bloviation extrordinaire
Mom and Grammy were out shopping. I was at home with the girls and started playing with modo. The girls thought it was the coolest thing ever. And it is, because they could sit right down and use it! I only gave them 10 minutes each, and here’s some of the silly stuff they made by deforming some of the canned objects…
My friend Larry was courteous enough to be born on New Year’s Eve, as well as having cultured in himself the ability to be a most excellent host. These facts conspired to bring about a great New Year’s Eve party. He decided on a casino theme, and spent his birthday daylight building a craps table. There was craps, blackjack and texas hold’em for everyone (no real money changed hands, we promise!), as well as more than enough alcohol for three times the crowd (which was large!). The Merchant’s parents were there, and charming Tom attempted to drink the whole party under the table. He almost succeeded! And we’ve all almost recovered. ‘Til next year!
Dan’s birthday is here, I bought him a webcam tonight and we got online and blew stuff up. Good enough for me!
I guess if you’re on your third expansion for a game, you’re officially a fan. Carcassonne came with the River expansion, and we added Inns and Cathedrals a year or two ago. This time around, we’ve added The Princess and the Dragon to the mix. All the expansions layer on top of the base game, and now it’s extended to a Hera-and-Zeus level of near chaos, which makes for an awesome game. We played until 1am last night (and I still biked to work, woop!).
I used to bike 13 miles to work in Florida, when I was a younger man, and I’ve been talking about biking to work here in North Carolina since we moved up 5 years ago. All talk, no action, until this past Friday. Our office moved from an impossible 20 miles away to a cakewalk 7 or 8 miles. So Friday and today were successful runs at biking to and from work. Hills are a bear! I’d say the 7 miles are roughly equivalent to the 13 flat Florida miles.
Jim Brown, the guy that keeps the servers humming at work, has been my inspiration – he’s been riding to work for years, he’d have to do my run 3 or 4 times every day to be satisfied. We’ll see if I can give him a run for his money any time soon.
The season is here, time to soak it up before it’s gone. I jumpstarted winter early with a 45-degree windsurfing excursion with Alec Oesterling – even with full wetsuits, including hoods and gloves, it wasn’t long before we couldn’t feel our toes. But now we can say we did it! The girls have helped us get into the spirit this season with a dance recital from Reiley (her part was a cute “Here Comes Suzy Snowflake” number) and a church Christmas program based on a revamped 12 days of Christmas. They are also keeping the house humming playing a piano bench full of Christmas songs – they’re both doing great with their lessons (despite daddy doing the teaching!). We’ve broken out the Christmas music and lit up the tree. I even have half the outdoor lights halfway hanging off the roof. Next it’s time to make some cookies!
Wren turned 6 on Tuesday! We had a party for her on the previous weekend at her gymnastics gym. We were worried it wouldn’t happen – ice and snow were predicted – but the bad weather held off and all 12 friends showed. The kids started arriving in the front room, and before the party started they had turned that into an extension of the gym, rolling and tumbling and yelling. Everybody had a blast!
I think the best part was watching Wrenny thank each kid for attending, politely handing each a goodie bag. Mom had given her some preemptive manners lessons to head off Wrenny’s shyness, and it worked like a charm. Coupled with Wrenny’s new desire to carefully enunciate every word, you couldn’t ask for a cuter kid. :> Pictures forthcoming…
On Tuesday we all played her new cooperative game called Rainbowland. You can’t beat a great cooperative game for family fun, and this one qualifies! Cute as all get out. :>
We’ve got a white day-after-Christmas!
It was snowing when we woke up this morning, and it kept up for an hour or two – just enough for us to scrape out a few small sled runs, throw a few snowballs, and harvest up enough snow for a snowman “little person”. Once we were frozen we headed back inside for some Burgundy Soup that Grammy and I scrounged up. Yum!
And Happy Birthday Grammy! We gave her tickets to see The Nutcracker performed by the Carolina Ballet Company and the Carolina Symphony Orchestra. We had to leave extra time for driving on the icy roads. We ended up in the FRONT ROW! We got to watch the percussion guy pull out all kinds of special noisemakers – he was only 10′ away from us. It was a great show, full of beautiful costumes and mesmerizing dancing – leaping acrobatics, a choreographed war between the rat and his mice and the nutcracker and his toy soldiers, and the enchanting “coffee” dancer – quite a hottie! And it’s a pretty rare treat to be that close to a full orchestra.
I cleaned up the header of the blog a little, stuffed a little thumbnail of a random bit of artwork from the girls in the upper left corner. The art’s really old and there’s only a few to start. I will add more over time…
We had a quiet Thanksgiving week here, just the “core” family. I had the first nice block of time off in a LONG time. It was nice to hang out with pretty much NOTHING on the schedule. We ate a ton of food, played some games (Heroes Incorporated, Mind Trap, Sims Unleashed), took the dogs for a walk, and caught up on some movies (Down By Law (9.5), Waiting for Guffman (8.0), Run Lola Run (9.0)). Ahhh…