The DVD Player IS Smarter Than A 5th Grader.

Our DVD player is definitely alive. Or at least has the ability to reason. I am kind of waiting for it to begin to demand food, or find it watching me as I do the dishes. It has been able to assess without fail the climax of every movie we have attempted to watch in the past two weeks and then freeze up for amazingly long periods of time before reloading and allowing us to search for the part we were watching only to stop again. It can sense that you are about the throw the whole technological nightmare out the window when all the sudden it lets you load it and finish it as though nothing has happened. It has happened with old movies, new movies, scratched and clean DVD’s, and is not showing any preference for any specific genre that I can see. If I were the DVD player I would freeze up and prevent the climax of “Star Wars” if I was made to play it repeatedly as well, but that is not what is happening. The most unfortunate portion of this story is the fact that I am being forced to watch long stretches of pro basketball against my will as the dang thing reloads ”Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” for the 3rd time today. Gross.

The Day I Hit a Tree With My Bike.

This is not long but funny. Jake has become “Captain Mountain Bike” recently and I am his amazing sidekick “Frau Falls Off A Lot”. In true overachieving fashion today I managed to hit a 6 inch wide tree dead on with my 2 inch wide bike tire. This was 3/4 of the way through the longest mountain biking trip of all time and I was barely remaining on the bike much less steering well. I could not reproduce the stunt if required to in order to save my own life. Jake said he heard me yell “OH BOY” (which I thought was very tame and proper of me under duress) and then heard a really loud THUMP. I managed to remain on the bicycle but have some pretty impressive bruises on my legs. Hard to figure out if they occurred during that scuffle with nature or the other five times I ran my pedal into a tree or rock, or the time I was pedaling up hill, lost momentum and just fell off. Happy to report that there is no poison ivy yet this time of year so it should turn out better than the last time I fell off. The point here kids is that no matter what nature and gravity always win.