Christmas concert

Kate's Christmas concert was this week.  It's kind of nice the way her choir director does it, no extra monologue, no long explanations about the music, etc.  (That comes next week at the elementary school concert.)

I tried capturing it on video, but I didn't have the tripod, and Noel kept trying to get my attention, so the results in the video vary...

Old videos #9

Mary performing in the living wax museum - or whatever it is the school calls it - 20 March 2013

This is the last in a series of old videos that had been sitting on the camcorder.  Hope you enjoyed them.

Old Videos #8

Spontaneous dance party - 11 Nov 2012

Old Videos #7

Try not to get sea sick.

Old Videos #6

All the way through the 2012 school year, Tara and the kids took piano lessons.  At the end of the school year, they had an outdoor recital - 29 May 2012.  Then the piano teacher quit...

Old Videos #5

Ruth's first grade play - 23 May 2012.  The video is a bit long...

Old videos #4

Mary at a school dance festival - 6 April 2012.  This was 4th grade.  No dance festival for Emma last year, the Chinese program didn't do it...

Old Videos #3

Mary and Ruth in a school talent show - 24 Feb 2012

Now with shaky cam!

Old Videos #2

Emma creating a snowman - January 2012:

Old Videos #1

I found some old videos on our camcorder, that were never posted here.  Today's subject?  Noel as a baby, October 2011:

Setting up a Christmas tree

Setting up a Christmas tree at our house is a bit of an event, with so many hands wanting to help, and so many ornaments to put up.  It's so big, we have two trees.  Usually, the trees get put up, the lights on, then I have the kids line up to get ornaments to put on the tree.  They put their ornament on, then go to the back of the line.  I also tell them to alternate trees, so that both of them get roughly the same number of ornaments.

This year, I set up the camcorder in one of the rooms to video it.  Here it is, sped up 8 times:

Random pictures

Turns out that out camcorder takes pretty poor pictures, but here are a few I found:

One day this will seem like a picture from long ago. 

I have no idea when, what, where, or why.  There were several like this.

This is actually a pretty cool effect.  I have no idea how it was done.  Maybe it's time to finally read the owner's manual. 

There he is again...

It's you, Dad!

Tara has made several little books with pictures of the family in them.  Noel like to go through them identifying each person.  If that person is around, she will run up to them.  "It's you, Dad, it's you!"

Lately, she's been going through other books as well, when she finds someone that looks halfway like a father figure, she comes and finds me, and says "it's you, Dad!"

Noel recently brought me the following:

"It's you, Dad, it's you!  But where is your hat?"

I'm not quite sure how to respond to that...

The Fall

Cleaning the leaves out of all the hair afterwards took several days.

The rhythm

Every once in a while, the rhythm, no matter what it may be, is going to get you...  Luckily she didn't see the iPad, and kept dancing.

College sports

I bought Tara season basketball tickets this year.  I even stipulated that she was under no obligation to take me to every game.  She seems to be enjoying them.  There's something to be said about the atmosphere of a college sports arena or stadium.  Here's a glimpse, but you really have to be there...

Aren't you a little short for a storm trooper?

I'm not sure that he appreciated the joke after about the 4th time I said it on Halloween, but I still think it's pretty funny...

...

Note to future audience:  This is how much hair I had in Fall 2013.  As of today, most of it is still there, but not all.  The forehead lines are not always there...

Massively parallel bedding - Part 1

This summer, I upsized a set of bunk beds:

First step:  create another bed frame

Second step:  Bust your hump trying to get the bed frames up in the air

Third step:  Attach the end caps/stairs

The reason for the upgrade was to get this munchkin into that bedroom...

Adam's birthday was in June...

... it's now November.  Here are just a couple of pictures.

San Francisco trip - Part 2 revisited

I had forgotten that we went back to redo the video of the big giant dioramas.  Here they are:

San Francisco trip - Part 2

Down on Fisherman's Wharf, they have an old time arcade museum.  Lots and lots of old arcade type stuff.  Here is some of what they have in there:

A player piano.  Reminded me a little bit about my time as a pack mule for someone that renovated these, regular pianos, and church organs.

Monkeys.

There also were some big old dioramas, with lots of moving parts.  I tried to take a video of them, but the recording filled my iPad and got fouled up.  Well worth a visit, if you end up down there, though. 

San Francisco trip - part 1

I haven't really said much about our trip to San Francisco here, in case you didn't notice.  Here are some pictures:

The Left Hand Store - stuff for Emma...

Alcatraz.  We didn't make it over there, because there were no available tickets for that weekend.  We didn't have a lot of planning time prior to the trip...

Fish and chips.

Why are these people smiling?  Because their kids are several states away, driving their Grandmother crazy...

We stayed down by Fisherman's Wharf.  We did not go fishing.

Weeping Angels.

The TransAmerica building, from the street.

Cable cars.  We didn't actually ride one, the line was much too long.

This street looked much steeper from the bus.  The picture loses something in translation.

This was about all we got of the Golden Gate bridge, all weekend.  We did ride the bus across, in the full fog, you almost could see to the top while driving across, but not quite.

Chinatown.  We were there on what must have been market day.  This picture does not do justice to the chaos that was there.  Tara did not appreciate the fish heads.

We ate at a random place in Chinatown.  I'm not sure what we ordered, but it was good.  Tara had something that included fried spaghetti.  We also found a bookstore down there, and were able to get some fairly cheap kids books in simplified Mandarin for the kids.

Good trip.  Thanks again for watching the kids, Mom.

I can be a poor customer at times...

There are a couple of restaurants around town that have menu items I like to order.  A couple of examples:

• At a place called Cubby's, I like to walk up to the counter and say "I want to have a heart attack."  The heart attack is an Italian sausage with Italian beef on top of it.  It's pretty good.  I also like their rosemary fries, but that's not as fun to say.  Once the lady behind me actually burst out laughing.
• On the rare occasion I find myself at Burger King, I order the whopper with no mustard or onions.  More than 90% of the time, whoever is taking my order gets worked up about how the whopper doesn't actually come with mustard.  It really works them into a frenzy, for some reason.  (You would think they would just mark it as 'no onion', and move on, but generally I get a lecture about it.)
• Any place that has anything with 'marionberry' in the name gets ordered.  All because of Marion Berry:

'Cracks' me up every time.

This evening, Tara and I went to Galdolfo's.  I finally noticed that one of their sandwiches was called the 'knuckle sandwich'.  From there, the conversation went as follows:

Me: "I think I want a knuckle sandwich"
Cashier:  "You want a knuckle sandwich?"
Me:  "Will it hurt?"
Cashier:  "What?"

Not exactly the reaction I was looking for.  The knuckle sandwich at Galdolfo's is one of their pastrami sandwiches.  It's not in my top three sandwiches I have had there, but there is a very real possibility I will order it again, just to be able to ask for a knuckle sandwich again...

Free trip!

Today is the first flight out of Provo to Oakland.  To celebrate, they had a contest to win a weekend getaway on the flight, and a three night stay in San Francisco.  The first 50 people in line got a key to open a lock, if the lock opened you won.  (Alcatraz themed idea...)

Tara and I went down at 5:45 this morning, I thought there would already be 75 people in line.  There were only two people in a car, that was it.  

Anyway, when they got around to the drawing, I was first in line.  I got two keys for coming dressed as a fisherman.  Didn't need the second, the lock opened with the first...  Tara wasn't paying attention, she was still trying to fish her key out.  The crowd looked a little shocked.

I had planned to say to myself "you have chosen --- poorly" ala Indiana Jones, I was not prepared to tell myself "you have chosen --- wisely"...

Long story short, we thrust our kids on my mom, and we are waiting to get on the plane.  I've never been to San Francisco.  We'll have to get my mom something nice for dealing with 10 kids over the weekend.

Birthday dinner for Ruth

We took Ruth out for a birthday dinner tonight.  She picked Brick Oven.  

Ruth's comment about her dinner:  " I liked it, and I want to go again next year."

My commentary?  

I used to be about to eat 6-7 full plates of pasta with all the trimmings.  Now I can only handle two...  I suppose that's not a bad thing.

Fun with dry ice - but not too much fun

Last week, for "free form Friday", I did some dry ice stuff with Adam.  He really liked watching the fog come off all the stuff we did.

We made dry ice ice dream.  One batch of strawberry banana and one batch of chocolate chip.

We also made root beer, because that's required any time you have dry ice in the house.

We put a piece of dry ice into a ziplock, closed it, and watched as the bag filled, until it popped open.  I stopped short of teaching about dry ice bombs...

We wrapped up by putting water and dish soap in a cup, and dropped dry ice in.  We were on the front porch, and watched for maybe 30 minutes as it bubbled out.  All the kids came out to watch, as did the neighbor kids.

Adam was very impressed by his free form Friday night, and has already started counting down to the next, even though it won't be until the end of June...  

Slightly awkward customer service moment

There is a restaurant by my office called Costa Vida.  They do burritos, enchiladas, salads, etc.

I found an old frequent diner card in my desk for the place recently, and stuck it in my wallet.  We went over there today, when I went to pay, I gave them the card.  The girl at the register looked at it and said "We haven't used those in a long time.  Are you from out of town?"  Then she took my card, charged me for the meal, and that was the end of it.

I laughed about it after I walked off, but it was a little weird.  They have a new frequent diner card, it's a plastic card, like a Subway card.  She didn't offer to start me in a new card, no follow up comment about my seemingly foreign nature, just took my money and moved on. You'd think that something would have happened at that point...  What might I have done?  Pulled out a new frequent diner card, and gotten the equivalent points on it for the stamps I had on the old card.  Maybe a "see you again soon" or a "thanks for coming in."  Certainly not a "are you from out of town?"  (Would it have made a difference if I was from out of town?)

Now I don't know about you, but I am on the fence about Costa Vida.  It's easy to get to from my office, but they are not in a great location if you are just tooling around, mostly because they don't have good parking at all.  Tara's been disappointed with the food the last couple of times she has been there.  It's not like there aren't 30 other choices close by.

I got a steak salad today.  No dressing, extra pico de gallo.  It was ok, I am glad I didn't get any dressings on it.  Just ok, not anything really special.  Maybe I would have liked it more if I had been in from out of town.  :)

Trying for better tomato plants

I've been sick for a while.  More on that later, but being sick, I'm a bit behind getting the garden ready for the year.  Last year we didn't do much with the garden, mostly because of all the trips across country.  

I got a bunch of tomatoes started a couple of weeks ago, and have had a light on them to get them growing properly.  Unfortunately, the light was coming from the side, and the plants on the left side were not doing well.  Each set of columns are a different type of tomato, so I want to get those ones on the left going...

Tonight I built an adjustable light harness for the plants.  I might have over engineered it a bit, in a few ways.  (That shouldn't be a surprise too anyone...)  Now the light hits all the plants mostly evenly, I expect the plants in the middle to still grow faster, but hopefully the ones on the left do a bit better.

Wings

I like wings.  We only have one really decent wing place here in town, but it's about 15 miles away, which is well outside my standard 2-3 mile travel radius from my house.  (Further out takes more effort to go...)

Anyway, they guy who owns this place tried to open a place near my office last year.  I went a lot.  (Maybe too much)  He closed down the place at Christmas time, leaving the other store opened.  Now I'm stuck dreaming about wings that I'm too lazy to drive up and get. 

This would be a totally different story if someone would just invent a transporter technology.  (Duff's...)

It seemed like a good idea at the time...

Last weekend, the city and the univserity co-sponsered a public Easter Egg hunt.  Normally, we have our own egg hunt here at the house, but we decided to try it.

We got there, and there were tons of people there.  They had three egg hunt areas for under 3, 4-7, and 7-10 year old kids.  I took Noel over to the under 3 crowd, we sat and watched for about 20 minutes, about every minute or so, some little kid made a break for the field of eggs, their parent chasing after them.  (No pictures, I didn't want my iPad in that giant crowd of people.)

Noel and I were at the front, about 10 feet from the eggs.  I'm not sure what I was expecting, but when they let everyone in, we suddenly had dozens and dozens of parents swarming us.  Some grandma was yelling at everyone to let her through, because she was in front.  I ended up picked Noel up and pulling her out of there, so she didn't get trampled.  Things would have been fine, if it were not for all the aggressive parents.  I had figured we would have been fine with just two Easter Eggs for Noel.  One kid gave her one, then another lady put two eggs on the ground for her, by the time she bent down to get them, some other kid ran up and swiped one of them.

It was chaos, but nothing compared to the older kids.  They were on the intercom over and over telling people things would start at 10:30.  Older kids were supposed to be limited to 5 eggs each.  At about 10:15, there was a dam break in the older kids ranks, kids started swarming the field in one section, then they all went.  They got on the intercom to tell everyone that it wasn't time, and they should put the stuff back, but it was too late.  The 4-7 year old kids, on seeing the older kids make a break for it, also went.  30 seconds and thousands of eggs and prizes were gone.

We had gotten passes for the baseball game that day, and had about 2 hours before it started, so I took the kids to the cafeteria at the dorms.  Emma and Ruth at giant waffles.  I think they were all impressed at the food.

By the time we got to the baseball game, some of the kids were tired, we only made it half way through the game, but stayed long enough for them to all get to eat a giant freezer pop.

Next year, we're going back to a private Easter egg hunt...

Look Dad! StormTroopers!

Adam and I went to something called "Big Guy / Little Guy"  at the library a couple of Saturdays ago.  Adam had no idea what is was about, we got there a few minutes early, and waited in line to go in.  While we were standing there, Adam looked over and saw these Star Wars guys going in the other door.  Adam said "look Dad!  Storm Troopers!  What are Storm Troopers doing at the library?"  (I would have gotten worried if he said "I must tell the others...")

They had face painting, Adam was only brave enough for a hand painting.

There were two long tables covered in Legos.  Adam could have stayed there all day long.  I made some sort of flyer.

No fear of Sith Masters...

It being a library activity, books were involved.  They gave away a free book for each kid.  Adam got a Spiderman book that he seems to enjoy.  Burger King had burgers for everyone, but they tasted like they were made about a week ahead of time, so:

 We went to Cubby's for fries!  They gave Adam a hat.  He puts it on every time he sees it in the house.