Rock! Death! America!
Littering our noise on the Earth
December 4, 2009 at 5:36 pm · Filed under Family, Food, Holiday, Kids
Ever since O was little, we’ve let the kid or kids help rip the bread for the stuffing. I now present to you a retrospective of stuffing making:
2003 - this requires a lot of concentration!
2004 - hmm, no picture of stuffing ripping, but clearly we had help in the kitchen
2005 - still serious business.
2006 - we were in China, but we did have bread!
2007 - XM’s first time!
2008 - she still thinks it is awesome to have her mouth wide open when we take her picture…
2009 - by now they are old pros at this.
I can’t wait for the teenage editions, you know the ones, where I force them to at least hold onto a piece of bread near the bowl and they do their best glare/withering look/eyeroll as I take the picture…
December 2, 2009 at 9:27 am · Filed under Board Games
And just in time for the crazy holiday season.
Gamer Dad has listed his Unplugged: 2009 Board Game Holiday Guide. So many great games! We have several on his list, and I can vouch for their funability (yeah, I said funability).
Incan Gold is currently XM’s favorite game. It is a really fun press your luck game as each player decides whether to continue on into the caverns looking for treasure or beat a hasty retreat before too many evil things come up and make you drop what treasure you’ve already found.
Wits and Wagers is a fun party game (we found it in the Goodwill bins for $1.99!). XM is a fan of Go Away Monster! (also a Goodwill find). Galaxy Trucker is one of my favorite games.
O really enjoys Heroscape (though it takes a lot of set up time and dedicated train table space). We found a ton of sets and characters on clearance at Fred Meyer. Tales of Arabian Nights is a really unique and beautiful game, and is one of O’s top three favorite board games (alongside Dominion and Arkham Horror).
Pandemic, Finca, Dominion… yep, yep, and yep! All great games. I’ve tried to implement a house rule in Finca that makes everyone bray like a donkey when they make a delivery of food, but my playing companions are generally uncooperative in that regard (party poopers). Small World just arrived today (along with Ticket to Ride Marklin and a couple of Small World expansions). Hopefully we can squeeze a game into our tight weekend schedule of beer brewing, dumpling festival attending, and Christmas tree getting.
November 30, 2009 at 9:27 am · Filed under Board Games
The San Francisco Chronicle has a great set of write ups and reviews on some of the board games that came out in 2009. We’ve been enjoying Finca and the original Dominion, and Small World is currently being shipped to us. I’ll have to check out the other games and see what else would be good to add to our already overburdened shelves!
November 5, 2009 at 12:39 pm · Filed under Art
November is turning out to be an exciting month for me! I’ve got a painting in the Pilgrimage show at the 100th Monkey Studio. Friday November 6th is the opening, from 6pm-9pm. There will be art, food, music, and tastings by Hip Chicks Do Wine. The show runs until November 29th.
I also did a painting for the Audubon Wild Arts Festival. They have a 6×6 project that allows artists to get a 6×6 canvas from Art Media and paint anything they like relating to the theme birds (go figure). Audubon will be selling these for $40 each with 100% of the proceeds going to their conservation and rehabilitation programs. You can get a sneak peek of my painting on my blog. The festival is November 21st and 22nd at Montgomery Park.
I submitted my art and was invited to join in the Art in Hand project in Portland. They’ll be making a deck of cards where each card is a unique painting by a local artist. I’m just waiting for my card assignment, I can’t wait to get started.
I’m also participating in Art Every Day Month, which is a bit like NaNoWriMo for artists. Check out what I’ve done so far…
All in all, an awesome month!
November 4, 2009 at 9:41 am · Filed under Family, Holiday, Home, Kids
We had a nice Halloween, I can’t believe that it stopped raining and was actually warm out!
I allowed the kids some control over the Halloween decorations, which is how we ended up with a string of pumpkin lights down the hallway.
XM got to go to the pumpkin patch with her school and picked out a big pumpkin, a baby pumpkin, and a gourd. I also miraculously ran into an old friend I hadn’t seen in about seven years, so that was great!
The tiny art directors had me carve the pumpkins into their chosen shapes: Boo (from Mario) and Darth Vader.
Their grandma helped them make caramel apples…
and we decorated Zombie Eyeballs (a peanut butter fudge type thing dipped in chocolate).
XM couldn’t wear her princess dress to school for Halloween dress up day because it sheds glitter like nothing else. She opted to be a tiger at school:
And they wore their chosen outfits on Halloween night and at O’s school Halloween Party. O saved up his allowance all summer to buy the Optimus Prime voice changer helmet, so his “trick or treats” were very robotic.
We had almost 100 kids come by this year, beating our record of 73 set last year. I promised D I’d take down the Halloween decorations by December…
September 30, 2009 at 2:12 pm · Filed under Beer, Family, Home, Kids
This year we planted cascade hops to grow up and over our trellis, and we recently had a a little harvest party with the kids.
D and I left the hops on the trellis and decided to pick and choose from the largest of the crop, thinking we’d let some of the smaller ones get bigger and have a second harvest day.
We had to contend with Sophie the hop monster.
We realized the futility and difficulty of our method pretty quick, so down they all came.
At that point we hired some help.
Picking hops is very serious business.
Many modes of transportation were employed.
We ended up with 10.4 ounces of hops. I failed to capture probably the most amusing photo ops: the drying of the hops. We first had them sandwiched between several heater filters and attached to a box fan (which we burned out) with bungee cords (also known as the Alton Brown method). We finished drying them by laying them on an old fireplace screen in the attic.
In the end we had 2.75 ounces of dried hops. D immediately used some to dry hop the rye IPA he just brewed (for non-brewers, basically they were placed in a cheesecloth-like bag and stuffed into the keg with the finished beer, where they will steep and impart delicious hop aromas).
We shrank up the rest with the food saver and stuck them in the freezer for a future brew session. Next year the plants should yield many more hops, as long as I don’t kill them over the winter.
September 11, 2009 at 2:05 pm · Filed under Family, Kids
I meant to post this before school started. We went to Blue Lake Park in Fairview a few weeks ago and played in the “spray ground”. They have a really cool fountain play feature, with different spray zones for kids big and small.
The kids had fun, though they got cold rather quickly. I was so happy to find the spray ground surrounded by shade!
They had a couple of water cannons to spray at each other, and the neat thing I noticed is that if you turned them too far to the right or left they shut down, so you could only spray the other cannon operator and not torment the kids in the rest of the area.
I hadn’t been to Blue Lake Park for a few years, and I forgot how nice it is. You do have to pay a $5 entry fee, but there are several large playgrounds, tons of trees and grassy spaces and picnic tables, boats to rent, and a place to swim in the lake (though you have to be five years and older to do so - I know they have some problems with algae and stuff in the lake, but I’m not sure if the under-fives enhance the problems, or are harmed by them). Next time I’m bringing a lunch so we can stay longer.
September 8, 2009 at 12:35 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
O was really excited to start school today, though I think a lot of it was because he really misses his friends.
He is carrying on a fine family tradition in footwear:
Now to find something to do for the next two hours…
August 28, 2009 at 11:16 am · Filed under Better World, Pets
I’m one of those people that spends a tidy sum on my pets’ food. But hey, after reading things like Food Pets Die For, I’m okay with it. I love to shop at Green Dog Pet Supply on NE Fremont because they don’t just sell a lot of great things, they know everything about all their products.
They just posted on their blog about taking a tour of the Natura pet food facility (parent company of the two brands I feed Ziggy and Sophie) and the place sounds amazing. Nothing but the best for my fleabags!
August 24, 2009 at 3:16 pm · Filed under Family, Kids
We are down to two weeks left before school starts. Last week we squeezed in a lovely overcast day at Oaks Park with the discounted ride bracelets the kids earned when they finished up the library summer reading program.
Unfortunately our first discovery was that O was just about an inch too tall for the kiddie rides. He is still a little young to go on most of the other rides by himself, so I had to get myself a bracelet too and go on several rides with them. The first thing I did was take them on the tilt-a-whirl, where I assured them it wouldn’t spin fast if we didn’t pull on the bar. I even pointed out a pair of bored looking girls sitting quietly on the ride eating licorice. You might guess what happened next after a statement like that - we did nothing but spin around quickly the entire time. Oops. Bad mommy.
As penance I decided I could probably handle the hot air balloon ride Up Up and Away and went on it with them. Mistake number two of the day - I cannot handle the hot air balloon ride. I snapped a couple pictures (after forcing O to grip the wheel in the middle the entire time so we wouldn’t spin) and then closed my eyes tight. Both kids assured me it wasn’t scary. Did they not feel the horrifying bumping and bouncing we were doing? Crazy nutters.
It turned out that most ride operators were willing to let O ride the kiddie rides (many joked that it was his curls sticking out above the “you must be shorter than this line” sign) so he and his sister had a great time together. I’m a little sad that this will really be their one and only time riding these rides together, if I had known how much fun they’d have together I would have taken them more often this summer.
Our third fail of the day was when we went in to use our free roller rink admission. Everyone was excited to go and I was trying to figure out shoe sizes when I realized that none of us were wearing socks. Oops again! I promised we’d take them back over winter when the rides were closed to try the skating again (O can’t get too tall for that, right?).
We really did have a good time, especially me, because the kids were generous towards each other, were okay not playing the carnival games, took turns choosing what to ride, didn’t beg for a bunch of food or souvenirs, and happily left when I said it was time to go. Maybe that happens when you spin them around really fast.
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