Tag: family

Christmas 2023

December 28, 2023 2:37 pm

With Christmas on Monday this year it, again, felt like a sprint to the finish. The girls had Friday off from school, but I was still working. So Saturday and Sunday were filled trying to get everything ready.

I used the weekend to bake! Peanut-butter blossoms, sugar cookies (the girls cut and decorated them), chocolate-cream pie, and crème brulée for desserts. Rolls for Christmas dinner, and baguettes to dip in cheese fondue for Christmas-Eve dinner. It took all day both days, but I got it all done.

For dinner on Christmas Eve we had our now-traditional cheese fondue with fresh baguettes, vegetables, apples, and whatever else we decide to dip. Corinne and Heather read a couple of stories, I played Christmas songs on my trombone (fairly poorly, but with all the baking I hadn’t had time to practice that weekend or warm up), and Jess read a story.

This year, in an effort to help the girls develop the ability to consider the interests of others, we had gone to Barnes and Noble and had them select books for each other as gifts. And then Jess and I switched off with them to select gifts for each of us. So after our songs and stories we all opened our books from the girls, drank hot chocolate, ate cookies, and read a little from our new books while listening to Christmas music. With the fake fire glowing in the fireplace, just needed some snow falling outside the window to make it a perfectly pleasant evening.

The girls set out eggnog, cookies, and carrots for Santa and his reindeer and then they were off to bed.

In the morning we were up at dawn (which is the girls’ usual time) to see what transformation had taken place in the house overnight.

Thanksgiving 2023

November 23, 2023 8:30 pm

Thanksgiving was a quiet day at home. I took the week off. On Wednesday, I helped the girls make a pumpkin pie.

We played part of a game of a new board game I got on Wednesday from a Kickstarter called Familiars and Foes. You play as the familiars of a group of captured witches/wizards. You have to work together to defeat the foes and rescue the witches/wizards.

Partial Solar Eclipse 2023

October 16, 2023 5:22 pm

On Saturday we watched the solar eclipse, which was an annular eclipse to begin with, but also only partial from our vantage point in Livermore.

I made pancakes and the Spencers came over to hang out with us.

We had some cloud cover throughout the morning and we missed the peak, but we got some good views before and after. The thin, wispy clouds made it more interesting to look at it at least.

2023 Trip: Part 5 – Heading Home

September 23, 2023 2:35 pm

We had originally planned to stay another day, but we were all feeling like it was time to be home. And this way there are still things we haven’t done for our next visit.

So we packed up and headed out on the 13th. We stopped at the Pima Air and Space Museum in Tucson on our way out.

I had no idea saguaro cacti grew so tall! I had expected something like 10-feet tall, not 20-feet tall.

It was hot at the air and space museum. We knew it would be, but thought we could see a few things fairly quickly and mostly stay inside out of the sun before it got too hot. But the 30-minute loop we did outside just about did in Jess and the girls.

Lots of things to see there though when it’s not too hot to stand and read the signage.

After the air and space museum we got lunch at Brushfire BBQ, which was pretty good. After lunch we headed onto something less conventional–the Mini Time Machine Museum of Miniatures (on the other side of Tucson).

I’m not sure how “Time Machine” makes its way into their name, but it’s a building full of miniature scenes which was fun to look at it. And it was air-conditioned! It included a “Fairy Hunt” for the girls to complete. That is, throughout the scenes were something like 12 fairies they needed to find to get a little prize at the end. We found them all and they got to pick out a sticker and eraser or something.

One large room was all scenes related to fantasy and holidays (mainly Halloween and Christmas) which was probably the most fun part.

But the other areas with more realistic to life scenes were cool too. They were more interesting from the view of noticing how many details are included such that a photograph can fool you as to what you’re looking at. Like the bookstore here, which is about 10 inches tall:

And they had these pencil tips that had been carved like this in what must have been an incredibly painstaking process:

And I also liked this old European street scene:

After those stops we drove for 4 hours and stayed the night in Blythe, CA. Then up the next day to thread the needle across Los Angeles between morning gridlock and afternoon gridlock. And we had an almost perfect run. We got slowed down by an accident for just a few minutes on the north side of LA. Once safely through LA we had dinner at Wendy’s and then up I-5 and home.