort out the mysteries of the dishwasher.

That's it - move along...