Friday, December 28, 2007

Watson said...

So all the kids ever talk about is superheroes. Milo made up "everything man" because he can do everything. I made up "papaman". I was singing to the batman theme song:
"papa man, papa man, does whatever a papa can. builds rollercoasters, klopps the kinder, flies them to bed and sieht gut aus. papaman!"
Then Watson said:

"I invented stupid man. he just stands at the corner and punches hisself. And he walks against lamp posts. And he is really stupid. He puts his butt on copiers. He has two butts and they upsplode (Watson's word for "explode").
He also jumps into the stupid air and when he comes back down he upsplodes. then he comes back to life and he eats hisself. then he throws back up. And that's all that stupid man does. And he is naked all the time And when his fighting friends come over he is naked."

Thursday, December 27, 2007

Christmas 2007

This year we went to Port Townsend for Christmas with Rudi, Valerie, Scott, Ulrike, Judith and Said (plus 9 crazy kids).
The weather was unusually great one day and unusually shitty the other. We made some great food - Rindsrouladen from Ulrike Grandma's recipe, Fondue on Christmas Eve and Turducken on the 25th. Melissa baked some awesome cookies, quiches, cake and onion rolls.

Needless to say the kids went nuts and played the whole time. They had a blast.

Here are some pix from the place:
Nice old officer's house.
The houses were all built the exact same way in that "officer's row". This is in fact a cascading image of all of the porches lining up perfectly.
Kids got to eat first, since they wanted really simple stuff. plus then the grown ups had time to enjoy a peaceful meal without food being thrown around and screaming going on.



This is the house we rented in Port Townsend, Fort Warden more specifically. It was a really cool old officer's mansion. Nice wraparound porch would be great in the summer. It had huge ceilings and all of the old molding in tact. Good thing it wasn't renovated to death!

View from the front porch.

We took the kids to the beach and they played around in the sand.


Milo discovered this obscure carving. Is it an AI? Or an N with a blemish in the middle? We'll probably never know.

We took the ferry back home via Edmonds. Watson and I shared a coffee and a cream cheese something:




Turducken
I saw something about Turducken on the Food Channel. I think it was on strange foods or something. It struck me as the original Americana Theme in every way: gratuitous amounts of meat. Insane preparation time (36 hours to be precise). Gratuitous stuffing of things into other things. Complete disrespect for the animal's original purpose.

So all of this at hand we set out to get the Turkey, the duck, and the chicken. Alas, Walmart didn't have any ducks left so we substituted duck with goose. Really we then ended with a Trugoosen, but still. three animals stuffed in one another is quite the feat.


Here I am deboning the goose.

Done deboning goose and chicken. Said is helping by deboning the turkey. Really I thought the deboning would be a total bitch and difficult and easy to fuck up but it wasn't. You just kind of cut out the rib cage part and then saw away at the wings and legs. Just takes forever, that's all.Then we put the beast into the oven.
You can see here how crazy this is. The turkey has the goose inside of it, so you can kind of see it sticking out of the turkey's butt (since the good is longer). Completely mantled inside is the chicken. There is also a ton of stuffing and for fun I added bacon and breakfast sausage as well.
After 9 hours of slow cooking at 250, this is what we got!
Carving the turducken is totally easy - cut through the middle.
And it didn't look so bad either. I have to say though the goose was extra gross so don't try it with a goose.

Got a Mac

Jeez this darn Mac. So I thought I'd jump the bandwagon with all the hipsters and convinced my boss I needed a Mac. At first very exciting. So sleek, so flat. Nice font rendering (I hate cleartype forcing into the pixelgrid). Very nice that there's only one volume control, not 5 like on my Vista laptop.
The power cord is really nice too. It's all magnetic and so when the kids trip over it (they always do) it doesn't destroy the computer, the cord just comes out.

But the problems are plenty. I can't get a decent bittorrent client. My digital camera is just not recognized so I can't get the Christmas pictures down and post them here. The quality of the built in camera is so bad that it's basically useless. I can't maximize windows and that drives me crazy. The desktop thus always looks so messy.

Oh, and the first time I took it with me in my bike bag riding home, it immediately rubbed off some of the aluminum coloring from the casing. How is that possible? I packed it up nice, but apparently it's not up for the task of being in a messenger bag.

Not thumbs down just yet, but definitely not as great as the hype.

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Random Thoughts

So Milo really loves to read so much. It's incredible, he reads all those chapter books for 3rd graders already. He just loves it and eats it up. Just like Melissa did at that age.
And Watson is much more like me: more physical, loves to play outside, doesn't get mad about anything and is kind of up for anything.

Watson also looks more like me (or really he just doesn't look like anyone of us) and Milo looks a lot like Melissa. So will the similarities the two of them share with the respective parents manifest themselves in more ways than we've seen? I really wonder. It's also funny that Milo is always totally on Melissa's side about any issue, and Watson is on mine. Watson also likes all the foods I do, and eats everything, like I do. Milo is more picky about his food just like Melissa. Pretty crazy.

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Hipsters in Seattle

Julian told me a funny story today. He said he was out at the new Cha Cha, sitting at the bar sipping a drink. Nobody was talking to him cause he's kind of nerdy like that. He'll sit at the bar and watch the scene, all quiet, read and drink. Sometimes he'll attempt the chat up the waitress if she is hip and cute enough looking. Well this one must have been.
Anyway he's sitting there contemplating all that stuff when he notices water dripping on his head. So after a couple of drip, drops, he decides to draw the waitress' attention to the fact that water is dripping from the ceiling into the bar and on his head.
She was so hip that in her hipster way she said: "oh, that must be the toilet leaking upstairs. Just ignore it."

Sunday, December 2, 2007

Der Erste Advent

Today is Sunday, December 2nd and that makes it Erster Advent! We went to some German friends who are of course the only folks around these shores that know about Advent. For you Americans out there, this is a truly European tradition. the four weeks leading up to Christmas are Adventssonntage, and you light one candle for each Sunday.
We had cookies, coffee, and of course some Gluehwein. Watson and Milo were conspicuously quiet playing with the other kids. Yes, playing. Not fighting. No hitting, no screaming or crying. That must have been a first.




Saturday, December 1, 2007

First Snow in Seattle

It snowed for the first time today! Can't believe it because the day started out pretty nice. It's been really cold in the last couple of days though so I am not that surprised.




Watson said...

We went to see a play. The big friendly giant, also called "B.F.G."
Watson and I had to go back into the cry room because he was afraid of the mean giants. there he said: "Der CSG is gut aussieht." Gut aussehen is the joke we make for having the pants pulled up really high, and the costume of the BFG had the pants pulled up really high.