I’m playing around with a new theme for the www.hubcrate.com site. This is a test post on it – but as a bonus to you, the reader, here are some pictures of Baby Brock (all the way from 2009).
From the picture, it looks like Brock had dropped his toy, a jar lid apparently.
Ben
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.
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.
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).
Ben: Following is another lost post found in the depths of hubcrate.com. It was originally written almost 2 years, in August of 2014.
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.
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.
There were a lot of kids over and much fun was had in the swimming pool.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
