12-25-09

Merry Christmas! Okay, that's out of the way. Now onto better and cooler things, such as the gingerbread house and presents!



The gingerbread house....it went okay! I got it glued together which was very painful, but after that, it was pretty much a piece of cake. Pun. Anyhow, here's the requested and thereafter promised picture.

On top of that, some of you may know that I am working on growing a bonsai ficus tree. Well, happy days! Yesterday, my Uncle and Aunt came down from Longmont and gave me a fully-grown bonsai ficus from McGuckins. Aww yes! So now I have TWO to take care of ;). Picture of THAT too...

What else? Not a lot, really. Just a little bit of..I dunno. Whatever. Programming, school's over and we're just waiting for the new year and becoming three-day fish for each other since everybody's home.

Happy times otherwise. And not much else to say. Bu-bye.

12-18-09

Tuesday it was mentioned that I had made chili for the men's group at church. Well, I was expecting we'd do like we did last year and every table (there are about twenty) would provide their own little mini potluck. Well, it was different in that it was a group-wide potluck in which the entire snack table was cleared off and everybody shared with everybody.

It's a good thing I made a double batch, because the pot got cleared out very quickly.

In addition to THAT, yesterday I made a gingerbread house and put the pieces in the fridge to cool. Today we went out and bought the stuff I'd expect public school kids to waste their lunch money on when mom isn't looking...candy. So we now have more candy than is healthy in the house, which is bad bad bad! But nobody's stealing, so that's good. So far I've assembled the walls and roof and the whole thing is on the verge of collapsing. I think I'll take the Joy of Cooking's advice and leave it sit for one to eight hours (eight being preferable). Actually wait. I DID let the walls sit for an hour before I stuck the roof on and that definitely helped. So for now, I'll let it sit with the roof on for a bit longer than that, put the chimney, doors and shutters in and then start in with the decoration. In either case, we'll see how it turns out.

In the Limelight

It seems this blog thing is getting more and more into the limelight. This word, limelight, comes from the 19th century spotlights of directing a flame at a stick of lime (calcium-oxide, the main ingredient in concrete). The stick would glow and they could reflect the high-intensity light at the performer, orator, etc.

Only problem with my blogging, is it takes at least three edits before I finally get a post perfect. Such is the problems: grammar, missing information, improper html formatting, blah blah blah. Once I think I even performed eight edits before I finally said that was good enough. Oh well. It's fun anyways!

And pictures aren't always a necessity either, although I put some of the Wrath of Khan pictures up as a slideshow on the sidebar for your enjoyment. This is actually my Picasa miscellaneous folder, so anything I deem fit will go there and show up on the little slideshow.

Nothing else too extraordinary to report, except that it's a potluck (share-a-dish for the politically correct people) at church, and I'm cooking up a double batch of chili. Probably should post this and go check to see how it's going. Anyhow, just thought I'd drop by. I hope I don't become a daily journalist like my sister. No. I won't. Although this is becoming more and more interesting as it goes on...

Edits this post: had to come back and add these paragraph breaks, since it jammed everything together. I should have checked my post options before I published, but I'm just absent-minded like that y'know.

Tree Cutting

Here's what we did BEFORE all those pictures of the media center were taken (on December 12):

Driving up to the National Forest near Redfeather Lakes

After parking

Hiking around

And the final product, taken not less than an hour ago

Media Center

Here is a set of photos of the church media center production area (not including store and duplication, which everybody can see if they just come in and buy something).

Director and Overheads console

Robotic camera controls

Post production computers

Finally, there's the epitome of the media center: Joshua's office. They clean it out and it quickly sinks down to this state...if it ever even leaves that state during a cleaning anyway.

And Joshua's office up close after we 'fixed' it up a bit.

12-12-09

Well! For the first time in 3 years, we've dewcided to do something of a Christmas! Today, we committed ourselves by going and cutting a tree from the National Forest people. We had a grand time chaining the tires and making Andrea drive with them. I would have had a really cute photo of Andrea but right as I pressed the 'take picture' button, the batteries died. What I should do is get a car battery or gel-cell and step it down to three volts for all of my thee-volt appliances.

Anyway, so the tree's up, but we have NOT gone and decorated it yet as we are going to church. Something to look forward to for tomorrow I suppose.

Photo: the deer right out our back fence. Of course it's a phone photo, so it's not the best quality, nor is it properly cropped.

12-9-09

Well then! Finals this week and I had a nice day yesterday taking a test on the Classical period of music. Then we have the comprehensive listening test tomorrow which will be our full final. Ha! Maybe if I worked hard enough at it I could....never mind. I can't even think.

Aaaanyway, we got like six inches of snow at the house. And it's been below zero for something like a full day now. Well, it got down to -20 at our house at 6:00 this morning, and it's now at 0. Wow. We also ran out of wood in the garage for our fireplace, so I had to tromp out to the woodpile and refill it.

What else? Nothing much. Mom and I are struggling with her blackberry version of Live Messenger. I've always loved the quirks of MSN in general. And that WAS sarcasm. Maybe I should switch over to Google 100% and make everyone else live with it. One email for every service on the planet is getting pretty annoying. I've got Yahoo for the Yahoo folks, Live for the MSN people and yesterday I got a GMail because my iGoogle (which is where I'm writing this from) was urging me to do so. But I really really like Google, so maybe I should consolidate.

Nothing else to report, other than the fact that the snow is AWESOME! Except it's not warm enough to pack and make stuff. Maybe it'll warm up enough tomorrow. We'll see.

......from previous

Oh..and for those of you who still think it's boring, I don't like to rush these things. I like to see if they look good and what I want to change before I go changing everything there is to change. So just be patient.

Design

Merry Christmas! Almost..

Per request for a channel design switch, I've done a bit of CSS editing with borders and background images and transparencies. Enjoy!!