babies – My Truant Pen

Fotographic Fall Fun

So I’ve been terribly remiss getting my pictures up and on the computer. With very little preamble, let me present to you:

– Pictures from Justice’s funeral
– Many neighborhood babies
– Apple-picking/rough-housing
– Mr. Toothless
– Adam’s birthday game night
– Thane’s fourth birthday
– Halloween
– Leaf raking
– Mocksgiving
and finally
– A trip to Plimouth Plantation (taken today, in unseasonably delightful weather)

Here are the pictures!

Mocksgiving and other pictures

It’s Christmas card time of year. I usually do ridiculously complicated Christmas cards. In recent years, my cards have involved:
1) Hand-stamped return address
2) Hand-stamped stamp in corner of envelope
3) Hand-addressed
4) Christmas card with personal note
5) Christmas letter (sometimes with personal signature)
6) Lovely family portrait picture

(I usually do about 80 of these)

There’s a chance that I might not live up to that this year. Let’s take, for example, the family portrait. It’s already pretty late to get one taken. And it requires planning. Money. And a time when we are free and no one is guaranteed to be hungry, tired, cranky, or demanding “red car! red car! red car!!!!”. Yeah. So then I wen through my 2010 pictures looking for that great picture where both my boys are looking at the camera and smiling. Now, I’ve taken a lot of pictures this year. Probably over a thousand. You’d think that there would, you know, be that picture. But you would not be the mother of a 2 and a 5 year old. There are few enough pictures where they’re both looking at the camera.

So a month ago, I decided to set this up. I found some scenic locations, and asked the boys to stand together, arms around each other, looking filial. HA!

I’m thinking this might be a good year to skip the family portrait. Still! Here are my attempts, along with Mocksgiving pictures (some great ones there!) and a bonus video of Thane at the Museum of ~~Dinosaurs~~ Science, talking about his favorite dinosaurs. (Tapejara, Neovenator, etc. You know. The classics.)

Grab bag

It’s sad. There are two things you need for a blog post: time and topic. But any time you have a topic, it means your life is busy and you don’t have time. Conversely, whenever you have time, it’s often because your life is boring. Granted sometimes you lack both time and topic, but that stings less.

Ah well. This past week has been a paucity of time and a plethora of topic. This leads to a blogging style of bulleted vignettes. So, without further ado….

I just wrote a birthday party invitation to Grey’s girlfriend. She apparently likes Star Wars. I approve of this as girlfriend criteria. Also, he pretends to die whenever he sees her — on the rare occasions he doesn’t run away. He seems extremely satisfied with his relationship.

I’m always surprised when I’m the biggest geek in a room. I mean, in my social life I hang out with video game developers and people who go to Gencon. We had Talk Like a Pirate Day at work today, with costume contest and scavenger hunt. I won “best Piratical attitude” and the scavenger hunt, and some people were shocked by my geekitude. You have no idea, folks. And these were programmers!

Camping with the boys was awesome this past time. Thane’s fixation on cars makes him much easier to manage. Granted, he attempted to drown himself about every 2 minutes while we were swimming, but that’s pretty much standard operating procedure. The boys were fun, the weather was great, we actually could relax and read, and I love Kindles. We got Grey a set of mostly wordless comic books called Owly and I got complete wish-fulfillment as he sat glued to them and reread them multiple times.

What Grey thinks of camping (from school)

I’m reading Herodotus right now. We’re reading it for our humanities book club. It’s like 600 pages long, so I kind of thought a head start would be a good idea. I’m also attempting to read project management books, a book on Kelso vs. New London Development Corporation (it’s weird to read a book about people you know in a place you know at a time you were there), and Owly. (Hey, you have to keep on top of what’s up in your kids’ life!) At least I finished the one on the strategic importance of Field Service.

Ooh! Ooh! I got to do actual code this week at work! Java on struts with Hibernate handling the data connections using ANT for builds with Subversion managing the codebase in the Eclipse IDE. My contractor was explaining all the ins and outs of the system I’ve managed the building of. It was very exciting. It’s astonishing how quickly I’ve lost all confidence that I know what to do around code.

The Red Sox have given us an awesome season, given their constraints, and would be winning the AL West. They’re still making it fun to follow the games. I’ve also decided to become a football fan this year. Um, go Pats?

I made another batch of plum jam. This was spiced plum jam, which is totally different. In many important ways.

Finally, I met a new person last Friday. He wasn’t very talkative, but he was pretty awesome. I see us having a long and fantastic friendship.