Christmas-y Busynessy

First off, props to my folks for being married 49 years. Their anniversary was last week. I'm blessed to have parents who take their vows seriously and inspire us. Only 48.5 more years for Jen and I to catch up with them.

Friday we had dinner with Kevin and Diana before dashing off to Jen's folks' neighborhood Christmas party. The big draw was that the dessert was being held in this amazing house that has some funky, exterior design. The Christmas party meant that we got to see the amazing interior design, as well as have lots of good dessert. The house was stunning. All sorts of wild decor and customized spaces. There was a droolworthy collection of cars in the awesome garage and so much more. It was seriously impressive.

Saturday, I went up into the mountains with Jason and a friend of his to do some snowshoeing. It was a blast to get up in the mountains (finally!) and see the winter landscape. We went through a lot of aspen, so I need to remember this hike for the fall. Afterwards, I came home and started an epic culinary expedition. Well, epic is a bit of an exaggeration. My parents got me a subscription to Sunset magazine, which I read for the recipes. There was a good deal on roasts, so Jen picked one up and I decided to try this recipe for sort of an spicy orange peel roast. We did it with pork rather than beef, and it turned out quite well. I did grate off a small chunk of thumb (we'll add that to the blister I got making cashew brittle), but otherwise it went well. It's an involved recipe, but it was fun to do a 'big' recipe and have plenty of leftovers. The rub on the roast was particularly good, though Jen and I agree we'd maybe strain out the peels in the sauce.

Not deterred by missing pieces of finger, I got up Sunday morning and started another recipe from Sunset. This one was the base for chocolate peanut-butter thumbprint cookies and chocolate peppermint patty cookies. We made a few of both. The resulting cookies were good, but intense in that one-a-day-max way. The dough was pretty hard to work with, somehow managing to be hard and sticky-gooey at the same time, since it is 12 oz. chocolate to 3/4 cup flour. I'm still weighing in my mind if it is worth it. The peppermint cookies look pretty awesome. We took the cookies down to Isaac and Elsa's for some games, but we called it an early night so we could do all the chores that had been preempted by fancy cookin'. On the way home, we fed my jonesing for carols by singing the whole way home. I have an awesome wife. And that pretty much brings you up to date to the minute.

It's the Most Recapping Time of the Year

Ok, you can start breathing again. I know you were all breathlessly anticipating the 2009 installment of the amazing, the wonderful, the written, the 2009 Thingvall Family Christmas letter! Well, wait no more my good sir and/or madam! The letter is ready for your perusal and adulation.

Oh, and completely unrelated: I finished Gyromancer last night. I can't say I was too impressed, although the last boss was a challenge. The game has its merits, but fails to capitalize on its potential. Too few interesting beasts, and a fairly non-existent challenge. I still want to play through some of the extra content, such as the challenges and go earn me some more awards to unlock some more creatures, but otherwise, I'm about done with it. Worth a spin.

Guilty Conscience

I'm writing the Christmas letter for Jen and myself. I've been using my blog for reference, and I see how few posts I've done recently. GUILT. So, anyway, there's a Christmas letter coming soon. In the mean time, I think you should be entertained by people playing music on a Jeep. Not playing instruments while on a Jeep, but using the Jeep as an instrument. High culture, people. This is what we are building society for.

Because I Love You

For four nights in a row this week, Jen and I are either entertaining or being entertained. But I'm gonna post some pictures for you. Why? Because I love you. I would do this thing for you. So here are pictures, exclusively brought to you by the G1 Android mobile electronic brain phone thing dealio. That's how much I love you.

So here's some stained glass from First Presbyterian Church in Boulder. We were there when Jen was doing a series of talks for a group there.

And, if you haven't noticed or heard. It has been fricking cold here in Colorado. (Thankfully it is back up into the 40s.) Our house is not the easiest to heat, especially the back rooms, as Jen so wonderfully demonstrates in this picture.

One of our engagements this week was hosting a potluck for some of Jen's ex-coworkers. I was commissioned to bake a cherry pie. As I was doing so, I was talking on the phone and unthinkingly used baking powder instead of corn starch. Then I was wondering why my pie filling was producing this ghastly grey foam. Corn starch. Baking powder. Not the same thing.

Fortunately, I was able to wash the cherries off, recreate the mixture, and craft a beautiful pie. Look! A lattice!

Jen and I are all but done with our Christmas shopping, but we decided that rather than walk in the balmy 40s and melting snow, we would go to the mall and people watch. I saw these cool little birds in one of the department stores' window displays. We also saw a little girl going around and putting her hand up the underpants of mannequins. Unfortunately my camera was not at the ready for this. I have a long way to go before I can work for National Geographic. You can click on the picture to get a bigger version of the picture.

Last night, Jen tried her own modeling of clothes. I think she took the idea of a model just being a hanger for the clothes a little too literally. Goodness, I love that woman.

Radio on the Internet and XBox

I'm going to ignore the fact that snow is piling on top of old snow out there, with promise of more on Tuesday. I'm going to have a glacial deck soon. No ... no ... I'm ignoring that, because I want to talk about radio; specifically personalized Internet radio.

Sure there are live streams of radio from existing radio stations out there, but there are these sites out there that just stream music you like, and music that they think you'll like. The two sites I've been using are Pandora and last.fm.

I'll be up front and say that my favorite is Pandora. The interface is slick, the service is reliable, and it provides lots of good results that I like. You can readily see the past few songs that have played and give them the thumbs up or thumbs down. You can bookmark songs or artists. The downside is that you only get 40 hours a month free of listening time. Since that's just a solid work week, that's not a whole lot of listening. You can pay for more, which, hmmm, now that I think of it, would be a great Christmas present for me. Hint, hint.

Last.fm is nice as well. They have a cool slideshow for each artist that can prove to be unfortunately hypnotic. The service is also quite good at giving me artists that I have never run into before (Owl City and Eisley are two I've liked). I like the songs I hear less in general, but they are still good. One huge plus for last.fm is that it can play on my XBox 360. Unfortunately, you can't do anything else while you're using the last.fm app. So no playing games while listening to my last.fm stations. Lame. One thing that puzzles me, is that you can't pause last.fm. So if you're really digging a song and someone calls, (be it your boss, your mother, or Nature) you'll miss out on the song. I'm also disappointed that you can't readily see what you just listened to. I'm sure there is a way to do it, but it is not as upfront as Pandora. However, so far I haven't run

into a free listening limit. Considering that last.fm has very few advertisements, there must be one, but I'm too lazy to look it up right now ... yeah, tried to find it, but couldn't in 3 clicks, so I'm done.

But I do dig that Internet radio!

Blessed

Man, we had a great weekend. Of course, it didn't hurt that it was 4 days long. Still, it was grand. We did Thanksgiving and decorating. We took walks and slept in. We saw our friends' new baby. We had good sushi, pheasant, and cake. We relaxed.

We also celebrated Jen's birthday on Sunday, culminating in dinner at her parents' house and a trip to Denver to watch the last Riverdance show in Denver. It was pretty amazing. In day to day life, we seem so earthbound; locked in our limitations. When you see people bounding around the stage and flitting about on legs that seem wired with springs and lightning, you are reminded that human potential is so high. It wasn't quite what I expected, but we had a great time and got free parking, to boot.

We're so grateful for the weekend we were blessed with. It was a good time of celebrating, relaxing, and reveling in the love God has given us for each other. Can I have another of these?

Ornamentation

As promised, here are some pictures of our decorations. Well, here is one picture. If you want to see the rest, you can visit my Picasa gallery and see the rest of them. We're so thrilled with the tree. It's bringing back some good feelings of Christmas past I haven't had for a long time. I've got a home for the holidays!