New Mexico

The day after Christmas we made what's turning out to be our annual trek to New Mexico. My parents have a little cabin in the mountains, and we all (us plus my brother and parents) had a great few days playing in the snow.

The cabin

The weather was nice enough to drop a couple of feet of snow on the area the day before we got there, and it was the dry, powdery kind.

This kind of snow doesn't make the best snowballs, but it does make driving easier especially when you're in a tiny POS rental car not designed for the conditions. We did have fun slipping backwards on a small hill a few times, but only because the worst case scenario was backing into a snowbank. Scott handled the drive well.

Something about the shape of the cabin and perhaps the strength of the wind during the storm created sideways icicles and, on the back side of the cabin, a wall of ice/snow/pine needles that extended down from the roof about 3 feet.

Scott, ever manly, decided that the snow needed to be busted down:

and thrown at Frank:

I can't decide what's funnier: Frank's expression or Christopher huddling away from the chunk of snow.

There were feats of strength:

...fort building: (hard to tell but it's a tunnel) 

...lots of sledding:

...a little bit of crying:

...some totally candid shots: 

and some skiing in Taos: 

(he looks thrilled in this one)

Also, this is what happens when you take a picture of the moon, with a long exposure, while driving:

Now we're back in town for 3 days before heading off the Vegas and a marathon. 

1 comments

Happy New Year!!

Happy 2009! I hope this is a great year for all of you. 

Did you make any resolutions?

Frank's sister Michelle has embarked on marathon training, hoping to run her first marathon in May in Vermont, the same race where Frank will run his 50th state!

I'm training to run a 5k, which will be incredibly challenging for me. I've never run more than .5 miles without stopping, and that was years ago. I'm using the Couch - to - 5k training schedule. I'm on week 1, and I might still be on week 1 when I should be on week 3. Who can say?

1 comments

Best Present Ever!

I'm now the proud owner of a 2009 Honda CR-V! We traded in our old faithful Dodge Intrepid on New Year's Eve and got a pretty great deal on the new car.  I had only planned to test drive, but one thing led to another and Frank started talking price with the sales guy. Long 4-hour story short, I ended up with a brand new car!

Here's me & C at the dealership just before we drove off the lot, which you've probably already seen if you're on Facebook:

The color is called Glacier Blue, the car gets 27-28 mpg on the highway, it's the perfect size for me, and I'm LOVING the heated seats.   We're going to be friends for a long time.

1 comments

Weekend in Vegasbaby

After some delays and de-icing, we got back yesterday from our weekend trip to Las Vegas.  Scott and Frank ran a marathon in Boulder City, by Lake Mead just outside of Las Vegas, and I'm proud to say that Frank won the marathon and set a course record.

I'm NOT proud to say that I'm still figuring out my newfangled camera, and that most of the people pictures I took were blurry.  I sure can take a mean landscape shot, though. Sigh.

Here are the boys before the race:

Here's Frank finishing in 1st place! (see what I mean about the camera? It's focusing on the RV, not the runner. I need to take some time to figure this business out)

Here's Scott giving me the universal sibling greeting:

And here's a shot of the scenery:

We stayed at Planet Hollywood, and were really impressed with the rooms. Ok, we probably would have been impressed with almost any room because last time we stayed at Circus Circus, but PH was still pretty nice.  Frank and Scott spent much of the weekend playing blackjack - Frank won $400 and Scott lost a small fortune before rallying at the end to break even - and I spent much of the weekend working on my magazine project. 

Sounds funny, but I was looking forward to some uninterrupted work time, and was able to make huge progress on the first issue.

Fun weekend, but I'm glad to be home for a while. Frank gets to stay in town for a whole 6 days before heading out to San Jose, but I won't be traveling for a while.

Oh, and HOOK 'EM, HORNS!

3 comments

Christopher's List of Bad Words

Tonight at bedtime, Christopher was experimenting with letter sounds and asked me what the letters b-c-h spelled. I told him they didn't make a word, but he kept sounding it out until I told him, "Honey, be careful because that's kind of close to a bad word." (He'd asked about the word about a year and a half ago but I didn't assume he remembered.)

His reaction? A pretend-casual, "Oh, you mean b***h?"

I tried not to visibly react, and asked if he knew what it meant, and he told me it was a really mean lady.  Fair enough.

Then he said he also knew some other bad words. His list of 3 included one real one and also "shut up" and "go away", which, okay, are not too nice and probably shouldn't be said too much either.

And for his grand finale, he tried - AGAIN - to get me to tell him what Ralphie said in A Christmas Story that got his mouth washed out with soap. When I wouldn't say, he tried various non-words that sounded a bit like "Fuuuudge" and looked at me sideways, monitoring my reactions.  I just smiled and told him good night.

I'm not sure how much longer this honeymoon of innocence will last, but I'm comforted by the certainty that, even though he knows some bad words, he's only said one in front of me once, and used it "correctly" (when he dropped his Lego creation and it broke), and I KNOW he'd be too scared to say it at school or at friends' houses. For now.

I don't thin he has a future as a sailor, but I'm stocking up on soap just in case.

1 comments

Total Lego Island

One of Christopher's favorite shows is Cartoon Network's Total Drama Island, which is a cartoon reality show complete with characters getting voted off the island. He watched the whole first season with great interest, and was bummed when his favorite people got kicked off.   It's a brilliant idea for a show, really, though of course I'm not jazzed about getting him all pumped up about reality shows.

Now that the season's over, he's been getting his fix by staging his own reality show with Lego people.  Here is a sequence from this morning's show:

The campfire ceremony

Helping the latest reject onto the Boat of Losers from the dock of Shame


Waving goodbye to the loser

Christopher would like me to point out that the loser is shaking his fist.

It's a welcome change from All Star Wars, All the Time, but in the long run I'm not sure it's really better.  But at least he's exercising his imagination, right?

2 comments