Christmas time was here . . .

And finally pictures to show you what a great holiday break it was!
** means be sure to click on the pictures for glorious enlarged details.

On the second day of the big blizzard we said "to heck with this!, " chained up the car, drugged up the cat, and skirted off to Grand Junction to jumpstart vacation.

**the small red sign say "No Parking, snow storage area, you will be towed or buried"

Dad and Amanda made two kinds of nut brittle


Mom and I painted the study


Andy did his mac thing


This brittle was devine


Christmas eve carols


and cat picture outtakes! I love that only me and Amanda are looking in the same direction out of all six of us.


We kids got dad a rc airplane. After a couple days the snow melted enough to give it a whirl


And dad loved Andy's wii almost as much as Andy. He got his own recently - and so did we! I mean wii!

Dad whaled Andy on both tennis and boxing





Addison is getting cuter everyday! Read about Kristin's family on her site.

All three Waterhouse kids teethed on this Sesame Street finger puppet.

There was a bonfire party at the Graves house. Ben was in heaven with their dogs


Later in the trip we were able to give the plane a proper run. I think it took two trips to the hobby shop to replace parts, but we had a great time flying.





**Love mom's face in this shot




**zoom in to see Dad watch his plane take a nose dive! This was a hilarious lucky shot.


Mom and dad have a fantastic aquarium in their office. These shrimp are fun to watch


At the end we had a beautiful drive back over the mountains.

We left later than planned because of more snow on the front range. I was spoiled with presents, got to see a lot of friends and family, and came back thoroughly relaxed. Merry Christmas.

Family Guy and Musicals

How did there ever become a show that has fart jokes for Ben and musical references for me? I'm not sure, but I'm so glad Family Guy is still on the air! Last night in the Road to Rupert episode, they gave 2 1/2 minutes (10% of the show really!) to a musical gag. They took the footage from Anchors Aweigh and put Stewie in for Jerry the mouse. Stewie and Gene Kelly dancing together! I almost fainted :-) Here's the clip in case you missed it:



This isn't the first time Family Guy has taken a large chunk of their show to dance some astoundingly accurate choreography. Check out this clip from last fall where Peter and a football team do Shipoopi from The Music Man, complete with Onna White's choreography:

Polish Ambassador

My friends in Brooklyn have made a splash on Myspace with a music video:

Hey Everyone,

We have no idea how this happened, but the "Earth Versus the World" music video has reached the top of the MySpace.com video section today, reaching almost 8000 hits as of this writing. Here's a link to the MySpace page just so you can see it in all it's glory.

Congratulations!

Sigh. My life is so suburban I could puke.

Oscar Nominees Announced

View them here.

My thoughts:

Abigail Breslin is up for best supporting actor?? She's 7! And she didn't do anything remarkable in the film but act like a 7 year old!

The art direction category is really interesting. Diverse films.

I hope An Inconvenient Truth wins best documentary just so Gore can run his campaigns with the tag "Academy Award winner Al Gore . . ."

How did Volver get skipped for best foreign? I thought it was sure to be a standoff between it and Pan's Labyrinth?

If Dreamgirls doesn't win best song it will be truly sad (only because they hold 3 out of the 5 nominee spots).

Click? Click is up for Best Make-up???!!!! Give me a break!

A lot of variety overall, good. It's boring when the same 5-7 films fill every category. I'm pleasantly surprised The Prestige is up for a few things. Even Borat squeezes in. I'm sad to see Marie Antionette only up for Costumes.

Today is the most depressing day of the year

according to this article. As a budding expert on depression, I recommend a hearty dose of cat videos (at least that's how I spent my lunch hour). May I suggest:

Soothing cat


Do I laugh or cry cat


Unusual cat


Biscuit making cat


Circus cat


Clever cat


Acrobatic cat


Kind cat


Deliver cat

Feel better now?

Back to normal

Hello! I'm not dead, I swear. Just very busy and ill.

After an awesome trip to Disney World I got a head cold that took me out for several days. I should be back soon with more pictures and notes from our journey (and Christmas) (boy, I'm far behind).

cameraS and petS

The presents keep coming for me this year! My parents thoughtfully let us decide what we wanted for Christmas, and just gave us the money to make it happen. Based on how frequent I take and post pictures, and the fact that my Fujifilm finepix camera was 2 megapixels, 4 years old, and slow functioning, a new digital camera seemed like the perfect thing to spoil myself. After much research and store searching, say hello to my new Canon Powershot SD600.

In addition to the gorgeous 2.5 LCD viewer it has 6(!) megapixels and lots of manual functions. The zoom is only 3X optical, but I didn't really use it much, and with the outrageous resolution I can do plenty of digital zooming and cropping in post if needed.

I love my fujifilm, and I hope to use it occasionally still as a back-up camera, as it has nice 6x optical zoom and runs on regular batteries instead of a built-in. But the other reason I wanted a new camera is that my fujifilm is bulky. The compact models are much better for travel, something I tend to do a lot. My new canon is about the same size as my photo ipod.

Sample awesomeness:

All were taken without a flash. Check out that dim restaurant! It was darker than it appears, I wouldn't have even tried to take a picture with my old camera. Thanks Mom and Dad!

I realize now that these images are taking way too long to upload. I'll fiddle with blogger settings to get them into more manageable sizes for posting.

My other present from my folks that I bought myself is . . . .

a little fishy! Mom got me this sweet wall aquarium at mod livin'.

She has no idea :-)

Happy New Year!

(a little late :-)

My December in pictures

I have a lot of pictures that I never posted. Here they are in particular order (yes, because I'm lazy).



I painted a portrait for the big empty space on the kitchen wall. I pumped up the contrast on this picture, then used a projector to draw the outlines. A week of painting later, and she's done!




Bread pudding made from chocolate sourdough.




She really puts up with a lot :-)



Julia and I hosted a cookie decorating party. I forgot to take pictures of the cookies, but here's the braciole I cooked.




The fantastic No-knead bread recipe from NY Times.







My favorite holiday cookie - Big Soft Ginger Cookies




Lots of Scrabble. I had a 4 game streak of wins! This game was my favorite played, my winning word was koala.




Finally! We got rid of that extra washer in our basement. Hurrah!!!




Delicious Ham sandwiches leftover from Thanksgiving (I haven't posted photos in a while!)




Checkerboard cookies.




Yea for waterproof mascara when you're chopping onions!




An earlier snow storm, I layered up two pairs of socks, legwarmers, long johns, and waterproof pants to visit the library on foot.




I wish our neighborhood had better sidewalks.

Blizzard of 2006!

Can you say Cabin Fever?? On the one hand, we're happy to be home safe and sound, on the other, WE'VE BEEN STUCK IN THE HOUSE FOR 36 HOURS, AND THERE'S NO END IN SIGHT. Roads are closed all over Denver, and those who try to drive on local roads are getting high-centered. Ben and I are wishing we bought each other snowshoes for Christmas.

So yesterday I didn't have work, all schools were closed. Today more of the same, all government, schools, retail, are closed. So even if you could get out, where are you going to go? We might give the grocery store another try today, just to get out of the house.

So what did we do? I made turkey stock, reorganized my kitchen pantry, cleaned, cooked, knitted, watched the news, and read. Ben worked from home and read. We napped in the afternoon and played some scrabble and hanafuda in the evening.

The day was long. How the heck am I going to keep occupied today?

Wednesday mid-day.


Wednesday evening.


Thursday morning.


Wednesday afternoon we trekked to the grocery store to get cookie ingredients (very important).




I also got brussel spouts to serve with dinner.


Wednesday afternoon we had an impressive drift in the front walkway.


Wednesday evening some workers shoveled the front walks clear. By Thursday morning it looked like this


This morning Ben shoveled our back patio for a second time.


It's light and fluffy, but DEEP! The levels shown here are non-drift snow.

Happy Holidays

December is busy! But it's all for fun. I had a cookie decorating party last night. Richard visited and we had dinner with Ben's extended family Saturday. My parents were up the weekend before, seeing the new house and shopping in the city. Mavi's visiting us en route to GJ. Tonight we're going to get hot wings at the Dark Horse in Boulder, just like old times.

All my Christmas shopping is done and wrapped up in silver paper and bows. I finally finished a little art project I've been working on for a few weeks. Pictures to come . . . sometime. Picasa is still annoying to use with this beta blogger I got roped into.

Some friends and I watched Dungeons & Dragons the movie this weekend. It was so deliciously bad. I haven't laughed so hard in ages. A couple months ago I came across this website, 64 reasons to watch Dungeons and Dragons. Lo and behold, the author was right on all accounts. I actually sort of wish I hadn't returned it so soon to Blockbuster*. Shoot, I may have to buy this one.

* What?! Blockbuster, you say? Yes, they've been running a deal where you can get a free rental by giving them your Netflix envelope flap. It's a marketing scheme to try to get people to switch to their service, but it saved us $5 so it was worth taking advantage of for this stupendously bad movie.

My mangled claw

Neighborhood Bully