A few Christmas traditions

But first, a blurry picture of a piece of Thanksgiving pie. Pie that's now a slightly distant memory for that got any of it.

One of our family's traditions is to put up the Christmas tree on the day after Thanksgiving. Usually this means I set up the tree, and put lights on it, and then we wait days or weeks for the kids to clean their room before we put ornaments on the tree.

A couple of years ago, Sears had a sale in January where they were getting rid of their 6 foot tall trees for $5. I bought two of them. We have hundreds of ornaments for the tree, more than enough to fill both trees. Sometimes we end up helping the kids put ornaments on, but this year, we just handed them the ornaments one at a time, and let them put the ornaments where ever they wanted to. The kids seemed to enjoy it, and did a pretty good job.

We also hang stockings, every year one or two seem to disappear. Last year, I got a 'mass quantity' sized Christmas stocking. This year we've lost a few more stockings somehow, and we haven't yet replaced them, so just the obscenely large one is up right now.

Another tradition we have is to send out Christmas cards. We've tired keeping in touch with family and old friends, sometimes we don't do such a good job. Sometimes it's kind of hard to keep up with where everyone is. Lately we've done a picture of the family with the card, we haven't taken a picture yet this year. The kids have been helping with a little family message the last couple of years, we haven't talked about creating this one yet, either.

The last couple of years, we've done Christmas cookies for neighbors. (And cards.) The kids kind of like going out delivering plates of cookies. I haven't started cookies yet this year, cookies are a lot of work, I haven't decided if I've got the time and energy for it yet this year.

Thanksgiving Dinner by the numbers

(In no particular order)

51 - rolls - Emma ate most of them
25 - pound turkey - Tara's Mom
11 - Adults
11 - Kids
10 - pounds of potatoes
7 - Kinds of pie - Apple, Berry, Pumpkin, Butternut Squash, Banana Cream, Chocolate, and a sugar free chocolate/banana cream
6 - cups of gravy
5 - Dishwasher loads
4 - hour nap - for me anyway - before 5 hours of late night work
2 - plates of leftovers for latecomers on Friday
2 - spoonfuls of horseradish in the potatoes. I don't think anyone really minded or noticed. Except for me.

(OK, so it was a particular order)

That's not a cough to truck has, but it is on it's deathbed.

I've shared the fist sized hole in the muffler before. I've tried taping the thing twice with metallic duct tape. The first time, the tape fell off, but it was quieter for about a mile. I tried a second time, and really wrapped the thing up nice so the tape wouldn't fall off. I taped all the way around the muffler and thought I had it done up, and drove off. After a mile, it started sputtering and complaining again. Turned out that the exhaust pressure blew a hole right through the tape. (But the wrap job around the hole stayed...)

I got an inspection on the truck recently. It didn't pass. The follwoing is needed for the truck to be road worthy again:

• 2 back tires
• Windshield
• Serpentine Belt
• Fix the oil pan leak
• New muffler
• and they didn't say it this year, but there is a suspension arm that is wearing out
• I also put the truck in four wheel drive yesterday before the 'blizzard' started, and some very loud sound happened just before it engaged, then it slipped out, and then back in again. Not a good sign.

So, I don't want to spend the money on all of that, really. The truck has over 235000 miles on it. The registration on the truck expires on Tuesday. I'll be parking it in the driveway Tuesday night.


That begs the question - "What do I do with the truck?" I have several options I on the table right now: (In no particular order)

• Create a greenhouse of out it - in the driveway
• Bury it in the front yard up to the bed - put a lawn chair and BBQ in the bed
• Start 'Car-henge' by burying it standing up
• Demolition Derby
• Sell it
  
• Watch "Red" to see what they did with a truck. I hear that's really the way to go, but I don't know what my parents are talking about yet, because I haven't seen the movie.

Any other options?

The Great Utah Blizzard of 2010

We had a so called blizzard last night. On Monday night, the National Weather Service started in on a blizzard warning, and called the thing a storm unlike one we have seen here in many years. Or something like that.

People reacted 'with caution'. Or over-reacted. The storm came in, snowed for about an hour, and basically blew out after that. As you can see from the picture above, I spent a very long time digging out from this storm. I'm exhausted from all the work.

It did give me an excuse to tell my 'delivering newspapers in a blizzard' story from when I was eleven. I told it several times leading up to the storm.

Halloween 2010

Tonight is trick or treating night in Provo. This afternoon has been kind of rainy, which is actually a good thing. We went to one of the grocery stores in town, which was giving out candy and balloons, while we waited for the rain to stop. We also picked up a few things at the store while we were there.

After it stopped raining, we went down one street, then it poured down rain on us. They got about a dozen pieces of candy. Not too few, not too many, no crazy sugar high & sugar crash tomorrow. When we got home, the ids were all soaked. They seem to be ok with what they've got, so we are rolling with it.



When we got home, the "stew in a pumpkin" I had made was ready to eat. Really, stew in a pumpkin is always kind of nice.

Seems I've got a

I found this today while walking up to the truck. It's a fist sized hole in the muffler. It looks like it's been there for a little while. The thing's been a little noisy, ever since our trip in August, but until now, I hadn't found the problem. I haven't looked all that hard, either.

I'd have to guess it happened on the way to the trip, when we had all the problem. Must have been something on the road I drove over and threw up onto the thing. There is a slight crease in the muffler, as well.

I'm going to try to patch the hole with metallic tape. Think that will help it pass the safety inspection?

John does not know how to make caramel apples

Tonight I tried to make caramel apples. Caramel was on sale as the store, I didn't take into account the fact that I would have to unwrap all those little squares when I passed up the little container of caramel for the little cubes. Thank goodness for all the cheap labor that lives at my house. I also got too much liquid in the caramel when it was melting, and the stuff just slipped right off the apples. Here are two I tried coating while the caramel was too hot.


The girls appear to be better at getting toppings on their apples that I am. Maybe we will think about letting them eat them tomorrow. Or something. Caramel apples can be messy.


It was also pumpkin decorating night here at the house. Tara and I didn't have the energy to carve pumpkins today, so we had the kids draw the faces on instead. This appears to have been a perfectly acceptable substitute. Sorry about the blur. It was darkish in the room.

Election Time

It's election time, and what does that mean? It means that there is all kinds of noise out there right now. Utah has Early Voting, which means I could go out right now and vote, or any time in the next two weeks, really. ("Come early, and come often!")

I have know for a little while who I've intended to vote for, except for our State House race here. I'm not someone who votes for the same party all the time, I'm happily unaffiliated. I vote for who I want to vote for. (Everyone should, really.)

Anyhow, in the State House race, I've been trying to figure out which of the candidates to vote for. One of them has said some things that bother me, until recently, I hadn't heard all that much from the other. One said something about his website that ticked me off. One had a political party call me one evening on his behalf. (Why did they call me? I'm not a member of their party. Actually, maybe that's why.) One is being supported by one or two people who I don't think match well to my political philosophies...

Anyway, a week or so ago, I poked through both of their websites. A couple of days ago, I did it again. I think I'm ready to go at this point, I've got my mind made up.

So all those phone calls can stop. The flyers in the mail can stop. I like Early Voting, because then when they call in the evenings, I can just say "I already voted.", and they hang up.

Book Review

Final Crisis
Greg Cox

This book is a comic book novelization of the DC comics 'event' from two years ago. As opposed to the previous book I read, which took several months, this book only took me a couple of days to read. I couldn't find it around here anywhere, I think the book buying tastes of my local library have shifted a bit in the last little while. Iended up buying the book on Amazon.com. Amazon is great.

Anyhow, the book starts out pretty violent. Heroes die. Villains prevail. Heroes become villains.

Then the book picks up speed. Dead heroes come back. The Earth is doomed. More heroes die. Some villains help out. There ends up being more than one major villain. And in the end, Superman, and his alternate reality Superman doppelgangers, all team up to save the day, just in time.

I hope that's a spoiler free review. I thought the book was pretty good, although I got the feeling that the author was carving out side pieces of the story to keep the book a normal size. I don't know that for sure, having not read the comics as the story unfolded, but that's the idea I have in my head.

Oh, and Batman dies, sort of. I hear they are bringing him back right now...

Food

I found this monstrosity of a turnip in my garden this evening. I had planted turnips, rutabaga, and parsnips early in the spring, nothing really came of it, so I assumed either I planted at the wrong time, or the quail got to them.

I ended up planting cantaloupe in the place of these plants, during the early summer, the cantaloupe plant started growing, but then eventually stopped. I thought this was kind of weird, we never got any fruit of the plant. Some blossoms, but nothing else. This evening I went to pull the cantaloupe plant out of the garden, and there was some sort of thing growing out of the base of it. I thought this was kind of weird. I dug it out, and it was a huge turnip. It had grown right through the base of the cantaloupe plant.

I also found half a dozen onions underneath the broccoli. It's like finding money on the street, except I was the one that put it there, and it's food. I guess it's time to make a stew. Stew with fresh vegetables.


I also got Emma to help me make an apple pie yesterday. I need to learn how to make pie crust.

Book Review

Bottom of the Ninth
Branch Rickey, Casey Stengel, and the daring scheme to save baseball from itself

Michael Shapiro

I've been reading this book off and on for the past few months. Not that it's not a good book, just that I haven't focused terribly hard on finishing the thing.

The book covers the period in baseball from 1958-1960, at a time when a third league tried to form and join the major leagues. This was after the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants left New York. The book is largely about Branch Rickey (the same guy who helped get Jackie Robinson in the majors.) and his efforts to build to new league. This league was called the Continental League, which I had never heard of before.

The New York Yankees had had the most success in the 1950's, one of the reasons was that the owners had all the control over a team. They essentially 'owned' the players, and held all the cards. There was a huge disparity in money between the large market teams and small market teams in the league. (Sound familiar?)

Rickey's idea (with the help of others) was to build a league where all the teams shared equally in profits, allowing for everyone to compete. In the end, the existing owners were able to squash the new league, and in most cases, eventually expanded into the markets that tried to first be a part of the Continental League. All except for (of course) Buffalo, who was firmly in place as one of the cities in that third league, but never got an expansion team.

It was an interesting idea, sharing the wealth to encourage competition. Because the owners were able to kill the league and it's ideas, it never happened. That's why today, you still have teams, like the Yankees, that have tons more money than other teams.

And Casey Stengel? He was the manager of the Yankees during this period of time. He was ousted just about the time the new league was scuttled. (At the end of the 1960's World Series, when the Pirates beat the Yankees. Interestingly enough, a tape of game seven of that series was recently found in Bing Crosby's wine cellar. Coming soon to a TV near you!)

Anyway, Casey Stengel had nothing to do with the Continental League. He just happened to get fired not long after the league was gone. It felt to me like the author didn't quite have enough material for a book, until he started talking about Stengel, and then give his own play-by-play description of the 1960 World Series. Not that it was a bad thing, just that I thought the flow was a bit off...

Anyway, it was an interesting book, talking about something I didn't even know happened in baseball. At it gave another reason as to why Buffalo is a cursed sports city.

I've got another option for the truck

A couple of days ago, Tara asked me to take the van in to get looked at. We've had a check engine light, a few days ago, the check oil light came on. (It was time for an oil change, anyway.) Tara found that the back left turn light was out. (Fast blinking on the dashboard. Genius.) For a little while, the car has had a bit of a problem at speeds over 50 MPH with a little bit of a shake. To top it all off, there was some sort of engine noise that bothered her, I didn't really hear it, but I don't really drive that vehicle all that much.

I took the van in yesterday. There is a shop right on the same block as my office, the guys there are really nice, seem very honest, I've never had a problem with them. (Ray's Campus American Car Care - Just off the West exit of campus.) They worked on it for a while, and called me to break the news to me. The shaking was because the tires are wearing on the inside of the tires. To be honest, the outside of the sidewalls of these tires don't look all that great, either. We've (meaning Tara, really) also had problems driving on these tires in the Winter. Anyhow, Ray also indicated that they had changed the oil, replaced the turn light, and were still tracing the engine light. The radiator had a crack in it, and needed to be replaced.

He actually talked to me about the options. Tara doesn't drive a lot on the freeway, he thought the tires might be ok a little bit longer (like until next month or something) if I wanted to replace the radiator first. He talked about getting the radiator done so that the engine didn't overheat and cause other damage. The code for the check engine light indicated a problem with the O2 sensors, but they kept testing them, and couldn't get them to fail. I guess check engine codes are just general suggestions of areas to check more than direct diagnostic data. I imagine that the idea is to get you to look all over the place on the car for five or six hours, then you get a message from thing like:

"Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over."

Anyway, I had them replace the radiator, they kept looking for the problem on the check engine light. At the end of the day, they decided to clear the light, and see if it came back. Tara and I went off yesterday evening in the van, running some errands. The check engine light came on after three miles of driving. We went to the grocery store, one of the things we picked picked up was a couple of quarts of oil for the truck. (It has a leak.)

On the way home from the store, about mile eleven of driving, the engine overheated. I parked the van, Tara walked the block or so home. After letting the thing cool a bit, I got the van home, but barely. All kinds of coolant was leaking out of the thing. Nice.

This morning, I put two quarts of oil in the truck so I could drive the kids to school in it. (The platoon system, two at a time, two trips.) Then I drove down to AutoZone, got some coolant, and tried putting some in the radiator. I poured a little in, it flowed through the radiator, and out the bottom. Nice.

I drove the truck to the mechanic, told Ray what happened, he went and got one of his guys, and sent him off with me to look at the van. It sounds like either a hose had a clamp that didn't fully get seated, or they missed a piece of styrofoam in the packaging, or something or the other, we got a gallon of coolant in the van, and it didn't leak out, so we tried driving the mile and a half to the shop. After a mile, the engine overheated, but it was mostly downhill at that point, we coasted in.

They worked on the van all day today, Tara used the truck to shuttle kids around. Kaylynn brought Lily and Ruth home after Lily's preschool. (Thanks Kay.) I had Lily at work for an hour, and Adam for a couple of hours, because there weren't enough seats in the truck to take care of business.

They reattached all the hoses on the radiator, filled it all the way back up, did a pressure test, and drove the things all over the foothills trying to get it to overheat. It didn't which is a good sign. They eventually found that the check engine light was from the catalytic converter, but they didn't have the equipment to replace those. The van doesn't have a lot of symptoms that would indicate a catalytic converter problem. (The truck does, but that's besides the point.) We need tires before it starts to snow, and a new catalytic converter before the next emissions test, I suppose. That's life owning a vehicle. We got a deal when we bought this thing, it's still a great deal compared to our options when we bought it.

What does all this have to do with my truck? The registration expires on the truck at the end of November. I don't think the thing will pass the safety inspection without repairs. It definitely needs a new wind shield. Tara thinks I should get it inspected anyway, if it's just a wind shield, I think she's willing to spring for it as my Christmas present for the year. (The only real expense past that is gas for the truck. Insurance is basically free on the thing.)

If it doesn't pass, I still like my demolition derby idea. I thought of another one today. I could dig a big hole in the front yard, bury the truck up past it's axles, making the bed flat with the yard. I'd then call it "yard art". No one would be able to miss our house after that. ("Turn on the street, then look for the house with the truck buried in the yard")

In the summer, I could move the BBQ grill out there onto the truck bed, add some tacky plastic furniture, sit back, drink a Diet Dr. Pepper, and relax...