I hope everyone’s having a great Christmas this year! I know I am so far, and since it was just my birthday two days ago as well, I’ll soon write up the usual post of my haul. And we saw the Tintin movie on my birthday, which was awesome, so I’ll have more to say about that as well.
Merry Christmas!
Much of November was uneventful—it mostly consisted of the usual routine for the first few weeks minus a kid’s birthday—but for the week of Thanksgiving we visited Burbank to spend the holiday with my brother and his family.
That trip started out slightly awry, as we tried to leave town on Friday the 18th, right after work, and only managed to travel all of 50 miles or so to Crescent before being stopped for several hours only to learn that the road (Highway 97) was closed entirely. See, that was the night of the big statewide winter storm that dumped snow and ice everywhere. So instead of getting to Redding that Friday night we ended up turning around and coming back home (after about 5 hours on the road) and left again the next morning. That was more successful; there was still snow on the roads but it was daylight and the road was open, and once we crossed over into California the roads were pretty much cleared up.
So we drove all the way through to Burbank (north of Los Angeles) in the one day. Which isn’t as bad as all the way to San Diego in one day (we’ve done that one too) but still makes for a long drive all in one sitting.
The rest of the holiday week was good; we drank a lot of good beer, toured the Warner Brothers Studios lot, checked out Burbank and the area a bit, and had a nice Thanksgiving.
Coming back was easy in some respects—as far as the drive went as we split it out over two days—and hard in others (whaddya mean I gotta go back to work?). We got back Sunday relatively early which left time for unpacking and cleaning and such but not a lot of decompression time before going right back into the routine.
Let’s see, what else went on in November… read a good book that I’d recommend, Ready Player One, which has its flaws but is a fun, clever, engaging read. It’s essentially a caper novel masquerading as a near-future/video game/pop-culture/MMO sci-fi adventure, set some 30 years in the future and mostly taking place in an online game/virtual world. And it heavily mines the pop culture of the 80s (and 70s to a lesser extent), particularly that of music, movies, and videogames, which makes it catnip to the contemporary Gen X geek who spent a lot of time playing with computers and videogames during the 80s.
Hmm… is it bad when that’s all I have for the highlights for the month? The rest has been filled with work, and the family stuff—a school concert and other school functions, birthday parties, the usual kind of things.
But! We’re going into the Christmas season, which is one of my favorite times of the year. That always livens things up!
Tomorrow, April 12th, is a pretty momentous date: it is the 50th anniversary of the first human being to launch into space (which took place on April 12, 1961) by Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Appropriately enough, the 12th is also when Yuri’s Night is celebrated, a sort of unofficial holiday “world space party” that commemorates that first flight.
As someone who grew up with a deep interest in space and astronomy (not to mention science and science fiction) I love the idea of Yuri’s Night and I love what the website is doing: presenting a registry of events that are taking place around the world for the event, and letting people register more at no cost. Mostly it seems entirely fitting to celebrate the occasion; it would be neat to have a Yuri’s Night event here in Bend, but it seems the nearest is Portland.
50 years of manned spaceflight. That’s something to think about.
It’s kind of nice having New Year’s Day on a Saturday (and Christmas last week as well); knowing there’s another day to this weekend (and actually another after that for me—I have Monday off as well) makes it easy to be lazy and recover from New Year’s Eve.
…Not that there was much for me to recover from; we spent the afternoon and evening with friends and overate and yes, drank plenty of beer along with champagne at midnight and—get this—a glass of absinthe, but I was careful enough not to wake up with a hangover this morning (lots of water plus aspirin before bed). Tired yes—for some reason I was up before eight, which is bogus considering last night I didn’t get to bed until after 1:30am.
So today was lazy but a few things were done. I sorted and cleaned out my old emails for the past year, reducing my inbox from just under 1000 (I think?) to 18 emails; straightened up the desk in the office (one of my goals is to re-work the office overall, but the first step is being able to see the desk surface); read the novella “Big Driver” in Stephen King’s latest book, Full Dark, No Stars (the second story in the collection; the first, “1922″ is longer and took me several sporadic days to complete).
And of course, the day was also spent being reflective about 2010 and thinking about what 2011 should be like, as these things go. I’ve not gone so far as to have worked up any resolutions, but working up some possible goals—you know how it is this time of year.
Really good holiday this year (by which I count my birthday and the Christmas days together), with good gifts but especially with family and good friends. My birthday was fairly low-key, with just the family and a boozy theme: a gift card to the Brew Shop, a giant bottle of Jack Daniels, a magnum bottle of Anchor’s 2010 Christmas Ale, a bottle of German mulled wine.
(Update—forgot to mention a new computer chair for the office as well.)
Christmas Eve was the first of the big parties: we hosted at our house (which we do every year), with homemade pulled pork sandwiches, lots of potluck food, lots of candies and cookies, and of course lots of good drinks. I warmed the mulled wine in a saucepan, and we had plenty of beer (both homebrewed and specialty bottles our friends Paul and Sandi brought over), wine, and some mixed drinks going on (our friend Karen brought over some homemade vanilla schnapps she had received).
Food was great, the company was greater. Besides Paul and Sandi and Karen, Shannon and Brian and their son joined us (and of course my family was here as well). Everything went off without a hitch and everyone had a great time (I hope!).
Then of course, Christmas day. Which began really, really early (does it start any other way when you have kids though?)—the kids were up at 6:45 checking their stockings (that’s an arbitrary time we’d set up long ago), but I had mostly been awake since around 6. (Plus, the dog had woken us up at 2am, barking briefly at something we couldn’t figure out. Maybe Santa?)
After opening presents, we had homemade crème brûlée French toast and bacon for breakfast. Yes, it was pretty much as good as it sounds.
For Christmas, I got:
The gifts are awesome, but it was spending Christmas out at Mom and Dad’s with everyone (Paul and Sandi and Karen joined us again, as well as some other old friends we seen once a year) that really made the holiday for me. My parents put together a fantastic dinner and party and it was perfect. There was so much good food and drink that food coma had set in by the time we got home. But we couldn’t have asked for a better Christmas.
I hope everyone else had a great holiday this year too!
I’m not religious, but I think that clip from “A Charlie Brown Christmas” does describe what Christmas is all about. (That’s also the best Christmas TV special ever, in my opinion.)
Merry Christmas, everybody. Stay safe and enjoy these days.
“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night. And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the lord shone round about them, and they were so afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not, for behold, I bring unto you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you this day is born in the City of Bethlehem, a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; you shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel, a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God, and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on Earth peace, good will toward men’”.
That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.
Merry Christmas, everybody!
We had a good 4th of July here, the weather was beautiful, the fireworks were grand and it was fun in general. I took the kids to the Pet Parade, while my wife and mother visited the gem show in Sisters. Afterwards we drank beer, barbecued hamburgers and set off fireworks for the kids in the cul-de-sac.
We got invited to a neighbor’s party down the street, which my wife and I visited for about a half hour after the kids went to bed. (Interesting illustration to me of one of the benefits of living in a “real” neighborhood community.) We came back home and watched the Pilot Butte fireworks from our new backyard for the first time in 5 or more years—that was pretty cool.
All in all, a good Fourth. Hope everyone else’s was good, too.
I kind of doubt I’ll be online posting much tomorrow, so a pre-emptive note for everyone to have a fun, safe July 4th. We’ll be shooting from the hip as far as plans go tomorrow; I’m taking the kids to the Pet Parade downtown at 10 for sure. Should be a good day.
And we can see Pilot Butte from our new house! It’s the first time in something like five years we’ll be able to see the fireworks. That’s cool.
Better late than never, I suppose, but here’s hoping everyone had a good Easter today.
Growing up, I could never understand why Easter always fell on a different day each year, rather than like “regular” holidays like the Fourth of July, or Thanksgiving. Ironically, it was some computer programming trivia that clued me in to how Easter Sunday’s date is determined:
Easter is the Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox.