My daughter brought home Ender’s Game from the school library without me mentioning it previously. Total win.

Unfortunately the book is rather violent and filled with expletives.

After assembling Anne’s new bed I had two rather large boxes. Hmm, what to do with two large boxes. A fortress of course! But that took only one box. A tunnel with portcullis! Still 1/2 a box left… Ok, knee padding in the tunnel.

• one princess bed for $20 (original price $250)
• extra boxes $0
• one set of MrMcGroovy’s rivets $30
• no cuts from the boxcutter $major medical bill
• two ecstatic kids, priceless

Here are some memorable quotes by Anne. You have to imagine them in her cute, innocent voice.

After Eugene listed off the abundance of what he ate the previous night, Anne says, “next time, eat less.”

After exiting the Sangrada Familia (the famous one that is still under construction) Anne blurts out “that church needs surgery”.

Finally, with respect to eating habits, Anne wisely acknowledges that “If you have icecream every night it is not good for you. It has to go in a pattern: night, no night, night, no night, icecream, no icecream”.

Here is the run down for the past couple months:

• Anne graduated from Preschool today. She had two excellent teachers this year and is sad to be done. Makes me wonder if she will be like Jason in Foxtrot. She was very beautiful in the dress her Grandma got her.
• We have been house hunting and found what we hope will be our next accommodations. We put in an offer which was accepted, but contingent on the sellers closing on another house. It has been a while since we bought a house, but amazingly enough, I think the process is even longer in Maryland compared to NewYork.
• Anne got pneumonia today. Very sad. So she will be taking antibiotics for a little while. No clue where she got it from and we hope that no other kids get/got it.
• I started another blog revolving around my coding for the MMORPG I play. Knowing me, I will probably update that one more than this..
• We are getting plugged into our church. I have been periodically helping lead the home group we go to. We love our home group, and we have felt warmly accepted into the community. I managed to get out skiing once with some of them. I think I will miss winter down here.
• Work continues to go well. Just hired someone to work under me and in the process of hiring another (in case anyone wants to send me a resume). I am really enjoying the Zend Framework but unfortunately I had to drop the smarty templates as they were killing the speed. Our hardware has killer I/O but awful CPU speed.
• On my daily commute I have been reading a very good book: As For Me and My House. I wish I had read it while in grad school. I know it would have helped me better understand myself and the stresses I place upon Camille. Better late than never. It is written in a very poetic style (not my style) which took a bit to get used to. While at home, I have been reading Fit Bodies Fat Minds. Another highly recommended read. It is not poetic and more my reading style.
• We have not gone to the movies in a while now. I think the last movie we saw was Children of Men. We did rent some interesting films though. An Inconvenient Truth, Who Killed the Electric Car, and Thank You For Smoking. They raise interesting questions, especially for a stats minded person like myself. The first 2 are more of the documentary type. The last one can get you thinking about how media and sophistry pervade and sway our culture.

So, hopefully Camille will post here soon to give everyone an update on some of the other important things going on in our lives.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

We are now all settled in Maryland. I drove up to Ithaca and brought Camille and the kids back down at the end of October. I am so glad we are all together again. I’ll try to have Camille give a larger update about how things are soon.

We drove back up to Ithaca for Christmas and New Years. It was good to see my parents again, and all our NewLife friends. We managed to get some good fossil hunting in as well, as the temperatures were not ‘normal’. Anne and Drew are becoming good hunters, with Anne scoring a few trilobites herself at the Portland Point quarry.

Today, being MLKJ Day, I had the day off. Woohoo! Being in the DC area is great! It was a normal temperature for January 15th, 72F with a 50 percent chance for rain. So we made the best of it and went to the Chesapeake to hunt for Miocene fossils. We managed to score a small amount of fossilized shark and skate teeth. It was warm enough for me to put on my Tevas and walk around in the water to better hunt. Pretty fun! Plus, having Drew periodically say, “Shark eat me” was great.

I think it’s safe to say that Anne can be a little competitive at times.

She likes to be first. First to wash her hands, first to wake up in the morning, first to get dressed in the morning…you get the idea. So one day, as I’m letting the kids out of the car, she starts to push her way out so she can be first. When I reminded her that it would be polite to let Drew out first, she paused, looked up at me and said, “Ok, mommy. Then I’ll be the first to be last.” Not sure how that jives with all that Jesus teaches on humility, but maybe there’s a sliver of something in there.

Anne was asking a lot of questions about Good Friday and the things that happened to Jesus on that day. She got more and more solemn and quiet and finally said, “Why do we call it GOOD Friday? It doesn’t sound like anything good happens.” Tried explaining Easter from a long term perspective. She didn’t buy it. Her conclusion: Call it Bad Friday and Happy Easter Sunday. Good enough for me. Happy Bad Friday everyone.

Have you ever felt like you were halfway in reality and then watching it in a surreal way from somewhere outside your body? I have them all the time–when I’m reading stories to Anne.

Only because sheer exhaustion sets in and the drone of my own voice (for goodness sake) puts me to sleep.

One day I was reading to her and out of the corner of my eye, I kept noticing that she would look at me and give me these really strange looks. She wouldn’t say anything, she would just give me a look that was a mixture of puzzlement and pity. I started to get annoyed thinking, ‘why does she keep looking at me like that?’ Then I started to tune into what I was saying as I was reading the story. For example: Cinderella did NOT grow potatoes in the garden when her fairy godmother appeared. The airplane did NOT fly from Boston that night. Scary what your mouth will do when your brain is no longer connected.