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!

Thanks!

I made two pies for Thanksgiving. One was a peanut butter chiffon pie, and the other was the famous pear anise pie. Both were well received, and although the peanut butter chiffon was nice, my heart belongs to the pear anise.

We took both pies down to the house of family friends of Jen's family. Jen's local extended family were gathered there too. We had a good time of the Thanksgiving standards: turkey, stuffing, and football. Afterwards we went to Jen's parents' house and helped them decorate for Christmas while Father of the Bride played in the background and the Broncos smacked around the Giants.

Today we did some decorating ourselves. We went and bought a tree this morning. It is gorgeous. It is also artificial. This is a big shift for me, as growing up in Oregon meant we could just wander up into the hills and find something amazing to bring home. In our house we could do a big tree in the 12-16 foot range, so it was an all-day affair. We'd go up gravel roads, tromp up and down hills before finding something to lug up and sling on top of our van. Then followed the battle of setting it up and the wonder of decorating it. So it's hard to switch over to an artificial tree. However, we found one that looks super realistic. It doesn't have that evergreen smell, but it should be more affordable, less hassle to maintain, and easier on the environment. Or something like that. I think I may grab some cedar garlands for the mantle to bring in the smell of Christmas.

Anyway, we have decorated the house. It looks lovely and I will have some pictures up here soon. I have to wait for it to get dark to get some good tree shots. I think we'll go for a walk here and enjoy the nigh-70 degree weather. Gotta love Colorado!

I'm so thankful to be able to share my holidays with the woman I love. God has been so good to us this year. Jen's practice has been growing and I'm still employed. We got married and bought a house in the same year without being reduced to subsisting on instant ramen. We have good friends and family in the area, and we're basking in the love God has given us for each other. And we are safe and secure in God's salvation for us, bought by His coming to pay the penalty for our sins against Him. We are blessed and we are grateful. I hope your Thanksgiving was great!

Leaves of Cottonwood

Man, that is a lot of leaves. I spent almost the entire day yesterday raking up the yard. I've learned a few things about timing and technique. First off, don't wait until it snows to try to get those leaves up. Wet, sodden leaves are not easy to get moving or deal with. Second, don't try to hold your bag to get the leaves in. Use a garbage can to hold it open. Third, check what time the leaf drop off program closes. We knew it was ending yesterday, but we did not know that it closed at 1 PM. D'oh!

We did have fun, though. I've never really raked leaves before this year, so having a leaf pile was a novelty. So I did one test jump into the leaves and found that it leaves something to be desired, especially on the butt. Jen also did a test fall into the fall leaves. It's a bit different than when you were a kid, evidently. The leaves are not quite so supportive of us larger adult folk. Here's an animation of Jen falling.

Now we wait for the soreness to set into the shoulders and wrists.

A Little on Gyromancer

Puzzle Quest has been one of our favorite games. Jen and I will play it a lot against each other and solo on the quests in the game. So I was quite excited about Gyromancer, a game that also mixes puzzle and RPG together. It's also put out as a collaboration of Square Enix (the people behind the Final Fantasy series) and PopCap Games (the people behind Bejeweled, Zuma, and many other addicting puzzle games).

The game came out on Wednesday, and we've been playing it a bit. It's been fun, but disappointing. The fun comes out of the puzzle and RPG blend, as well as the interesting game mechanic that is making us reprogram our brains from the pattern recognition used in Puzzle Quest to looking for new patterns of items to match required by Gyromancer. Rather than swapping gems to make matches, in Gyromancer, you rotate a quartet of gems to make sets of 3 or more. So far, I'm digging it.

However, the disappointing things are getting to me. First off, there is no player vs. player mode. That makes it really lame for us as a couple to play the game. Secondly, a second person can't go through the game at the same time as another. If you try, it will erase the game of the other person who is already playing. So we can't even play individually. We have to share the same saved game. Really lame. One other disappointment is that the game so far is exceptionally easy. We have not yet lost a single battle. In fact, most of the time, we won't even take damage in a battle. I'm waiting for the difficulty level to ramp up, but right now it's just a mental exercise, not a challenge like Puzzle Quest can be. I'll reserve harsh judgement for later.

The Dangers of SuperPunch

So, there's this blog called SuperPunch, and lemme tell you, it is dangerous. Mainly, it is dangerous to your productivity. If you are nerdily inclined, it contains a wonder of fascinating, intriguing, nifty, and distracting bits about Lego renderings of characters, neat art pieces, hilarious hijinks, and the like. One smart thing they do is link a post back to a related post, so if you really like bats or steampunk, you can follow back a long and winding thread of posts on the subject. It's better than a tag link that gives you a vague idea of posts dealing with bats, but it gives a specific blog post to look at. This makes it more compelling for me. This blog is a massive time sink for me, as tabs it spawns obscure the top of my browser.

Also excellent is the Pandora Radio site, which I just started using today. You tell it what type of music you like, and it feeds you more like that, like your own custom radio station. That's the simple version of it. There's a lot more going on. All I know is that I tell it the bands I like and I'm getting lots of great music. Now I might actually start using the app that's been on my phone for so long, gathering dust.

I think I should also point out that as I am writing this post, I noticed that 'lemme' is no longer showing up as an error in the spell check for Blogger. Huh.

By the way, thanks to all who came out for our Settlers game night last night, despite the rapidly accumulating snow. It was fun and we got through five games of Settlers in one night, which is pretty awesome. I even won one! We had a grand time, and now we have more alcohol in our house than when we originally stocked up for the party. If we do a few more nights like this, Jen and I will be opening our own bar soon.

Pre-weekend Show

The snow falling on the commute home doubled the amount of time it took me to get up to Lafayette, making it an hour long. Thankfully I had my headset and was able to have a good conversation with Chris, which kept me from going insane.

I made a teen bean bake casserole and followed that up by grinding up our remaining Halloween M&Ms and baking them into a cake. Unfortunately the frosting was a nightmare. Betty Crocker done me wrong! It was thick like paste even after I thinned it down some more. So much for that recipe. I thought I'd put it on the hot cake and let it melt a bit, but even after that when I tried to spread it, it ripped apart the top of the cake. Hopefully the folks coming over tomorrow for Settlers won't mind. It should still taste good.

Yesterday, the news from Pueblo was pretty dull. I did discover another great mascot though. CSU-Pueblo has the Thunderwolf as its mascot. I don't know what a thunderwolf is, but it sounds awesome. Tomorrow there is a volunteer brunch for AINC. We'll see what my fellow readers are like.

Fiat Lux

I have married an amazing woman. We may not have all our skills aligned traditionally with our gender, but we complement each other so well. I am glad that I have Jen, because she can charge in and quickly tackle the things that would take me a while to get the mental nerve together to try. The point in case is the dining room lights.

When we moved in, one bulb was burned out. Well, sort of. We found out later that these low power halogen bulbs are infamous for essentially burning out their contacts and the sockets they plug into. So rather than constantly tweaking the bulbs, replacing them or rewiring the sockets, we decided that we needed to switch over to a stand bulb base so we could do incandescent or compact fluorescent.

Dealing with electricity is something that would require months for me to get around to studying and doing, but Jen went on ahead and did it; taking off the face plates, mucking with the wiring, and getting things done. Things didn't go smoothly at first, with a blown out dimmer switch, some broken glass, and a few necessary candlelight dinners, but Jen persisted and with some advice from an electrician got the lights back on and switched over. She, of course, also saved us a boatload of money.

I'm so grateful God gave me someone who can complement my talents and keep me from electrocuting myself!

Less Than Ideal

I'm super exhausted right now, so I probably shouldn't be trying to write a blog post. But my laundry hasn't finished yet, and I'm too tired to find things to do. There was this computer sitting there and it occurred to me that I haven't written a post for a while.

Today was less than ideal. I am ready to be done with the project I'm on at work. I keep waiting for word of the next project. They're out there. We just haven't gotten the green light yet. Hrrmpph.

Traffic. What the heck? It gets dark on the evening commute and all the sudden people drive like they are coming back from their lobotomy appointments. One night had thick traffic, an accident reducing 287 to a crawl, a bad turn by me, a wait for the world's longest train, and a trip up 96th behind slugs learning their way around an accelerator. Grr.

Jen has a group of colleagues coming for breakfast tomorrow, so I made a breakfast casserole to cook tomorrow and we cleaned. Cleaning is grim work when you're exhausted. Bleh.

Sorry, no entertaining news from Pueblo this week. There was a sordid story about a 62-year-old housing employee who embezzled more than $1 million, but it's too depressing to relate and I'm exhausted.

Finish the laundryyy!

Poor Choices

When Jen and I were coming home this weekend, we saw a man coming down the street we live off of. He was riding a Segway, and was wearing a reflective florescent yellow vest. He was riding down the middle of the lane, and in his hand he had a cane you usually associate with the blind. He was sweeping back and forth to make sure he didn't hit anything. This does not seem advisable.

Then today, as I was driving down Highway 36 to work, I passed a man on a bicycle riding through the construction zone on the narrow shoulder. This seems highly inadvisable. He didn't look like a mental case. He had his bike gear on. He just evidently has a death wish, or enjoys exhaust a lot.

Our weekend was pretty quiet. Jen has been sick, so we mainly laid low. On Halloween we watched some bad movies and passed candy out to the dozen or so kids who came by. Now we have to resist gorging on Whoppers and M&Ms. One of the movies we watched was the hideously bad Transformers 2. I had to fast forward through some parts; they were so painful. Watching it was quite inadvisable. Watching The Proposal was also bad, but not nearly as bad as Transformers 2. Really execrable.

Tonight I watched the most recent Heroes. Until the last few seconds I was ready to not watch the show again. Then the last few seconds intrigued me, and I'll be back for more abuse next week. Time traveling is stupid. Hiro is stupid. And I am stupid for continuing to watch this show. It is inadvisable.