A Farewell to Fun (or, 'August'): A Retrospective

Well, this is it, America.  The End of Summer.

I rank this right up there with January 2nd, when we generally take down the Christmas Tree and bid adieu to the Holiday Season, as the most depressing time of the year.

Our August was insanely busy, as it usually is, with Back to School mode fully engaged, but along with that usual scramble came a heightened social calendar.  We were far busier than usual with social obligations, and nearly every day and night of every weekend in August was spoken for.  Needless to say, there's quite a bit of visual random to peruse through this time around, folks.

(You're welcome.)

Abby's been really into writing lately, and writes all the time - both as a creative outlet and a way to blow off steam when she 'Houghs Out.'  This is a 'book' we found, at the beginning of the month, that she wrote about her family. . .

For the record, I NEVER talk about my day when I come home.  I like to leave work at work, thank you very much.  The beer thing is pretty spot on, though.

Wait, wait, wait. . .  she's sweet?

'She loves TV.'  Understatement of the year.

This one's pretty accurate, actually.

At an impomptu Jenga-in-the-Garage night with our local group of friends.  This was far too stressful for my taste - I despise this game.

One day, while Kris was at work and Alayna was off on a playdate, I took Abby up to Marshall's for some Back to School shopping.  She tried on dozens - seriously - of outfits, and for each one I took pictures like this to send to Kris in order to prove the validity of their purchase.

We ended up buying a ridiculous amount of rompers like this one.  'Cause, you know, BFF Larkin wears them all the time.

A cheesecake in the house.  Must be Mom's birthday again. . .

Kris wanted to invite people over for a bonfire on her birthday.  Happy wife, happy life.

The scary part about this picture is that Alayna requested it, and purposely posed as if she was channeling dark powers from the realms beyond.

The Larson kids and ours, getting the dog all riled up, as usual.

Kris and her selfies. . . and White Claws.

Remember, back in the Spring, when Abby 'accidentally' broke one of our chairs?  Well, the one she broke has been chilling out in our shed for months, awaiting our first bonfire of the summer.  With as busy as we were the first half of summer, and seeing how we were under a city-wide Burn Ban for the second half, we hadn't gotten around to any bonfires whatsoever for the last couple months.  This being our first, it was time to send the chair off with a proper Funeral Pyre.

The varnish on this old chair caught like crazy, and in no time we had ourselves a full-on blaze. . .

Fare thee well, Chair.

 

Spotted this nonsense on one of our back tress, in the far-back garden of our backyard.  Not amused.  We've dropped a ridiculous amount of money into our yard this summer, keeping everything alive and healthy. . .

Indulging in some mint chocolate chip ice cream at Mom's.  Mom had all the siblings and their familmies over to her house one weekend, along with Mindy and her fam, Grant and Linda, and Grandpa Chinery.

Uncle Grant and Scarlett talk ice cream. . .

A ridiculous amount of bodies all in one room. . .

That seven-foot-tall kid you see there is Mindy's only child.  And he's only a sophomore.

Hanging with the twins.

 

The following day, in the morning, I went out to the Midland Sportsman Club to go shooting with Matt and Ryan.  Matt brought his shotguns, I brought my rifle, and Ryan brought up a bag full of handguns.  It was a ridiculously fun time.

The .22 range was a lot of fun.  I had sighted the gun in last spring, but it needed a few minor adjustments.  Some time I'm going to have to bring up some paper targets and see to it properly.

We did a couple rounds of skeet shooting, too.  You had two shots from six different positions, and two clay skeet were fired out of two machines on either side of you - one from up high, to the left, and one from down low, to the right.  You had to swing the shotgun around pretty fast in order to hit both, which I actually did okay at, being a first timer and everything - I shot twelve out of twenty-five shots.

These were nicer, over/under break-barrel shotguns, too - no pump nonsense - so much fun to shoot.  If I did this more regularly, I would definitely invest in one.

Like I've been forced to do in the last couple elections, I had to take the girls along with me to vote the first (or second? I forget now) Tuesday in the month in the party primaries.  Unsurprisingly, I voted Blue all the way down the line, but unfortunately my man Abdul didn't get enough votes to secure the party nomination for governor.  Instead, we're stuck with a moderate, Clinton-esque party favorite of questionable integrity that will probably be decimated in the coming general election.  I honestly don't know why I even bother voting Democrat anymore when they keep putting up candidates like Whitmer.

This year I joined a $50 buy-in Fantasy Football League with a bunch of the husbands in our mutual group of friends (the wives of this group are all really close, being in the Girl Scouts and PTO together, and so after hanging out together so often whenever our wives hung out, we've gotten used to each other.)  I don't know shit about football, so I'm pretty sure I just flushed $50 down the toilet. . .

The Voigts flew into town one weekend, halfway through the month, to visit with Adam's family down in Belleville (outside of Detroit.)  It was a whirlwind visit for them, but they had an afternoon open with not much going on, so we pounced at the opportunity to drive down for a quick visit.  Like we used to do back when we used to go over to their house in Florida, I took a picture of a 'Scary Bridge' to let Adam know we were on our way.

And over another, considerably less-scary bridge, entering Belleville, some two hours later.

Adam's dad, a retired cop, let us use his 'backup' truck - an old beater from the '80s - when we went into town to pick up a couple sixers of craft beer.  This thing runs like a beast.

A totally vintage dash - I love it.

On the porch of Adam's parents' house.

We ate dinner at a nearby A & W that Adam used to work at back in high school, and then afterwards walked over to some local ice creamery to get the kids their fill of sugar.

They were all setting up the backyard for a birthday party for Voigts' son, Jackson.  Instead of helping, Adam and I sat off to the side and worked our way through the six-packs.  Just like old times.

The following morning, back in Midland, we drove over to my brother Chris' house for yet another birthday party, this time for my twin nephews, who were turning one.   Chris had some Chris-appropriate beer on hand.

The birthday boys, prepped for an expected cupcake smashing.

This is about the extent of the 'smashing' these guys did.  They are incredibly dainty eaters for a couple of one-year-olds.  Must get that from their old man. . .

(I didn't have the heart to tell Nicole's mom that she wasn't recording any video with her phone.  It got to that awkward point in the scheme of things where I had waited too long to say anything, so I just silently let her continue thinking she was recording.  She had been doing it for, like, three minutes.)

We had to tell Abby repeatedly to get out of frame.

Ugggghhh. . . I despise this time of year.

One Sunday, while Yours Truly was occupied with Back to School lesson planning, etc., Kris and Courtney took the kids over to the Midland Center for the Arts for a stage production of Disney's The Little Mermaid.

After the play, kids got to go up on stage and meet some of the cast members, which I guess was cool.  Not really sure, obviously, as I wasn't there. . .

A couple of Belles and a Snow White.

Outside the theater, kids got to mingle with some of the cast, like King Triton, here (also known as f***ing Posiedon.)

Um. . . a mermaid, I guess?

This must be Ariel.  I'm calling it.

And now with Dom Delouise, the Seagull.

And a fish.

Of course the Hough kids did that. . .

Once again, I had my 'helpers' along with me as I started setting up my classroom. . . 

Alayna teaches math.  I'd make a joke here, but she's far better than me at adding fractions.  Props to you, kid.

This is what most of my students will look like during the first week of school, having to sit through days and days of 'rules and procedures' presentations. . .

A couple days later.  My classroom, almost completely set up and ready to roll.  I only went in on three separate occasions this year - my room is a well-oiled machine and doesn't require a lot of upkeep (thank God.)

Out for a family walk with the dog, the girls wanted to swing by their school and see how the summer-long construction project was going.  By this point in time, the parking lot had only just been paved - how they're going to have everything up and ready by the beginning of the school year is beyond me. . .

Abby in pajamas, Alayna in Daisy Dukes.  We're those people.

A greeting on my whiteboard, courtesy of Abby.

While I started my crappy back-to-school professional development workshops, Kris took the girls up with her to the eye doc to have her glasses fitted.  While she was there, she also had Abby try on a few pairs.  A recent visit to the optometrist a couple weeks earlier had shown that Abby's vision was starting to decline (it was only a matter of time for our kids, seeing how Kris and I both wear corrective lenses, as do all of our parents and grandparents on all sides.)  While the doc wasn't pushing glasses on Abby just yet, if her vision starts to grow worse in the coming months, we're going to have to go down this road. . .

Kris finds a lot of pictures like this on her phone these days. . .

Bringing in the ol' apple harvest.  One of our trees in the far-back garden of our backyard, believe it or not, is an apple tree.  We had no idea when we moved in, and we didn't get any apples last summer.  These things are falling like crazy, but, because there are so many apples growing on the tree - it hasn't been trimmed in a long, long time apparently - they're all coming in too small for human consumption.  In the fall, once the temp starts to dip, I'm going to trim up the tree and try and grow real apples (these ones I ended up bagging and giving to Erik so he could use them for deer feed up in the U.P.)

I did trim a few branches while I was back there - it was getting out of hand.  I'll fine-tune it later.

After an hour or two of burning a frickin' tree, this is all that remained of the apple tree trimmings (smelled pretty awesome burning, though, I'll tell you that.)

This dog is beyond weird.

Our main kitchen light start flickering like a strobe light towards the end of the month, and when I got up on a stool to fix the lightbulb, I discovered that it wasn't a bulb at all. . . but a pack of Birth Control.

Still Back to School shopping.  We've dropped hundreds of dollars so far, and we still have to buy the girls four pairs of shoes each rain boots, gym shoes, every day shoes, fall boots, etc.)  I hate kids.

Couple of divas.

After a full day of shopping with mom (Yours Truly was once again in professional development all day), the kids came home and crashed. . .

It had been six months of waiting around for the local vintage stereo repair guy to try and troubleshoot my dad's old Denon receiver, and he hadn't had any luck.  He was able to take it apart and clean it thoroughly, and was able to fix all the receiver inputs except for the Phono inputs.  In the meantime, I'd been using one of my mom's old vintage receivers, that had okay sound but came mostly out of the right channel.  I was chomping at the bit to get my Denon back, and after six months of no luck, the guy threw in the towel and told me I could swing by and pick it up, free of charge.  He felt bad for making me wait so long for nothing, but I was okay with it seeing how he had done so much fine-tuning for free.  Fortunately, I was able to buy this Phono Preamp off Amazon for $50, and was therefore able to once again play records through a decent sound system.

For the first time in probably thirty years, the Denon is back to blasting quality vinyl.  It sounds AMAZING.

Sound being important and everything, I still won't skip over praising how f***ing cool this thing looks.  The minimalistic, metal '80s aesthetics is pretty awesome, not going to lie.

After three years of heavy (if not religious) use, Watson's favorite squeaker toy was finally retired from duty.  R.I.P. Mr. Squeakers.

The girls dressed up like waitresses (sorry, 'servers') to wait on Kris one day after work.  Let's hope their eventual career aspirations end up a little loftier than that, though - I want to end up in one of those retirement communities where you get to drive a golf cart around.

Selfies with mom.  Kris' selfie-to-normal-picture ratio is far different than mine.

. . . aaaaand featuring Dad.

I had the misfortune of passing through Michigan's Butthole one Saturday.  I was not impressed.

I'm taking this omen from work that this is going to be a great year at school.  When have the Misfits ever led me astray?

While taking the girls shopping at the Birch Run outlets, Kris made it a point to swing by Dunkin Donuts and get her fix. . .

Kris is way more excited about this than Abby is.

Another weekend, another bonfire - this one the weekend before the beginning of school, at the close of August.  A fitting way to bury the Summer of 2018. 

- Brian