3 years later...

wow, where has the time gone?

3 years ago we moved from Pittsburgh to Columbus, OH, and bought our first house.

About 8 months later we had a baby!

I think that about brings things up to date.

Dave's Top 10 Films Of 2010

Yes, it's time for the long-awaited Dave's Top 10 Films Of 2010 list! This year, Virg and I saw pretty much everything. First, a few honorable mentions:

Most Over-Rated Movie of 2010: I Am Love. It sucked through and through. 2 hours of artsy fartsy sap and scenery, utterly devoid of characters or plot.

Favorite Fun Movies of 2010:
Kick-Ass (great premise, with a hilariously lethal little girl)
Despicable Me (cute, clever, and great use of 3D)
The Other Guys (great opening hot-shot cop sequence spoof)
Easy A (very clever dialogue, and Emma Stone is great as the lead)

Dave's Top 10 Films Of 2010
Now for the real list. I've done my best to describe these movies without spoiling their endings. Which was difficult, because there were some great endings this year, and I loves me a good ending.

10. Buried
Ryan Reynolds trapped in a coffin for 90 minutes, with only his cell phone to save him. The entire movie takes place in the coffin. No flashbacks or fantasies. You never see anyone but Ryan Reynolds, and half the time you don't see anything at all. It was a lot like watching 127 Hours, except you didn't know how it would end. And like Black Swan, the movie really messes with you, finding the perfect ending in the final seconds.

9. A Solitary Man
Michael Douglas gives a good performance as a not-so-likeable guy, who you become increasingly sympathetic for. A smart movie with good dialogue, made more interesting by a small twist.

8. The Town
Ben Affleck was excellent as writer, director, and star of this intense bank-robber story set in Boston. I was on the edge of my seat the whole time, but disappointed by the cheesy ending.

7. Toy Story 3
Sadly, we only saw it in 2-D, as a rental. I wasn't crazy about Pixar's first Toy Story, and I thought the second one was pretty dumb. Last year's Up was 10 very moving minutes followed by 80 minutes of somewhat entertaining silliness. Toy Story 3 was similar, but saved the 10 good minutes for the end of the movie, delivering some surprisingly haunting footage.

6. 127 Hours
The true story of a guy whose arm gets trapped under a boulder in Canyonlands, and who escapes 127 hours later by amputating it with a dull knife. Before the movie had even started, Virg was cringing at a preview of a movie about people trapped in a cave, and I instantly regretted dragging her to this. When the hero first falls in the canyon, you realize just how absurd it would be for him to cut off his arm. The movie does a great job of walking you to the point where you understand his desperate act. James Franco is wonderful, and the script is fantastic. And yes, I covered my eyes for the amputation scene.

5. Animal Kingdom
If The Town was a glorified look at the life of bank robbers, Animal Kingdom seemed like the real thing. It's an Australian movie about a young guy who is taken in by his seemingly sweet grandmother, and 3 criminal uncles. The movie feels distant and spacy, as the main character is increasingly caught between the police's attempts to make him their star witness, and his loyalty to his increasingly mistrustful family. The final resolution makes for an excellent ending.

4. The King's Speech
The story of King George VI struggling to overcome a terrible stutter. Colin Firth is fantastic (and my pick for best actor), as is Geoffrey Rush, and the script is excellent.

3. Barney's Version
As soon as we left the theater, we were ready to see it again. Paul Giamatti stars in this very clever, very funny, and very touching film. Rosamund Pike is great as his love interest, Dustin Hoffman is very funny as his father, and Minnie Driver is hysterical as his cartoonishly awful wife.

2. Blue Valentine
Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams are both phenomenal in this complex relationship study. The movie alternates between telling the story of a single day in their married life, and telling their back-story, with an absolutely heartbreaking ending. This great script and its very human characters leave much food for thought. Were they good for each other, and who was to blame for their troubles? Typically, Virg sides with the wife, whereas I found the husband more sympathetic.

1. Black Swan
Darren Aronofsky wrote and directed this brilliant psychological thriller--a surreal behind-the-scenes look at ballet that is part Wrestler and part Pi. Like Animal Kingdom, it's about a good but weak character needing to find strength. It put us on the edge of our seats from the very beginning, and the final 15 minutes of the film are absolutely chilling. It's one of those movies you continue to analyze for days afterward. And Natalie Portman is truly perfect in it. This is my pick for best picture, best director, best actress, and best screenplay.

Sweet Potatoes

My FarmVille: Week 23

My FarmVille: Week 22

My FarmVille: Week 20

The first ripe tomato has arrived:

The first sunflower opened:

The first (and still only) pumpkin is now bigger than my head:

The corn cobs are plumping up:

The first butternut squash appeared:

The first pickler looks about ready to throw in the brine:

As always there are more garden photos in our gallery.

My FarmVille: Week 19

Those pole beans are climbing so fast I can hardly reach the top of them. The butternut squash vines on the sidewalk trellises are getting pretty big too.

We have our first zucchini!

This pumpkin is growing very quickly as well. Hopefully this year we can carve a full-sized design on it.

Ready to eat this week are green beans, zucchini, broccoli side shoots, beets, and carrots.

My FarmVille: Week 18

The peas are done. No, really this time. I got a few more handfuls off the vines this week but they are really slowing down.

You can see the garlic drying over there on the table. This week I pulled 17 heads out of the ground along with 10 bunches of shallots. This is my garlic harvest, about to be pureed in olive oil for convenient cooking:

The green beans and cucumber vines are rocketing up the trellis (behind the umbrella), and we now have a few tiny beans and cucs coming forth. The corn tassels are pouring out of tiny ears, and we have our first pumpkin (now bigger than my fist):

More garden pics are in our photo gallery.

Grilled Quiche

When it gets this hot (94 today) you'll do anything to not turn on any heat generating appliance, so for dinner tonight I baked a quiche in our gas grill on the back porch.

I just made the quiche recipe as I would for the oven. Instead of my usual glass pie pan, I poured the filling into a heavy square metal baking pan that fits my grill top.

I got out the oven thermometer, lit one side of the grill, and placed the pan on the unlit side, so it wouldn't be directly over the flame.

It took about the same amount of time as it would in the oven and it turned out great! I'm thinking brownies might be the next experiment. :)

Basic Quiche:

6 eggs
1/2 cup cream or whole milk (whatever I have around)
pepper and salt
1 cup chopped fillings (veggies, bacon, etc.)
1 cup grated cheeses

Beat the eggs, cream, and seasonings together, and pour the mixture into a buttered baking dish. Arrange the veggies and cheese over the egg mixture, and bake at 350F for about 45 min.

My FarmVille: Week 17

Remember last week when I said the peas were about over? Well not so much. The vines look terrible and spotty and brown but the peas just keep coming!

There are a few new things this week...

1) As the fruit was ending, I pruned the currants and made that area nice and neat:

Now I just need to figure out how to dress up the space under the bushes. I'm thinking it might be an excellent place for summer lettuce and a backing trellis of brown-eyed susan vine.

2) I made a new compost pile:

The black bin was not cutting it. Not only was it woefully undersized for the amount of organic waste in my home, but nothing was decomposing in there. I noticed that the pile of old hay stacked up next to it was rotting faster so I made a big pile out of both, and enclosed it in a 4x4 foot wall of cinder block.

3) We have garlic:

The stalks have been getting kinda fall-overy, so I decided to see what state they were in, and Voila! there is a giant head of garlic where a single clove once was... like magic!

4) Imagine my surprise to find this hibiscus bush blooming behind our garage:

I thought it was a tropical plant but it seems to be doing quite well next to the alley.

5) The corn is blooming!

Yesterday the neighbor's landlord came over to mow their grass and commented how surprising it is to see corn growing in the city, and I noticed that the flower had started to open. We are well past knee-high and it's not even July 4 yet. :)

I posted more pics of blooms and tiny fruits growing in our garden in our photo gallery.

My FarmVille: Week 15

Sadly, the peas are almost over, and there's not a lot else to eat in the garden right now other than herbs, lettuce and baby carrots. The broccoli is coming in very small and the beets and turnips are still nowhere near eating size, so I'm going to be relying on the farmer's market for a bit.

I have currants though:

The mature lettuce plants are getting really tall as I cut outer leaves off:

Good thing the new lettuces I planted a few weeks ago are harvest size. The weather's getting really hot and I predict these old ones will go to seed very soon.

I can't wait for tomatoes. One day this tiny green San Marzano blob will be in my sauce:

My FarmVille: Week 14

I'm pretty sure it's actually week 14, even though I just posted just last week. I'm getting a few blooms on the eggplant, pepper, and tomato plants in this bed:

I hope the bees come around again. I got another tomato plant yesterday (my 5th--the Sweet Million cherry tom I grew last year that was amazingly productive), but I have no idea where to put it. The herbs are really taking off and spreading out, and I've picked a bit of basil here and there.

The sweet potatoes (under hay) and corn are coming up nicely here:

The sunflowers I planted along the wall (above) are acting as snail bait, because I can't seem to get many to grow much before they get mowed down, giving them belly aches before they get to the other plants (I hope). I also put in another pepper plant right in front there (behind the ginormous strawberry plants in the foreground). That makes 5 pepper plants.

As you can see in the photo below, the peas got really tall and thick, and then fell over.

I'm getting a lot of peas though, so I can't complain. The carrot foliage is growing thicker now, and I've harvested a few more disappointing turnips.

The spinach is at it's end, and I have to decide what to plant there next. I also ate the first head of broccoli and it was pretty good, just very very small, but the buds were opening so I knew it was already mature.

I'm really looking forward to some baby carrots and the next broccoli coming soon.

Road Trip

The beach is a place I rarely go, which is odd considering I love the water and swimming is one of my favorite physical activities.

Last weekend I arranged to see some of my old buddies from high school and go to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, which I remembered loving from childhood for all the sticky sweets, arcade games and rides, tacky souvenir shops, and silly t-shirts. I was not disappointed:

My FarmVille: Week 12

There was lots of growth while we were away in Michigan. The peas have overgrown the fence, bloomed, and have already produced some rapidly maturing pods:

The larger broccoli plant has a small head forming (as does the cauliflower):

The squash and zucchini are getting ready to climb the ropes:

And the rose exploded with multiple blossoms:

I put some shades over the spinch plants because they are starting to die off in the heat. I've lost 6 plants in the last week and they're going fast. I had to reseed some new ones in the shady area cause I neglected to arrange watering while I was away last week. Oh well! Time to buy a sprinkler timer for my soaker hoses.

Michigan ain't so bad after all

We went to Michigan to celebrate the end of Dave's semester and to visit our friends Eytan and Sara and their 10-month-old twins, who moved to Ann Arbor nearly a year ago. We drove there, surprised to find that it's less than a 5 hour drive from Pittsburgh.

Dave gives Avi his first piano lesson:

Virg constructs yet another tower for Maya to destroy:

Virg displays feats of strength after a picnic at the arboretum:

Our next stop on the trip was a cute lake town called Saugatuck on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan.

This is the inn we stayed in overlooking the Kalamazoo River:

On our first day there, we attempted to drive to the famous Oval Beach, but the access road was closed and there was no other way to get there. Feeling desperate for adventure, we instead climbed this crazy set of 280+ stairs to see what was at the top:

It turns out that there was nothing but this nice view of Saugatuck at the top. We immediately walked down again, and our calves ached for the remainder of the trip.

A sign at the Dairy Daze creamery asked us to receive our ice cream in waffle bowls for environmentally friendly reasons. This is how it was served:

The next day we went to Sand Dunes state park to try and get to another beach. The trail map indicated we would have a 2.5 mile hike to the beach from the parking lot, but it took less than 10 minutes to get there. We enjoyed this beach on Lake Michigan until the tide suddenly swept up and over the berm, almost sweeping our shoes away. (A "berm" is a narrow ledge or shelf typically at the top or bottom of a slope.)

Kilwins ice cream (which we also had in Ann Arbor) was the best ice cream shop in Saugatuck. Look closely at the photo and you'll see two things: Virg enjoying delicious ice cream and a second Kilwins location across the street.

We enjoyed many loving strolls around town:

Virg glows in the sunset after succeeding in the final attempt to access Oval Beach (named for the oval-shaped parking lot).

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