Jess' Birthday 2020

September 26, 2020 10:47 am

Jess wanted to go to the beach for her birthday. So we packed into the van with our social-bubble buddies and headed out to Half Moon Bay. We pre-ordered some sandwiches from Subway and ate lunch next to the ocean.

The girls had a blast playing in the water and people were generally pretty good about distancing and mask wearing. The parking lot was full, but it didn't feel really crowded. Maybe that's because it was foggy and you couldn't see very far down the length of the beach.

Corinne eventually got cold and fell asleep hunched over on the sand.

Then she decided that on me was the only acceptable place to rest.

Once we'd had our fill of the beach we went to get gelato. This was a tactical mistake. The gelato shop was up the road away from the route home. And the way back was bumper-to-bumper traffic of people trying to head home from the coast.

So a short gelato trip added over an hour of additional drive time to get home (which is only about 1 hour anyway). But we eventually got home at which point it was dinner time. We had to parallelize our remaining celebrations in order to get things done in time for the girls' bedtime. Jess got the girls bathed while I heated up some chicken strips for them to eat. Then Jess blew out candles (all 40 of them!) on the cake I made and opened presents. By that time our dinner order was ready so I went to pick that up while Jess got the girls in bed.

Jess decided that my birthday cake is so good that she should have it for her birthday too. So that's the cake I made--chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, complete with Kyle's special, vanilla-cream filling.

And that's 3 of 4 family birthdays this year celebrated under the ongoing stay-at-home order and it looks like Heather's will be the same.

Christmas 2019

December 31, 2019 3:29 pm

On the 16th we went to look at lights around town with friends. It was even a bit chilly.

Christmas Eve at home with cheese fondue with fresh bread and hot chocolate. And a couple of terrible, low-light pictures of the girls opening gifts to each other. Heather received a fossil dig kit and Corinne received 2 Magna-Tile plates (she ran around the house screaming she was so excited).

We added an alicorn and a narwhal to our Christmas lights this year. The alicorn immediately required replacement supports as it would fall over in a slight breeze and its lights are already having issues. So it may have to be returned. But the girls _loved_ it.

And I upgraded our "fire" with some flame-effect lights mounted on a board at the back of the fireplace. Surprisingly convincing in peripheral vision.

Christmas Morning!

I made another Bûche de Noël this year. Unlike last year I skipped all the hazelnut parts and went with a filling of dark-chocolate creme & chocolate-chips with dark-chocolate ganache frosting and chocolate chips for garnish. It was pretty good.

Thanksgiving 2019

December 21, 2019 11:15 am

We drove out to Utah to spend Thanksgiving with Erin's family this year. We arrived on Sunday night and stayed until Saturday morning.

On Tuesday we went to the Thanksgiving Point Natural History Museum.

Thursday was a busy day of baking 131 rolls, both baguette-style and soft-dinner-style, making cream puffs, eating food, and the girls playing in the snow.

I needed to make a lot of rolls, but the standard mixer bowl wasn't big enough. Turns out it works just fine to use another bowl of similar height and hold it yourself (and spin it around to help the mixing).

A whole gaggle of girls who had a ton of fun running around all week. Heather looks twice their size. I think it's mostly because she's all stretched out, but she's also tall.

On Friday we visited some friends that live in Lehi. Then we had to shovel 4 inches of snow off Erin's driveway to park the van. I don't miss shoveling snow!

We packed up Friday night planning for an early departure, but had to shovel more snow off the driveway in the morning in order to safely get to the street, which was not plowed.

We eventually got moving though had to head South due to the storm system coming through which also made I-80 across Donner Pass really dangerous with dozens of accidents and disabled vehicles. Shortly after we left, apparently a propane tanker overturned on I-15 around Lehi and had I-15 closed in both directions all day, but we avoided that.

The unicorn headband is also headphones!

Once we got out the bottom of Utah we had gotten ahead of the storm and the weather at least cleared up even if traffic didn't. We had hoped to get home in one day, which should have been possible with ~15 hours of traveling. Any dream of that happening though was shattered by the CA agricultural checkpoint which had traffic completely stopped for 27 miles.

We, and much of the rest of the highway, tried to stop for some food at the only town in existence for that stretch of road, Primm, just inside the Nevada border. We headed for a Taco Bell that Google thought existed, but did not. So we ended up at the busiest McDonald's I've ever seen. We grabbed some food to go and got back in the traffic jam. By the time we got up to the checkpoint they were closed for the day and you could just drive through, but it takes a long time for 27 miles of stopped traffic to start moving again.

We made it to Barstow and stayed the night there. When we got up in the morning, the checkpoint still had 5 miles of stopped traffic (according to Google Maps). We got moving again and made it back home after another 7 hours of driving. Patches of driving rain and poor visibility, heavy traffic, and incredibly unsafe drivers (gee, it's pouring rain, I can't see more than 2 cars in front of me, but this guy left 20 feet of space in front of him, I'm going to take it!). It was not a lot of fun.

At least a Raspberry Pi loaded with TV shows and Movies kept the girls entertained.

Halloween 2019

November 2, 2019 10:09 am

On the 30th we worked on carving our pumpkins. Which means I worked on carving pumpkins since everyone else thinks it's too gross cleaning out the inside of pumpkins.

Heather developed a cat-like design for her pumpkin. And Jess helped Corinne with a friendly-face design for hers. My design comes from the recently released game "Untitled Goose Game" in which you play a goose that terrorizes the neighborhood. Honk!

And costume pictures:

We started trick-or-treating at 6:30. The neighborhood seemed to get busiest around 7:15. Heather was scared of any decoration that looked like it might have the potential to move suddenly. Corinne was scared of any house without any decorations. But we made it down one side of the street, back up the other, and then back to the house. Then the girls were exhausted and Heather helped hand out candy while getting ready for bed (seems to be her favorite part of Halloween).