Thunderstorm

Now THAT was a thunderstorm!!!! Wooo! Talk about lightning! I love thunderstorms, as long as no one gets hurt of course, and THAT was a good one!

I Just Had a Party In My Mouth!

Summer = Grilling. It's one of the best parts about summer really. Last year, my wife saw somebody grilling peaches on tv, so we tried it. Amazing! If you've never eaten a grilled peach before, well then you just haven't lived. This is a great summertime dessert.

It's best to use peaches that are already ripe or maybe a little over ripe. Carefully peal the skin off of the peach being sure not to bruise the fruit. Cut the peach in half and remove the pit, again be sure not to bruise the fruit. Then get that grill roaring. Bring it up to a very high temp--maybe 300-400 degrees--and then back the heat way down as low as you can so that the peach will cook slowly and thoroughly. Peaches have so much natural sugar in them that the sugar will actually carmelize when it is slowly cooked, making the peach even sweeter. Cook about 7-10 minutes per side, add some vanilla ice cream in a bowl and I promise your mouth will be partying too.

That's right, you just cooked...well, grilled, with Mr. Rodgers.

Visit from Friends Young and Old

This weekend was wonderful! My wife and I lived in Manassas, VA for the first three years we were married. While we lived there, we became very close friends with three other young couples who were near our age. They all came to stay with us this weekend. So, we had 8 adults and 2 children (ages 2 and 3) staying in our house. Thank goodness the heat wave broke! We enjoyed playing with the kids--Kailey is feeding Aaron imaginery picnic food--playing some ladder golf, which I made myself, and catching up with the people who are still some of our closest friends.

Heat Wave

Okay, I love summer. I really do--this is my favorite season. But this is heat wave is a ridiculous, crazy kind of stupid! It's 8:00 in the morning and tying my shoes just made me sweat. Yep, just sitting in my house sweating at 8:00 AM. This is going to be a great day!

Independence Day

I love the 4th of July! It's definitely my favorite holiday of the year. What's not to like about it? Grilling, swimming, volleyball, warm evenings, and things that explode. I LOVE IT! I celebrated the holiday with my wife's extended family in Wellsburg, WV which is about an hour west of Pittsburgh. The fireworks weren't as good as Williamsport's but they were MUCH closer which made them really really loud, and I liked that.

Hope you all had a nice 4th of July. Keep having fun, safe summers! And stay cool in this heat!

World Cup Fever

Do you have World Cup fever? Were you jumping around your house when Landon Donovan scored the game winning goal last week? Then watch this YouTube video of America's reaction to Donovan's goal. It could have been you. The Americans were knocked out of the World Cup on Saturday, but the legacy and memory of this goal will carry on.

Some of these clips from personal homes were probably staged, but my favorite is the shot of the crowd of people watching at a TV in a store window in New York City. Great goal; great video!

(PS I promise I'll stop blogging about World Cup soon...promise.)

Proud Work

My wife and I are investing a lot of energy into home repairs/renovations. Just recently, we finished updating our downstairs bathroom. Mrs. Rodgers did most of the work on this, but I helped out by doing some plumbing work as well as tiling the floor and setting the toilet and sink in place. It looks great!

Then, last week I built a fence around the vegetable garden in our backyard. Our neighborhood is home for lots of rabbits (and when I say lots, I mean it's not unusual for there to be 3-5 rabbits in our yard at one time) who like to jump the fence and eat our vegetables as they grow. As a result, I ripped up the old fence and built this structure in its place. This fence is 3 feet high (twice as high as the old fence) and I buried the chicken wire 1/2 a foot under the ground so that rabbits will have trouble burrowing under it. Yeah, it's just a fence, but every once in awhile, when you finish a project, you can step back and very proudly say "Yeah, I built that!" It's a good feeling.

In other news, remember when we made 3-D maps of Africa and you had to identify Victoria Falls? Check out this video of "the most dangerous swimming hole on Earth" where people are swimming on the edge of the falls. This is nuts!!!