A non-holiday!

Yesterday we stayed home. Wow.
Leftovers for dinner, we have enough for a week. After dinner we played our new game: Scotland Yard. I played Mr. X running around London while Susy, Andrew, and Mali played detectives trying to catch me. Fun. (I won)
Afterwards I FINISHED painting our bedroom. It is now a deep, dark, relaxing purple. We are reassembling our bed and moving all the furniture back. Mali is out with Zoë and family at a Narnia play. Andrew is over at Alana's watching football on her TV. He was updating his pool spreadsheet and discovered two games on TV now. You should have heard the yell when he went downstairs and rediscovered that we have no TV.
When Mali gets home we are going to go buy a new one, but not HDTV. We will wait on that one. Hopefully I'd like to have one in time to watch the World Cup this Summer.

Tonight we wil be having our New Year's festivities at Pablo's place. Same old group, but we're missing Alana, who is in Sun River, and we get to celebrate with Tom, Tsulan, and Tiana this year, who are not in Hawaii for a change.

Holidays, cont.

Last night was a festive dinner at Gayle, Dave, and Kelsey's house across the street. Gayle made this delicious dessert, along with a delicious chicken dish. Pablo brought my favorite spicy sweet potatos, and I made Nancy's bean salad and brought it. Click the picture to see the chef.

Still Christmassing

Okay, last night was birthdaying. We went to Chevy's for dinner with Theresa and Larry for William's 13th birthday, and surprisingly, ate too much. Then at home Larry kindly helped me haul our new dryer inside.

As I was buying the dryer at Sears, after backing into the nice Democrat's rubber car, Mali called my cell to tell me our TV is broken. It really is. I was planning on replacing it today, but now I'm thinking maybe to wait a bit and see what life without it is like.

Day after the day after Christmas

A fine meal tonight: Paul's amazing turkey curry. Who would of thought(?) turkey would make such a fine curry, but the flavor seems to fall right into it. Followed it up with a largely unnecessary pumpkin pie. Included the Sageville wine received Christmas Eve from Unka Jim, which was very nice.
No painting today. Tomorrow I get us a new dryer, as the old one is making grinding noises.

Boxing Day

Boxing Day at Alana's: More food! More presents! More people!
The fun just never stops around here. Tonight Paul is making a curry with the leftover turkey from Christmas dinner. And we have a complete pumpkin pie leftover. It is leftover night!
I have been laughing all day as I read through my newest book: a Boondocks treasury: A Right to be Hostile. Hilarious! I'm finally getting to start at the beginning with one of my very favorite comic strips. Mali keeps sharing her Baby Blues book with me. I haven't yet shown her my new humungous Little Nemo in Slumberland book. It is not overly funny, but has amazing artwork. Cute, too.

Post Christmas

The whirlwind is over, though still tonight we feast at Alana's Boxing Day party. Tomorrow we've been invited to dine on leftover-turkey curry at Paul and Nancy's. It's all about the food. The diet may begin with a fast, to start at some indeterminate date.

Last night's Christmas feast was great fun. It began with a bang, as Nancy created a potent pomegranate lime punch. The food was incredible. My favorite dish was the huge squash stuffed with onions and peppers. But the turkey and trimmings and blueberry pie were all fantastic. I'll post any recipe's I can get.

Christmas!

Click for full effect.

More photos can be found at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/oregondad

Kids everwhere! We had great fun at Mary and Jim's for Christmas Eve. Rylin and Conner stole the show. Fame is fleeting: Next year it will be Cooper and Alex.

Andrew declared it the best Christmas ever, so we must have done something right.

Breakfast was scratch pancakes and scrambled eggs from Tsulan, who called to invite us over just as we began discussing breakfast. We returned so Susy could cook her share of the Christmas feast, and I could paint the bedroom. It is purple now, and soon to have it's final coat.

Billingses

We had visiters last night, and their little dog too. I forgot about Maple, the worlds cutest toy poodle. Pete gave me a CD by switchfoot, which looks very good, but everyone is asleep right now so I haven't listened to it yet.
Susy and I both worked, so we just ordered pizza, which everyone seemed very happy with. Mali saved the day with dessert - a little something she whipped up after seeing it on a food show: A brownie with cream cheese on top and a design of chocolate syrup. I'm betting it gets made again, as it was very tasty, and quite beautiful. And she did the whole thing herself, except for the part where she wrote me a little note while I was on the phone working that said, "I need cream cheese." Walgreens had it, which I had to go to anyway.

Yesterday, we completed our first ebay sale. This is possibly to be Andrew's money factory. He sold his BUM luggage, and Susy helped him package it and I dropped it off at the Post Office. All that's left now is the hopefully positive feedback we will get. If all works out, he can help people sell stuff for a small cut. The professionals here charge 30%, so 20% should get him some business and still a nice return.

Christmas Season Continues

Last night we had a festive dinner at Tom, Tsulan, and Tiana's. They are usually in Hawaii for Christmas, but they went for Thanksgiving this year. Also there were: Alana, Olivia, Pablo, Rocio, and Matias.

Tonight we will be visited by Pete, Megumi, Marissa, and Anna. Very fun!

Snow and Ice.

The snow kept falling yesterday, and then the freezing rain came. It let up for a bit so we walked over to Alana's for dinner. Paul, Nancy, Zoë, and Hannah also walked over to join us, and Pablo drove Rocio and Matias and his friend over, in Pablo's supercool all-wheel drive VW Passat. Handily, Alana just happened to be making a typical dinner, so had no trouble feeding all 15 of us.
Susy risked the roads to drive to work this morning. They are getting better now, as the temperature has gone all the way up to 33°.

Photo of Andrew at Rhode Island meet

Susy just found these photos from the Cross Country meet in Rhode Island. Click the picture below to see more of them.

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Snow!

We have snow here. Big, fat flakes coming down. An ice storm is predicted for later tonight.

Christmas Season

I have finally entered Christmas Season. My body rejected it after spending Thanksgiving in Mexico. But now the kids are celebrating the start of another vacation (though they hardly seem to go to school anyway) and the party season is upon us. Susy and I went to a Christmas party down the street last night while the kids spent the night with friends. Very fun, with lots of decorations and Christmas cheer. We met several new neighbors, and saw some people we don't see as often as we'd like.

Mali's latest look

Mali tries out a new hair style today:

Andrew recovers

Andrew stayed home from school yesterday, and appears to now be fully recovered.
I'm working in Portland today. Mali was invited to go home with Rachel after school, which works out nicely.

The saga continues...

Andrew woke up at 2:00 AM to throw up. He also made full use of the air sickness bags on the plane on their leg to Atlanta. Apparently, he has a stomach virus. We are to meet them at the airport with a lime popsicle.

In other, seemingly unrelated news: Zoe broke her collerbone yesterday while skiing. We'll be visiting her this afternoon.

Yesterday's weather here was beautiful. I spent several hours out in the backyard, cleaning up mole mounds and the yard in general. I was unhappy to see a new mole mound out there this morning. The battle for lawn supremecy rages on.

East Coast Update

First let me give a big shout out to all our new readers out there: Hi Dad!

Susy decided to share course conditions with me at 6:00 this morning. Snow everywhere, but temperature above freezing. She and Andrew called again afterwards to tell me Andrew survived. He doesn't know his place yet - they'll call when they know. The OCC team took 15th. Marcus got third, and Jackson lost a shoe right away and went most of the 3k without it.
In other news: Last night Mali and I went with the neighborhood gang to see the Narnia movie. We all loved it.

Update: Andrew took 212th out of 246. Snow is not his thing.

East Coast Arrival

Susy and Andrew have made it to Rhode Island. They have heard that the cross country course is closed today and they're not allowing walk throughs because of the snow. Many of his team members are still travelling because of all the weather delays.

More travelling

This time Susy and Andrew are flying - attempting to get to Rhode Island for Andrew's cross country meet on Saturday. They are stuck in a snowstorm in Chicago. Originally they were scheduled to fly through Atlanta, but their early morning flight was cancelled. Hopefully they'll get there at a decent time tomorrow.

Mali and I had dinner at Alana's, then we went and visited with Rocio and Pablo.

I just talked with Susy. They're at a very nice Holiday Inn in Chicago. They have a flight out to Providence at 7:00 AM tomorrow.

Nearly back to normal

Whatever normal is for us, we're almost back to it. The kids were off today (We do live in Oregon, after all.) Mali spent the day at Sara's house, and Andrew spent the day doing all his leftover homework, and asking me about it every 10 minutes.

A few more photos

There are a few more photos now posted at http://www.flickr.com/photos/oregondad/

Here's one:



Andrew hates this photo, but it reminds me of how happy we all were.
It's good to be home, but we sure had fun.

Photos

I've posted some photos on my flickr account. Please note that they are in opposite order (more or less) of occurance, so if you want the sequential effect, you should start on page 3 and work back to 1.

I have more that need additional tweaking to be presentable. Also there are many on Mali's camera to upload.