Soapbox

I find myself from time to time wishing for a place to post to the internets, so I've turned on my blogspot blog. Everybody has an opinion and now I get to put forth my own ramblings to talk to close friends, my family, and the random strangers pointed here by search engines.

Today was one of the best days ever and also a great example of me wanting to let other people know about good things. It was my first fathers day and it was awesome. My beautiful wife got up and took the squirt out early to the grocery store to pick up some yummies for the day and to let me sleep in. She got back and brought me a New York Times which I love to read on Sundays. It has been a long time since we've been able to veg out and read the paper and drink coffee, but she made sure that JBL was tanked up and happy.

She made super awesome pancakes which we discovered in Cooks Illustrated. I don't like magazines much because they are usually bland, stuffed with too many ads, and have stale information, but Cooks is awesome. We love the online subscription as well so we can access all of the recipes online. New dishes are usually made in our house with a laptop in the kitchen.

After reading the paper for a bit we went out to shop a bit. Jess saw a kiddie pool on sale at Target and we wanted to look at other things for summer fun and start looking at getting stuff for the birthday party in August. We ended up buying this pool and it was the absolutely the best $15 spent. I set it up in the backyard and filled it with about 8 inches of water and it was a blast. After the freezing cold water at Nags Head last week, this little blow up kiddie pool was totally refreshing and the squirt had a blast playing for over an hour. It's deep enough to enjoy lounging around in and shallow enough to empty and refill frequently. We all fit in it very comfortably and the water isn't too deep for the little man. We are going to go and pick up a backup pool since this is such a great deal.

While at Nags Head with the rest of Jessica's family we saw how handy their Dustbuster was at cleaning up around little ones. I started looking into Dustbusters online and thought I was going to pick one up at Target. Jessica was interested in getting a lightweight stick vacuum for the copious dog hair that Shaka leaves for us in the kitchen. We discovered the Electrolux two in one stick vacuum. The link here is to Best Buy but we got it at Target. Oddly the Target site doesn't have it listed at all and the official Electrolux page doesn't list this model, the el1014a at all. As awesome as the web is, sometimes it's still frustrating when things are missing or just ill organized. Anyway, the unit is pretty awesome in that it has a very nice handheld which is also the heart of the stick vacuum. The styling is awesome and everything is very simple. There were other offerings that had a similar idea, but they were all much more complex and had ugly parts sticking out all over the place. This one just feels put together very well and was obviously well thought out with super clean lines. It handled it's initial run through the dog hair very well.

After the pool and playing with the new vacuum we started watching Fever Pitch on HD video on demand. I had heard it was good, but it exceeded my expectations for Jimmy Fallon by quite a bit. I really like Drew Barrymore in most everything she's in, but I was pleasantly suprised by how much I enjoyed this flick. The evening was capped off by a delicious pizza from Yaghi's with pinapple and pepperoni, my favorite.

All in all, I couldn't have asked for a better fathers day. I got to play with JBL, Jessica made great efforts to do all the stuff I like and we all spent the time together. This is my idea of heaven. The best things in life are the simple pleasures and being able to share them with the ones you love. I hope you all get a chance to find your favorite simple pleasures and get to share them with your own special people. Too many people are so focused on what they think is the "big prize" that they miss the rest of life, which is the best part.