leftovers anyone

We did our thanksgiving meal yesterday (black Friday). It was a lot of hard work, but most of that was cleaning up. I also did a lot of un-packing of boxes that had been in the baby's room but had been moved to the porch. Four more empties!!!!

The food was all good. The turkey ended up fine. We cooked it in a bag, which kept it nice and moist. I didn't realize that it would also shorten the cooking time by about 30%, so it was done about 1 1/2 hours before our guests were scheduled to arrive . It had plenty of time to rest. But I did have time to get the the turkey carved before the guests got here. And my sister-in-law helped pick the bones clean, so I'm all ready to make soup.

Everyone pitched in and helped clean up, so we have a clean kitchen and a ton of leftovers, some of which will go into the freezer for post-baby meals.

Happy Thanksgiving

I have a wonderful life. An awesome wife and two great step kids. A nice house and a couple of nice cars. A decent job with a good paycheck.

My parents are great and in good health. I love my in-laws.

Baby Peter is due in 18 days and we are all prepared.

I could go on, but I just to share the highlights of the things I am thankful for.

Baby's room - check

We are all set in the baby's room. We are just lacking that one last little item.


Waiting patiently.


still waiting

Ouch and Oucher

Ouch: I have a pinched nerve in my neck. It started a week ago, but really got bad over the weekend.

Oucher: Tera is 36 1/2 weeks pregnant. She wins, not in a good way.

It makes for uncomfortable sleeping.

I am a Jerk

Playing the Dungeon and Dragons app in Facebook has taught me that. Every place I go I'm stealing stuff and killing anyone who gets in the way. I find and ancient ruin do I call the local university and help painstakingly discover the mysteries of the people that used to live there? Nope. I tear it apart looking for treasure.

Running into a group of strangers? Yep, more often than not I'm going to kill some of them. And take their stuff.

So murdering thief might be a better label than jerk.

It's nothing like me in real life, but I feel good that I feel bad about enjoying it so much

Back in the Saddle

After hours of frustration, emails and phone calls with tech support, I can finally work form home again.

It stopped working when they updated a security file, which fixes itself on a PC. They don't officially support Macs, but a guy tried to help me. As near as we could tell we had everything set up the same, except he runs so newest OS.

Rather than try the OS and have it not work, Tera suggested we set up the Macbook to dual boot. The tech guy says that he uses Parallels to have a PC window right in Mac. That works great! It cost about the same as a new OS, but the access to work is better in windows. But I don't get to play with the new OS :(

making progress

Halloween is mostly put away. As are most of the outside tables and chairs. There is some room left in the shed, so we should be able to get the last of the totes out of the house and in the shed, garage or spare room. Yay!

Some decent weather this weekend and we might put up some Christmas lights (but not plug them in!)

Cool In-laws

My in-laws came down for the weekend. Peter's room is all set up!

The crib and dressing table are put together (thanks to Papa), and little critters decorate the walls (thanks to Grammy). All the stuff we stored in there "temporarily" three months ago is gone. Or moved to another part of the house.

Chris and I also replaced the ceiling fan in the kitchen. OK, Chris replaced it and I handed him stuff. I also closed up the hot tub for the season.

Busy weekend, but we really needed help getting going in there.

Halloween Recap

We had a pretty good time. My in-laws were in town, so they stayed home with Tera to hand out candy and I took the girls around the new neighborhood. It's nice many of the people insisted I take some candy . We had a lot of positive feed back from the neighbors about the house, even a couple "you should see the house on Palmer" from people who didn't know it was ours! The spiders were commented as much as the pumpkins and the rest of the decorations.

We set up the fogger so it could be triggered from inside. That startled a lot of people in addition to being being pretty cool.

I put daytime pictures of most of the decorations on Flickr.

Oh, the neighborhood also does a pizza and doughnut party followed by a little parade. We missed out on that because they forgot to update the labels for the newsletter. We got it handed to us while out trick or treating. We were welcomed to the neighborhood in it!