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Monday, January 12, 2009

The Holiday Season Ends... NOW 

While the Holiday Season™ always seems hectic, the 2008-2009 Holiday Season© seemed much more hectic than usual. That's because it was more hectic than usual.

Basically, every day that either Carrie or I "had off" for the span of about two months turned out not to be a day off at all, but a family holiday, trade/craft show, or wedding event.

That's right, this Holiday Season® had an extra holiday: The Duncan/Briggs wedding. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

First was Krismuhs Eev. Because of the snow my family tried to cancel our traditional Crhistmas Eve Brunch, but my brother and I were all like, "Screw that!" and decided that even if the rest of the fambly didn't wanna do it, we (with Carrie & Cassie) would do it anyway. And because of our obstinance everybody except for Pa, Jason, and Alexis had brunch at The Village Inn on Christmas Eve. Take THAT!

There was still snow on the ground on Christmas Day, making it only the 2nd or 3rd White Christmas™ of my entire life. Carrie & I went in the morning to drop Suki off at her folks' house before continuing on to my folks' place for the traditional Li'l Smokies, scrambled eggs, and orange rolls for breakfast. We then opened stockings & prezzies before going over to G'ma's place (just up the slippery road) for more prezzy opening.

In the afternoon it was over to Carrie's folks' house where we mixed things up a li'l bit by opening prezzies before stockings! Gasp! I KNOW! This was because Christine came and joined us for the stocking opening portion of the day! Hooray! It was good to have her there. We got her cute stocking stuff (and a cute stocking).

Then there was a marvelous pork dinner, for which we were joined by the people who live across the street from Carrie's folks, and eventually Carrie & I went back to our house.

It was an interesting Christmas, the first one in who-knows-how-many years that I didn't get any video games! Instead I got a bunches of DVDs and a handfuls of books. Carrie got me the T-Mobile G1, which seriously kicks some major bottom. It came in the mail a week or so early, though, so I had it before Christmas. In addition to that she got us some Jonathan Coulton tickets for his show at the Moore Theater next Friday. Carrie also gotted mostly of DVDs and a few of books (one each from me), but I also gave her a pair of fantastic frog slippers.

New Year's eve was (as always) only 6 days after Krismush, but in the meantime this time there were a couple of wedding events, including girls-only drunk bowling at Chalet Bowl in the Proctor district:

There was also some sorta bridal/wedding shower that weekend. Not to mention the usual Fools Play funtimes!

New Year's Eve was another good time party, but New Year's Day was unusual in that it was the first time in years that Carrie & I didn't go out and see a movie. We just had been doing way too much and still had way too much to do for the upcoming wedding.

The very next day, in fact, was the rehearsal dinner. Carrie got a wedding-party gift: a walking cane with a concealed knife/sword. The head of the cane is a skull. A robot skull. It K's all kinds of A. There was hanging out with Lawrence and some of his New Orleans friends at The Parkway afterwards. Good times.

The next evening there was a girl group getting together to make all the programs for the wedding (which were much more complicated than the programs at my wedding, which were printed-out pieces of shiny gold paper folded in half). I was on errand duty and drove people and things around for a while.

Then that Saturday was the actual wedding. The wedding started around 6:30. I got to the location around 1:30 to help with setup and bringing in box after box of hooch and putting up decorations and locating things and supplies and all that kind of thing. Carrie was one of Lawrence's groomsmen, and while I wasn't a bridesmaid I did have a role in the wedding: I got to escort Christine's mum down the aisle. This meant I got to wear a nice suit. I clean up well:


Anyway, it was a very pretty wedding, which you would expect from Christine & Lawrence. Lotsa peacock feathers involved in the decorations and corsages and whatnot. Here's all the peoples standing up there:


And here's my favorite picture I took of Chrstine. She's purdy:


Anyhoo, I took about 40 photos and uploaded them all (full sized) to this page in case yer interested.

After the wedding we hung around and helped clean up, then I drove Travis's daughter back to her house. When we got off the freeway I heard sirens behind me and pulled over just as a cop car went flying past us. We continued on and went up a road to a T-intersection. I turned left and then when I looked in my rearview mirror I saw that if I had turned right I would have run into about 18 cop cars all arranged higgley-piggley all over the road, completely taking up about a one-block section. Whew! Didn't want to get mixed up in that!

The next day I took Lawrence's family to the airport so they could take their respective flights back home.

Oh! And mixed up in those past two weeks were also daily going and feeding a cat and lizard, and letting Boston Terriers out to pee in thier backyard. Almost forgot about those.

After that we were actually done. No more holidays. No more weddings. No more events. I had intended to get started on the new year that Monday (a week ago today), but honestly Carrie & I were just so exhausted that all we've been able to do for the past week was clean the house from the New Year's Party and sleep. And play Animal Crossing: City Folk. And sleep.

Then today we went out to Safeway and bought food fixin's, and cooked a wonderful, healthy meal of Mahi-Mahi salad with spinach, green beans, pecans, and parmesan cheese with a creamy lemon dressing that Carrie made from scratch. It tasted so very, very good. Carrie & I both agreed that today, Monday the 12th, was when the new year was finally able to start for both of us. So we drank a bottle of bubbly wine to celebrate with our om-nom-nummy dinner.

Now I'm just finishing up this post and then I'm going to start making many, many lists of all the things that I'd like to accomplish. Then I'll start moving around the list items to that I know when to accomplish what pieces of each list. I'm using the fantastic backpackit website to do all of this. I absolutely lorve that website. Too bad it doesn't have a good mobile version; if I wanna use it on my T-Mobile G1, then I have to navigate the browser to the full website (easier than it sounds; I just poke one icon and I"m there, but it does take longer to load than I'd like and isn't really formatted for the small screen).

What kinds of things am I listing? Oh, let's see. I'm in the process of teaching myself to use PHP with MySQL to create custom database-based shopping cart applications. I have a handful of movie reviews and articles that I'd like to write for THIS VERY WEBSITE (gasp). Carrie and I are working on a joint etsy site. I have a major writing project that I'm going to be diving into head-first in February, so I have to gear up for that. I'm transferring THIS VERY WEBSITE's server and looking to switch over to Wordpress. And there is one extremely major project that may seriously change a huge chunk of my life, but that for now will remain a secret. Except to those people who it involves, in which case you'll be getting an email from me later this week.

Oh, and also a very fun and awexomely good-for-me project: Starting tonight (in about a half-hour) I'm beginning this program. I'll be posting my progress here and on my twitter account, so that's probably gonna be pretty boring for you, but it's incredibly exciting for me, especially after the six weeks have passed (though for me it's likely gonna be closer to eight weeks).

Whew! That's about it for now I guess, but Happy New Year (finally) everyone!

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posted by Christopher at 4:54 PM

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Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Early Christmas 2008 

Saturday the 13th was our annual "Early Christmas" that we do with Carrie's bosses' family. This year was much lower-key than some previous years.

The logistics of it threatened to be a little wonky, though. Carrie's mum threw a home show that afternoon, where Carrie sold her jewelry and I sold my glassware. How would I go to Fools Play while Carrie simultaneously went in the opposite direction and picked up the kids? We only have one car. Her dad might have had to drive me to a rendezvous point in Federal Way where my brother could pick me up on his way down to Olympia or something like that.

Fortunately Laura also came to the home show, so she was able to drive me back to my house where I was able to leisurely prepare for Fools Play before my brother came and got me. Which he did.

We went down and performed the Fools Play Holiday Special at Mud Bay Coffee. Carrie & the kids came down and watched it. It was an interesting show — it was just me and Mike doing 2 improvised Rankin/Bass-style holiday specials. We'd never done it with only two of us before. It was a hoot! But, man, it was a lot of work, too. Fun work, though!

The first special was based on "Jingle Bells" and was about a music instructor trying to get Santa back on track, and we learned that jingle bells are made out of magic freckles or something. The second special was based on "O Come All Ye Faithful," and was supposed to be a religiously-based special. But I made it a Science Fiction special instead, my reasoning being, "The Bible is Science Fiction, right?". It took place way in the future in a distant galaxy (the "Angel Galaxy"). Turns out Jesus's mum was an alien queen who fled back in time from an evil warlord, and the 3 wise men and Joseph were actually assassins sent to kill them both.

During the show it started to snow. Like a Christmas magic had occurred.

After Fools Play I crammed my stuff into the car (which was still full of the stuff from the Home Show) and we all drove up (through the snow) to the Red Robin in Tacoma for a late din-dins. We were joined by other people I like, such as Christine, Lawrence, Melissa, Travis, and Laura again. After din-dins most of us took the kids on home and hung out there for a bit. We weren't s'posed to exchange gifts this year (taking the kids to Fools Play and buying them din-dins WAS the gift), but we still ended up with stuffs: Carrie got a bottle of wine and I was given a bottle of Diddy Vodka! By Diddy Vodka, I of course mean Cîroc, the vodka endorsed by Sean Diddy Combs. I wrote a song about it:
When you're drinking up the hooch
Just try not to screw the pooch:
If you drink the booze to quick
Diddy Vodka makes you sick.

It's actually really nice vodka! It's made from grapes. Very interesting.

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posted by Christopher at 9:37 PM

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Sunday, November 02, 2008

Hween Hwrap-up, or "The Mii of Me on My Wii Looks an Awful Lot Like Me" 

I must admit, I was completely stumped as to what to do for my Hween costume this year. After the Hard Hat last year, Pac-Man the year before, and Sinistar a couple of years before that, I wanted to make a costume that was a little less... intensive.

But, as I said, I was stumped. Carrie & I batted some ideas around, and I thought Bomberman would be cool 'cause I could make a big plush bomb to throw around. But I couldn't figure out how to easily do that gigantic head of his. Then suddenly Carrie came up with the idea that I should be my own Mii, and just like that my problem was solved!

The Mii of me on my Wii looks an awful lot like me. But how to make a costume out of that as simply as possible? Thankfully, there is an online tool where you can make your own Miis: the Mii Creator. All I had to do was select all the right parts and then fudge them around until the Mii on the screen looked the same as the Mii on the Wii.


I took a screen capture and brought it into Photoshop so I could fix the hairline. The online Mii Creator is a little bit too literal about the thumbnails of the hairstyles looking exactly like the hairstyles; the one I use on the Wii looked different than the same style online. But I fixed it, then printed it out on an 8.5" × 11quot; piece of glossy photo paper, then carefully cut it out.


I cut out a piece of cardboard that was slightly smaller than the Mii, and poked two holes in it at about ear-level. I strung a comfortable organza ribbon through the holes, then mounted the piece of cardboard on the back of the photo paper, voila:


I didn't make any eyeholes (I didn't want to ruin the aesthetic), so I would have to rely on my peripheral vision to move around, but that was fine; many of my costumes have had no vision whatsoever.

I wasn't quite done yet, though. If you look at that image of the Mii Creator up there, you'll notice something about the Mii's hands. Miis don't really have hands. They just have spheres on the ends of their arms. I wanted my costume to be as authentic as possible, so I decided to make a couple of sphere fists for myself. But how? By sewing, of course!

I had no idea how to sew a ball, but thankfully we're well into the 21st century now and pretty much all how-to knowledge is somewhere on teh intarwebz. A quick search came up with this reasonable set of instructions on how to make a plush ball.

I went and bought a long-sleeved purple T-shirt (it was a UW shirt that I just turned inside-out) and some cheap fabric that was a close-enough color. I cut out 12 foot-ball-shaped pieces of the purple fabric.


I took 'em over to mum's house and used her sewing machine to sow them together in sets of three, so that I had six hemispheres. I then sewed the hemispheres together into two spheres, leaving about a three-inch gap in them so that I could insert my hand.

Then I turned the shirt's sleeves inside-out (well, right-side-out in this case because I wanted the shirt to end up being inside-out) and sewed the spheres to them like this:


Once both spheres were sewn on, I turned the shirt right-side-out (inside-out in this case) and then stuffed the spheres full of poly-fill so that they'd maintain their shape.


Then all I had to do was put on the shirt halfway, tie on the mask, and then slip my hands into the spheres and my costume was complete! I am my own Mii! And it was comparatively easier than the costumes I did the last couple of years.

Then if you're lucky you'll get to hang out with a hottie like Tia, whose costume was her own character from Rock Band:


Everyone seemed to love me being my Mii quite a lot. I liked it quite a lot as well, though there were two problems with the costume:
  1. I could only see via peripheral vision
  2. I had no usable hands

My "Batmen of Many Variations" jack-o-lanterns were also a hit, though not as popular as my Pac-Man punkins (though more popular than my Space Invaders punkins). Here are some photos of my 2008 punkins all lit up and purdy:




On Hween night we did our annual tradition where I make a metric tonne of Reuben sammitches and Carrie makes a delicious Russian potato soup with green beans, sauerkraut, and dill. Hope everyone else's Hween was equally as enjoyable as mine, if not moreso.

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Wednesday, April 02, 2008

Fool's Day Round-Up 

Here were a couple of my favorite intarweb pranks from yesterday:

Chemical Periodicity Remains ONLY a Theory
(via jeffthefish)

The Legend of Zelda Film Trailer
(via Whedonesque)

Surprisingly, Maddox's annual April Fool's Day joke wasn't ready yesterday!

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Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Hope Y'all Had a Happy Irish Day! 

Yesterday (Monday) Carrie, Laura, & I went over to Carrie's folks' house for din-dins. I had corned beef, cabbage, potatoes, 3 pints of Guinness, and green pistachio pudding!

Then while walking to work this morning, I passed this on the street:

Seems likely that a transient is gonna have a happy day today!

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posted by Christopher at 6:13 PM

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Monday, December 24, 2007

Hoppy Hilidays! 

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posted by Christopher at 10:54 PM

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Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Happy H'ween, Everybody! 

Today (Wednesday) is Halloween! Hooray!

On Friday Carrie got me a Wii because I'm an awexome husband. Take THAT, all you lousy husbands! Har har! Score! She also got me The Legend of Zelda - Twilight Princess. Boo-yah!

Gina came and stayed with us over Halloween weekend, because Halloween weekend was also the Bead Factory's 15th anniversary weekend. They needed extra help, so they paid for Gina to take the train up from Portland for the weekend. She slept on our couch. I cooked breakfast for us (scrambled eggs & sausage on Saturday, Li'l Smokies and orange rolls (Christmas breakfast) for us on Sunday). We like her. It was nice having her around, even though we really didn't see her that much because everybody was working so mucho.

Saturday evening was Fools Play Trick or Treat, our annual Halloween show. Not as many people came as usual, but here's what us Fools dressed up as:

As Cactus Jack - Jake Ynzunza the Pink Fool:


As the victim of a pillow fight - Taisha McFall the Jade Fool:



As James, ½ of Team Rocket (with the very lovely Tia as Jessie of Team Rocket) - Mike Harris the Blue Fool:


But I know what you're asking: What whas Chris Harris the Purple Fool's costume? And what awexome punkins did he carve this year?

Well, lucky for you all, I wrote a new Article all about that! What was my costume? What were my punkins? What new H'ween craft did I do this year? And what could possibly make The Ocean Shores Pirate cry a single, gigantic tear? You can only find out by reading...

A Halloween Surprise for The Ocean Shores Pirate

Well, my in-laws are coming over soon for our annual H'ween tradition of soup, Reuben sammitches, and handing out full-sized candy bars (not them crappy little dinky things) to everyone who comes to the door!

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Thursday, July 05, 2007

4th of July 2007 

Yesterday (Wednesday) was, of course, the 4th of July. We got up at a reasonable time so Carrie could go meet her friend Erin and give her all of the jewelry she'd designed for her wedding. I worked in the meanwhile on gathering supplies for our day-long cookout. I also baked brownie bites (brownies baked in miniature muffin pans) which were very, very tasty fish.

Carrie brought Erin back to the house to give her some CDs for wedding music, so I got to see her. I had seen her before, but many, many years ago. She left, then Carrie & I continued gathering things and supplies (and a lot of food). Christine & Lawrence went down to Point Defiance Park and after a false start found an absolutely fantastic place where we could all set up. So as soon as Melissa was dropped off at our house we loaded everything into the rental car and headed down to the park to join them.

It was a great spot, the first barbecue area after you pass the area that has all of the playground equipment in it. It was really nicely shaded, and there was a big enough open area that I could actually set up a badminton net for some Two-Sticks action later on.

So by the time 1:00 rolled around we had the coals a-burnin' and everything all set up. That was also, unfortunatley, the time when Christine had to take Lawrence away because he had to work on the 4th. Honestly, why is Starbucks open until 9:00 on the 4th of July? Lame.

Soon other people started trickling in, and Travis brought Christine back, and there was much cook-outing and frivolity. The whole Lareau clan even stopped by with their two pugs and three kids and hung out for quite a while. Lila really liked Gabby, the puppy. She learned how to say "Gabby" (and apparently she's been asking Jen, "Where Gabby?" pretty much nonstop since the 4th).

There were several games of Two-Sticks throughout the day. Julian & I actually had a pretty successful team ("Team Broken Backs") that won three games in a row. It was fun explaining all the rules to everybody.

Oh! And Chris Fantz showed me the iPhone his folks had gotten for him. It is pretty spiffy, but there's no way I would every pay that much for it (especially right now), nor would I really want to switch to AT&T. T•Mobile is so very cheap!

Anyways, after almost eight hours of cooking out things started to wind down. So we packed up our group, got a grip, came equipped, pack our proton packs on our back, and we split! We took Christine with us, and after we got home we drove down to Starbucks to wait for Lawrence to get off of work. It took a while due to somebody messing up a till or something. I dunno. But then we picked him up and drove through the northern Stadium district looking for a parking spot within easy walking distance of the intersection of Yakima & Carr (here), which is a primo place to watch Tacoma's annual 4th of July Fireworks Display. We met up with the entire Lovejoy clan there and all watched the fireworks together. I discovered a while back that my camera actually has a "fireworks" setting. I think it might work better if the camera is on a tripod, but here are a couple of good shots:




Anyway after the big show the four of us (Carrie, Christine, Lawrence, & I) all walked back up to the Rental car and took everybody home.

Here is a photo album I made of the day's festivities in case anybody is in the least bit interested.

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