Oh good god, do I have to do this?

Facebook and Blogging?! It's almost too much. I suppose the blog is for philosophical thoughts and longer stories, Facebook for status updates, and Twitter is just for burps and farts. Good god, make it stop.

Anniversary gift...

Isaac gave us the best gift yet this week. After 1 week of no diapers, and no accidents, we feel pretty comfortable saying he is potty trained!!! Thank you Isaac.

10

Happy anniversary to us. Christa and I have been married 10 years, and together even longer.

How do I know? Well, we celebrated our anniversary two days early while the kids were in school, we spent it together lazing around, opening presents and going out for a really, really good lunch and then putting together photo albums for the boys. For our actual anniversary on Sunday, I cleaned out the garage and attic, Christa did laundry and played outside with the boys and we all went out for the best Indian lunch buffet ever. We read books to the boys, put them to bed and then watched Animal House (two words: Kevin Bacon).

Yeah, we've been married a long time :) We're both looking forward to another 50 years of beating the odds...

Hands off me treasure!

Cheesecloth: $2.25
Leather vest: $1.50 (in 1979)
Daddy's Belt: $12.82

Dress Like a Pirate Day at School: Awesome.

Friends who also dress like pirates: Arrrgh, matey!

Summer...

...is about catching frogs on camping trips (even if it means getting your pajamas muddy)...


...is about swim lessons, swimming at school, and then swimming at the water park when you get home...


...is about watching fireworks with your friends, but only after catching as many firefly's as possible...
...is clearly not possible without green grass, blue sky and water.

The most perfect day...

Sleep in until 7:30 (ah, age...), then eat breakfast (waffles!), play dinosaur in the backyard. Then go see a kid's movie (WallE), eat lunch at your favorite Indian buffet.

Hey, why not go to the Bluegrass festival, too? Go to Bluegrass festival (get in free because the people in front of you had extra tickets they didn't want to waste). Spend 2 hours laying on a blanket, listening to excellent (and not so excellent, but fun anyways) music while watching your 2 and 4 year old boys run in circles with everyone else's kids. End up in the middle of a pre-school pig pile. Eat hot dogs and lemonade on a bench while watching the sunset.

Walk a block to your friends house, have a beer while the kids play some more, and then pile into the car. Kids fall asleep on the way home. Put two small bundles in their beds, watch movie with spouse. Sleep, blessed sleep.


This day was a keeper.

Daddy's Day Adventure...

Happy Father's Day! For mine, the boys and Christa took me hiking to Portland Arch, a sort of mini-canyonlands here in Indiana. We hopped off the trail pretty quick and elected to follow the creek, just deep enough to be interesting, but shallow enough to be passable along the length of our adventure. Along the way we saw fish, animal tracks, crinoid fossils, a venomous (?) snake, newly emplaced debris dams, and a large (I can fit my house in it) grotto/alcove. Isaac and Alden loved playing in the creek and on our return Alden found a large, well weathered cattle femur in the creek. He's convinced it's a dinosaur bone ("Now I really believe in dinosaurs!") and we aren't going to disabuse him of that notion.


Best line of the Week:

AE: Daddy, I made you a surprise for Father's Day.

NE: Don't tell me what it is, I want it to be a surprise.

AE: I won't...It holds pencils and other things.

NE: Don't tell me what it is! It should be a surprise.

AE: I didn't tell you what it was, I just told you what you can put in it.

Off the beaten track...

If you missed it, see "Lars and the real girl". How could a movie about an emotional introvert and a sex-doll be funny and touching? You haven't gotten the memo, have you....

It's right up there with "Juno" in tone and production. Good stuff.

A (Two) day(s) at the (Red Bull Air) Races...

So we packed it up and went to the Air Races in Detroit this weekend. The first day we sat on the Windsor riverfront, directly across from Detroit. That's Isaac's first foreign trip, Alden's second. The weather was beautiful, but too windy for the air race. Not too windy for the flyby's and acrobatic demonstrations, which both boys really enjoyed (especially the near-sonic boom one F/A-18 made on it's flyby). The second day we spent with the family of my friends Rich and Susan, who's cousin Cheryl works in one of the high rises next to the waterfront. A great view of the races from there on Sunday when they were finally run. Here are the pictures...

Obama skating...

We all went out and knocked on doors for Obama on Saturday. Saturday night, we went to a small party for Obama at the local roller skating rink and look who showed up. He stopped and talked with us for about a minute, complimented the boys and stood still long enough for us to get this picture. He's a nice man for a future president of the United States (we hope!)...

Sweetness, light and spring

As in the title, Buddy in the redbud tree, Bean with the hose. Spring is here.

Latest thing: Dinosaurs; Perennial favorite: Airplanes and water.

Been a while. We're alive, the boys are happy and healthy and Christa and I are working away on our respective research (Cosmogenic isotopes and stable isotopes in cactus, respectively). Quickly, the first pic is of a small reunion of my high school friends in Portland on a short visit I made to visit my great-aunt Ellen (she's much better now). Below that are the boys on the bunnkbed, and then an absolutely great picture of them at a wedding in Texas. They had smiled for the previous picture, which was cute, but then I asked them not to smile, and that picture is much cuter. They're both wonderful hams. I'll try to update more often from now on, thanks for sticking with the blog (all three of you! :)

Halloween pics...

Due to demands imposed on me by others, here are the obligatory blogoween pictures. We had a great time going with our friends around this great neighborhood, people even put 10 piece bags of candy in the kids candy bags (parents rxn, "what the hell!? Oh, wait, you don't have kids. Nice.") The boys went as Great White Sharks, which looked great, but only Isaac's photographed well.

Isaac is very serious about pumpkin carving...




Here's the little Great White...


















The day before Halloween, our neighbors all reported the presence of a 6 point buck in our yard. I believe it because before Halloween we managed to catch (and release) two of the biggest racoons I've seen getting in through the cat door to eat the cat food. We go through significantly less cat-food now. We sent Alden down to check the traps each morning until we heard, "Daddy! We got Racoons!". We then took them to the river and let them run off. They were also the gentlest racoons I've seen, eating side by side with the cats and nary a peep out of them when we moved them in the traps.

Get out the Boat...

At the polling station the today, getting out of the car:

Me: Let's go vote.

Boy: But Dad, I need my life jacket.

I'm not even going to try...

...to catch up. Summer was great, lot's of family and travel, and now that both kids are in school in the mornings, I might actually earn that PhD. Here is a pic of Alden on the secret trail in the secret woods with the secret butterfly garden and secret bridge. Apparently, it also has some very large secret mushrooms!

Back from summer, check back soon...

Easter, just like Christmas but just for kids and in pastel...

Baby, corn and ribs....

Note the rib sauce/hair gel on his head....

Chicago

Here are some pictures from our Chicago trip. Auntie Sarah came to visit (thanks Sarah!) the boys and we headed up to Chicago together for the St Patrick's day weekend. While we were there we saw our old friends (Thanks Jen and Ben!) and went to the aquarium, Museum of Science and Industry, the John Hancock Tower and lots of really good food... Great trip, now Alden wants to live in Chicago and not Lafayette!

Go green, buy black (toner)...

I just refilled the toner in my laser printer cartridge using a kit and a bottle of toner. It couldn't have been easier or cheaper. And, I have the satisfaction of getting just a little bit more out of that big chunk of plastic. I ordered the kit and toner from Toner refill kits and I was impressed. More toner than would fit, fast delivery and simple directions (on a CD...well, not entirely eco friendly, but better). I can probably use the same cartridge 3 times before I need another.

New clothes for the House...

Our house finally has a new skin and some highlights. The main work was done shortly after the last set of pictures, but we've been waiting for the shutters to arrive to post the final pic. We especially like the shutters and the small gingerbread work at the top. Our siders did a top notch job, even fixing some siding we had damaged just a week after the installation (free of charge!). Next up, landscaping...

Brrrr...my house is naked.

We've gone and got new siding for the home. Here is a picture of the house with it's old, masonite siding (I've heard lot's of different names for this, but it's essentially compressed particle board). Now, it doesn't look bad in the snow, but up close it was swelling and rotting. We had planned on replacing the siding earlier, but the blizzard of 07 moved it back a bit.



Now, underneath that rotten exterior is some plastic and awesome 2 x 6 planks of TIMBER. The good stuff — solid, thick and straight. Right out of 1910. No rot, no termites, just beautiful holocellulose wrapped in polyethylene goodness. The next pics will be of the finished product, I just need the sun to come out so I have a good comparison picture. The new siding is vinyl, and a vast improvement considering what it replaces.

And just for good measure, my sweets in the snow (Isaac is posing as a Minnesotan, note the cockeyed ear-flap hat and Miller Time in hand). What good fortune to live here with my girl and boys...

Blizzard!!!!

Brrrrr.....

17" of snow in just 24 hours = FUN FUN FUN! I'm in a snowy, soft, quiet heaven right now. Here are some pictures of the snow coming down yesterday and of us out playing in it today. Everything is closed while people dig out (with a shovel and beer). It's really not that bad, just enough to play official hookey and drink scotch. Nice....

Yeah, we have palm trees in Indiana. What about it?


Our house in the snow, look at the gas meter at back left, i's at least 3' off the ground at the top.


Snow Ice Cream, oh yeaaaah...

Wikatrivia...

OK Here's my new smart idea...

Link Wikipedia and Trivial Pursuit(or TP for short). Just put a little TP pie in the upper corner, you'd click on the color you needed a question for, and -BOOM- you get a random question with a set difficulty in that category and a link to the answer (and wiki).

Someone make a beta for me to test drive (NO PINK QUESTIONS). Yeah, you could even have a feature where you get to select which categories you want to play (rather than just the traditional six – I hate entertainment). You could have a random category button. AND it would never get outdated. You could link video and graphics. Can you say You-Trivia. SWEET!!

Who would write the questions and categorize the wiki's? Why the same people who write and edit them. What would the wiki's be sorted by:

Category - (i.e history (sports, geography, television, movies, mid-Eighteenth century literature, women in war (tip of the hat to Quinn )). Most questions would be multi-category;

Difficulty - would be based on a running tally of how many right answers versus how many wrong answers (as more people played, the difficulty of each question would settle at the right place). Different players could select a difficulty for each category.

Date - the time frame or year of the event ("I'd like to play mid 19th century Trivial Pursuit with a medium difficulty and Entertainment, Early American Literature, War, Monarchy, Science and U.S Government as categories, please.")

Dust off that old blue box...

Books and Sledding...

Well, Alden has started school and he loves it. He's in a Montessori school for 3 hours a day in the morning. He's potty trained even through the night...he's no longer a toddler (sniff, sniff). His imaginary play has begun in ernest as he makes all sorts of airplanes (monoplanes, biplanes and triplanes) out of legos, airports out of lincoln logs and pretends to read books to his baby doll. He's on the cusp of reading, spelling some words and beginning to sound them out. Quite the kid.
Isaac is beginning to talk. Words like "dada", "water", "Wheee!" and "more" as well as "Fire Truck" (see relevant Onion Article). He walks like a champ, has begun to climb up on stools and is now more curious than ever. He also cleans up like it's in his genetic programming. He fed himself a whole bowl of stew tonight.
The boys get along well together and like to snuggle when they can sit still for a minute or two. Christa and I love Lafayette even more. A park four blocks from us has a sledding hill with a dedicated snow making machine. Sweet!

New Toys...

Thanks to everyone who sent toys and gifts to the boys (and us!). We had a wonderful Christmas filled with squeals of glee, lots of gingerbread, a tree and food. Here are some pictures of the kids with their new toys...

Isaac got a car

Overheard in my house

Alden: "Mommy, what is peace?"

Mommy: "Peace is a happy feeling get when people all get along and share."

Alden: "Oh. I think peace is when you go poop and then you feel happy."

Moral: Don't tell your kids to give you peace when you're on the toilet.

New Year!

Happy New Year! I promised a bunch of folks I'd put pictures of our house without the other people's stuff in it up on my blog. Here's what our house looks like now. We're working on getting pictures up and finding crap to fill it up with — but we're only here for two years, so more crap may not be the smartest move.

Dining Room/Parlor
Dining Room