Back in mid-September, we had a family mini-vacation (3 days, 2 nights) down the coast in Corpus Christi. I am working on a post about that trip which might make it up before this post, but maybe not. In the rental home we were in, there were a I couple of games, one of which was “Telestrations”, labelled as “the visual equivalent of the party game telephone”. Based on my past experiences with Telephone, my immediate response was to decline, but I overcame that emotion and we went ahead with it. It turned out to be a lot of fun and we’ll probably be picking up a copy – although likely the 8 or 12 person edition.

By way of explanation, each person gets a flip page pad (with pages which alternate between drawing a picture based on a description and writing a description of a picture) and a random word. The starting player on each pad writes down the original word, flips the page and then draws a picture. The pad is then handed to the next person who looks at the picture and writes a description of what they think it is. Then the page gets flipped and passed to the next player who can only read the description and has to draw a picture. Once three iterations have been completed, we were done – and then shared the iterations that each word had gone through.

While the odd word (like the word “book”) made it through intact, most got quickly garbled. The garble effect was likely enhanced by Brock (and Davison somewhat) who don’t have quite the drawing skills and breadth of experience of others. Probably my favourite Telestrations (which I didn’t get pictures of) started off as “president” which then morphed to “Abraham Lincoln”, then to “hobo”, and then Brock had no
idea of what exactly a hobo was and thought it was a crazy man. Hmm, come to think of it in light of the upcoming US elections, perhaps a more appropriate starting place for such a conclusion should have been “Republican presidential candidate”.

Anyhow, here are some compilations of some of the end results. The original word is in the caption at the top. Then read through the picture-description-picture-des… iterations left to right, wrapping down the page. Bottom right is the final description arrived at.
image image image image image

In our front yard flower bed, we had planted two watermelon plants – one from seed, the other from a bedding plant. We’ve only had a few watermelons show up, most (that would be qty of 3) of which went rotten when they were pretty small. However, one of the watermelons has grown to a reasonable size. On Saturday morning, Heidi and Mikaela picked it and stashed it in the fridge. We cut it up as part of our Sunday evening meal yesterday. Here are some pictures of The Watermelon.
The Unpicked Watermelon

Watermelon Still Life
Watermelon Still Life
Dad, Watermelon, Davison and Brock
Dad and Watermelon
Davison, Dad, Watermelon
Davison, Dad, Watermelon
Watermelon, Dad, and Brock
Watermelon, Dad, and Brock
The cut watermelon, not quite ripe apparently
The cut watermelon, not quite ripe apparently (who can tell with watermelons)  but still really good

I’ve previously shown some pictures of our yard and growing efforts. In this post, I’d like to show some pictures of the garden that my Dad and Mom put in at their campsite, on Marlin’s land near a private lake. If memory serves me correct, this particular patch of ground used to be a feedlot of sorts at one point, so there is lots of nutrients in the ground. That being said, it takes skill and hard work to make it into a garden – Mom and Dad Huber are master gardeners (and can correct my captions as I’m not sure they are entirely correct).

picture of garden
Nicely tilled soil

picture of potato plants
Potato plants
picture of rows of carrots
Rows of carrots
picture of squash plants
Some sort of squash
picture of graden
More squash plants (possibly, I may be mistaken).

Ben: Following is another lost post found in the depths of hubcrate.com. It was originally written almost 2 years, in August of 2014.

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Dinner on the deck with fresh from the garden carrots and Swiss chard. Great fellowship, delicious food, loads of fun.

Ben:  Before reading Heidi’s post – a quick word of explanation… I’ve been fixing picture links in old hubcrate.com posts, and came across this post which was written back in March 2015, but had not been published yet.  Even though it is a little dated (and predates Brody), we can still enjoy Heidi’s writing and pictures.

We were so excited that Layne and Elissa were coming to visit ( especially us kids to get a break from schoolwork) and it turned out to be a great time. Ar first we just had some relaxing family time, but then we went on a couple outings. First we went to the beach which was fun , but there was a festival so traffic was awful and because of this we came home sort of late. Then we went to the NASA space Center that was really fun. Layne and Elissa took each of us kids out for lunch to just talk about what’s going on in our lives, I don’t know about the other kids but I really enjoyed that special time and just being with them. Looking back I know God has given me the best family I could ask for.

 

 

 

 

 

In the interest of getting back to regular posting here on hubcrate.com, here are some of the photo highlights of the past few weeks.

picture of boy blowing up kitchen
Baking soda and vinegar fun with Davison
Picture of blackberries in garden
Some edible blackberries that the birds didn’t get
picture of Davison with chocolate pudding pie
Davison, the chocoloate pudding pie chef
pikcture of red climbing rose blossom
Climbing rose blossom
picture of small watermelon
Little watermelon growing in our front yard (but it had split so had to be discarded)
picture of girl sitting on kitchen counter
Danaya using her phone
picture of toad hiding in plain site
Find the toad
picture of lame word search
Easiest Sunday School word search puzzle ever

 

Ben:  This is a bit of a late post, but possibly better late than never…

To celebrate the 4th of July, we had a number of families from the church over for the afternoon and evening.

picture of ladies talking at dining room table
Daelynn, Mikaela, Lori and Jenn in the Dining Room
picture of ladies talking in dining room
Another shot of the ladies’ table

There were a lot of kids over and much fun was had in the swimming pool.

picture of kids in a swimming pool
Lots of pool activity

One of the families brought along (unbeknowst to me) a signal cannon.  Here’s a picture of one that I snagged from eBay, that was pretty similar to what they had (except that they only had the metal/aluminum cylinder but not the wooden carriage).

Signal Cannon
Signal Cannon

The basic premise is that it is a very loud noise-maker.  It consists of a metal cylinder which has been smoothly bored most of the way down, and has a separate small fuse hole.  A fuse is put in the cannon, and then it is loaded with gunpowder (up to the top lip, I believe) which is then tamped down (in this case I think they were using a short broom handle).  No projectile is fired, but the resulting noise is extremely loud (for those of you who have played the game “Bang!”, think of the “BLAM” made by the Howitzer).  On its first firing, I was behind the house by the pool, it was pretty startling.  It was only fired twice, which was probably okay as we live in a pretty quiet neighborhood.

We had purchased a bunch of fireworks (of the lesser explosion variety) to set off after it got dark.

picture of sparklers on Fourth of July
Sparklers and other fireworks

 

picture of fountain firework
Davison watching a “fountain” firework

Davison was our chief firework lighter and did a pretty good job of it.  We landed one firework on a neighbor’s roof (they weren’t home and it rolled off without starting a fire) and almost hit a couple of vehicles with others. But it all ended safely and the kids had a great time, especially with the sparklers and the snappers.

We also had some items that generated smoke which didn’t really work well in the dark, so we lit some of it off the next day.

picture of military smoke firework
July 5th – setting off the “military smoke” firework

All in all, it was a pretty fun way to celebrate with friends.

With my children I have a reputation for occasionally picking up weird and wonderful items, usually because they are on sale and being unloaded cheaply. Some of these purchases end up being winners, but others not so much. So, I thought I would throw together a post with some of the more recent winners and losers for your enjoyment.

picture of Dr Pepper cherry Dessert Topper
Dr. Pepper cherry dessert topper! Not sure if anyone liked it or didn’t read closely enough and thought it was chocolate syrup.  Apparently it is “Amazingly smooth”; not sure what that means for a product that is essentially a syrup.  On the other hand, maybe I was amazed at the smoothness the first time that I used it.
PIcture of Ferrer Wild Mushroom Porcine soup
These have been well received, particularly the mushroom soup as Mikaela and Heidi are in a really-like-mushroom-soup phase.
Picture of Caramel Sishito Mustard
These mustards were big hits (at least for Lori and myself).
Picture of Chocolate Flavored Blood Orange Sparkling Juice
This sparkling juice was a total fail.  Possibly the label “non-alcoholic” should be read as “non-drinkable”. If you want to try it, I still have a bottle or two!

I’m probably a bit of a sucker for gadgets (specifically ones that are not too expensive), so when I saw a set of specialty lens that could be used with iPhones and iPads (and more specifically that the set was less than $20), I did some research (as there was a bunch of options) and then committed. The set that we get has a clip that you use to hold the lens over the lens on the device. There are three different lenses, one a fish eye lens, the other two providing a couple of other options including close-in macro shooting.

picture of fisheye lens
Fisheye lens

fisheye lens picture of butterfly plant
Fisheye lens view of Butterfly plant
picture of Crepe Myrtle flowers
Fisheye view of Crepe Myrtle floweers
fisheye picture of pink flower
Fisheye view of pink flower

This small set of pictures isn’t dated (other than the parent folder date of 1980 01 01 which can’t be accurate). However Davison looks to be about two and the location (for the Davison and Dad pictures) is our kitchen in Calgary before we renovated it.