Hell Yeah I Party!!!

Hey Jay, What did you do this weekend? Anything awesome? Totally awesome!  After a day of chasing my kids around at a harvest festival filled to the brim w/ other insane kids and their wiped out parents at Shelburne Farms, we came home and gave the kids a bath. After we got them out and were drying them off my son starts saying, "poop, poop". Uh oh! I race to get a diaper on him while my wife cleans up the bathroom (oh yeah my daughter had pissed on the floor. Well, the silent assassin was not done. She snuck into our room quiet as could be and took a dump on the rug. Saturday night. Of course Sunday was also awesome, another harvest fest, this one put on by the Skinny Pancake, and another poop event. This time my son took a shit that launched out of his diaper and went all over his jammies and his legs. That was pretty fun.

I liked the SP festival, it was pretty chill and they had good food and beer. Of course because I was chasing around my kids I really was unable to talk to my friends and barely escaped them launching off the jungle gym a couple times. One other guy's kid did take a digger and he had to suffer bad parent stares while he just tried to drink a beer. I felt for him... easily could have been me. You can't manage more than one kid at a time on a playground full of other kids. Too much going on and those places are death traps.

We did see 2 pretty good movies on Netflix this weekend. Silver Linings Playbook was excellent. Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence were both very good and Bobby DeNiro even showed up with a very good performance. Great chemistry and an interesting story. 1 7/8ths thumbs up. We also watched the WWII movie Defiance. It was better than I expected. Again the actors made the movie. Leiv Schreiber and Daniel Craig were great. They both excelled as smoldery (wife's word) complex characters. The Russian accents were not so great but that was kind of fun as well. I'll give that movie 1 1/2 thumbs up.

So there you have it... like I said, awesome!

The Not So Amazing Spiderman... Part 2!

So my wife and I took a small break from cooking, cleaning, and hating our lives to watch a movie. Now, these days there is no such thing as video stores and we don't have cable so we took a spin through Apple's movie collection. I-Tunes is pretty sucky for rentals. They don't have a smooth streaming service so even renting a movie you have to wait an hour to download a 2 hour movie. Another drawback is that they have a pretty drawn out period between when movies come out and when they can be rented versus purchased. So with a limited number of choices for rental we went with the Amazing Spiderman Part 2. The first one was pretty crappy and reviews for this second one were not great so we went in with pretty low expectations. This blew through those to the downside. The two and a half hour running time was were things started getting squirrelly. Very few movies should be that long and this was not one of them. The story and the writing were very similar to what you might find in the bookstore under teen girl action/love fiction. This was all about feelings and teen angst and tons of bullshit you can access in a Nancy Drew book or One Direction song. It is a little difficult to even imagine such teen angst when the main characters who are purportedly college freshman are actually 42 years old (well maybe 30 but close enough). The "action" was super fake looking and not at all compelling. Not one character was really compelling. Andrew Garfield mailed it in worse than Robert Deniro's last few pictures. Gidget playing Aunt May was whiny and not true to character at all. The guy playing Harry Osborne some how was more creepy than James Franco and yet still played a crappy bad guy. And what the f*** was Paul Giamatti doing in it for those 32 seconds of totally unnecesary "plot". After an hour and a half I wanted to kill myself and this piece of shit just kept going. My wife looked up from the I-Pad a few times to say... "is it still going? This is maybe the worst movie I have ever seen.". That is a spot on description of this movie. It makes Daredevil seem like a true piece of art. 2 thumbs down. If you have $5 and need to get rid of it just buy a hammer at the hardware store and smash your own thumb on a table, it will be less painful and save you a couple hours.

We also spent a little time at the South Burlington Art Hop and it was pretty enjoyable. "And the Kids" was a female trio that really wailed. We thought they were really quite an enjoyable band who played a tight little rock and roll set. The new space at the Switchback Brewery is great. I go back and forth on the beer itself but check it out. The Pale Ale is a fine way to enjoy the new bar.

A special shout out to the pony tail asshole who wouldn't let me back to the patio space at Arts Riot... F*** You and you dooshy pony tail you f***ing poser. I had already gotten into the space and had my bracelet. I will give Arts Riot overall a huge 2 thumbs down for how they ended the end of the evening Friday night. They had no plan for how to wind things down and execution was a train wreck. Total amateurs. The inside space was not too bad and the bartenders inside were very much on top of their game getting drinks quickly and efficiently, so that mitigates it I suppose.

Jay About Thai Dishes

So we dropped our kids off for their first day of school/daycare. Up until this point we had a nanny so they had been primarily home throughout the day. I thought dropping them off at a new place would be traumatic but they didn't give 2 shits when I left. My son gave me a quick hug and my daughter faded me like I was a stranger! Daddy can't compete w/ a new kitchen playset and a plastic tiger. F*ing tiger. I will say this, getting up an hour earlier and making sure everyone is prepped for the day and have lunches and 32 snacks is a giant pain in the ass.

We had a little out at the Echo Center this weekend and as the kids were pretty well behaved we decided to test our luck w/ lunch. A few staples were pretty packed and not having many ideas we decided to try a new Thai place in Burlington, Thai Dishes. The space looked nice enough but we were a little alarmed that it was empty. We asked the waitress setting up tables if they were open and she said not until noon. Well, first off... it was just past noon. Secondly, who does not open for lunch service at 11 or so? Whatever, it is hard to f*** up Thai food too bad and we like empty places because we are less worried about the monsters we take around with us. A couple other tables fill in and we peruse the menu.  The well behaved kids leave quickly and we are now in a race against time. It takes the waitress forever to get around to our order but lo and behold she has given us the wrong menu anyway. "It is my first time working a weekend lunch". Yeah, I am sure that is the problem. We order fast. She brings me the wrong dish. Of course. I had already started mixing the rice in the curry so that f*d up 2 meals. We finally got our food and it was fine. The Pad Thai was adequate. The Massaman Curry was pretty good, very spicy. The kids steamed veggie dish was a bust. They liked the chicken satay but the vegetables were hard as rocks and lacked flavor so for our little ones that did not play. No problem, they ate a bunch of our food. As the mess began to take over the table and the fussing got louder it was time to wrap it up. I asked for a leftover box and the check. I got my check but never saw the leftover curry. Overall 1 thumb sideways if you are in a pinch. The service was terrible, the food is decent but overpriced. I would take the extra 10 minutes and cruise over to Tiny Thai. But then I wouldn't have anything new to write about so f*** it!

BTW, I am very upset about my nudie pics w/ Jennifer Lawrence coming out so please take it easy and don't stare.