Star Meet Star Destroyer

We set up our Christmas stuff, including this little tree in my study. I wonder if that white star on the top is safe, what with a Star Destroyer floating right above it.

He, He Himself, Announcer Man Carved The Roast Beast

You all thought I was kidding didn't you? Here he is, Announcer Man and his electric knife. Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving At Work

Announcer Man is carving the turkey with an electric knife right now. Man, I wish I wasn't at work for Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving Breakfast

Back in 2011, I had to work Thanksgiving. With an eight hour swing shift, there was just no way that I could attend any kind of Thanksgiving festivities. So, we decided that we would do a Thanksgiving breakfast instead of the usual Thanksgiving dinner. I really enjoyed that particular Thanksgiving. I love breakfast foods well above and beyond that of turkey and the other usual Thanksgiving dinner side dishes. So, when I realized that I was going to have to work that same shift this year, we quickly decided to party like it was 2011.

Thanksgiving has always been a second tier holiday for me, but if we did this every year, it would jump right up near the top.

It was so good. Every single one of my favorite things was on my plate, and even though I was full, I kept at it until pretty much all the food was gone.

What's So Civil About War, Anyway?

 The trailers for the summer movies are coming in, folks. Time to get geeked up, I guess. Here's Civil War!

Dunesteef Episode 176: TWSC – The Mosquito Room by Katherine Inskip

Katherine Inskip has a bit of Biopunk for you. The Company is under attack. Someone’s hacked Factory-9’s fruiting knotweed. Water filtration’s screwed, there’s untreated effluent everywhere…oh, and the plants are oozing blood, apparently. And if all that wasn’t enough, Chris has got a friggin’ tour group to deal with. Could it be worse?

Afterward, Rish and I talk about Biopunk, not being smart enough for Biopunk, and all the things that we talked about the first time we tried to do the episode and the recorder’s battery died.

Special thanks to Renee Chambliss and Katherine Inskip for lending their voices to the story, and to Justin Charles for producing the episode and providing the art.

Alright, if you want to check out this episode, go listen to it on the main Dunesteef podcast feed—(EDIT: We finally went down the drain, I guess. Now that the feed is gone, the only way to hear the show is over on the Dunesteef Podcast YouTube page, which I am embedding below).

Lighting The Darkness

I'm in the Christmas spirit this year, so I decided that we'd put up our outside lights. We've probably only done it maybe four times since we moved out of California eleven years ago. You have to get them up early, before the snow hits, because once there's snow, you just don't want to be up on the roof. Today was cold, but bright and sunny, so it was...well, not the perfect day, but as good a day as we were probably going to get.

It took a while to get all the stuff out of its box, and organized. We went through the strings of lights, found all the burned out bulbs, and replaced them. Eventually, we had something like three and a half working strings of lights.

My older son climbed up on the roof outside his bedroom window, and clipped one string on, and I opened our ladder up as big as it would go, to get to the roof outside my bedroom window.

We also put some garland and wreaths up on the porch, as well as taking a set of solar lights that we have for the yard, and attaching it to the garland.

In the end, I think it looks really good. It's nothing fancy, or out of control (like some of the houses in our neighborhood), but it's cheery and festive...and hey, we did it. That's way better than most years.

Sadly, by the time I got back from the grocery store tonight, several of the bulbs had already burned out. I'm gonna have to throw my son back out his window, to get those ones replaced.

Pancake Breakfast

On Wednesday night, as I was getting ready for bed, I noticed that we had run out of milk. In the morning, the kids would have a hard time getting breakfast together without the ease of pouring a quick bowl of cereal. I could have got in the car, and headed out to Ridley's to grab a gallon of milk, but I was ready to go to bed, and wasn't very interested in going out into the cold.

Then I spied a little paragraph on the side of a bag in the pantry. "Have a Krusteaz pancake breakfast today!" it said.

You know what, I thought, I should do that. I could be a great dad, showing the kids just how much I loved and appreciated them. Just imagine how happy they'd be in the morning when they came down, and smelled the hot pancakes; and fresh, homemade syrup. I usually didn't get up that early in the morning, and the kids had to get their own breakfast, but this time, I was going to make it a special morning.

So, in the morning, my alarm went off, and I went in and woke my oldest son up for school. Then I headed down the stairs, and got to work. I wanted to have the pancakes read by the time he came down from his shower. It was tight, but before a half hour had passed, I had a stack of pancakes, and a pot full of syrup ready to go for him. I smiled in anticipation.

And down the stairs he came...at a run.

"Did you wake me up late?" he asked in a squeaky shout.

I didn't know what he was talking about. "Uh, what?"

"It's seven o'clock! It's time for me to leave...past time for me to leave. I'm going to miss the bus." He grabbed his coat, and backpack, and dashed out the door.

I looked at the clock. He was right. It was time for him to leave. But I hadn't been down here cooking more than a half hour. Something weird had happened. Either my 6:00 AM alarm had not rung like it should have, or it did ring, and I'd turned it off and gone back to sleep without realizing that I'd done such a thing. Now, he was late, and possibly going to miss the bus. He'd eaten none of the pancakes that I'd lovingly prepared for him. In fact, he'd had no breakfast at all, and he'd had to run out the door without a lunch too. On top of that, since I'd thought it was 6:00 AM when my alarm went off, I'd only woken him up. My daughters are supposed to wake up at 6:30 AM so that they can get ready in time. Now they were a half hour late too.

I went upstairs, and woke them up. My older daughter jumped in the shower, and got ready as fast as she could, then hustled out to the bus stop. My younger daughter, while she waited for the older one to get out of the shower, did come downstairs and have some pancakes, but the older one never had any time for them. Once the younger one was ready for school, I took her and dropped her off. She told me thanks for the pancakes, but at this point, I felt totally defeated. The grand plan that I'd hatched up for a breakfast to show them how much I loved them turned out to be a pretty nearly complete failure. I had a bunch of leftover pancakes and syrup though. Maybe...well, maybe we could try again the next day.

So, last night, I double-checked my alarm. And, this morning, when I got my older son up for school at the right time, I headed back downstairs and cooked up another batch of pancakes (the kids had eaten yesterday's pancakes as a snack after school at some point). My son was happy to have them, and didn't even realize that they'd been there for him the day before. He'd been too worried about making the bus to care.

My older daughter got some pancakes too, and the younger on had her second plateful.

So, in the end, everyone got to feel a little bit of Dad's love. But, as usual, it didn't go according to plan, and barely happened at all. Sigh.

Decking The Halls

On Saturday morning, I was down in the basement trying to clean the place up a little bit, when we found several of the ornaments from our kids' Christmas tree on the ground in bad shape. I picked them up, fixed the issues that they had, and put them back on the tree to wait until it was time to put the decorations up for Christmas.

"Daddy, when can we put this tree upstairs?" Little asked.

"Well..." I started to answer, and then realized that I didn't know. I didn't know what the date was. We like to put our decorations up a little early in our household. We generally pick the weekend that falls the closest to November 15th, but when was that going to be? Probably next week, I guessed. I pulled out my phone and checked the date. I was surprised to discover that today was the 14th, and tomorrow, Sunday, was the 15th. I suppose you can't get a weekend any closer to the 15th than the 15th.

"Well," I said again, "We can probably do it as soon as we can get the basement cleaned up enough to quit."

A few minutes later, we were taking the tree up the basement stairs, and installing it in the corner of my study.

In an attempt to make things easier on ourselves last year, we didn't even take the lights or the ornaments off the kids' tree before we took it down to the basement. So, all the kids had to do was plug the tree in, and rearrange the ornaments so that they looked nice.

In a snap, it was ready to go.

So, what is the kids' tree? We have a family tradition of going to the store every year, and allowing the kids to pick on ornament each to be their own special ornament. We mark it with their name and the year, and someday, when they move out and start their own family, they'll be allowed to take those ornaments with them to their own home. For a while, my wife would let the kids put those ornaments on our main Christmas tree. Eventually, she got herself a set of matching, themed ornaments for our main tree, and the kids' ornaments needed a new home. So, we got a second, smaller Christmas tree for putting the ornaments our kids pick each year. My wife does allow the kids to put the present year's ornaments on the main tree, but the rest have to go to the other one.

So, the kids tree was part one of our Christmas decorating for this year. Part two, we did that evening. That's when we went to the store, and picked our ornaments for this Christmas.

What did they pick this year? One picked this glittering, blue and red representation of the planet Saturn:

Another picked this white nutcracker:

Apparently, she has plans to paint it. Not sure if that will work, since it's already covered with a coat of gloss, but we'll see. Maybe, once she's done it, I'll do a post about how it turned out.

Another picked this pair of mukluks:

We realized, once we got them home, that she has some kind of a thing for shoes. In previous years, she's bought ballet slippers and ice skates for her ornaments. Now she has a third for her collection.

Lastly, there was Little. We kept finding things that we thought he'd like, and he'd look at them with no enthusiasm whatsoever.

"That's nice," he'd say.

"Do you want it?" we'd ask.

"No," he'd answer uninterestedly.

We started to wonder if he even understood what was going on. It was time to go home, and we'd looked at every ornament they had. Nothing had clicked with him. We were considering going to a second store, to give him another chance to pick one, but we didn't really want to. We wanted to be done.

As we went to put back all the ornaments that we'd put in our cart as possible keepers, Little suddenly spied something he liked.

"There it is," he said, "I've been looking for this all night."

It was a rocket ship that had been set aside as a possibility for my older son. Apparently, Little had never seen that one. Proportional to his disinterest in all the other ornaments, he was in love with this one:

Now everyone had what they'd come for...except for me. I grabbed a bag of mint M&M's.

Now everyone had what they'd come for. We headed home, with plans to put up the rest of the decorations the next day.

When we went to put the lights on the tree, we found that we didn't have very many lights. Not enough to cover the tree to the top. I tried to spread the strings we did have as sparingly as I could without leaving it looking bare, but it still left the top bereft of lights. So, we made the kids only put the ornaments on the areas below, and planned to get another string of lights tomorrow.

The tree looks a little funny, but it won't for long.

The last bit of holiday fun we had planned was the jug of eggnog we'd bought while grocery shopping the night before. We poured each of the kids a cup, and bid them enjoy.

Eggnog is one of my favorite holiday treats, but it's pretty expensive, and also astoundingly fattening. So, it's not something we can indulge in too much. This may well be our only eggnog of the year.

Blue Tooth

I've been hanging spaceships up from the ceiling of my study like this for the past six months or so. Yesterday, I was at Target and I realized what I really, really needed. They have a Millenium Falcon that is not just an awesome ship to hang from the ceiling, but is also a bluetooth speaker! I gotta have it. Unfortunately, it's $50. My wife is never gonna let me have that, especially not as we head into Christmas. Oh well, maybe some day, when all the kids are gone and...nah, who am I kidding, I'll be desperately saving up for retirement at that point I suppose, even though we all know I'll never live that long. This post turned from fun into a bummer. Sorry.

He Whe Smelt It

Don't you hate it when you go into the restroom, and it stinks to high hell, and you know that as soon as you enter the stall, all the people that come in after you are going to assume that was you that stank the place up. Sigh...

Confounding Fabric

I wish I knew somebody who could understand what I was thinking when I noticed these bolts of cloth at Walmart this evening. Alas, there's no one who will understand or care.

No Need To Argue

Best trip to the grocery store ever. They were playing "Parents Just Don't Understand", and I walked the aisles rapping along. I'm sure anyone watching me thought I was totally awesome.

Parents Who Love Their Children...

With a young child, I sometimes gotta think about just what I'm going to let him be exposed to or not.

Zombie Football

My friend Mitch sent me a birthday present, and it finally arrived today. I think it's a football souvenir even Rish Outfield could appreciate.