Last Weekend's Beach Trip

I know I'm a week late with this post. However, I really wanted to share what we did during our first trip of the year to the OC... Maryland, that is. We went with Mary and Long's family. Everyone was all grown up... about a year, coincidentally.

This also marked Sarah's first trip to the Nguyen Family beach condo.



We played in the water.
We built sandcastles.
We went to the amusement park.
We really wore ourselves out.
Here are more pics.

How to Remove Deck Stain from Aluminum Siding

We wanted to re-stain our back deck and Megan thought is would be easier to use a sprayer. Unfortunately, the siding of our house got caught in the crossfire. We tried many different substances to remove it: paint thinner, turpentine, soft scrub elbow grease... lots of elbow grease... Some of those didn't work at all and the ones that did took a lot of time (about two hours for one square foot.)


Then one day while cleaning the windows Megan stumbled upon a really effective substance... VINEGAR... specifically the one found in window cleaner. It took just a few sprays and a couple of wipes.







Megan doesn't want me dwelling on her mistakes, even though she did find a solution. Anyway, I'd like to add that she did make a lot of improvements to the deck this season. The staining job looks wonderful and she planted numerous number of flowers. The new furniture helped too. Take a look.



mp3: "Down In Mississippi" by Mavis Staples

Date Movie

As parents of a toddler, Megan and I have faced the fact that we'd rarely see films in the theater. The last time we did was in November. Therefore, when my mom and dad offered to babysit Paige for one evening so we could watch Knocked Up, we jumped on the opportunity.

I loved the movie. There were definitely many laugh-out-loud moments, in no small part due to the performances. Every supporting character had their moment to shine comedically. Even if they only had one scene, they had me rolling in my seat. As for the leads, Seth Rogen pulls through, but Katherine Heigl had times where she seemed to make some amateur acting choices. Ultimately though, she was playing the straight-man so that didn't bother me too much.

There for some things I really loved about the movie. Chief among them was the entire labor and delivery sequence, which was done in a way i've never seen done in movies before. It was much more real. There were even scenes that reminded me of events surrounding Paige's birth. The film also made a great date movie, since it captured the way both men and women thought and spoke. A telling sequence involved cutting between a guys' night out and a girls' night out, when the movie became both a chick flick and a stoner comedy.

All great comedies are both re-watchable and quotable. This was a movie I definitely wanted to see again, and as for quotes, my personal favorite was "THAT is how you get conjunctivitis!" (See it for the context.) Overall, I'm grading it an A.