This morning I was in the kitchen preparing for lunch, and Leo was drawing on his whiteboard out in the dining area. Suddenly he announced “D-A-D spells ‘Dad’!” I looked up and saw him holding his green marker, with a big grin on his face. So I walked out, looked at the board, and saw this:
Needless to say it brought a big grin to my face as well. 
As I mentioned previously, a bunch of us got together for New Year’s Eve to light fireworks. We had a few boxes of assorted sparking and booming explosives, and as midnight drew near we started tearing into them - only to discover that we didn’t have a way to light the fuses! Not too many years ago I bet there’d be at least a few smokers in every gathering, but on this night not one of us had a lighter. I guess the anti-smoking campaigns have been working!
(We soon remedied our situation with a blowtorch, and the sparking and booming ensued…)
On the weekend before Christmas, Daph made a bunch of sugar cookies and we invited friends over to help decorate them. It turned out to be a pretty small gathering - almost everyone was either out of town or sick. But between 8 adults, 2 kids, and 2 dogs, we managed to ice & sprinkle about 6 dozen cookies! Some fine art was created…
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Leo of course made the rounds. It turned out to be quite a pleasant afternoon - good conversation over snacks, hot apple pie (apple cider, tuaca, cinnamon & whipped cream), egg nog & brandy, and some champagne to toast Derek & Patty’s engagement (he proposed a couple weeks earlier on top of Coffeepot Rock in Sedona after they had just climbed it!).
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Rather than join the travel madness of the season, we opted for a mellow Thanksgiving meal at home. We also didn’t feel particularly up to the challenge of cooking a traditional holiday feast, so we opted to just “facilitate” one instead - we got a bunch of stuff that was pre-cooked:
OK, we did cook one dish - Daph made a wonderful smoky pumpkin soup to accompany the rest of the stuff. But prep was minimized here too thanks to pre-cut pumpkin from Whole Foods. Yum!
We got up early and did our Whole Foods run in the hopes of beating the crowds. Success! Came home, ate breakfast, and played with Leo for a while. Turned out to be a beautiful day, so we went for a long mid-day walk before starting the food prep at around 1 in the afternoon. Everything was ready by 3:30, unfortunately right about when Leo woke up from his nap and demanded his own dinner. So we were a bit delayed in fixing our dinner plates - another lukewarm meal. (Daph used to tease me for being a stickler about hot food, but in the last four months I’ve had to get somewhat used to room-temperature meals…) But it was yummy, and we have plenty of leftovers - a sure sign of a good Thanksgiving feast!
Happy Thanksgiving! Gobble gobble…
This may seem a bit off topic, but… Ever since I spent a summer volunteering at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory in the national park on Hawaii’s Big Island a decade ago, I make a point of checking the daily updates of Kilauea volcano’s eruption status. (They’re posted at http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov…) The eruption went into a pause on June 17, and there was no volcanic activity in the weeks that followed. You never know whether one of these pauses means a short break in activity (which has been continuous at Kilauea since 1983), or whether the eruption is flat out finished.
Well, the fact that Pele chose July 2 to restart her eruption has a bit of special significance for me…
New lava lake in Pu’u ‘O’o crater. Source: USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, taken by a set of remote cameras fixed on the crater’s edge.
Happy New Year! We hope your holidays were enjoyable and possibly even relaxing. Well, Daph & I have finally done it - we’ve finally joined the blogosphere. One resolution to check off the list. Not sure if that’s still a fashionable thing to do, but we finally have something to blog about: A baby due in July! We figured what better way to let our families & friends share in this journey than with a blog… Cheers!
