The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

So Amy found this book called "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time". It is excellent. Im about 1/2 way through. Its about this autistic 15 yr old who finds his neighbor's dog stabbed to death with a garden fork. Its all very intriguing to read about it from an autistic point of view. Well, a little later his teacher tells him to try and write a story, so he decides he is going to write about this dog and try to solve it, because that will make a good story to write.

So the novel is this autistic 15 year old's story from his point of view and the mystery of this dead dog.

The authors ability to handle the storyline from an autistic point of view is just amazing. I cannot put the book down. The mystery behind the dog and the story itself is actually very compelling and there is more to it than just some random animal murder. I dont know how it is all gonna go down yet, but I am super excited to find out.

One word of caution though, because this is written as an autistic 15 year old, it makes it very hard to skip anything. You know how in most books, you end up skipping paragraphs now and then cause the author starts describing something or starts explaining something you already know blah blah blah, Michael Crichton does this alot, well, in this book, being from an autistic point of view, there is very little fluff or extra detail. It is very straight-forward and almost everything is important.

Anyway, it is very cleverly written and diving into the mind and world of an autistic child is fascinating. Especially to see a murder mystery from his point of view.

You can read about it on Amazon.com here.

Suburban

Well, we bought a Suburban today. It is soooooo awesome. It is so roomy. It is THEE family car period.

We bought it from Carmax, which is the greatest car place in the universe. There is absolutely no haggling of prices period. The price on the car is the final price. They have a 5 day full refund return policy no questions asked and a 30 day guarantee that they will fix any thing that breaks. Of course you can always purchase an extended warranty, which we did.

Getting financed takes about 45 minutes, and there are no loan fees.

Also, they give an appraisal on the trade-in value of your car, and it is good for 7 days. Heck, they will even buy your car anyway, even if you decide not to trade it in towards a new one.

So anyway, we looked at mini-vans, suvs, and others, Amy likes the SUV but they just dont have enough cargo space. I like mini-vans, but with another kid, we are maxed in seating. So we kinda settled in the middle and bought a suburban. It seats 8 and still has TONS of cargo room. Plus it has 4-wheel drive and a towing package. And it comes with a built-in DVD player. Its built into the ceiling and folds down. It is sweet! It is a big screen. The previous owners didnt have it wired into the car stereo, so we are having them do that. It also has an 'AV in' so you can hook up like a Playstation or Nintendo or something.

Im telling you, this is EXACTLY what we needed. It is going to be so sweet. Ive already driven it around a little and I love it. Amy sat in the 2nd row and was loving how comfortable and roomy it was. I was loving finally having a car with all the radio buttons right on the steering wheel.

Ahhh - its nice to finally have a good big family car.

Camping

My fam and Ed/Sades fam went camping to City of Rocks last weekend. It was really good, I actually enjoy camping alot, although Im quite lazy about its specifics. For example, I dont want to hike, I want simple meals that are easily done, and I like easy to setup tents etc.

Friday about 1pm we left my parents house and drove straight to Amy's parents in Almo. We picked up some blankets, dropped off Bridger, then headed to the campsite. We only made it about 2 miles before our rear driver's side tire was completely flat. SERIOUSLY, WE GET A FLAT EVERY FREAKIN TIME WE GO TO IDAHO. So I changed it with the spare, and took it to Rock City Repair just down the road. They found a fairly large rock had worked its way through the tire. But they got it all fixed and we were on the road about 45 mins later.

We drove to our campground, only to discover it was 10 billion miles away from the parking lot. With all our junk including everything for 6 kids, I knew there was no way we were gonna pack all that into the campsite. So Eddie and I figured out a 'questionable' way to drive the explorer to the site, and we just made multiple trips with the explorer and all our junk. Im pretty sure if we woulda got caught, we woulda got fined.

The camping itself was good. We had tinfoil dinners for dinner that night, the kids roasted probably close to 50 marshmallows. Wether they ate them all or not is unknown. I started to get on Crystal about it, then Amy asked my why it mattered.... and after thinking about it.... its true, who cares? So I let them roast all they wanted and if they fell in the fire or caught on fire, oh well.

Then Eddie had these glow sticks that the kids wore around their necks. We had one extra one, and we would chuck it way out in the sagebrush and trees, and the kids had to run and find it. They loved it. We broke some of the glow sticks open and spread the glowing liquid over the rocks, it was pretty cool looking.

Then we had to make a trip with everyone back to the parking lot where the outhouses were. So I sent Eddie on ahead to hide in the trees and growl like a monster when we walked by. Not even Amy knew. So we started walking and at some point we heard a deep growl. It scared Amy pretty bad, along with the kids. They all had flashlights and were trying to find where the monster was at. Then Eddie came charging out and the kids all screamed. After the first growl, Bailey said "Its a cow!". Anyway, it was great fun.

Eventually we got all the kids in bed along with ourselves, but not till we all had some hot choclate first, mmmmmmm.

The nighttime was extremely windy, but it didnt wake any of the kids. Then in the morning I was forced to get up cause I had to go to the bathroom so bad. But I started the fire, and eventually Eddie got around to making breakfast. He made a dutch-oven breakfast with red potatoes, eggs, sausage, bell peppers, and onions. It was perhaps the most tasty breakfast I have ever had in my entire life. It was seriously delicious. I was amazed.

We packed up and made it out of the camp about 2 minutes before the park ranger showed up, so we barely made a clean getaway.

Then we climbed a couple different rocks with the kids, chased after some lizards, and then finally went back to Amy's parents, had lunch, then headed out.

Amy stayed in Idaho till Monday, so I went home with Ed and Sade and went to Stockton church all by myself.

Anyway, I love camping. I like everything about it. It was a good time.

Sprinklers

Wow, its been 2 days of sprinklers. I ache everywhere, and for the most part, I had the easiest part. I dug trenches with the machine and did pipe, while Dad and Joe and Amy did all the manual labor. But still, Im wasted. I did get the main line that feeds everything in. Its really nice, I added taps to the back areas and even put a tap with a water fountain right in the corner of the sandbox. It is awesome, the kids are going to love it! Now they can flood the sandbox all they want, and can get a drink whenever they want, without telling us to hook up the hose blah blah blah blah blah. We also added a fountain to the corner of the house at the bottom of our porch stairs. Its such a pain to have to walk up those stairs every single time you are thirsty.

So up to this point, everything works, it is great. I have 3 more zone to pipe out, run the electrical cable, and then bury everything.

Oh and HOLY COW you should see the amount of rock that is all over the yard. Its gonna take 10 years to get it all cleared. But we will just do it slowly as time permits until it is all finally clean. Then we will have to have a sod blitz or something.

At least we are making progress.

Thanks to Dad for helping so much. He has been amazing. And thanks to Joe Shmoe for coming out on a Saturday to dig trenches. I think I owe them both big time.

Amy's Pics

Wow, you should see Amy's pictures page, it looks really nice. Just go to Shmaumau.com and click on the pics link. Its sweet!