Summer starts with a 12 pack of Summer Ale...

That is when you know that summer is here, when Sam Adams Summer Ale is back on the shelf. At least it is one of the many beautiful signs. This summer has already been packed with several amazing trips and lots of great time spent with friends. My wife and I took an awesome trip to New Orleans where we saw the sights and had more great food than we should have had time for. We saw the Magazine St. stores and the WWII museum. We found a really cool cigar shop that rolls and presses all its own cigars. There really is nothing better than waiting on a table at Cafe du Monde while smoking a stogie. We also got to spend a fun weekend in Sevierville, Tennessee with my parents, my sisters and my awesome nieces. We stayed at a hotel with a huge water park where we were able to slide down huge water slides as well as play with my nieces in the kiddie pool. We have had Weird Beer Night III and IV and the results will come in a new post soon. All in all the first half of the summer has been awesome and I can't wait to see what the next two months before football season brings.

Fantasy baseball has been quite an exciting new addition to my summer time days. My buddy Barrett got me into a league last summer and i enjoyed it but was not able to draft my own team because of shift work. This year has been alot more fun, I was able to draft my team and on top of that I have been able to follow my team better with the droid. I am holding onto first place in our league at the halfway point of the season but alot can change after the all star break.

My wife is amazing and she encourages me to strengthen myself in many ways. One of those is the way of the handy man. With her amazing gift for design and the skill to put her ideas into action she continually pushes me to learn how to do things that years ago I didn't know what to do. Recently we have been tiling a first for me and it has been a slow but gratifying procedure, check my wife's blog for the updates. 

One big part of every summer, especially my summers, is summer reading. This summer has been a good one too. I have found some really neat books so I will forgo some of the ones that have been on the shelf waiting to be blogged about and hit my summer reading this time.

Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy - Melissa Milgrom (5 out of 5) What an amazing find this book was. It was an amazon.com book of the month a few months ago and it really caught my attention with the awesome cover. What makes this book so unique is that is a book about taxidermy but it's not by a taxidermist. It is written by a woman who found taxidermy interesting and so researched the heck out of it. It covers the WTC, that's World Taxidermy Championships for you newbs, as well as everything from the Smithsonian professionals who make the dioramas to a Canadian who builds amazing extinct and protected animals out the pelts of other animals. After learning everything about the profession she actually stuffs her own New York squirrel and enters it in the WTC under the watchful eye of a master of the trade. Just good.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest - Stieg Larsson (4 out of 5) The final book in the millenium trilogy follows Lisbeth Salander as she recuperates from a gunshot wound and the journalist Blomkvist who is doing everything he can to keep himself alive while also keeping Lisbeth from ending up in a straight jacket for life. It brings the story that starts in "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" to a great close. I wouldn't recommend it without reading the others, but for a thriller it is really a fun read that really shows that this author will be missed. The original plan of five novels, he only finished three before he died, would have been fantastic.

The Help - Kathryn Stockett (4 out of 5) Continuing the summer streak of great books. This was one recommended to me by several girls that I know and I will be honest I was slow to purchase this book but I can't think of a reason why now. Set in Mississippi in 1962, it follows a young southern college grad who is trying to explain to herself why the city she lives in is the way it is. She wants to help the world see the connection between black helpers in southern homes and the children that they raise. The way the author bounces between three narrators, two maids and the author skeeter, is seamless and really draws you into the book.

Beatrice and Virgil - Yann Martel (2 out of 5) Probably a bigger letdown for me because "Life of Pi", the authors previous book, was soo good. It has great characters and in a funny coincidence a heavy taxidermy story line. The narrator is an author who is trying to run from his fame and befriends a taxidermist who is very skilled and wants the authors help finishing a play he is writing about a donkey and a monkey (beatrice and virgil) that seems to be about the holocaust. It is strange and never really grabbed me.

There are several books I am working on now but those are the ones I have finished. Stay tuned for more summer blogs as well as weird beer updates.