Ginger had nursery duty at church this morning. And she had a full set of kids (seven) and no one to help her, so I got stuck helping. This means I'll probably end up coming down with something in the next couple of days as the toddlers are just little walking germ factories.
After church it was raining and we couldn't really do anything outside. So Ginger decided it would be a good time to put up the kid's Christmas tree in the basement. I didn't do a time lapse video like I did a couple years ago, looking back on that I might have to do that again next year. I'm amazed at how much the kids have grown in the past two years and the video would be completely different now since they do most of the stuff themselves and stand on chairs to put ornaments onto the tree.
I think the kids did a really good job decorating their tree. Quinn put on most of the lights himself. It's just a matter of time now until Ginger wants to put up the tree on the main floor. Later in the day after we had finished putting up the tree Ken and Amanda came over for an impromptu play date and dinner. All in all a nice relaxing day with the only downside being that I know tomorrow I have to return to work.
While we had almost no traffic problems getting to Richmond, we ran into all kinds of traffic heading home on Saturday. We left just before five, which was significantly later than we intended. That's because everyone went out to the toy store earlier (except for me, I stayed at the house and worked). And it's good they went to the toy store, because they managed to find some Batman Lego items. We've been looking for these things online and and the major retailers have all sold out, and all the smaller shops are charging double or more than double the retail price (hint, if you see any in stores, buy them and ebay them, you'll make a killing). But that good fortune came at a cost as on the trip home we were in slow traffic nearly the entire trip. The sad part was we were about 30 minutes too late the entire trip. For almost the entire trip Ginger could see on her iPhone that the traffic about 10 miles ahead of us was moving fine, but then by the time we would get to that section it had slowed to a crawl. Had we managed to leave 30 minutes sooner we might not have run into much in the way of traffic at all. The trip back home ended up being over three and a half hours. Pretty brutal considering the trip is normally only about two hours. And I know people will find this hard to believe, but for the most part I am not an overly patient person, so sitting in traffic that is barely moving just about kills me. I managed to work through it though and about halfway through the trip I managed to get past being irritated by the situation and became more resigned to our fate and realizing there wasn't really anything I could do. After that the trip didn't bother me as much.
Friday was spent just lounging around. For me it was in large part because I had consumed so much the day before I was having a hard time moving. Nana was still in town and ended up sticking around for most of the day. This is one of the first years that no one had ventured out to try and take advantage of Black Friday deals. For me I just decided I would rather pay more than try to get up and to a store by 4 AM. Seriously, were there tons of people demanding that stores open earlier or something? Four am? Are they serious? At that point I'll pay the extra $50 just to be able to sleep in and not have to fight the crowds.
For some reason just before noon people thought it would be a good idea if the kids went outside on the deck while only in the their pajamas and raked up some leaves. Luckily Ginger took pictures of the event so now if the kids get sick over the next week or so I can point back to this photographic evidence and blame this.
After coming in from the deck and getting dressed Catherine got some mild banana curls in her hair. I'll confess to not previously knowing what exactly a banana curl was, but having a daughter opens you up to all this new information. Catherine was proudly showing off her new curls to everyone and even posed for pictures.
Other highlights of the day were Quinn perusing The Rokenbok catalog and website making a list of all the 60+ dollar items he wanted. Luckily he at least understands a little bit about how much things cost, because items that were over $100 he decided were too expensive (although he also decided that maybe Grammy and Pop Pop could buy him one of the 100+ dollar items). Why they decided to get him any of this Rokenbok stuff at all is beyond me. It's like giving a free hit to a crack addict and then hoping he won't want anymore (not that I'm saying Quinn is a crack addict, but he can get a tad obsessive trying to get certain items).
The kids also helped Grammy and Pop Pop's put up and decorate their Christmas tree. Because it is one day after Thanksgiving and therefore the Christmas season is in full swing already. I say that jokingly, but back home several of the malls have had Christmas decorations up for several weeks now. The "season" just starts earlier and earlier each year I guess. Plus this year is seems like stores are trying to milk everyone for all the money they can as fast as they can because it feels like they believe people will eventually realize how bad the economic situation really is and stop spending (maybe that's why there were stores opening at 4 AM this year).
Quinn of course was most interested in getting the train that runs around the base of the tree up and running.
Once it was all said and done the tree looked really nice.
And then after the tree was done both kids took a couple moments to pause and take some pictures with Grandmaw.
After our quick trip to Richmond last night we celebrated Thanksgiving in Richmond with Ginger's folks. Nana also made the trip to Richmond to spend the day with us. Since it's getting harder for Ginger's grandmother to travel, we decided to move Thanksgiving down to Richmond this year (and just after I had gotten all the grandparents trained to come to our house for holidays).
Quinn decided he really wanted to help with the meal and decided he would be a waiter and bring everyone their drinks. Considering we had no broken glasses I'm going to call it a rousing success.
And for whatever reason this year we finally got to have turkey for Thanksgiving. In years past we've had roasts and ham, but for some reason turkey had always been avoided. Bu thankfully this year it was on the menu. This also provided a chance for the kids to try it. Catherine loved it, and Quinn, well, Quinn ate some just so he could play the Wii, but I could tell he wasn't really into it. The good news is that for the meal Quinn tried several bites of turkey, a bite of broccoli, and a small helping of carrot souffle. Of the three the carrot souffle might be something that sticks since that was the item he would come back to and wasn't making a face while eating.
Later during the meal Quinn attempted to entertain us with a musical number. And then Catherine showed us the danger of consuming too much on Thanksgiving (Sir Mixalot would be proud). Sadly I forgot to get a group picture of everyone, so all I have from the day are pictures of the kids.
Surprisingly enough traveling wasn't too bad tonight. We looked online before we left and saw where all the backups were on I95 and then I used Google Maps to plot a course down that bypassed most of them. We did end up having to travel west for a small bit before we could start traveling south, but thanks to Ginger's iPhone with it's GPS and maps interface we could see exactly where we needed to go and when turns were coming up. Very handy little tool (although one still needs another person riding in the car with you to actually make use of it). Overall the normally two hour trip ended up taking two hours and twenty minutes. Not too bad all things considered.
Since Ginger wouldn't let me take pictures while I was driving, all we have are the photos from her iPhone. In case you're wondering why the readout says two hours forty minutes when above I said we made the trip in two hours and twenty minutes it's because Ginger had used the car for an hour and a half before we left taking the kids to gymnastics and dropping the cat off at the vet.
As we were heading down after the kids finished playing Nintendogs on their DSes (they love having them meet up and sending messages to one another) Quinn started telling us riddles that he's heard.
Quinn: If April shower's bring May flowers, what do May flowers bring?
Me: June bugs?
Quinn: No. It's pilgrims.
Ginger: June bugs. You think you're so clever.
Me: Think?
Quinn: I've got another one. How many jellybeans can you put into an empty trash bag?
Me: Hmmm, I don't know.
Quinn: One. Because after that it's not empty anymore.
This of course prompted Catherine to get involved.
Catherine: How did the football go over the gate?
Me: It was kicked. No wait, that's too obvious. I got it, the monkey took it.
Catherine: No... The wind took it.
Me: You sure it wasn't a monkey?
Obviously the logic behind some of Catherine's is lacking a bit at this point. Of course all this riddling meant the kids weren't sleeping like we had planned, so when we got to Richmond Catherine only slept for about 20 minutes in the car and I don't think Quinn went to sleep at all. They're going to be tired and cranky tomorrow, but hopefully it won't be too bad.
Lately as I've been driving the kids to school we've been playing 20 questions. Quinn stumped me pretty good the other day. Let me give you a sampling of some of his answers to my questions and see if you can figure out the answer.
Me: Is it alive?
Quinn: No.
Me: Is it something you drive?
Quinn: No.
Me: Is it bigger than me?
Quinn: No.
Me: Is it in our neighborhood?
Quinn: Yes.
Me: Is it in our house?
Quinn: No.
Me: Do we see it on the way to school?
Quinn: Yes.
Me: Is it something you play with?
Quinn: No.
Me: Is it something you get in?
Quinn: Noooooooooo. You would die if you got in it.
Me: Really? Hmmm, I'm having trouble coming up with something lethal in our neighborhood. You know we don't have quicksand in our neighborhood, right?
Quinn: It's not quicksand!
Me: For the record that wasn't a guess, I was just pointing that out.
At this point I spend the next several minutes trying to come up with what exactly is in our neighborhood that's smaller than me, is lethal and that we see on the way to school in the morning. And frankly I come up blank. So we finally get to school and I still haven't figured it out.
Quinn: Do you give up?
Me: Yep, you stumped me good. What is it?
Quinn: The sun.
Me: The sun? Wait, you said it was in our neighborhood.
Quinn: You can see it from our house.
Me: Hmmm, ok, I'll kind of give you that. But you also said it was smaller than me.
This is depressing news. FOX is getting out of the Saturday morning cartoon business. To add insult to injury they're going to be replacing the cartoons with infomercials (because you need Ginsu knives that can cut through this tin can and still remain razor sharp). This leaves the CW network as the only game left in town for Saturday morning cartoons. I find this all a bit depressing since I have really fond memories of Saturday mornings when I was growing up and with the way things are going my kids won't have that same memory. Back in the day there were cartoons playing from like six in the morning until noon. And all the big three networks at the time were showing them. In fact I can remember being torn between which ones I wanted to watch. All that's changed now. With DVRs and networks dedicated to only showing cartoons there's no real need to have a specific time to show them for kids. Guess you're out of luck if you don't have cable though. The only good news is since the same company was providing the programming for FOX and CW that now some of the more popular FOX shows will move over to the CW, which means hopefully that there will still be some new episodes of The Spectacular Spider-Man in the future since that was being shown on FOX.
Another low key Sunday, so there's not much to report on that front (I did snap the above picture of Catherine, but that was about it). So instead I will regale you another haircut tale. It's been about two to three months since I had last gotten my haircut so it was way longer than I would like. I walk in and as I'm being directed back to the shampoo area by my stylist she asks what I want to do with my hair. Now remember my hair is pretty long at this point, so I tell her I want it short. She asks if I want it buzzed, and I say, not that short, but almost. She asks about length and I say I'm thinking somewhere between half an inch and three fourths of an inch. She says ok and we're off.
As I'm sitting there in the chair she's going around my head with the scissors and trimming it. After a while I'm starting to get a bit worried because she's just trimming it so I mention off handedly "You know, I was really thinking a bit shorter than this."
She says something along the lines of "We can do that" and starts around again. This time as she comes around it's still pretty long and not that much more has been taken off.
So I go into "I'll pretend I'm stupid" mode (waits for jokes about this not being a stretch or me playing it close to the vest) and I say "You know, maybe I told you the wrong thing, how long is half an inch?" Apparently I'm just playing the part of the straight man today as I can only imagine the jokes from this comment, but let's ignore those for now. She shows me on her comb about how long half an inch is, and I say, "Yep, that's about what I wanted." So she starts around again.
This time I don't wait for her to make it all the way around since she's just trimming around the sides again, so I say "If we're going to make it half an inch long, shouldn't you be taking more off?" (must... resist... double... entendre...)
At this point she stops and looks at me and says "You want it half an inch long? I thought you only wanted half an inch off the top."
I try and remain calm and not point out that I said I wanted it short and then gave the length. We both had a nice laugh and we go back and forth about how this could have happened and how it's like something out of Three's Company and she continues to apologize profusely. And to her credit she remained nice and apologetic about it even though underneath she was probably upset too because now she's almost spent an hour on my hair and she could have been serving other customers. So after that I got it the length I wanted (maybe a tad shorter than I wanted, but I figure at this point it's close enough and what the heck, it'll grow back).
To round out the trip I found out they no longer let you include the tip to the stylist on your credit card. Which for me was especially annoying since as is typical these days I had no cash in my wallet whatsoever. This meant a quick walk across the street to Giant grocery store to make some minor purchase so I could get cash back from them and then go back and give a tip. So overall I spent about three times longer getting this haircut than I was expecting.
Catherine and Ginger attended Amanda's birthday party today. It was held at Build-A-Bear. Catherine decided to make a Dobie (that's one of our cats). Funny thing about this Dobie, we've been told he's a boy cat, but we've also been told he likes to wear dresses. Afterward Catherine and Ginger bought some more accessories for Dobie (because that's how Build-A-Bear works) and they got a baby Dobie for Catherine and they purchased a Bat Bear outfit for Quinn. Quinn wasn't attending since it was an all girl party, but don't feel too bad for him because Nana was up and that meant Quinn got her time exclusively the entire time Catherine was gone.
Oh yea, and Ginger wanted me to know I left out some stuff when I descrbied Parent's night a couple days ago. I apparently forgot to mention Catherine also showed us some of the reading she was doing by reading through a stack of about fifty flash card words. And that she also was able to name and label almost all the countries and territories in South America (which is probably better than I could do, which is sad but true).
Tonight was parent's night at the kid's school. We got to observe them in their natural environment. Turns out apparently Quinn goofs around a lot and does almost all his work with his friend Franco. I got to observe sentence deconstruction, seven digit multiplication, music and finally testing the rigidity and elasticity of solids. Some pretty heavy concepts for a seven year old.
Catherine meanwhile was polishing shoes. When I tried to explained to her there was once a very famous shoeshine boy, she gave me a look that indicated she had no idea what I was talking about.
Then Catherine showed me how she does work on a computer at school. A really really old manual computer.
Ultimately we didn't end up leaving until around eight, which is well past the kid's bedtime, so I can only imagine how well things are going to go tomorrow since our toughest days are usually those where the kids are tired (and those cranky and irritable, although thinking about it, those traits could be simple genetics they get from me).
Ginger and I watched Run Fatboy Run over the weekend. I don't know what I was expecting going in, but I enjoyed the movie a lot. In fact it's one of the funniest non-Judd Apatow comedies I've seen in quite a while. I'm going to have to credit a lot of this to Simon Pegg since he helped write the screenplay as well as starred in the movie. He seems to really be hitting all cylinders with his movies and roles. I can't really describe why I liked the movie as much as a I did, since there wasn't anything really too far outside the norm of typically movie scripts. Maybe it's the protagonist isn't necessarily a really likable and has a ton of flaws. Maybe that makes him more easier to relate to versus the standard lovable loser stereotype most movies typically have. I do think there are more funny bits near the beginning of the movie and it's more drama-ish as the movie goes on, but by then you've gotten a bit invested in the story and want to see how it resolves. And yes, the resolution is a bit too neat and pat, but it is a movie, so they can't go but so far outside the framework. I will add that Ginger didn't seem to like the movie as much as I did since she started reading a book partway through the movie.
Catherine's room has new hardwood floors. Why you ask? Well, the carpet that was in her room before had been there for who knows how long (probably well before we took ownership of the house). It wasn't in great shape, but was more than able to do the job so to speak. We do have a rule about the kid's rooms though. When they leave their rooms they're suppose to close their doors. This is because they're both slightly allergic to the cats, and we didn't want the cats going into their room and getting cat hair everywhere and making the situation worse than it already was.
Well, Catherine forgot this rule at some point a couple months back and left her door open. And sure enough one of the cats went into her room, but not being content to just get cat hair everywhere they also decided to pee on the carpet. And not just a little bit of pee either. This was without a doubt more liquid than I would have believed possible to fit inside of one of the cats. And it stank. I mean let's face facts, cat urine doesn't exactly smell good to begin with, but this was beyond that. And nothing we did was able to get rid of the smell either. We tried the Nature's Miracle, water with vinegar, the works. So at that point we moved Catherine into the guest room because it didn't seem fair to have her stay in her room when it smelled that bad. We were hoping that with regular treatments over time the smell would dissipate. No such luck though. So the carpet had to go, and about this same time we found out that Catherine has several other allergies that would be exasperated by carpet. So we got hardwood flooring installed instead.
Normally that would be the end of the story. But this is joy that keeps on giving. When they installed the new flooring the stress of pounding it in caused the nails in the ceiling of the room below to loosen a bit. So those nails cracked through the plaster in the ceiling (if you look the top of the picture above you can see several holes in the ceiling now). The good news is the nails didn't come all the way out and drop onto the grand piano. That would have been really bad. But it has made it now that so that we have to touch up the ceiling at some point. I was planning on trying to take out the nails and replace them with screws thinking that would provide better support and connectivity in the future, but others have told me all I need to do is drive the nails back in and replaster and paint. Guess now I need to investigate a bit more what the proper course of action is.
The election is over and Spotty give his acceptance speech. Trust me when I say that I suspect only family will want to watch this since it's hard to hear and understand. Let me just give you the highlights.
Spotty claims he's going to keep his promises, but there's no mention of what those promises are.
Apparently there's going to be a party with cookies and cake to celebrate the win, but there's no mention of my tent.
Spotty and Hippo are ... brothers? Truthfully I did not see that coming.
The next election will be Hippo against Blackie. Oh, and this will evidently happen in January.
Elmo has been hitting the sauce, either that or he has trouble counting (really, it could go either way).
No one else in the house cares about the speech since in the kitchen everyone just keeps right on talking through the whole video. *
The video was taken Saturday night when Ken and Amanda were over, hence all the chatter coming from the kitchen. Sadly today Quinn has been coughing a lot, so if this keeps up we'll probably end up keeping him home from school on Monday.
There's no justice. Knight Rider gets a full season pick up and yet The Middleman has been effectively canceled. They claim DVD sales could save the show, but I have my doubts. If and when the DVD does come out, you should consider renting the first one and check it out if you're a fan of intelligent shows with snappy banter (while the premise of show is something of a cross between Men In Black, the old Get Smart TV show and The X-Files, the dialogue seems like something out of Buffy / Veronica Mars).
* In their defense this was the second time Spotty gave the speech, the first time I was out getting food for dinner.
Another day where we had big plans, but ultimately do nothing. We had planned on driving into Vienna since the model train exhibit was going to be open this weekend. But considering lunch took a couple hours and didn't end until after three we didn't think we would have enough daylight to make the trip worthwhile. So instead Ken brought Amanda by for an impromptu play date with the kids. And we got a some rain on and off throughout the day, enough so that we ended up with multiple rainbows over the course of the day. The most interesting part of this was Quinn claiming it was the first rainbow he had ever seen. Even though Ginger and I know he's seen many of them previously, and even Catherine told him he had seen them before when she had seen them, so we were all a bit puzzled by his comment and not quite sure what he was trying to say (maybe this was the first full one he had seen where he could see both ends of it).
And yes, that is a picture up above of Quinn with a banana. That's right, the child was eating a banana. It's amazing what the child will eat just for a chance to play the Wii (Lego Batman has been a real winner in that both kids love and an it's great as incentive). Although when I offered him something new to eat earlier in the day for lunch (I think I was offering him a bite of my tuna fish sandwich) he actually told me "You don't have to play video games all the time," which I believe is code for "Even playing the Wii isn't worth eating that."
He collects Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian comics
Note the verbage tense. He "collects". Not "collected" or "used to collect", but "collects". How cool is that. I knew I liked this guy. The above image is by noted comic book artist Alex Ross.
Thanks to everyone out there that voted. We have a new President Elect of Stuffed Animals in our household and it is Spotty Dog. I'm unsure whether Hippo will challenge the results since it was so close. At the same time, since it was so close you can feel your vote did count and made a difference. One vote in the other direction and it would have been a tie. Spotty doesn't officially take over until Saturday according to Quinn. Quinn just learned the other day that Obama, while elected, is not the official potus yet and won't be until January and as such Spotty doesn't take over immediately (which begs the question as to which stuffed animal is the current President, because I don't know that I've ever been told that piece of information).
And what a difference a couple of weeks makes. I took the above image in the backyard just three weeks ago. There was still lots of green. The one below I took in the backyard just over a week ago. If I took a shot now it would mostly barren trees.
Random musings of JamesF. More than likely stuff in the blog will be about what's going on with the kids (Quinn and Catherine). Let's face it, they're a lot more interesting than I am, but that's not to say it won't contain other updates pertinent to what's going on here in the household.
