Reunited

Cameron came home from Boy Scout camp today. It's the first night the whole fam has been under the same roof for about ten days. Heh, as a retired Navy family this isn't the big deal I am making it sound. Nonetheless I cooked dinner as a celebration. Yes, it takes a celebration for me to cook these days... and even then, it's questionable. It's just a summer thing, I swear... Just a summer thing, I swear... How many more times do I have to repeat this to make it believable? And, since said "Celebratory Dinner" involves the acts of shaking and baking, I will spare you the culinary details.
I need to get much better about planning meals and cooking meals.
Our Menu "Planning" looks much too much like this these days...

I'm tempted to make a resolution to cook dinner for five days straight. However, with plans to go out of town to amusement/water parks, museums, and shopping, that's not going to be an easy... or convenient... task. Sooo, I will just blame it on summer again!

The past couple of days have been home bound, cleaning and organizing, and listing odds & ends on a local Facebook sales page. Jason drove to the depths of Chesapeake, and then some, to pick up a Shoo-Shoo track & table from one of those sites last night.

Last night, Benjamin was enthralled with the trains. He woke up this morning talking about his trains. Today though, he was much more fascinated with taking the track apart and trying to (sometimes) rebuild it.

We've also watched some movies over the past few days.

Friends with Kids was excellent. I love a good movie set in New York City. Several of the cast of main six characters looked familiar, though not "big names," and all of them were excellent in their roles and interactions with one another. The plot is a bit predictable. The sextuplet group of friends are two married couples and two single friends, of opposite sex. The single friends think marriage has made their friends miserable and boring, yet they want to be parents.  They decide to have a baby together because it would be the perfect arrangement to be a parent 50%  of the time, and single/happy/free to date the other half of the time. Well, of course they fall in love. Despite that predictable plot, it was well acted with just enough twists to make the development interesting. The movie had a really good soundtrack too!

Wanderlust was also excellent. I am a big Jennifer Anniston fan and the cast of this movie too was just well put together. I am intrigued by communal living and this was a humorous twist to several of the stereo-types associated with "Intentional Living communities." Anniston and her husband, played by Paul Rudd, are forced to move out their New York City micro-apartment and find themselves thrust into a world of truth circles hosted by hallucinatory tea and naked grape crushing. It's a light-hearted witty plot with some good twists and the occasional overdose of corniness.

Chatroom was... odd, in that way foreign movies often are- the bad way not the good way. A psychologically disturbed teen created a private chatroom where he meets with four other teens on a regular basis. He uncovers the insecurity of each of his on-line peers and manipulates them to control the behavior of the the teens to the point of near-suicide. Although there is some aspects of a good psychological thriller weaved into the plot, the metaphor used throughout the movie of a mangy hotel room where chatters check into and out of each of the rooms becomes confusing, especially when the chat room guests realize that their host is trying to push one of them to suicide and they must come together to stop him "IRL."