Long time, no post

Here's a quick one ...

It's been a while since I posted. I've been driving in to work the last week, which takes a lot of the slack out of my work day ... no posting! It looks like that will be the status quo for a while, bummer!

Other than that, it was a fairly normal week. School, play dates, work, etc. Emma have a ski day with school on Friday and had a really fun time. She's learning a lot. Hopefully next week (Friday is another ski day) the whole family will get to go. Last night my folks baby sat and Cyndie and I went to some friends night for a Euchre tournament. It was fun, but kind of late! We didn't get home until like 11:45 ... very late for us. Many, many thanks to Mom and Dad for putting up with us slackers. Fortunately, the kids were great this morning and let us sleep until 8:45.

After brunch this morning, we went ice skating down at the lake, and then this afternoon we're headed off to some friends to help celebrate their twins second birthday.

There you have it ... great excitement!

Blog posted

Hey all you email recipients of this blog, you may want to check out the actual blog page as my last post went out with only a title.

wildwooddevries.blogspot.com

The weekend cometh ...

Not sure what just happened, but I think that I accidentally posted the blog with just a title ... whatever.

It's Friday, yeah! Today Emma has a short day of school, and then is having a friend over for a play date. Other than that, it should be a pretty quiet day.

Last night was worship team practice, and Cyndie and the kids watched Wall-E at the library. Cyndie said Emma was very into the romance of the story ... excited when there was love, crying when there was heartbreak. Timmy thought the movie was hilarious, and laughed out loud a lot.

So that's the story, and I'm sticking with it!!!

Thursday

The weather's been nice the last several days ... up into the 20s which, relative to a week ago, feels extremely warm. It's also been very sunny, which is great. It's amazing what a little bit of sunshine does to brighten your day!

Yesterday at art class, we finished the first painting (all of us did paintings of birds) that we're doing in our monoprint series (1 of 2). A monoprint is when you pour, drip, spread, whatever paint on a piece of glass, and then press your paper on that, making a print. Then you paint into the print in traditional ways. It's really interesting to work from a background like that instead of the more normal way of working on the subject matter first and then filling in a background. I ended up with a bird in the jungle. Cyndie's was of a bird in a branch looking at a sunset. I think they both came out very well.

We had Bible study (Cyndie) and bowling (me) last night. The big excitement in bowling is that (I think) we pulled ourselves out of the cellar in the league standings. Go Ham Fighters.

Today is the normal work for me, a PJ day at school for Timmy, and Cyndie has several different meetings to go to. Tonight we'll probably try to go to the movie at the library, though I'll likely stay home since I have worship team practice.

Quicky ... but not to catch up!

It's been a while since I posted ... I've been pretty busy with work, so no time for extras!

It continues to be pretty cold out, we haven't had a "melty" day yet, which means that the snow is still powdery.

Bits and pieces:

• Cyndie's birthday was Sunday ... we had a quiet, relaxing day together as a family.
• Emma had a High School Musical bday party on Saturday which she really enjoyed
• Emma and Cyndie went to our neighbor's baby shower Sunday ... they have a boy coming after two girls.
• I've had to drive up to Waukesha for work the last 3 work days ... bummer! (but productive too).
• I had traffic school on Saturday afternoon ... huge amounts of fun!

Now Cyndie and I are off to art class and Timmy will hang with Grandma and Grandpa.

Friday ... still no school

So, no school again today for the kids. They're not getting cabin fever yet, but who knows. I had to drive in to work today. The car thermometer registered -18 degrees at the lowest, and got as "high" as -15 degrees during the drive in!

Not a whole lot to report today. The kids and Cyndie had a good time swimming at the Y yesterday to kill some time. Other than that, we're just surviving the cold.

Note: I just ran to McDonalds to grab a burger for lunch ... we're all the way up to 2 degrees! Balmy!

No School

So, it's supposed to be around -10 degrees today with a windchill in the -30 neighborhood. As a result, there is no school today. The kids are enjoying that, and Cyndie and I were able to sleep in a bit this morning, which is nice considering that we stay up pretty late on Wednesday nights ... me for bowling, and Cyndie usually working on some project or another. However, that makes for a "tough to focus on work" day for me as the kids are running around enjoying the day off, and my internal setting is more "weekend" than "work day". Oh well!

Moving along

It's Wednesday, it's still very cold, good stuff.

A few tidbits:

• Cyndie and I had our date yesterday ... went to a breakfast and lunch place on Main Street and had some yummy food.
• We had our first art class today ... fun stuff doing mono prints and starting some new paintings.
• Emma and Timmy had swim lessons yesterday ... Cyndie's comment "I think every time we start a new session, Timmy takes one step back in his progression." Hopefully he'll take two or three steps forward in the class so progress is made. Her comment was in reference to his willingness to jump off the starters blocks in the big pool last session, but not wanting to get his head wet again yesterday.

So there you have it. Life.

Coldness descends

So it's cold here ... Yahoo says 9 degrees. It's supposed to be cold all week. This juxtaposed with the report from a friend in LA of 90 degree temps! Hilarious!

The week moves on. Yesterday Emma had a play date with her friend Amya while Amya's mom, Leah, and Cyndie planned for their psuedo-girl scouts troop for the rest of this school year. They've been wanting to have a troop for the girls in Emma's class, but with all the training required for the leaders, didn't think that it would be worth it to do it for this semester only, so they're going to create their own thing ... the Jewels. Then they'll turn the group into a girl scout troop for second grade. Anyway, I think the kids will have a lot of fun with that.

Today Timmy has a play date with Lukas after his school and Cyndie and I are going on a noon time date. Should be fun!

The weekend that was

We had a fairly good, laid back weekend. It started Friday with a great day of skiing for Emma. She's progressed very well. This, the first ski day of the year for her school, had her graduating from the Bunny hill and taking her first ride on the chair lift. She stayed on the easy hills, but did very well and really enjoyed herself. The only accident being when she forgot to lift her tips (of her skis, for you non-skiers) when she got on the chair lift and lost one of her skis. Fortunately her friend, Hannah, was next in line and brought the ski up to her. Given Emma's enjoyment of the skiing, as well as Tim's good experiences last year, we decided that we'd use the money Grandma Cathy, Grandpa Fred, and G & G Weaver gave us to take a couple of family ski days on several of the next Woods School ski days. We are able to get greatly reduced ski prices those days ... should be fun. Though the next ski day (Friday) is supposed to be very cold!!

Saturday we had some friends from the neighborhood over for breakfast ... sourdough pancakes. It was a lot of fun. The kids are all basically old enough to play together with little supervision, so it was fun to just hang out and get to know our neighbors a bit. We were all really lazy after that ... just sat around much of the day! We had some leftover pancake mix (you have to use it up in about 24 hours), so headed over to Grandma and Grandpa D's to share that with them for dinner.

Sunday was church and more relaxing ... whew, I'm tired from relaxing so much! And now we're back in the swing of things for a new week.

We got quite a bit of snow Friday/Saturday, with more to come today. There are huge piles of snow everywhere. It's amazing to think how big the piles would be if we hadn't had the big thaw/melt several weeks ago!

Nearing Week-end

It's Friday, and the snow is coming down. I've heard we're supposed to get 6 - 8 inches. I think we've gotten at least 4 or 5 by now, and it's really coming down fast, with large flakes! That should make for good skiing for Emma and the Friday Ski Day crew from Woods School.

The snow means that I didn't have to drive up to Waukesha today like I was planning. I went up yesterday and had a productive set of face to faces and got over some hurdles. Today was to be a meeting with the team leads to talk about new work, but since the main guy lives in Toronto and is (supposed to be) flying out today at 1:30, we canceled the meetings.

No big plans for the weekend other than having 4 or 5 families in the neighborhood over for pancakes tomorrow morning. That should be fun. Hopefully we'll get the house straightened up in time!

Midweek, first week back, is reached

Today marks hump day ... we've made it!

Tim and Cyndie are headed to Hebron, WI today to pick up a table that we bought off Craig's List. We're going to use it as a craft table in our new art room that we're going to be creating. This will be the first step.

We got about 2 inches of snow last night, but it's been cold so I was able to mostly just sweep the snow off the sidewalks. The cold weather's been good for the skating rink I'm attempting for this year. The location is over by the driveway kind of in a low spot that becomes a pond when it rains. It should be much less in the way than the deck rink, and melt less too since it's not elevated. We'll see!

Routines

I think we're back to a normal routine now. This morning Emma woke up at a more normal time ... I think she was not as excited for school as she was yesterday. We did homework last night and hit the library, a normal Monday evening activity. Today Tim had school again (the letter 'O'). Tonight is the start of swim lessons for this session. We're trying a "family" lesson which just means that they have the same time period (4:45 - 5:30). They'll still have different class levels.

Emma's excitement is that her Christmas party was rescheduled for Thursday, so she's looking forward to that. She was also excited to receive a small portable, purple framed whiteboard from her class secret santa, so she was carrying that around much of yesterday afternoon.

After dinner (we hit the library before dinner), we watched part of Attack of the Clones. It was somewhat excruciating, and nut just because the movie is so bad. The whole time Emma's going is that person going to get killed, and Timmy's talking about who is good and bad. I'm not sure about Emma's fixation ... probably because at the end of the previous movie Kwai Gon dies ... whatever. She definitely gets emotionally involved with the movies!

Back Swinging

So I'm back to work ... sitting at my desk in front of my computer, which means you can expect to hear a lot more on the blog that you experienced the last two weeks.

I'm not going to go over the past couple of weeks, but it was a very fun, and largely relaxing time. Lots of family, and a few days of just us at the end to wind down before getting back into the routine.

Emma is very excited to be going back to school. I think she likes to be at home and stay in her PJs for a while and watch extra cartoons in the morning. But she's definitely a routine girl, and the routine that school provides is good for her. She's particularly excited to have the Christmas party that got postponed when the last day before vacation was canceled as well as to go skiing on Friday ... the first Woods School Ski Day of 2009.

Timmy is much more go with the flow, and as a result, is kind of "whatever" when it comes to school! Today for Cyndie and Tim will mark getting caught up on dishes, laundry, and grocery shopping ... fun stuff.

As for me, I have to remember what I was working on 2+ weeks ago!

Vacation means Movies

Saw some movies over the extended Christmas break ... there are a few I'd recommend, and one total clunker!

Valkyrie (3.5/5)
A decent movie. It was interesting, well made, decently acted. However, it failed to grab me and really make me "into" the movie.

Burn After Reading (1/5)
This movie was a steaming pile of self indulgent crappola ... is that too strong for a family blog? This was a Coen brothers movie, the follow up to their excellent No Country for Old Men from last year. Since I really like that movie, I had high expectations for this one. I was disappointed on all counts. The characters were basically lame, there was no plot. I happened upon an extra which was the Coens saying effectively "we made this movie because we had some characters that we thought would be fun for certain actors to portray". Meaning, "we can make any movie we want, so we threw this together because we thought it would be fun to work with these guys". I was very disappointed. I was totally surprised when I found out afterward that the movie had made $140 million at the box office.

Traitor (4/5)
This was a very relevant and current subject matter which makes the film very engaging. The topic was terrorism and Islam and the ubiquitous good versus evil theme. Don Cheadle was really good in the lead role. The movie definitely made me think about terrorism and who exactly terrorists might be and what we can do about them. I never was bored with the movie, though the plot was not very far off the "normal" order of things.

Iron Man - This one still holds up after I've seen it now three times. Just a fun, engaging, thrilling story which never loses me. They develop the character of Tony Stark well, there are top notch actors and technical production is first rate. A very good movie.

The Incredible Hulk (3.4/5) - A fun watch, but not horribly deep. The CGI Hulk was a little cheesy. William Hurt as the antagonist was a little over acted.

Movies I've seen this year (in the theater/a few video):
Iron Man - 4.2/5
Wall-E - 4.0/5
Traitor - 4.0/5
The Dark Knight - 3.9/5
Kung Fu Panda - 3.5/5
Valkyrie - 3.5/5
The Incredible Hulk - 3.4/5
Horton Hears a Who - 3.0/5
Jonah, a VeggieTales Movie - 2.4/5
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - 1.9/5
Burn After Reading - 1.5/5