Sadly, tonight was the end of Thanksgiving leftovers here. I had the last of the leftover roast, and from here on out we'll be back to our regularly scheduled dinners, the dinners that never end. For the past month or so we've implemented a new policy here at the Fitzgerald household. No getting up from the dinner table until you've finished eating. Unless it's an emergency or you have to go the bathroom (and around here, that still qualifies as an emergency). Because of this new policy dinner time is now akin to a marathon. Two hours for dinner is not unheard of at this point. If you're like me and basically inhale food, then this leads to some *really* long evenings at the dinner table.
Just finished watching Lost. As much as some of the things about that show bug me, I still like it. Tonight's pet peeve was how in the world are Sun's clothes still bright white. Ginger pointed out that they have a washing machine now, but still, how do you keep clothes that white on an island? I see Lost is getting into the habit of doing that trick of running over an hour (looks like tonight's episode was 64 minutes). That's a pretty cheezy trick on the network's part I think. Doesn't matter ABC, I'm still not gonna watch Invasion. And it would appear that TiVo has gotten with the program and now handles negative padding. At least I believe it must since it started recording Law and Order after Lost and we know Lost ran into the next hour.
For those actually keeping track, at work we made phenomenal progress today and we're accomplished almost everything we set out to do. In fact, it would appear that we're now IO limited due to network limitations and we're cranking out data as fast as we can get it (I believe we're only on a 100 BaseT network though, once we get GigE or 10 GigE, we'll have to re-evaluate where we're at).
And even though it has nothing to do with anything in the post, a picture of the kids.
Don't Panic! Has anyone seen my towel? We're under a tornado warning here until just after midnight. We've been having really high winds here. It's too bad the wind isn't blowing in the other direction, it would have saved me the trouble of having to do something about the leaves in the backyard. As it is, it's just made the whole situation worse.
Made some good progress at work today. Which is good since we have an internal demo on Thursday and then a customer demo on the following Thursday. Hopefully we don't have too much more to do (at some point we need to stop making changes for fear of completely breaking stuff before the customer demo). It's interesting, but I've noticed that it seems every year we have on of these work major crisis issues, and it's always right around this time of the year (when we all have so much free time on our hands and nothing else is going on).
Today was Tuesday, so that means Catherine attended her ballet class. I must admit, at first I was really hesitant about her taking the class, thinking her interest in it was just a fad. But she really likes it. And now we have so much Angelina Ballerina stuff that I'm not sure there's anything out there that we don't own.
When I got home tonight, the kids and Ginger were making homemade snowmen. They're really cute. They're made out of styrofoam balls, white pipe cleaner and filled in with black marker. Both kids just love snowmen. One of Quinn's favorite books is "The Snowman" by Raymond Biggs. We even have the video adaptation of the book which is actually semi faithful to the story in that it also has no speaking parts (except for a couple of setup lines at the beginning by the author). If you're a fan of George Winston (and really, who shouldn't be), then you've probably already heard some of the haunting melodies present in the video from his CD titled "The Forest". Speaking of Winston, I'm thinking I need to go find my "December" CD and start listening to that to get me into the holiday spirit.
It occurred to me after the fact that I didn't actually post a pic of the finished Christmas Tree. I looked through a bunch of the tree pics and finally settled on this one. I've decided it's really hard to take a good tree picture. Since it's pretty difficult to get the lighting and coloring right without having the flash whitewash the scene. I think for this shot I used -1 ev on the flash, still didn't help too much. Anyway, Ginger's family took off mid day Saturday (after checking the traffic cameras online and seeing it was clear, they figured they should leave in case it got worse later). Not much of note really happened Saturday. Quinn played his Uncle's Nintendo DS right up until he left, Catherine was more socialable.
If we didn't do anything of note on Saturday, we more than made up for it on Sunday. After getting back from church, we fired up the grill for hamburgers (temperature around here was low 50's, so we figured it would be good to get in what may end up being the last grilling of the year). While the food was cooking, I actually worked on the gazebo some and managed to get one section screened (removed old screen, put up new). A co-worker (Rex) has chastised me for calling it a gazebo, since it's not detached from the house, although I can't really call it a screened in porch either since there's no door from inside the house into the structure. However, this is the same co-worker that once got into an bitter dispute with some other folks from work about whether a flight of stairs was landing to landing vs floor to floor (his position was there were 2 flights of stairs between the floors in our building). Yes, I know, you're wondering with stuff like this, how do we ever get any actual work done. Anyway, I've deviated a bit from my train of thought. With the gazebo / screened in porch I'm getting close to where soon I'll just have tons and wood laying around that I have to put back up (really not looking forward to that since that means removing all the nails and staples from the pieces before putting them back up). This all started because I initially balked at the twelve hundred dollar estimate we got for having a contractor do it. At this point, I'm thinking that would have been money well spent.
After lunch, we put up lights outside the house and we put up and took down the inflatable snowman (we didn't have enough plugs for him and the lights). After the kids went down for their nap, Ginger and I ran by Home Depot and picked up plugs, and some supplies (in case you're thinking we abandoned the kids, my Mom is still up). Then we went over to Target and finally back home. Tomorrow it's back to work for me and back to school for Quinn. Wheeee.
Thanksgiving was good. Much like that old commercial though, "I can't believe I ate the whole thing." Food was great and plentiful. Kids were even well behaved through most of the day (yet something else to be thankful for). They were both starting to get a little cranky during the evening since neither of them had taken a nap, and that was in part due to the meal time slipping further and further into the day. The passed the time playing video games with their Nana. Ginger and her Dad spent part of the day doing construction in our bedroom (ok, they put up shelves). And no, I wasn't there helping them. I'm not exactly what you would call construction oriented (things have a habit of ending up in worse shape than they were once I'm through with them). Don't believe me? Then at some point I'll post where progress is on the project of replacing the screens on the gazebo on our deck (my goal at this point is to finish the project before Spring).
I started the day a little late, slept in till about 9:30. Things were already in full swing by the time I got downstairs. When I came downstairs there was already a nativity scene up on the grand piano. My Mom was one of those crazy people and had ventured out to Radio Shack at like 6:30 (she was gone and back before I was even up). And since it's the day after thanksgiving, apparently the tree had to go up. This is the first year that we're using a fake tree. I think we're still planning on getting a real one, but we've commandeered one of Ginger's parent's old tree for use also. So today that came out and got set up. The kids 'helped' put on the lights, then some ornaments. Quinn was much more interested in putting on ornaments than Catherine. Catherine spent most of her time cutting up ribbons, and cutting, and cutting, and cutting. And yes, she was supervised since neither Ginger nor I feel it's wise to leave her unsupervised with scissors (it's not that we're afraid she's going to hurt herself, but more who knows what will get cut).
After the tree was setup, everyone went to lunch at Arties (except me, I went into work for a couple hours, we have a big demo coming up in a couple weeks that we're preparing for). Later after the kids had napped, they made a Gingerbread house. I was actually surprised at how well it turned out. Ginger was responsible for all the white and the kids each got one side of the roof and various other pieces.
Peer pressure. That's what ultimately is prompting this blog. Everybody else is doing it (ok, maybe not everybody, but a lot of my friends are, so I figure, what the heck, I'll give it a shot). At the current time I have a hard time believing this will be a daily update, but if nothing else, I figure I can use the space to keep some friends and family up to date with what's going on around here.
It's Thanksgiving, and last night we had our first snow of the season here. It started snowing during dinner around 8, and stopped around 10. It left a nice white covering on the ground. Since the kids didn't have to get up early, we decided to let them play outside for a bit. I'm feeling pretty good about that decision since it was 38 degrees during the night and this morning almost all the snow had melted. Luckily we were able to build a couple snowmen and do some sledding. Catherine especially like building snowmen, she would keep making balls and putting them on the snowman (which is why he looks like he has mouse ears and some form of lump on his chest).
With the snow it makes it hard to believe it was in the 70s and low 80s a couple weeks ago. I'm sure the crazy weather patterns have nothing to do with global warming. Seriously though, just a couple weeks ago the weather was nice enough that the kids were running around outside in short sleeves. They even broke out the sleeping bag and had a mini camp out in the front yard. For some reason, they thought both of them squeezing into one sleeping bag was a whole lot more fun than breaking out 2 sleeping bags.This year represents a first of sorts for us. We're not traveling this holiday. Now that the kids are older, we've decided people can come to us. I like how it's going so far. We'll see if I still feel that way by the end of the weekend.
