Game Time

Age of Empires III

Adam and I got kicked out of the house this evening, Drew, Tom and I went to Rocky Mountain WingShak for dinner. Mmm, wings.

We played Age of Empires at Drew's house, I brought 2 computers. Tom, Drew, and I played 3 computers to start, the computers didn't fare too well. Then we played a couple of Free for all games, I won the first, Drew won the second. We are headed into Xbox 360 land for a while at this point...

One more Christmas picture

I think what she is trying to say is: "Did someone really wrap up a package of socks and give it to me thinking I would be excited by them?" Classic picture, Tom.

Tom's Gifts

I tried to get a picture of Tom with his presents. (For Mom...)

Other pictures of the Christmas morning mayhem

OK, so the mayhem was pretty controlled for six kids...

New coats

The girls got new coats. Tom, our expert Christmas photographer, was on had to document.

Santa brought Emma a turnip for Christmas...

This year, Santa decided to include some stew ingredient for the kids stockings, in addition to the normal fruit, candy, Little Ceaser's gift certificates, and coloring books they normally get. Kate got celery, Mary got carrots, Emma got a turnip and some rolls, Ruth got potatoes, Lily got onions, and Adam got yellow squash.


I added some stew meat, garlic, salt, pepper, paprika, and oregano to the mix, and the stew turned out pretty nice. We called it "Santa stew", but it has a different context than the "Easter Bunny Roast" I hear my family did one year after I moved out...

Electric Guitar

Grandma Payne send Emma an electric guitar for Christmas. Emma Really enjoys it.

To Emma's shagrin, Lily also enjoys the guitar, and steals it when Emma is not looking...

Adam

The slobber is because he is teething. The surprised look has more to do with the fact that the vacuum is running than it does with my taking his picture...

Lily's birthday

Lily opened some presents tonight. She had been waiting all day to tear into them..

The highlight of the night was the big giant box with the baby doll accessories. Several fights have already broken out about them. (Ruth also likes Lily's presents.)

Hoodlum Reindeer

I think the sucker was a nice touch on Emma's part.

Gingerbread house festival

Mary and Emma both made Gingerbread houses at school this week. In this picture you have just missed the part where Mary had an entire side of the house in her mouth trying to get pieces off... (We were too slow with the camera.)

Requisite pose, but not before pieces were missing.

Emma's pose, she was able to hold off before pictures were taken...

Emma did a pretty good job with hers. They are both gone now, as happens to all good gingerbread houses...

2009 Christmas Cookie lineup - Week 3

AKA "Small plate week"

I made some chocolate stars, but forgot about them, they didn't get on the plates. Tara liked the stars so much she went out and got some different molds tonight for me to make more. I've got one fan at least...

This week's "cookie" lineup:

• Banana bread
• Chocolate chip cookies
• sugar cookies - now from a mix! - save an hour or so...
  
• coconut encrusted thumbprint cookies with either apricot, raspberry, or marionberry jam on top
• chocolate covered pretzel sticks
• candy cane

The deliverees:

• Bell
• Botts
• Bright
• Bullock
• Capps
• Carlisle
• Cole
• Gonzalez
• Heftel
• Howell
• Keele
• Kelley
• Mackay
• Marble
• Martinsen
• Niccoli
• Oakes
• Perazzo
• Reece
• Wilde
  

Book Review

In Defense of Food
Michael Pollan

This book is about the "western diet" and how much of it really is not food. The author takes quite a bit of time talking about how "Nutritionalism" as a science has been trying to break food down to it's individual nutrients, not necessarily with a lot of success. (He uses the ever changing products "margarine" and "baby formula" as examples. He figures that if they really could do it, baby formula by now would be the same as brest milk...)

Anyhow, he talks about how the macro- and micro- nutrients in foods appear to be more than the sum of their parts. His ideas are that our diet is what makes us sick as a people. (At least all kinds of sicknesses people get these days.)

The last section of the book go over 3 different sets of suggestions he has: Eat Food (as opposed to 'food like products'), Mostly Pants (He thinks eating more plants is good for us, eating less processed food is good for us, and is not necessarily just an 'organic' guy...), Eat Less (He would have us pay more for our food. We would get better food. Just eat less of it.)

It was an interesting book, I would recommend it to anyone, especially people that just eat junk all the time. One of his ideas is to have the family start sitting down for dinner together again, which we started doing before I read this book. I think the girls enjoy it, hopefully someday we can see some benefit from it... (It is still early in the process...)

By the way, I think this is the first time I have used the word "breast" on this blog. My hit count will likely go up now...

mp3 player

2 weeks ago, Tara was telling me she wanted to find a relatively inexpensive mp3 player for her niece, and wanted me to watch slickdeals to see if one came. 30 minutes later, a deal for an mp3 player popped up.

The mp3 player was $11 with free shipping. I didn't really read the description, I just saw that it was a refurbished 1GB mp3 player and ordered it.

The thing came today, and it ended up being a 1GB Sansa mp3 player, with FM tuner, kind of like Tara's 2GB mp3 player, but newer, with a color screen. We loaded some music on it for her, then I noticed the thing had a microSD slot. I pulled the microSD card out of my phone, and the mp3 player synced the music that was on it. I wonder what we will find in the next 12 days for Brianna for Christmas... (Just kidding.)

If I had been playing attention to what I was actually ordering, I might have ordered a few of these mp3 players. buy.com is not selling these anymore. I guess I will need to wait to see if they ever come up again...

The 2009 Christmas Cookie project - week 2

Last Monday, we continued our cookie delivery quest. We ended up taking the girls in the van, and let them make deliveries. (We need to figure out a way to get deliveries done before the girls get tired.) Last Monday was "Big plate night", we delivered to bigger families.

This week's cookie lineup:

• banana bread
• chocolate chip cookies
• andes peppermint cookies
• sugar cookies - all cut into trees and frosted
• oatmeal raisin cookies
• no flour monster cookies
• blueberry muffins
• candy canes

This week's delivery lineup:

• Anderson
• Berrett
• Brimhall
• Callaway
• Champagne
• Daniel
• Egbert
• Fromm
• Garrett
• Harper
• Johnson
• Kovacs
• Morales
• Pope
• Shields
• Werner
• Palmer
• Hales
• Christiansen

More to come in just a few days. We picked up some sugar cookie mix from Costco the other night, which will make it easier. It takes so long to make sugar cookies from scratch...

Ward Christmas party

We had our Ward Christmas party tonight. I think Tara was a little nervous about it for a while, but it turned out fine. Except for the large number of children running and yelling in the halls all evening, some of them ours.

I sliced the hams for the thing, I think I did a pretty good job, if I say so myself. There were about 175 people that showed up, which was pretty good, I thought. The Primary did a little Nativity, the girls were angels. (At least for a few minutes...)

Just about everyone seemed to have a good time, and get enough to eat. (There was plenty of ham.) I waited to long to go for potatoes, and didn't end up eating, at least until we got home. The party went for an hour and a half, the Bishop ended the thing, had a pray, and asked people to help clean up. I pushed around a garbage can collecting donations.

While cleaning up, one lady complained that we were cleaning up. She thought the party was going to go until 8:30, not 8pm. She was complaining that her kids didn't have a chance to eat. The thought in my head, which I didn't say, was "Your kids would have had plenty of time to eat if they hadn't been running through the halls all night." I didn't say that. 5 or 6 years ago, I might have. I think Tara is happy that I sometimes edit myself more often these days.

Writer's Clob Christmas Gala

Tara goes to a monthly writers club. It is a few of the ladies in the ward that just get together to write about a topic and share what they write. They had their first annual "Christmas" gala last night. Guests were invited, Tara decided to bring me.

The dress code was casual to classy, I wore jeans, a white shirt, tie, and suit coat.

While they were waiting for everyone to arrive (there ended up being 10 people there), the guys were in the kitchen, the suggestion was made that we head downstairs to watch a game. Had the ladies not decided to eat first, and read second, that was where we would have been.

After they had some light desserts, we all sat an talked. It was kind of funny listening to some of the stories. We heard a story that justifies never, ever buying a real Christmas tree. Ever. It was a nice little evening. Not exactly what I would call a gala, but a nice evening.

Kate's "Christmas" Concert

On Wednesday night, we went to Kate's school to listen to her sing in the 3rd grade choir. Kate has been practicing in the choir for a couple of months and really looked forward to the concert.

They did a few songs, usually when we go to the school for something, the gym is completely packed, and it is hard to get seats for us all together, but Wednesday night wasn't too bad, not crowded at all.

I tried to take pictures of Kate from our seats, but I guess the lighting wasn't good for how far away we were, and the pictures didn't turn out all that well. At one point while they were singing, I tried to get closer by going around to the side, but I guess I couldn't get all that close.

Anyway, the music teacher had them sing songs from all over the world. They included some Jewish songs just to make sure no one got offended. (The program for the night called it a "Holiday" concert. I guess the school is afraid of writing the word "Christmas", at least outside of kindergarten. Emma's class is learning about how Christmas is celebrated all over the world...)

Kate did a good job, and seemed to enjoy it. It was a fairly short event, which was an added bonus for a family of 6 small children.

Back down to a two car family

We sold our minivan today - to Drew. It took us quite a bit longer than we planned back in May, but that is ok. It is nice to not have that second car payment to thing about anymore.

Hopefully it will be a good van for them, it really has been for us.

New Computer

Our current home computer is very old by computer standards. It is somewhere around 8 years old, and is starting so show its age. I have tried nursing it along over the years, I have had to add disk space to it twice, and added memory to it once or twice in its day.

In the last week or two, it has started to have little hard drive failures. It will hang on Tara while she is trying to get something done on the computer, and she will be unable to get it to recognize the disk after a reboot. I have got it running again so far, but the signs of impending death are clearly there.

I looked at a couple of different machines from Dell, and looked at some HP machines. This past week, Dell was running some deals, I ended up getting a nice computer for the amount of one of the machines I had spec'ed out, but the one we got had many more upgrades in it.

The computer I got? A Dell Inspiron 530, 4GB of memory, 20inch flat panel monitor with integrated speaker, 320GB hard drive, DVD+/-RW drive, and a 4 year accidental care warranty. Not the best computer money can buy, but for what we will use it for here at home, not a bad deal at all.

They also gave me 2 business day shipping, my new machine was in Memphis this morning, and is only 40 miles away right now. It should arrive sometime tomorrow.

The first thing I will do? I will install Windows XP over the top of the Vista installation Dell provides. (Unless someone can give me a compelling reason not to in the next 21 hours...) I have the home directory for the old machine, including all music, photos, etc on an external hard drive for our existing machine, so it should be fairly easy to move everything over. It will be really nice to have the extra space on the desk by getting rid of the CRT monitor.

The second thing I will do? I will probably install name extraction software for Tara. The third thing? Wish I could find the Zoo Tycoon 2 disk (the one that I swear I loaned to Missy...) so I can install the game and both expasion packs I have so we can play the game for the girls on that machine. There are some silly little games the girls like to play that we can't install, we don't have the installation files. This might not be such a bad thing.

I hope we don't ever have to use the Accidental Care coverage, but you never know, especially around here, that is why I got it. I would save the thing for Christmas, and just wrap it up, but that seems a little silly since the machine on the desk right now is so slow and is having so many problems...

Restaurant Reviews

I have two restaurant reviews to do from the past few weeks:

Sam Hawk

I went to this Korean restaurant a few weeks ago with one of the Stake presidency. I forget what I had, I forgot the name of it about 3 minutes after I ordered it, but it was some sort of spicy chicken dish. Very spicy. Not that there is anything wrong with that. While we were waiting for our order, they brought out some little appetizers on little dishes for us. It was stuff like kimchi, little black beans, and some other stuff I didn't really know what it was, but it was tasty. I don't know how the place ranks in the world of Korean cuisine, but I liked it, and would go back again.

I have been having problems using my bipap lately, it is time for a new mask and tube, every time I use the thing, I end up sneezing all day the next day. The night before we went to Sam Hawk, I used my machine. After lunch, I was sneezing, but each sneeze left me with a good dose of "Spicy Korean food acid reflux". Good times. I'd still go back to the restaurant again...

International Buffet

A new restaurant recently opened in between Movies 8 and Shopko here in town. It bills itself as a "Chinese, Japanese, Italian, and American buffet." Ruth spent some time with me at my office one day last week, I took her to this restaurant to check it out. I liked it enough that on Monday, when Tara ended up picking me up from work, she looked like she needed more time than 10 minutes away from the girls, so I took her back to this place for dinner.

They have a mongolian barbque of sorts in it, a little sushi station, and lots of steamed shrimp. (Tara's favorite are those steamed then chilled shrimp.) What I think I like about this place is that they don't seem to care to dull down the taste of their dishes. Too many Chinese buffets make their dishes taste kind of bland, at least around here. (Is it the same in other places?) At this place, the foods actually have flavor. They at least taste like you would think they should. I liked the dim sum, which I guess was a number of the things sitting there. I couldn't figure out why they weere unlabeled until I went to Wikipedia and looked up dim sum. Turns out all those things were 'dim sum.' I don;t know if the sushi was good sushi, since I don't eat sushi all that often, but it doesn't matter, since any time I have sushi, I use generous portions of wasabi with it. (Cleans out the nasal passages in a hurry...)

When I was there with Ruth, they had fried mushrooms. Those things were good. Ruth and I both liked the fries they had. I liked the wontons, potstickers, and General Taos chicken, and a lot of the other stuff. It just had flavor.

Ruth's most favorite thing? Their dessert station had an ice cream section, they had about 6 different tubs of different flavors of ice cream. Nice touch, not just a soft serve ice cream machine most places have.

Anyhow, they look have way busy, at least the few times I have driven by there. Maybe they will stick around. Maybe it is about the flavor after all...

Woah! It's the 10th.

Somehow I took a 9 day vacation from the blog. Sorry about that everyone. I guess I was just out of energy half the time, and busy the other half.

One thing I have been playing with - gmail. I settled on the "shiny" theme, the "planets" theme was a little too dark, the contrast kind of bothered my eyes. (The terminal theme was way too much contrast. Funny how 10 years can change things. The old mainframe terminal wasn't so badback then, the internet was young. These days, there is a lot of white space on web pages, you get used to seeing it. I still miss 2 things about the mainframe days. I miss sleeping on top of the big Xerox printer during the night, waking up when the thing stopped because the paper filled the trays. It was nice and warm up there. The other thing I miss was the master console that used to beep whena message came up that needed attention. I could half sleep until I heard a beep. There seems to be a lot of sleeping involved at work those days. Now, I might not even wake to an explosion outside, much less a little beep...)

Anyhow, gmail also released something called 'tasks' in their labs. You can start multipe task lists, and link emails into the tasks to refer back to them. No longer will I need to use my inbox for a task list. It is kind of nice. It is new, I am sure it will get better, right now you can't add a priority to the tasks in your list, but you can at least link in emails, which I really like. I went from 50 emails stored in my inbox yesterday to one, that one will be archived tomorrow.

Tithing Settlement (aka "the girls overwhelm the Bishop in 10 minutes")

We had tithing settlement yesterday afternoon. The Bishop took a few minutes to ask the girls some questions about tithing and do some teaching. He kept asking Ruth questions, the answers Ruth kept giving had nothing remotely to do with tithing. (Bishop: "Ruth, do you know what tithing is used for?" Ruth: "I once smashed my fingers in the piano. It hurt.") Ruth certainly had a lot to say about him. Lily sent the entire time with her hand raised shouting "My turn! My turn! My turn!", then when he turned to her, she started mumbling something. Once he was done to her, she was back to "My turn! My turn! My turn!"

At one point, he asked who their Mommy was married to. Ruth insisted it was baby Adam. (Unfortunately, he said 'married', not 'chained', so this answer was wrong.)

He showed them a Widow's mite that he had in a box, circa the time of Christ, the girls didn't seem all that impressed. Kate let out a 'wow.', but it sounded like her trying to humor him.

At least he only has to endure it once a year. We let him know this was pretty much how every Family Home Evening goes... He wanted to make sure we made a blog entry about it, it impressed him that much.

Will it blend?

Have you seen any of the "will it blend" videos on YouTube? They have this industrial strength blender that they chew all kinds of things up in. Tara wanted me to make her a shake, so I decided to make my own video.

As you can see, a Butterfinger does indeed blend. You can also see that after all this time, I still can't seem to figure out that Tara keeps the blender unplugged so that the girls don't fool around with it.

Maybe the hammer was overkill...

The 2009 Christmas Cookie Project - Week 1

We have restarted the Christmas cookie project again this year. This evening, the girls were way too crazy to try to deal with driving them all over the place delivering cookies, so we let them get the neighbors and put them to bed. Then Tara and I went to deliver the rest.

This week's cookie lineup:

• Banana bread
• Andes candies cookies
• Mexican wedding cookies
• Sugar cookies - complete with green frosting and green sprinkles
• Candy canes
• Little round creme filled chocolates

This week's delivery lineup:

• Snow
• Faux
• Duffin
• Falater
• Blackham
• Lott
• Christensen
• Teresa
• Corless
• Crow/Havasi
• Sawyer
• Rose
• Rose #2
• Kinsie
• Krommenhoek
• MacDonald
• Ringer
• Weinheimer

Will you make the cut next week? Only time will tell. Speaking up will bump your priority on the list higher. Bribery will put you on top...