Christmas and Everything After

Here are some pictures from just before Christmas and then Christmas morning.  The girls were "rocking around the Christmas tree".  Then, a couple of pictures of the girls on Christmas morning.

Then, today, we got some more snow, and the girls went out and built a snowman.  Then, for reasons known only to kids, they decided to destroy the snowman.  Ah, well, at least they had fun doing it!

House Plans

Oh, I forgot to mention that someone actually came to see our house today.  We have totally gotten lax about keeping the place ready to show, and so we had to scramble to get it all cleaned up before they showed up.  This is the first time anyone has actually come to see the house, and I don't really know how it went, since we had to leave.  Anyway, it was crazy and exciting.

Also, I realized that many of you have not seen my house plans yet.  I showed Mom and Dad at Thanksgiving, but nobody else was around.  I've been working on these for a while now - I'm designing the house we want to build once we sell this one.  Hopefully, we can actually afford my design.  *chuckle*

Have a look:

Winter Wonderland

It's been snowing here since last night. It snowed early this week as well, and most of that snow stuck, which is a bit unusual here. So now, it's a marshmallow world, and the girls have been out playing in it for nearly 3 hours now. I'm surprised they haven't frozen their little digits off yet. (edit: Just as I was typing this, they came in whimpering 'cause they were cold. *chuckle* Well, they had fun anyway.)
Have a look:

Have some time to waste?

This little game is SO much fun!  And it's really clever, too. It's called "Continuity", and it takes the simple platform maze-run style game, and gives it an interesting twist.

Instead of just a two-dimensional maze that your little stick figure runs through, you are presented with a maze made up of multiple connecting "tiles".  You can slide these tiles around, like the little slider-puzzles you sometimes find in kid's meals and dollar stores.  You have to switch back and forth from the close up view, where you control the little stick figure, to the zoomed out view, where you slide the tiles around.  Not only do you have to make it through the maze to the red door, but you have to rearrange the maze as you go.

Sounds complicated, but it's not.  It can be, however, fiendishly difficult to figure out just exactly how to arrange those tiles to get your little guy where you want him.

So much fun, such a simple idea, and it really makes you think in ways you don't often have to do. Click here to play Continuity.

Gingerbread houses

Well, graham cracker houses, anyway.  Here are the girls at their grandma's the day after Thanksgiving building graham cracker "gingerbread" houses.
Ashlee looks like she's really concentrating on hers.  Construction is serious work.

The 2009 Geminids

I know it's cold, but you might want to stay out late this weekend.  The peak of the Geminid meteor shower will be the night of December 13, early morning December 14.  It's supposed to be overcast and snowing here this weekend, so I'll probably miss out.  Too bad, too, because there won't be any moon to interfere (we're nearly to new moon), and astronomers estimate it should be a good show.
Check out Astronomy.com for more info.

It's about time, I guess

I've had this blog for 2 years now, I guess it's about time I did something with it.  So, I put up a background.  I didn't take the picture of M31 I'm using in the background - I can't remember now who took that one.  One of these days, I'll have one of my own that looks that nice, but until then, I don't think anyone will mind if I use this one.
I'll try to post here on occasion with pictures, thoughts, stuff I'm doing, whatever.  I guess we'll see.