Snowfall, Take Two

 

The First Snowfall of the Winter

a light dusting, but still pretty. 

It's That Time Again

This year we tried an unusual approach to Thanksgiving by avoiding traditional get-togethers. That choice was bound to come with some unhappy consequences, as it means we missed getting together with family that we really enjoy seeing. However, with our calendar looking like blackout-bingo for the past several months, and again in December, it almost had to be done.

We hope everyone had a terrific time and can't wait to see you all for the coming Christmas celebrations.

Which brings me to my point: The Annual Christmas List!
We took the boys to Finnagan's and Toys R Us yesterday, to get a feel for what tickles their fancies in the world of toys. They both appeared content with roughly every second thing they saw.

Jamey is most excited about Moon Shoes; mini trampolines you strap to the feet for extra jumping action. He's hoping he can jump into his bunk-bed with them. And secondly, he craves a Robot with "supplies", which we haven't entirely defined yet, but we get the general idea. It is to be a very capable and useful robot. At Finnagan's he seemed most taken with Marvin's Magic Set for Young Magicians. It has 125 pieces and directions for performing many magic tricks. He is also interested in a Glow-in-the-dark magic wand that comes with 15 tricks of its own.

Arthur has a tendency to mimic Jamey's list & so I'm not as clear on what appeals to him, personally. However, he is still keeping the robotic dinosaur that we discovered shortly after last Christmas high on his list.

Things that Heidi and I think they would like include a buildable framework for routing marbles down ramps and such. Lego Star Wars II for the XBox (aka "the babysitter"). I'd also like to get us all a telescope. Despite my typical reluctance to hang about outside in the cold, it seems a practical necessity to retain a high-powered optical device.

Heidi is into Fabric, Yarn and Knitting Needles.

My ideas for my own list can most easily be summed up as "Gadgetry". Accessories for my camera, like a 1-2GB Ultra Compact Flash card, a new flat-panel monitor, which would allow me two monitors, since my 5 mo. old Dell supports that. I'd like to get some kind of science project kit, like an electronics, or robotic kit that I could work with the kids on. I'd like to get started on a projection-based home-theater, perhaps with a screen. I'd love to be able to project our DVDs and XBox games on a giant silver screen. Then there's the wireless internet radio device for listening to music in any room in the house.

However, when all is said and done, what I'm most excited about this year is getting together and having some excellent conversations and trying to make it super-special for everyone that I can.

Star Wars Strikes Back

There are a lot of great things about The Empire Strikes Back, and it is tremendous to be able to enjoy it, and the other Star Wars movies, with my two enthusiastic boys. However, I never realized, as a child, how heavily the plot relies on the repeated failures of the Millenium Falcon to make the jump to light-speed to move the plot forward. I guess that isn't a horrible condemnation, but it surprised me, as an adult, how many minutes of this movie are spent on the struggle to fix the hyperdrive.
Nevertheless, this series is such a classic; I love watching how excited the boys get over it. I also love understanding every part of the dialogue. Yoda's wisdom is not quite as mysterious and profound, but is still high-quality and enjoyable. I'm somewhat amazed that the same mind that invented ewoks and Jar-Jar Binks was able to conceive all of the other, lovely details of this universe. The romantic tension between Han Solo and Princess Leia is also a little more aggressive, than I remember. It's a bit unsettling, actually. However, it resolves fairly well and their affection seems genuine, despite the lack of onscreen evidence for it.
This post is not cohesive, nor informative. I know it. But I'm going to post it anyway, because I want to express my euphoria over relishing a favorite movie raised to the power of 2 Star Wars-loving boys. Someone in euphoria can be excused for be incoherent. Right?

New Music

These are not recommendations or reviews. It's more of a "news-alert" to those who are interested in these artists.

Solomon Burke - Nashville
A country-flavored album by an old soul veteran

Willie Nelson - Songbird
Willie Nelson & Ryan Adams collaborate, with some unusual results. My favorite track: Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah

The Decemberists - The Crane Wife
Established Independent-label band goes major with this Capitol release. The title is based on a Japanese folk-tale.

Three songs that aren't necessarily new, but I've bookmarked them recently, while listening to pandora.com:

Laudanum by Letters To Cleo

Lisa's Song by Allison Crowe

Venezuela by Dayna B. Kurtz

Soap In The Eye

Do you remember when you were a child, and getting the Johnson&Johnson "no-tears" shampoo in your eye made you cry like your cat just died? Then, growing up, you realized, hey, this stuff is rather mild. Eyes get tougher, or rather, desensitized, as you age.
Enter Selsun Blue.
This stuff has Selenium Sulfide in it. Now, I don't know the exact properties of Selenium Sulfide, but my understanding is roughly this: the skin on your scalp is whining and complaining about some irritation or other, so you send in Selenium Sulfide, which basically says "You want me to give you somethin' to cry about?!!" This is one bad dude. In just a few minutes of contact , you get no more whining from your scalp for at least a day. Now, as adults, we have graduated from the days of sloppy shampooing. We can sense where our hairline ends, and have the advantage that it is further from our eyes each passing day. We can get it all sudsy, without missing spots OR getting any in our eyes. That's just one of the perks of adulthood. How-ev-er....there are those infrequent accidents that remind us of childhood trauma.
Several years ago, when I first discovered the usefulness of Selsun Blue, I also discovered the curiously strong cap on the cap of the Selsum Blue bottle. It's stiff to open, requiring considerable thumb-strength and stiffness. They do not want children opening this product. Fair enough. And it's not just the latch which is stiff, the hinge on that cap is also quite robust; give a little push and it'll snap shut like a venus-flytrap. Always close your eyes before doing this. On that day, years ago, which I still remember vividly, I was unaware of this rule. One tiny droplet of the soap launched from the cap, directly onto my cornea, triggering sensations similar to the ones I experienced when I sprayed flat-black spraypaint in my eyes, or the time I had my corneas scratched by an ice-laden snowball. (I mean shards of ice, not to be confused with the microcrystals in snow, which couldn't scratch corneas.) So, from that day forward, I have diligently closed my eyes immediately preceding the closing of the Selsun Blue cap. (Forget what you hear about needing to hear something 15 times before you learn it; that's not always true.)
Last night, as I lay in the tub (imagine a Northern Pike in a sardine can) shampooing my hair, with Selsun Blue, I let some ride the water droplets down into the corner of my left eye. This brought back all those old memories and furnished me with some of the finer details that I had forgotten from my first experience, which I will now relate to you.
All the pain was still there, nothing new to add on that score. Here's what I had forgotten: hazy vision! For several hours after flushing out my eye with water, I found the vision in my left eye to be impaired as though I wore a pair of slightly foggy, or grease-smudged glasses. "How long is this supposed to last?" I asked myself. And, "How many more chances will I get, before this effect becomes permanent?", I added.
This morning I can still feel tenderness in the area where that most impressive concoction of a shampoo penetrated my eye. I don't know whether to blame or cheer animal-rights activists. In any case, the animal-testing has been done, the results are not hazy: avoid getting this soap in your eye.

Nov 2nd Heat Used

This year's first day of using indoor heating was November 2nd. Almost a month later than last year. (We had workmen leaving the door open all day last year) Our indoor temperature never dipped below 64 degrees prior to using heat.

Also beginning Nov. 2nd: a rain storm. According to my weather-station, we've had 7.39 inches of rain since the 2nd. Almost half of that (3.49 inches) has fallen in the past 24 hours! The creeks will be rising. Greetings El Nino.

Update: in the past two minutes we're now up to 3.51 inches in the past 24 hours. You see where this is leading, right?

This One's For Lief

C3-PO, R2-D2 and Han Solo, frozen in carbonite.
Brix Blox baby! 

Moody Photo

Using Picasa, I feel more free to do crazy things with photos than before. Picasa makes automatic backups before saving any altered version of a photo. So I am less inhibited about trying radical processing techniques on a photo, it is easy to undo all changes and even undo a save!
Here, I increased color saturation dramatically before using a filtered black & white effect to get the best contrast in the elements of the picture. Along the way I increased fill, highlight and shadows as well.


Here is another version, although I think I prefer grain over blur:

Mushroom Hunting

We started out looking for diamonds, but soon expanded that to "whatever we can find" in the forest. As it turned out, mushrooms were a conspicuous novelty at this time of year. Arthur and Jamey turned out to be experts at identifying new varieties. I followed them around, playing photojournalist. You can see the results of the expedition on my Botanical photostream .

Halloween revelry culminated in the Fargher Lake Grange Halloween Party. Costumes of some of the guests are on my flickr photostream.