Christmas Forecast

Many of you entered your zip code on my weather post a few weeks ago so I could include it in my Christmas weather forecast comparison. I must admit to adding a few zip codes just for fun so we can have a little more variety. All forecasts are taken on the first official day of winter - Sunday Dec 21st (except Mt Pleasant - I messed that one up yesterday). Seven of Eleven locations appear to have a good chance of seeing the sun on Christmas day.

NO GYM MEMBERSHIP NEEDED. . .

. . .when it snows around here! The pictures might not do justice as to just how many square feet of driveway we have. There was about 10+ inches of snow Friday. Saturday morning it took both of us (no help came this time from the kids since they had both thrown up within the last 24 hrs) less than two hours to tackle it together. This is with shovels ONLY! No snow blower - don't own one. The pictures below were taken before additional snow fell. Then last night and this morning we had about another 4+ at least. Now the wind is blowing and drifting those 4 new inches and previous snow making it look like lots more fell than that in places. Since the temperature as I write this is -11 with wind chill (sustained winds of 25 and gusts of 35mph), there is NO WAY we are going out to shovel! It would do no good anyway. We will wait until tomorrow for our next workout. Its Sunday anyway. Isn't this a day of rest? WE LOVE MICHIGAN!

(Looking away from the house the paved driveway ends where you start to see solid white. Then it turns into gravel. There is a turnaround off to the left and then the road is out by the pine trees that mark the entrance.)

Teacher Ornament

It seems there is always a dilemma at this time of year to find something to give to teachers. Since moving here the teachers at the school generally suggest that instead of bringing them something to donate to the Helping Hands program or pick something from a the Wish List for classroom supplies. That is all cool and we participate. A few years ago we started to do teacher ornaments that the kids help make. It is inexpensive and generally personalized so more meaningful than many other things that might just pile up. Anyway, I have failed the last year or two in my effort. I had almost given up the idea and thought this year, we will just do a card. But I cannot just take a card out of a box to give them. If we are going to do something it has to be from the boys. So the other night when I realized if I wanted the teachers to receive something it better be done that night as the weather was not looking good and potentially the last day before Christmas break would be the next day. With some luck on my first search attempt on the web and because I have a stash of paper and other things for crafting we had something in little time and Sam helped! Unfortunately Dan didn’t get to help as he was at Cub Scouts. Instead of a card we turned it into an ornament. Yeah, the ornament tradition continues! I must say it was very exciting to see how the teachers just loved it.

So if anyone wants a cute idea that is super easy to do. . . .Here are the pictures. We used Sam’s thumbprint. On the back of the ornament a personalized note was attached. It all worked and once again, a miracle last minute ornament came together!

Christmas Ornaments

UPDATE -- ORNAMENT WINNERS!! Yup, there was more than one winner. You will know if you were a winner if an ornament shows up at your house in the near future. :)

Years ago every Christmas season I tried to come up with some unique Christmas card greeting. I dreamed of making an ornament as well. But as I often do, I dream and don’t do. Then a couple years after we moved to Illinois I was invited by a friend to participate in an ornament exchange. There started my new tradition of making an ornament every year.

This ornament exchange was no simple exchange where you make 12 ornaments and get 12 ornaments. It was a production and a fun one! The ornaments were always thoughtfully made and often had some purpose or meaning behind the design. The ornament exchange was then celebrated at an afternoon getaway. I call it a getaway because the few hours spent at this soirée was a real treat and perfect way to truly feel the Christmas spirit even though it was simply at someone’s home. The first Saturday of December was the usual date and ALL things were set aside for these few hours. Upon arriving we would enjoy cranberry tea, visiting and lovely Christmas music. Everyone was assigned to either bring a salad or dessert. The buffet table of food was no ordinary pot-luck but a true holiday spread. We would play a few fun games and do a simple gift exchange. The culminating event was to go around and unveil our ornament. We would explain why we chose that ornament and any meaning it might have. The memories of our exchanges will always be with me every year at this time. After six years of this tradition life moved on and we moved to Michigan. I had thoughts all year of starting the tradition here in 2007. I even thought about it all year this year as well but. . . Here it is, December 2008 and I did not do it. This is not an event one could pull off last minute. It takes months of preparation so everyone has time to come up with and make their ornaments. Maybe 2009 will be my magic year to start the tradition here.

Each year as I pull out the Christmas decorations I fondly open my special boxes that hold the exchange ornaments. I think of the many friends who shared them and how we are now spread all over the country. I actually need a special tree to hang all of them (and I don’t have one yet). I still continued my personal tradition of making the ornament last year and shared them with family and a few friends. I had always made extras each year and sent them to family. This year I had a small ornament crisis. The idea I was so excited about was not working and time was ticking. In hopes of inspiration and a way to not ruin my fun tradition I went to Joann’s the other day. I was pleasantly surprised by an idea that came together with great speed. My ornaments are done and I’m quite happy with them. Hopefully next year I can make my other idea work.

To my family members who will be receiving one soon in the mail I guess you get a sneak preview. This year I am going to follow in the footsteps of my good friend Heidi who has been giving things away from her blog occasionally. I am going to give away at least one of my 2008 ornaments. To be entered into the drawing, just simply comment on this blog. I will select the name(s) for the drawing on December 15^th so that there is time to deliver or mail the ornament to arrive before Christmas. I would love to hear if you have any ornament traditions or if you have ever participated in an exchange. The more comments from different people I receive the more ornaments I will give away!

Not all of my ornaments are the fanciest but I have documented them from the years of this traditions beginning in 2001. Enjoy!

2001 - Christmas Goose, 2002 - Mini Christmas Caroling Book,

2003 - Old Time Sled, 2004 - Star & JOY blocks, 2005 - Christmas Lighthouse, 2006 - Cinnamon Stick and Bead Star

2007 - Small wooden present with thought

2008 - greetings from the middle of the "mitten" of Michigan

What does your forecast look like?

Looks like now through the weekend holds a 100% CHANCE of snow here.

I'm going to do a forecast project for Christmas week. Put your zip code in a comment to this and I will be posting the forecasts for all those who reply. It will be fun to compare what our weather will be like across the country for Christmas!

Ode to Maria (Nick)

This is for Maria. If you really want to know, you'll have to ask.

It's Beginning to Look a lot Like Christmas!

Before Thanksgiving. . .

After Thanksgiving, an even whiter winter wonderland.


Panning the backyard to see the monochromatic color scheme for the next many months.


Slowing down is always underrated. The poor neighbors get all the action. Summer brought them a live powerline down across their graduation party tent. Now their driveway gets blocked and mailbox knocked completely off by someone who probably didn't wake up this morning and say "lets try driving into a ditch today!"

Nick the Geek and his toys. [Nick]

Hi folks. It's the old man here. Sarah gets to post much more than me, and she posts about things people are probably interested in. I want to post about something I'm proud of. You see, in this house, we are geeks. We love our computers, we love our internet access. Our lives are stored on computer files and web sites, from financial information to photographs, to documents we've created for various purposes.

When we first moved to Michigan, before we even got our stuff from the moving van, we had the cable guy out here hooking up the network connection. (Don't tell anyone, but if you remove the modem-only trap at the interface mounted outside your house, you can get free cable TV from it.) Anyway, we got the network connected and had the cable modem put in the only place we could think of at the time, in our living room. Next to the fireplace. On the floor. Then I connected the wireless router and bingo, the laptop (which belonged to the University of Illinois and was returned after I finished my degree) was connected. But we also have internet phone service from Vonage, so connected the telephone interface to the wireless router (which had four wired ports). There were only two outlets there, so I had to plug in a power strip as well. All in our living room next to the fireplace, on the floor. Very ugly. But it was only temporary I told myself.

Well, we had a desktop computer we keep in the living room, but there was no room for it in that corner, so we put it in the opposite corner, I installed a wireless desksop card in it, and bingo, it was wirelessly connected. The main desktop machine was in the basement, out of easy reach of the wirelss, and it wouldn't work with our existing wireless card. SO I had another wireless router... no big deal, bridge it with the first one, placing it in a location in the basement where it could receive a signal from the one upstairs. Then wire the main desktop to the wirelessly-bridged wireless router. So every computer in our house was wirelessly connected to the internet. Lest the tech-savvy among you cringe, I at least was using WEP or Wired Equivalent Privacy (it isn't wired-equivalent at all) and MAC Address filtering to keep people off my network and more or less not snooping my packets, which sounds much naughtier than it is. And anyway, it was temporary, right?

Well, that was December of 2006. In March of 2008 I finally decided this temporary situation was ridiculous. It wasn't safe to have my information travling wirelessly all the time, and the bridged connections were flaky, sometimes not working at all. I decided to undertake the wiring of my house. First things first, of course, I spent weeks researching equipment, tools and methods. I bought a 54" long 1/2" drill bit for drilling holes through the flooring inside the wall cavity. I bought a box of Cat6 cable, patch cords, a punch-down tool, RJ45 blocks and a network tester. (Some of that is pictured.) I bought a new Linksys wired router. I bought a network-attached storage disk housing and 500GB drive. I watched videos on youtube, I read web sites. I drew up plans. I walked over the plans in my head, planning each step. I was finally ready.

I won't go in to all the gory details, but I will show you some of the results. First, I ran cabling from the location of my future network center to each location I wanted to have a network jack. That involved drilling holes in my floor joists and pulling cable along 25-foot span in some cases. That was a lot of up and down the stepstool, buffing up my legs. Then I had to cut holes in the walls about the size of my faceplates. I used metal clips that clipped onto the wallboard opening and provided a place for the faceplates to screw into. With the gaping hole in the wall, hopefully at a location between studs, I had to insert the long drill bit and drill a hole through the subfloor into the basement. Then I used the fish tape and fished it through the hole, went into the basement, connected the fish tape to the cat6 cable and pulled it up through the floor and wall. Then I had to strip the wiring and punch down the wires into the RJ45 block, attach it to the face plate and screw the face plate in. Look at that picture. Notice the quite straight and level installation of my network jack as compared to the professionally-installed electrical outlet which is cockeyed. Yeah I'm proud of that.

I installed two jacks in the 'dining' room, which is in quotes because we don't really use it for dining, but it is where the kids' computer and the wireless router live. I installed one jack in each of the three bedrooms. The ones in the boys rooms aren't used yet, but I'm probably going to teach dan how to build his own computer within the next year, so he'll probably have one in his room. Did I mention that I built our two desktop computers from parts? That is a cool thing everyone should try at least once. Anyway, I also installed two jacks in our kitchen (pictured above), one for the phone interface and one for a possible kitchen computer someday.

That done, I built the shelf unit downstairs. It hangs from the ceiling joists by 2x4s. I attached some cheap shelving (yeah, it is cockeyed but I can fix that 'someday'). The vertical black bit is where all the network wiring comes in, and is connected to the punch-down block. The yellow cables are the patch cords which connect to the jacks on the Wired router (on the right, under the cable modem). I'm proud of that wiring. On the left, the 110 block labeled "CAT 5" is all the actual telephone wiring in the house. That was all left hanging when we moved in, so I bought the 110 block and mounted it, and then punched down all the wiring. I stll have a little more to do, but since we don't have old-timey phone service :) it won't happen for a while. You can seel all the RG-6 cable (the black TV cables) on the right-ish side, coming down behind the plywood unit. Those aren't connected to anything yet either, but I will be buying a distribution block and wiring those up someday soon as well, for the sake of completeness.

So now, both of our desktop computers are wired, and the network connections are far more reliable. The wireless router now sits atop the computer desk for the kid's computer. I still need to kick it in the butt occasionally by restarting it. Plus now I still have a second one in reserve in case one kicks the bucket. Oh, I also upgraded to WPA2 (WIFI protected access).
Now the wireless router is only used for wirelesss networking, with the new laptop I bought with grant money*. It's nice because now I can actually use the computer network I built without feeling like I'm kicking my wife or kids off the computer. I removed Windows Vista Home Premium edition and have installed Ubuntu Linux 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex". I have it skinned so it looks like a Mac. If you've read this far then you are either a geek or my Mom. Well probably not my Mom-she probably won't read this far. So you're probably a geek, which means I can tell you that this thing is SO COOL. It has 3GB of ram and a dual-core processor. It has more memory and disk space than my office computer does. I just can't get Ubuntu to print to my shared windows printer yet, but that's basically the last hurdle.

Well I'm done showing off. I hope you're all still awake. Sarah will resume posting stuff y'all care about shortly.

* Let me make perfectly clear that this laptop belongs to Central Michigan University and that the money spent on it was not my own.

November Park Marathon

The boys have 2 days off for parent teacher conferences and a 3rd for what I would call the beginning of deer hunt. Speaking of deer hunt, we have been hearing guns go off near us for a couple of weeks, while inside the house, so I can hardly wait until its official this weekend to see how that sound increases. It’s a little unnerving.

Today we tried an activity that I had hoped for better weather. However, the drizzle, breeze and gray skies made the adventure all the more fun. I somehow got this idea to do a “park marathon” to hit as many parks as we could. I was thinking of spending a couple of hours but it turned out to be FOUR! What was I thinking? Because it was wet I had the boys dress in their snow pants and boots. We would pull up to a park and they would run to the playground and play for 10 – 15 min. Dan felt very military with the walkie talkies to communicate with me if I were a little distance from them. I lost count of how many different slides they went down. Some were quite spectacular as they would hit the bottom of the slide only to look like they were heading into a pool as the water splashed out for quite a distance. They were wet, sandy and muddy but having a great time. After all they were pretending to be military guys and were on various operations or maneuvers. Such a boy thing! By the way LL Bean snow pants are fantastic for keeping water out!! We even logged every “operation”. For those who like detail here was our entire log for Operation Park Maneuvers. Full pictures can be found on our online family photo album.

12:00 Operation Information Pickup (got the mail)
12:05 Operation McDonalds – Dan bought cheap lunches for us
12:15 Operation REFUEL – gas was $2.03
12:30 Operation McDonald Park
12:50 Operation Sunnyside Park (police escort out of park)
1:10 Operation Mission Park (for picture only)
1:15 Operation Pickens Field
1:35 Operation Island Park 8 slide obstacle course
1:50 Operation Island Park “woodpark” (cut short by some beady eyes staring out from under a platform)
1:55 Operation picture taking (mom got side tracked looking for some Kodak moments with the remaining fall leaves)
2:05 Operation Nelson Park (for picture only)
2:10 Operation Mill Pond Park
2:25 Operation Chipp-a-waters Park (and grateful that the restroom was not locked for the season)
3:00 Operation Potter Park Playground
3:20 Operation Jameson Park
3:35 Operation Horizon Park (actually sunny and blue sky by this point)
4:00 Operation Industrial Park (just to be funny)

The Real Winner is. . .

DAN! A different kind of election took place at the boy’s elementary school this week. The 3^rd and 4^th graders were selecting their class representatives for Student Council. Dan tried for this last year while in 3^rd grade and didn’t make it. He was determined to not let that get him down. Last week he worked hard on his speech, which was a required one page essay. The speeches were given and two of the eight running were then selected through the ballot process. It is an exciting thing for him and we are pleased that he did not let discouragement take over and keep him from trying again this year. Way to go Dan. You are a GREAT kid and we are happy that you make up an important part of our family. You are a winner!

Another WIN was that the kids had the day off yesterday. We got up first thing and intended to be at the polling place when it opened. But as our mornings often go we got away 30 min late. Our line moved quickly but the process still took just over an hour. We were happy the boys could come with us. It was nice to show them the process, even when Nick messed up his ballot and had to get a new one. We celebrated Election Day and several other things with breakfast at Big Boy.