BilikFamily.com

Friday - I was let out a bit early on Friday. Since the forecasts predicted rain most of the weekend, I rushed to the tractor to mow the Bilik estate while it was still dry. Since last weekend I had assembled our compost tumbler, I used some of the grass clippings to get the tumbler christened with its first load. At the beginning of October we'll see how it does.

Saturday - While it didn't rain much on Saturday, it kept looking ominous outside as the remnants of Hurricane Ernesto loomed overhead. We had four of the kids' friends over, three as holdovers from the previous night's sleepover. I exposed the girls into the silliness that is The Princess Bride. “Inconceivable!” “ You keep using that word — I do not think it means what you think it means.” In the afternoon we browsed for new trees to plant and then took the kids for dinner at Chili's.

Sunday - Sunday started out with Mass, followed by coffee and donuts with friends. Late in the morning we took the kids to see Barnyard. As is becoming a pattern, I missed the beginning of the movie fetching snacks, while Michelle missed the end as the boys got fidgety. Afterwards we took the kids out to lunch at Smokey Bones and a bit of shopping at Target. Since it was still raining when we got home, Claire and I went downstairs to watch the pilot of the 1963 sitcom Petticoat Junction. I could barely remember the series so it was about as new to me as it was to her.

In the evening I put my laptop into installer dependency hell. I'd been reading a bit of geek buzz about a supposedly friendly command line shell called fish. Before committing to install it, I neglected to check what package dependencies it had. I figured it's just a shell. Bad move! It had major dependencies that kept my machine downloading source and compiling for hours. As I was dozing off to sleep, I could still hear the tiny muffin fan cooling the laptop. It rarely kicks in, but continuous compiling of megabytes of C code will do that to a processor. Lesson learned.

Monday - After two days of overcast, rainy weather, today the sun finally made a showing. We head to The House by the Side of the Road in Wilton to look for trees to plant. We decided on two Cleveland pear trees and a Red Sunset Maple. When we got home we had the kids flag the sprinklers so I could aerate the lawn. Afterwards I helped Michelle plant the pear trees. It never ceases to amaze me how after about 4 inches of digging, you hit rocks and sand — at least here in Milford, the Granite Town of the Granite State. Pray tell, what is this topsoil you speak of.

Video - Timothy was hamming it up on the piano today so I captured it in this video. He pretends to play along as the piano plays one of Claire's older practice songs — Jumpin' Jazz Cat.