Hi Everyone! We made it through Christmas and I am exhausted. We had family over our home on Christmas Eve and last week was a flurry of activity as we prepared for that event.
The majority of my time was spent outside trying to chip away all of the ice from last week's snow storm. I spent around 6 hours outside doing just that task and my hands, arms, and shoulders were killing me when I was done.
I also prepared a path, across our front lawn, because some of my elderly relatives have a hard time with steps. I took an old outdoor carpet and cut it into strips so that I could lay a green path across our lawn to the front door. Everyone loved it and I know the old folks appreciated it.
We've spent the last couple of days after Christmas at the stores either returning stuff or buying stuff with gift cards received as presents. I bought some poker books and a couple of the Sudoku puzzle books.
I'm enjoying my week off...sleeping in...staying up late...spending time with family. I hope everyone else is having a good week too!
I have some distinct Christmas memories as a kid and then as an adult with kids too.
The first one was when I was a young lad and still believed in Santa Claus. My grandfather would call our home on Christmas Eve and pretend he was Santa. He'd ask us if we'd been naughty or nice, and then promise to visit us once we were in bed and asleep.
I can remember the year that I first said, "Santa sounds like Pop-pop" and the the following year handing the phone to my mom and whispering "It's Pop-pop" because the ruse had to be maintained for my younger sisters' benefit.
The other memory wasn't so happy. I was a young teen and my dad came home Christmas Eve and decided he was pissed because there was some ice in the driveway. I was sent out to chip away the ice and not come back in until it was done. It was dark, it was cold, and I missed Christmas Eve dinner. I came back in and went straight to bed thinking that I could care less if I got anything that year.
I can remember Son's second Christmas. He was 14 months old and Beautiful Wife was convinced that he cared about what he got under the tree. I held up each beautifully wrapped gift that he decided to ignore after being told for weeks, "No, Bobby! No touch!"
BW decided it was all in my delivery so she tried handing him the gifts and still no dice. I remember a bow from one of the gifts being the highlight of the whole time for him.
The princesses all had similar experiences and there were the occasional tears as the whole day was too overwhelming for them. They'd be up before the crack of dawn and end up back in bed after some event (something they got, something they didn't get, something that someone else got that they wanted, etc.) sent them over the emotional edge and we decided that more sleep was needed.
Over the years we've been woken up early, slept in late, and everything in between. We always supported the magical idea of Santa but frankly, I was relieved when BW and I finally started getting credit for the gifts we bought for them. ;)
Middle Daughter is a junior and takes classes like physics, pre-calculus, and French IV. She got an A in all of the classes except for pre-calc...she ONLY got a B+ in that class.
She took her PSATs and the scores indicate that she'll be in the high 600s to low 700s and she was feeling embarrassed because she thinks she could have done better on the math portion.
She jumped at the offer to take an SAT prep course this summer...she's just that kind of princess. :)
So we made it through the first 'family' Christmas party with Beautiful Wife's Youngest Sister and her Husband's family without incident. Next on the list is our Christmas Eve party featuring my family and Beautiful Wife's family too. Then, we go over to the outlaws for Christmas dinner after opening presents, having a nice breakfast, and then likely taking a nap before heading out the door.
Each year, BW's Oldest Sister does something to make the celebration gut wrenching. The last time we had everyone over here I made mention of the fact that kids shouldn't be in chairs when adults didn't have a place to sit. BW's Oldest Sister proceeded to give up her seat for her daughter, after I asked her to sit on the floor, which goes against what I requested.
One time, we decided to play poker. BWOS didn't want to play, wouldn't let her husband play, but decided to stay at our home. Three of the adult couples played while she decided to sit out and watch a movie instead. They kept turning up the volume because WE were being too loud.
She stalks the children to make sure everyone is being 'nice' to her kids which equates to them doing everything her kids want and always letting them go first. When I say stalk I'm not exaggerating either.
All I want for Christmas is for everyone to get along and have the holidays be pleasant...but I'm pretty sure I'm not going to get my wish. LOL
I just got our latest mobile bill for the phones that the princesses and Beautiful Wife use and almost fell off of my chair.
Youngest Daughter had some 60 and 75 minute calls which all ended up being chargeable because Oldest Daughter used up nearly all of the minutes in the plan. I just looked at it and she had 649 calls and the total was 1030 minutes! Youngest Daughter had 192 calls for a total of 663 minutes!
The problem is that we have unlimited nights and weekends and unlimited mobile-to-mobile as long as the mobile is Cingular too. They have boyfriends that don't have Cingular phones and they call when it isn't a night or weekend.
Time for a chat with daddy....
I can remember going to this party back when Beautiful Wife's Youngest Sister started having them. Her Husband's mother always had them on Christmas Eve and he took over the tradition the year after she died.
At first, everyone showed up from both sides of the family and you got to meet all the elderly aunts and uncles and have their great Italian cooking. Over the years, less of them are healthy enough to make the trip and for the first time, none of them made it to this party.
It used to be Christmas Eve and they lived south of Boston at the time. We'd get done the party by 10-11pm and then have to face the two hour drive home with tired kids in the back of the car. Once we got home and got them settled into bed we'd have to get out all of the presents and set up things for Christmas morning. I hated it.
Now, it happens a week or so before Christmas and we don't have to deal with tired toddlers. Some of the older nieces and nephews on his side of the family are married and have started to have children of their own. I get to sit on a comfortable couch and watch football while they all take turns taking care of the babies. LOL
This year we left the party around 7pm (after the Yankee swap) and I went to my Brother-in-Law's home for a little poker cash game. I sat down with $10 and left with $27 so it was a good night for me.
It snowed quite a bit and now it is raining on top of it so I'm hoping we don't lose power any time soon.
I bought Oldest Daughter a laptop when she went off to college. I also got her a carrying case for it that included a lock and a pair of noise canceling headphones. I just found out today that she's not only never used the headphones, they weren't even opened yet.
I'm using them now while all the princesses sit in the other room and watch a movie. I'm listing to Styx and I don't hear any background noise at all. The only thing I don't like is the fact that the press in on both sides of my head. I'll have to see if I get used to it or not before giving my final judgment on the headphones.
I didn't realize a new season of Stacked had already started. Last night's episode was funny but I don't know if I'll be able to watch the show in the future with the Daughters.
They find an iPod in the store, and a 20-something looking girl comes to claim it. One of the guys sees the music on it and decides they are musical soul mates. They go out and on the second date they go to her place for dinner and just as they start making out her parents come home. Bottom line, she's only 17 ("and a half" she says) years old!
She shows up at the bookstore the next day in her pep squad uniform and is astonished that he "wants to break up with her." When he tells her that she's been bad she asks if he wants to spank her. I wanted to laugh but instead had to act suitably shocked. ;)
At one point Skyler (Pamela Anderson's character) appears to be hitting on the girl and then has to hastily point out that she's not gay. She then goes on to say that she's "dabbled" but "only with a guy in the room watching." Again, funny but difficult to enjoy with the Daughters watching the show too.
I woke up last night and made my way downstairs for a drink of water. You can't keep a glass by your bed in this house because all the cats think you've put the water there for their personal use.
I looked outside and it was beautiful. The ice cold air (nearly 4 degrees below zero last night) gives a crisp clarity to the night sky and the nearly full moon.
I noticed a shadow that looked a lot like a deer at the edge of the woods in the front yard but it didn't appear to be moving. I got my drink and when I looked outside again the shadow was gone from that spot so I knew it was a deer. I looked around and noticed that there was actually three deer in our front yard.
They walked around for a while and then I saw them climb over the stone wall and snowbank to cross the road to the wooded area across the street.
It was such a rarity to see deer when I was a kid and it thrills me now to know that we have them hanging around in our yard during the winter. Maybe I'll get some deer feed and help them out this winter.
I ate at the Buona Sera Restaurant while I was in NJ last week. The first night it was with co-workers and the second night with a customer.
I ordered a bottle of the 2003 Seghesio Zinfandel Sonoma County Sonoma and everyone enjoyed it so much that I ordered it the next night too. It was a Wine Spectator Smart Buy and it scored a 90. Everyone had a variety of dishes and it seemed to go well with all of them.
I had a bone-in rib-eye the first night, smothered in onions and olives in a port demi-glaze sauce, and a buffalo steak the second night with a portabello mushroom coated with gorgonzolla cheeze.
The most spectacular part of the meal was the dessert. I had pineapple sorbet which doesn't sound all that spectacular until you hear about how it was made and presented. They took a wedge of fresh pineapple and scooped out the fruit. They used the fruit in the sorbet mixture and then refilled the wedge. The whole thing was frozen before being served on a bed of whipped cream and drizzled with a raspberry sauce. It was incredible. My only regret was not having a dessert wine of some sort with it. I was there with work people and customers and nobody had any interest in a dessert wine so I skipped it.
They did the same thing with the other sorbets serving the coconut in half a shell, and the lemon or orange sorbets in a hollowed out fruit. It was a creative way to serve a delicious dessert.
Youngest Daughter likes "Morning Side of the Mountain" by Donny and Marie Osmond.
"He lived on the 'rolling' side of the mountain" she trilled...and then stopped when I started to laugh.
Her other recent favorite is "I'll Have To Say I Love You In A Song" by Jim Croce.
I wonder where she gets her GREAT taste in music.
We got snow this weekend...a lot of snow! Two things happened to make it even more noteworthy: 1) my snow thrower doesn't throw snow 2) the camera's battery died.
That means I did a fair amount of hand shoveling and that I couldn't take any pictures of it. Take a look at the photos in the Flickr box and that gives you a general idea regarding how things look around here right now.
The good news is that Oldest Daughter's boyfriend has a plow and saved me a couple of hours of shoveling by clearing the main part of our driveway.
I won a seat in a poker tourney and played in it online this weekend. I got knocked out in 225th place out of 455. I didn't win any money but still had fun doing it. It would have been more fun to win 1st place since that was worth $20K but it wasn't meant to be.
I was in town the other day with Youngest Daughter. We were pulling out of a parking lot that empties on to a one-way street when a guy came flying around a corner and nearly hit us. He swerved around us and gave me the finger.
I pulled out the rest of the way, right behind him, and when we came to a stop at the crosswalk I leaned out my window and said, "Let's go, pull over tough guy." or something along those lines. I kept it clean, because YD was there, and had a big smile on my face.
This kid wasn't giving me the finger any more and kept looking nervously over his shoulder and in the rear view mirror. I taunted him one more time before going left at the split in the road instead of following him to the right.
YD thought it was funny. I thought it was funny too because there was no way that geeky kid was going to pull over once he saw the size of me.
Be careful who you give the finger too when you're driving your car. They may be even crazier than me. :)
We bought a fake tree last year for the first time ever. Beautiful Wife is allergic to pine and with her lung surgery that year, we decided to play it safe and make the atmosphere in our home easy for her.
It also appears that I'm allergic to pine because that was the first year in I don't know how long that I didn't have a raging sinus infection by New Year's Eve.
I got down the tree and Youngest Daughter put it all together. I did my part, putting on the lights, before they put on all the ornaments. I then get called back into service to put the angel on the top and to put my three glass ornaments (the three wise men) on the tree.
I bought an outside timer this year so that I don't have to go outside when it is bed-time in order to unplug all the lights. The lights come on at dusk and stay on for six hours after that before going off automatically. Wicked convenient is what I say!
I was in the upstairs bathroom, usually left to the princesses, and didn't have anything to read. I noticed a 17 Magazine on the back of the toilet and wondered what kind of teenage nonsense, in the form of makeup and fashion tips, was inside.
The magazine fell open to the middle, where there was a perfume insert, to "your body questions answered". Here are the three questions:
1. My friend and I - she's 12 and I'm 13, want to have sex with our boyfriends. We'd use condoms. Is it okay for us to do it? We know we're young, but we love our guys and they love us too.
2. Can you get an STD from being fingered (she's 18)?
3. Before my boyfriend (she's 16) has an orgasm, he pulls out, ejaculates, wipes himself off, and then we continue to have sex. Can I get pregnant this way?
Obviously, health classes, starting in 4th grade, aren't doing a lot of good if these questions are representative of what the magazine receives each month.
The next page (it gets worse) had an "owner's manual" that shows all the specific parts of a womans vagina, or as they put it "Your vulva has a lot of parts-check out where they are and what they do". The opposite page had actual pictures of two different women's vulvas to show that the "length, width, and color of the labia minora and labia majora vary from girl to girl. It's also fine if the two sides don't match."
All-in-all, it was quite an education. I definitely would have read 17 as a teenage boy if I'd known such information was going to be in there, plus pictures, rather than trying to work up the nerve to buy a Playboy!
I ended up not making it to the blog brew last night. I really wanted to make it and hope everyone had a great time. By the time I finished work I was just too beat to walk out the door and drive to Portsmouth.
Instead, I dusted off my knives and cutting boards and made dinner! I'd been receiving requests for my 'purple chicken' and that's what I made. It is actually Rachael Ray's Chicken with Red Wine and Tarragon from her 30 Minute Meals show and it is a nice meal to eat on a rainy night.
We enjoyed dinner together and then gathered around the TV to watch the latest installment of Lost. Honestly, they almost lost me as a viewer when the first couple of shows didn't go somewhere. The last couple of shows has brought me back into the fold.
Another show that I'm really enjoying right now is Invasion. Plenty of plot twists, action, and some hot chicks thrown in for good measure...what's not to like?