Whew.

I'm whipped. Back to working full time +, had my first Mrs Fields, um, field trip last week in Chicago, and just spent the evening taking Z & P swimming, getting them fed, doing laundry, helping them pack for their weekend with Grandma at the cabin, getting them to bed, paying bills, and providing some smalltime business consulting for a friend. It's 10:00 and finally peaceful. Annie and I have a nice reprieve this weekend - Sat and Sun are her first consecutive days off since about April - and we're going to enjoy some Utah outdoors, although I haven't revealed our secret destination yet.

Michigan sports fans: How weird is it that the Tigers are so good still? Chris Berman on Baseball Tonight yesterday said something like "...and the Tigers, who are always so fun to watch with their great young pitching..." Step back in time with me, just 15 months ago, and imagine any respectable analyst saying that sentence. You'd either assume he was being a sarcastic jerk, or you'd recommend his transfer to ESPN7.

One thing I love about my first spring/summer in Utah is this:






I'm trying to think of some witty and wise anecdotes to share but it's not going to happen. I remember when a 'bed time' of 10:30 was laughable. Now it's a necessity. I'm nearly 29, after all.

BARRACUDA! Killers

I was going to write this post chronologically, but then I realized a review of The Killers concert would be anti-climactic after my Memorial Day stories. To Thursday's concert then: There's a warehouse-like building on the shore of the Great Salt Lake, with faux-Arabian domes and windows all around called the Great Saltair. The setting is mysterious, with the expansive but empty lake, salty dry flats, and mountains on the fringes. Anyway, the concert was great - Annie even enjoyed the few songs she recognized, but couldn't hang in the midst of the crowd with me except for the openers and the finale. But it was memorable. I hadn't been to a good rock concert in quite a while, and it felt good to leave with that 'my head's in a tin can' feeling and scratchy voice.

Memorial Day weekend, I flew to LAX, met up with my family, and headed south on the 405 to lovely Dana Point for a family reunion / 60th Anniversary Party for my grandparents, Gene and Mary Carter. Friday was a catch up day with all the cousins, aunts and uncles, and we had a sweet game of Family Jeopardy in our reserved conference room (about 35 people in the room). Saturday, a group of us congregated at 5:45 am, and boarded a charter fishing boat. After an hour of luckless giant squid fishing (seriously), the captain caught wind of a BARRACUDA! school down the coast a bit. The next several hours were spent frantically grabbing 5" sardines out of the bait holds, jamming hooks thru their snouts, and casting out to land one of these sharp-toothed fish. Once you hook one, you reel it in toward the side of the boat, and then a crew member grabs a huge hook called a 'gaff', stabs the fish through the belly and pulls it on board. AWESOME!!! The three BARRACUDA! I landed were the three largest fish I've ever caught. What made this more interesting was the constant presence of sea lions, seagulls and pelicans. The sea lions (or seals, I still don't know the difference) would chase your bait and bite its body off, leaving the fish-head on your hook. Or worse, you'd hook a BARRACUDA! and they would chase that, grabbing hold and snapping your line. To better express the excitement of our first encounter with this school of starving fish, here is a sequence of things you'd see and hear:
(12 of the 18 people on board hook a fish)
"Fish on! Fish on! Fish on!"
(Barracuda move quick, so people constantly switch places and get lines tangled)
"Ah, I lost him." "Stay with it!" "Move with your fish people!"
(Sea lion steals bait)
"Crap! A Sea lion stole my bait!" "Get more bait!" "I think an egret pooped on me!"
(Someone gets a BARRACUDA! close to the side)
"GAFF! GAFF!"
(Crew member runs behind you with a giant hook and stabs fish)
"HOORAY!"

I highly recommend ocean fishing to all of us Michiganders who are used to hauling in 1/4 pound bass and blue gill all our lives. It is so fun to say BARRACUDA! that I felt compelled to spell it that way each time, as you may have noticed. Saturday night, as we were prepping to see a slide show of the pictures my Uncle Dan took (he's a professional photog., so they're nice); we started humming the riff to Barracuda by Heart. My cousin Mark's girlfriend Debin suddenly says, "I think I have that CD in my car!" Sure enough, 5 mins. later we were watching the slideshow to the rockin' sounds of the Wilson sisters. Here it is:
BARRACUDA It helps if you play this in the background: VIDEO

On Sunday, we had a church service in our conference room hosted by my Aunt Becky, who is an accomplished music minister, which featured a recording of one of my Grandfather's sermons from about 1989. He mentioned both my mother and my sister Wendy in the sermon. I have a unique family, where 4 generations of us (probably 40 people total) were gathered in a room for a Christian church service in a hotel on the beach, and we were all cool with it. We all think we can sing too, so we sang old hymns in 4-part harmony. The oldest grandchild from each family also participated in some way. My Grandpa recently wrote a book called "My Life - As I Remember It", had it published via Amazon's self-publishing service, and gave each of us a hard cover copy. Each of his children's copies had a unique note written in it; and each of us grandkids had the same words of wisdom: "Remember who you are", signed by Grandpa. He has certainly left a legacy that has reached well beyond our own family. Congrats to Gramps and Grandma on 60 years!