I awoke this morning at 6:45, walked down the hallway to my office and peered outside to see how much snow had arrived overnight. We only got about an inch of fine, powdery snow - the kind that's easy to shovel. I pulled on my boots, a hat, gloves and and a coat and went outside to clear it away, while Marna and her folks got the kids ready for their return to daycare after a long holiday weekend. They made a point of saying as little as possible to Kieran about the snow. Once he gets wind that someone might be outside shoveling, he immediately wants to be part of the action, breakfast be damned.
Marna and her brother Dan are off to Manhattan today to visit the recently re-opened Museum of Modern Art (easy on the flash animation there, people!) with my sister Jen, who is taking the train down from my father's place in Connecticut and hanging out with them for the day. I'm working this week, but I'm going to try to get down to the City to have dinner with them this evening.
Christmas was a lot of fun. For my birthday, on the 21st, Marna and Dan pitched in to get me a Sony home theater system. Dan and I spent the better part of Friday putting it together and figuring out the wiring. With a TV, CD player, DVD player, VCR and Tivo all going into the unit, it took us a long time to untangle the complicated nest of old wires and cables and put the new ones in place.
Dan, with his engineer's mentality, made sure that all of the slack on the cables was neatly gathered together with zip-ties. We also had to figure out how to best connect the rear speakers. In the end, we decided to take the speaker lines through the basement (not a problem, as holes had already been drilled by the cable and satellite guys). The new system sounds superb, and it's nice to be able to dispose of our old set-up.
Yesterday we bought rear speaker stands to complete the installation and got Madeleine the new Harry Potter DVD. After dinner, we got the microwave popcorn going and watched the movie together. I thought for sure that the new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher was going to turn out to be the bad guy, but the movie throws you a (somewhat confusing) curveball at the end. I miss Richard Harris as Dumbledore - the new Dumbledore doesn't hold a candle to him. Still, the movie's lots of fun, has a great soundtrack, cool special effects and killer sound - it was a good choice to test out the home theater system, which came through with flying colors.
On Christmas Day itself, we traditionally drive up to my dad's place after opening our gifts in the morning, and this year was no exception. But one of my siblings needs to start having kids, pronto. Between stocking stuffers, Pawling gifts and Connecticut gifts, Madeleine and Kieran were positively swimming in Christmas presents. Thankfully, a lot of it was badly needed clothing, but there were also a lot of books and toys as well.
The pick of the gifts this year has to be Kieran's mini John Deere lawn tractor. Mom saw it, and knowing how much Kieran loves to ride on "mow-mows", as he calls them, thought it would be the perfect Christmas present. Amazingly, it didn't require nearly as much assembly as we had anticipated. We let him ride it around the basement a little bit on Christmas, then I took him out in yard for a real road test yesterday morning:
I spent a good hour following him around the yard and trying to teach him how to steer. The ground was frozen, so it was a bit of a bumpy ride for the little fella, but he had a wonderful time. We're not going to be able to get him off the thing when springtime comes.
I took advantage of Jen's visit to raid her CD collection, importing stuff into iTunes like a madman. In addition to the new Elliott Smith album, which I really wanted, I got Joe Strummer, Steve Earle, The Plimsouls, Devo, X and much more. Thank God Jen has good taste in music - she could have been into Céline Dion and Shania Twain!
11:19:32 AM 
|
|
