Ma and Pa's Blog

The first sunny day in the 50′s for a good while, and we took advantage of it — in our small way.  We went to the French Coffee Shop for lunch.  Then we visited Stein Mart and Mustard Seed, then continued on to Sears, Aurora Farms and Aldi. Do we know how to live, or what!? I guess being out in the sun in light or no coats made it all feel quite invigorating. Now we’re waiting for pizza to come out of the oven — spinach, goat cheese, onion, mushroom, garlic, and walnut on whole wheat crust. It’s beginning to smell pretty good in here.  While we wait,  Mom’s enjoying some wine  and I have a Great Lakes beer (Dortmunder Gold) from Mustard Seed. Hope you’re all having a day as good as ours — full of things YOU enjoy

Here are a few snapshots from the birthday party Bob and Lyn had for Poppy.   Deborah and Kris were in town (Kris to pick his next car at the Auto Show), and we got to meet Cooper for the first time.  Cooper is a very cute and very easy-going baby. He was watching everything, and he was engaging in baby conversation with Lynda.  The red hair makes him seem very “Westbrook-ish” for now. I think everyone is hoping he keeps the color — much like Zach’s.  We had a good time, and Poppy seemed to enjoy everything.

My three year old Lenovo laptop is beginning to crumble before my eyes. In the past three months I replaced the battery (after the better part of a year constantly tethered to the AC adapter), then the keyboard (several keys stopped responding), and yesterday the hard drive failed in the middle of submitting my taxes online. So, today I replaced the hard drive. I’m still less than half way to the price of the cheapest netbook out there, so it’s probably all worthwhile. I just wonder what the future holds. On the bright side, each component was replaced in less than five minutes — formatting and installing the OS (and updates to the OS) to the hard drive took a good bit more than five minutes, but I do that for fun anyway.

Fortunately, Ma’s five year old Apple Powerbook continues to hum along. Apple does some things better.

Since joining the ranks of FB zombies, I was still a little baffled by its appeal, but then I realized why  it’s been a long time since we updated the blog.  Facebook has sort of taken the place of the stream of consciousness posting that sometimes occurs here.  It’s a lot easier to write a random thought, no frills, over in FB than to compose a blog entry.  And, after all, do we really need an entire blog  to say, essentially, “Holy Freaking God, When Is This Damned Winter Going To Be Over?”, which is pretty much what our Ohio February lives are like.   So I guess the FB appeal is to let our “friends” in on the minutiae of our humdrum lives without the burden of worrying about composition.

Not that this is particularly well-composed, but still.

I’m sure we’ll post more blog entries when we can get some sun and fresh air and blow away the winter brain-fog that grips us every February.   Oh, and as my silvery stripe of growing out gray hair becomes more visible, I’ll be sure and share the horror of accepting my 60 year old hair with grace and dignity .

We got ours overnight . . . our snow, that is.   We should be done in a few more hours.   Looks like about a foot so far.

We delivered the toy fridge and spent last evening and this morning with Mike, Jenn, Caleb and Owen.   It was a fun visit, and we staged some photos for manipulation before we left.   You can see the results here.  I think we’ll need a bigger place to gather for vacations — with all the additional children and grandchildren.

I built this play fridge for Caleb and Owen — an addition to the kitchen set they received for Christmas.   I hope they have as much fun playing with it as I had building it.

I came across a post on using masks in Photoshop and had to try it.   This was done in Gimp using the same technique.   While not perfect, it’s pretty good.   I can see this being much fun in the future.

We tried in vain to capture Owen making volleyball returns and kicking the balloon — both of which he does very well.   He’s still cute in the below video.

Owen’s Soccer and Volleyball Skills from Pa on Vimeo.

Here’s Ma’s video of our Mentos and Diet Pepsi experiment that Caleb described as “very dangerous” to Sebastian.   Enjoy.

Mentos and Diet Pepsi from Pa on Vimeo.