Of Pirate Talking, Gerbilsitting, Birthday Fishing, Currant Bush Finding, and Flan-Not-Selling

Avast, ye scurvy mutinous swabs! Talk Like a Pirate Day it be, but if ye think fer one second that I'm goin' ta write me entire log entry in pirate language, ye got barnacles in yer bilge. Har harrr! All right, that's quite enough of that. Seriously. Once I get going with Piratese, it's hard for me to stop, and the last thing I need is to offer a closing prayer at church and inadvertently say something like "We thank ye, our bonny Cap'n in the Sky, fer yer gifts o' booty and plunder." That wouldn't go over so well with the "Well I never!"-saying dowagers in the ward.

Okay, stuff that's gone on recently... Well, not a ton. We've been babysitting Brayden and McKell's gerbils, Gilbert and Scamper, for the past week. Actually, I'm not so sure either of them is a gerbil. Scamper looks to be part rat (he's even got those creepy rat eyes that glow red) and I'm pretty sure Gilbert is the cast-off runt from a litter of chinchillas. They don't even look like the same species. But they're fun, especially when Alyssa takes them out of their cage and messes with them (see accompanying photo).

Other than that, everything of note that's gone on lately consists primarily of fishing and garage-sale-having. Alyssa, Calvin, and I took Hideki fishing at Diamond Fork for his birthday a few weeks ago, and fish were caught in abundance, except by me, of course (I got one bite in the course of about six hours). But lest you think I'm some kind of non-contributing lazy good-fer-nuthin, like the fat slob in Church-produced pioneer movies who stands around and hits on the hot sisters while the other brethren push the handcart, I did my part by finding and identifying us a Ribes aureum (golden currant) bush, the fruit of which Alyssa used in some ever-so-loverly muffins the next morning. Go me. Woot. Way to pay attention in that Wildland Shrubs course last year.

As for garage sales, we've helped out at two in the past two weeks, one at Laura's house and the other at Alyssa's parents, and we must have got rid of about half of the random crapola the previous owner of our house left in the shed (although we kept some of the more awesome stuff we found in there, such as a cot and an axe), as well as our fireplace mantel, which has been sitting in our garage for about a year, gathering dirt. At the second garage sale, I whipped up some flan that we tried to sell, but without cute children around to flash Bambi eyes at customers and make them feel like pond scum if they didn't buy anything, we sold roughly two pieces the entire day. Oh well. More for me. And I mean that in the most non-sour-grapesy way possible.