Oct 27
I found a nice link-collector-type-widget called linkli.st.
My family and I have agreed on a “secret-Santa” theme this year for the holidays with a $50 limit. Carrie and I wanted to make it easier on everybody… here’s our stuff…
P.S. I’m making this post sticky until after the holidays…
Dec 19
It’s not Christmas until I get wrecked on Christmas Ale.
And I’m not alone:
Nov 16
It’s a cold, rainy, crappy day outside and all the ‘Black Friday’ ads suck. Having a hard time getting into the spirit? Here’s something to make it a little bit easier:
Can’t see anything? Sorry… RIAA shut down Mixwit Bastards.
Oct 24
Saw this in Marc’s the other day…
Dec 21
For the very first time ever, Jim decided to make a dish to contribute to our office Xmas party. Jim’s most usual contribution to any office party is something easy like a 2-liter bottle of soda or just a cash donation. Needless to say, we were all skeptical when he insisted that we’d be surprised when he showed up on party day with a homemade Taco Casserole.
Party day dawned and the unthinkable happened: Getting off the bus outside of work, Jim slipped on a patch of ice and down he went. Down, also, went the Homemade Taco Casserole in the nice glass casserole dish.
Jim survived the incident with a tear in his pants and several minor scratches and abrasions.
We all agreed that next year he should just bring a 2-liter bottle of soda or maybe just donate some cash.
Dec 16
We took the kids to the American Legion for the annual Christmas party today. We were eleven adults bringing two kids to see Santa. It was less than a success. Our scheduled time to see Santa coincided with Abbey’s nap-time, so she was in no mood to deal with a fat man in a red suit. Max, on the other hand will probably have nightmares for a month.
All was not a complete loss, however. We did see John and his wife and kids:
And Joe got to wear his hat:
Mar 25
So I finally broke down and bought a video camera. I knew I didn’t want a camera that recorded on any kind of VHS and I wanted something from which I could transfer videos to the computer.
I wound up buying a JVC GR-D370u. It takes MiniDV tapes and apart from a weird noise issue we had with the first one (which we exchanged a week later) it’s pretty nice. Of course in order to make the video play nicely online, I have to compress it a whole lot and that kinda makes the video quality all pixelated. But I could also transfer the vids to DVD and maintain the quality. Hmmm… I’ll have to try that next.
Now I have to figure out the best way to get my videos online. YouTube? Google Video? Just plain old embedded flash? I don’t know.
Until I decide, enjoy this embedded video clip of my family preparing to serve St Patrick’s Day dinner at the American Legion a couple weeks ago. NOTE: I replaced the video with a YouTube version… too many people were having a hard time with the ‘right-click > Play’ thing…)
Nov 25
What a difference a year makes!! Last year I surprised my wife and daughter by driving by the site of the house where they filmed some of the scenes from that Christmas Classic “A Christmas Story” 
What a surprise to find out that we were invited in and they were planning on renovating the house to it’s big screen glory and opening it up to the public!
Fast forward almost exactly a year later and today we attended the official grand opening of the “A Christmas Story House and Museum“.
The entire area of West 11th was a mass of people waiting in giant lines for the museum and house tours. Luckily the weather was unseasonably warm. The lines inched along and soon we found ourselves in the museum where you can view memorabilia, props from the movie, on-the-set photographs taken by the cast and crew, and buy t-shirts, lifebouy soap and leg lamps.
During checkout we bought our $5 tickets to tour the house. After a brief stop at the Rowley Inn across the street, we headed to the end of a very long line to get into the Christmas Story House.
During our wait a few enterprising residents of the area capitalized on the captive audience by selling bottled water, soda, pictures and even bathroom breaks!
Slowly but surely, we made our way to the house itself.
Word on the street was the people running the whole affair are still not completely finished with the renovations. The exterior of the house looks almost exactly like it did in the movie. A few anachronisms like all the security cameras aside the house was dead near perfect from the outside. But murmurs through the line outside mentioned that they did not even have a Christmas tree in the living room. The rumors were true. While they took great pains to stock the house with 50′s era furniture and decor, the house was still pretty bare. Furnishings aside, the House itself is best known for the Leg Lamp (which was, thankfully, present) and Christmas Tree (with crooked star) in the front room window.
Volunteers throughout the house answered questions and informed everyone that inside renovations were indeed still underway and explained that very little of the interior of the house was used in the movie. For this reason, while the interior was wonderfully put together and promises to be even better in the future, ultimately it will never truly match the house in the film.
Last year I said that we may make a trek to the Christmas Story House a new annual tradition and I think that still holds true. 24-hour marathons every year make this film a holiday favorite and the fact that so much of it was filmed here in Cleveland make it ever more special.
Check out some pics from todays festivities: A Christmas Story House 2006
Nov 24
So this is the first year we got up at the ungodly hour of 4:00 am to make the trek to the mall so we could stand in line waiting to get into a store and take advantage of excellent holiday prices.
I’ll admit that the tone of the day would have been entirely different had we not got the items that we waited in line for, but all in all it wasn’t that bad.
Arriving at the mall we immediately saw the line that we would be standing in. It was not quite 4:30 am and there was easily 300 people already in line. I made the wife and mother-in-law get out and get in line while I tried to find a parking spot. By the time I joined them in line we had only a half hour to wait and the people kept piling up in line behind us.
The half hour passed pretty uneventfully and the line moved pretty quickly once they opened the doors. We got into the store and ran to the area in which we thought the items we wanted would be only to realize that the store was totally reorganized to accommodate the huge Black Friday crowd. Luckily, we flagged down an employee and he pointed us in the right direction. We were pretty excited to see the items we wanted still in stock and promptly grabbed them and headed to the checkout.
The checkout line was handled efficiently and in no time we were standing outside again, items in hand, looking at the line of people still waiting to get in.
Like I said: if we had not found what we wanted and woke up that early for nothing, I think we would have been soured on the whole experience. But as it is… I think we might do it again next year!
Oct 31
We’re off to the land of the sugar-coma.
May 14
I found this somewhere on the internet. I think it pretty much sums up what we all thought about our Mom’s at one point or another when we were kids. It’s pretty funny, a little sappy and in some ways, frighteningly accurate.
Moms Defined
The following are answers given by elementary school age children to the following questions:
Why did God make mothers?
1. She’s the only one who knows where the scotch tape is.
2. Mostly to clean the house.
3. To help us out of there when we were getting born.How did God make mothers?
1. He used dirt, just like for the rest of us.
2. Magic, super powers and a lot of stirring.
3. God made my mom just the same like he made me. He just used bigger parts.What ingredients are mothers made of?
1. God makes mothers out of clouds and angel hair and everything nice in the world and one dab of mean.
2. They had to get their start from men’s bones. Then they mostly use string. I think.Why did God give you your mother and not some other mom?
1. We’re related.
2. God knew she likes me a lot more than other people’s moms like me.What kind of little girl was your mom?
1. My mom has always been my mom and none of that other stuff.
2. I don’t know because I wasn’t there, but my guess would be pretty bossy.
3. They say she used to be nice.What did mom need to know about dad before she married him?
1. His last name.
2. She had to know his background. Like is he a crook? Does he get drunk on beer? Does he make at least $800 a year? Did he say NO to drugs and YES to chores?Why did your mom marry your dad?
1. My dad makes the best spaghetti in the world, and my mom eats a lot.
2. She got too old to do anything else with him.
3. My grandma says that mom didn’t have her thinking cap on.Who’s the boss at your house?
1. Mom doesn’t want to be boss, but she has to because dad’s such a goofball.
2. Mom. You can tell by room inspection. She sees the stuff under the bed.
3. I guess Mom is, but only because she has a lot more to do than dad.What’s the difference between moms and dads?
1. Moms work at work and work at home, and dads just got to work at work.
2. Moms know how to talk to teachers without scaring them.
3. Dads are taller and stronger, but moms have all the real power ’cause that’s who you gotta ask if you want to sleep over at your friend’s.What does your mom do in her spare time?
1. Mothers don’t do spare time.
2. To hear her tell it, she pays bills all day long.What would it take to make your mom perfect?
1. On the inside she’s already perfect. Outside, I think some kind of plastic surgery.
2. Diet. You know her hair. I’d diet, maybe blue.If you could change one thing about your mom, what would it be?
1. She has this weird thing about me keeping my room clean. I’d get rid of that.
2. I’d make my mom smarter. Then she would know it was my sister who did it and not me
In order to offset all that cuteness above, I had to include this internet classic. Click the play button:
Jan 1
It’s 8:00am. I’m a little hung-over. I don’t know why I’m up this early.
The New Years Eve party was awesome!
Check out the pictures… I’m going back to bed.
Dec 30
So I’m blogging the holidays half way between Xmas and New Year’s…so what. Christmas was awesome (except maybe, that stupid Browns game) and it’s taken me nearly a week to recover. For the second Christmas in a row Carrie and I woke up before Ashley and waited in our room until we couldn’t take it anymore. Then we woke her up and told her that Santa had been here and it was time for us to open presents. Everybody got everything they wanted and a morning of presents and pastry and candy devolved into an afternoon of ham and sweet potatoes and taking out boxes and bags of garbage. By the end of Christmas day we were all just sort of staring at each other googily-eyed from across the room. Too much Christmas had turned us into holiday zombies. It’s taken me all week to get my sugar level back down and my sleeping pattern back in-whack.
Just in time for New Year’s.
There’s gonna be a party. With alcohol. And pictures.
Stay tuned.
P.S. Happy birthday to my sisters Cindy and Sue. Hope you girls have a good one.
For the first time since we met, I have (some of) my Christmas gift wrapped before my wife. Every year so far, the week leading up to Christmas is a scramble trying to figure out what to get Carrie and how to get it and hoping the store isn’t sold out of it. This year I think I came up with a couple pretty good presents, but more importantly, I was able to get them before Christmas Eve.
We took our traditional trip downtown yesterday to see the lights and wander through the mall. 
I brought the camera in case anything came up I might want to photograph. Something like the completely random arrangement of letter-holding miniature stuffed bears sitting on the shelf in the American Greetings store? Perhaps. I sure am glad I had my camera.
Today Carrie went with Joe and Rita to pick up the Christmas ham and we’re spending the rest of the day catching up with the holiday specials we’ve got backed up in the DVR. We’ve got a weeks worth of programming to plow through. But we started early.
There might be such a thing as too many holiday specials because between shows I dozed off and had a dream that Charlie Brown came by with Heat Miser and Snow Miser looking for Nestor the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey. They were bummed out because of that mouse family that ruined Mr. Trundle’s clock tower. It seems that Scrooge had taken off the Baby New Year’s hat which made Yukon Cornelius laugh so hard that the Grinch put the hat on a snowman, which, of course, turned out to be Frosty. Frosty started babbling “Happy Birthday” over and over until Mrs. Claus showed up and declared that this would be the year without a Santa Claus. It was chaos until a tiny voice peeped up and said “Lights, Please”. In the spotlight, Linus delivered a stirring speech about the true meaning of Christmas which Eric Cartman argued was actually about ham. Just when all was bleakest, the fat man himself appeared (with eight tiny reindeer). He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work, filling all the stockings; then turning with a jerk, and laying his finger aside of his nose, mentioned something about some good Christmas snow.
At this point I woke up and decided it was time to change the channel.
Dec 3
On the way home from the Westside Market today, I decided to surprise Carrie and Ashley by taking them over to the house that “A Christmas Story” was filmed at. It took them both a couple minutes to figure out where I had taken them, since the house has been renovated significantly since the movie was filmed, but imagine our surprise when we were all invited inside for a tour!!
The website AChristmasStoryHouse.com is covering the renovation and is inviting people to stop in over the next few weekends. Sadly, there’s not much to look at in the house right now (frankly, it’s completely stripped, except for the Christmas tree and leg lamp in the window) but the curator has Ovaltine to drink and plenty of “A Christmas Story” memorabilia for sale. There were DVD’s of the movie, lots of stills and glossy pictures from the film, leg lamps, t-shirts and even lifebuoy soap!
A Christmas Story House 2005 Slideshow
We picked up the special edition 2-DVD version of the movie (Yeah, I bought the movie from the living room of the house at which it was filmed) and Ashley got a t-shirt. All proceeds go to the restoration of the house to it’s big screen glory.
If they can indeed restore the house to it’s movie appearance, I can see us making the house a holiday tradition.
Today was pretty cool. Now if anybody needs me, I’ll be under the sink with a glass of milk.
P.S. So you’ve seen the movie 1000 times? But have you seen it performed by bunnies? In 30 seconds? No? Click Here.
