Parentheticals

On Christmas Eve, Alison spent a lot of the day cooking and preparing for the evening, so the girls had to amuse themselves. At one point Rea came and invited her to join them for Church. They sat on our bed and took turns standing up at the nightstand (their "podium") and giving talks or testimonies. Alison says it was really, really cute. Rea is getting very skilled at her testimony-bearing, and she's beginning to learn how to do talks, with some help, and Sara has started doing coherent testimonies all by herself. It's so much fun to watch them. This year we had a really nice Christmas. We woke up at about 6 to find that it had snowed for the first time in December this year. The kids opened their stocking and enjoyed them for about a half hour. They then opened up one present and played with it for another hour or so. It took until about 11 before we were done with our gift opening. Sara really loved her Christmas candies. She ate them all and then tried to ...

We saw the last Hobbit movie on Tuesday this week. It had a huge amount of fighting in it, but it was also some times funny. Perhaps the best character was Dain. He was not comic relief, but he was very funny. There were a lot of moments in the movie that felt like they were taken out of a gameplay report of Dwarf Fortress  (all the leaders being so much more powerful than the underlings that they were only able to be killed by each other, the leaders all riding on weird war beasts, the general shape of the fortress). There was also this one weird moment where some of the dwarves apparently leveled up and took the Improved Mount feat so that they could procure war rams out of thin air. The best part of the movie was perhaps the part where Galadriel singlehandedly defeated all of the ringwraiths and Sauron with a Spirit Bomb  attack. I never thought that she was the most powerful person on the middle earth, but it seems that Peter Jackson does. Tolkien did like her a lot...

This last week we didn't do much to speak of. We wrote our Christmas website. We finished a lot of the acorns that we had been working on for forever. We made fudge, which turned out a little grainy. Mike did tithing settlements as part of his new calling. Alison made lovely chili and baked potatoes. We worked on the rules for Moar Moai since we are prepping it to be submitted to SaltCon's Ion Award (which is a contest where unpublished games are judged and voted on by a panel of publishers. ) Our cheese is moldy. Alison has been working hard on the kids' physical skills. Timmy can move himself around pretty well now and is likely to start actually getting around the room in the next few weeks. The girls are going for half mile walks most days. We spent a lot of Saturday shortening the monkey bars so that we could move them to a more convenient location, and Andrea can now swing about four rungs on her own. Sara enjoys hanging and swinging. Perhaps next ...

This week I was sick with a cough. I rarely get sick, so it is weird for me. We mostly spent this week recovering from vacation.  Timmy is working hard on his crawling skills and getting better every day.  The girls adjusted back to normal life much better than in previous years; there were more cousins, so they had to share the grandparents and play with other kids, so it wasn't as much of a shock to go back to normal life. Our blue cheese is growing a fairly good coating of white mold on the outside, though there are other species that seem to be competing with it. I made some ricotta with the intention of making more gnocchi, but our 5 gallon gamma-lidded bucket of wheat ran out, so I didn't actually turn the cheese into pasta yet. We watched the First Presidency Christmas Devotional, which was pretty good.  Elder Andersen's talk was really quite depressing when you're trying to use the stories to help your small children focus, but other than that it was enj...

This last week we went to California for the Poulson family annual reunion. We had a fun time lazing on the beach, visiting Sea World, and spending time with the Poulson family. The cousins (mostly Andrea, Sara, Jack, and Max) really got along well together. They would all sit together and tell stories to each other and laugh and laugh. The babies (Ellie, Lilly,  Timmy, and Kendrick) were all in good health, and seemed to have a fun time. We brought some gnocchi which was really popular. We completed our NaNo novels successfully, however they could have been better written. Alison finished hers Sunday night, which was the last day possible. I also chatted with Chauncey one day and we made a second Naga Demon game. It has sixteen cards and took two hours to play our first game. We plan on shortening that, since two hours is really long, but we haven't played a game with the new rules yet. On the way back home we listened to an audio book of "Thief of Time", ...