Monday, December 31, 2007
Manhattan
The next morning we got up early, rode back down to Battery Park, caught the ferry to Liberty Island. The kids earned their Junior Ranger badges. We went through the base of the statue, and got to look up inside the statue, then headed on over to Ellis Island for even more history. Sheela will be posting her pictures on her blog and hers are the only pictures as my battery ran out long before this. Late in the day we went through Central Park, had a late lunch and then caught the train back to NJ.
Western New York
There was a little bit of snow but not quite enough to satisfy our southern craving so after the visit was over we headed just a little bit farther north. We stopped in a small field to stretch our legs, build a snowman and make snow angels.
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Where's Sunil?
The H2 - revisited
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Christmas comes early
Sunil's favorite gift turned out to be his new Razor scooter with the red handle grips and the wheelie bar. Sheela's favorite has to be her new camera.
Tomorrow morning we are off to the airport. We are flying to NJ to visit Ravi, et al. Happy Holidays everyone!
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Cowboy cubscout
Sunil and his Akela (Sid) went with his den to visit a local farm. It has been in operation for 116 years. A good and informative time was had by all. As we'd had rain nearly constantly forever before hand I convinced Sunil to wear his cowboy boots instead of his only pair of tennis shoes. The cowboy hat rounded out the outfit perfectly. We even convinced Sid to wear his cowboy boots. He bought them on a whim a decade or so ago and never wears them. Apparently they are a form of torture. I bet he doesn't wear them again for another decade now.
Lost and Found
Friday, December 14, 2007
Irish Blessings, Scottish Pipes and Catholic Mass
Handmade with care by Sheela
For Sheela's birthday she received a pattern for pants and as much fabric as she wanted to choose for her use. She selected three fabrics and began making her own clothes last night. The first pair will be denim with a silver under layer. She cut out the fabric, sewed the button holes and joined the side seams for the legs. Tonight she will join the legs, create a wist, thread in the elastic, add the fake tie/draw string and hem them. They should be wearable by morning.
She has some super-soft plain denim and black fleece to choose from for the next pair.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Christmas Cashews...
Two weeks to go until Christmas and I've already eaten myself sick. One vendor sent tins of cashews to all of us that handle their products, one vendor sent tins of Belgian cookies dipped in chocolate to all of us that handle their products, our Italian sisters sent a selection of gourmet, Italian cookies and chocolates, the baking ladies are making fudge, cookies, tartlets, cakes, popcorn balls, salsa and tamales (it is Texas after all). Yesterday was a vendor lunch and a vendor dinner, today was lunch with a co-worker, Thursday is a departmental lunch, Monday is a holiday luncheon, Wednesday is a baby shower (lunch and afternoon cake) and Saturday is the holiday party complete with dinner and dessert buffet. All of this does not even take in to account our baseline assortment of chocolate, candy and birthday cakes. It would be easy to gain a pound or two everyday around here if you don't exercise willpower. Luckily, I ate so many of the cashews that I can't even look at the rest… except for maybe one chocolate dipped profiterole…… and maybe some divinity…..
Friday, December 07, 2007
Miscellany
Mom and John have taken water samples from the hot tub to have them analyzed. It appears that we mixed brands of treatment chemicals with a negative effect... more to come on that after we get the results and recommendations.
I finally caved and went to the doctor last night (after sleeping all afternoon). I decided I had strep but as I don't know any one with a confirmed and antibiotic prescriptions and went back home to sleep. I feel great again today but given 10 minutes in a quiet place I'm pretty sure I could still fall asleep.
Sheela woke up to our traditional breakfast in bed in honor of her 10th birthday. We made her fresh cinnamon rolls and hot chocolate, marked her new improved height on her giraffe and sent her off to school where she was featured on the morning announcements. Her birthday traditionally concludes with dinner out at the location of her choice but this year she has requested that we have chinese food sent in and watch the Polar Express on TV. Works for me.
This weekends adventures include a DI workshop for Sunil and a shopping spree for me. I've been elected to buy the door prizes for our holiday party. My goals are quantity, diversity and sheer bulk. The prizes will be displayed at the party and a larger display is more impressive. We've already purchased most of our technological gadgets, so I get lower tech and mass appeal items.
We also plan to pull down the Christmas decorations and get the house set up. Luckily the housekeeper came today so we are staring with clean floors and neat surfaces.
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
Tubbin'
Monday, December 03, 2007
Bonus
Party 2007
Parade 2007
Friday, November 30, 2007
Renewed Energy
I took a look nap after work yesterday while Mom and John fed the kids and took Sunil to his Pack meeting. Then I sat up for an hour to talk with Mom and went back to sleep. Once again I skipped my workout but I feel much better today. I'm almost perky, much to the annoyance of my cube neighbors; if I start singing or anything they will stuff me in to a closet somewhere. Apparently their colds/allergies/winter blahs have not lessened.
I'm going to run home at lunch to pack for parade weekend. We will stay at the Hotel Indigo tonight and watch the Children's parade in the morning. Then Sid will run off to work and Sheela will run off to an Instant Challenge Scrimmage with her DI team, I will go home and start to bake Sheela's birthday cake. We are decorating it with Jell-O mosaic squares. This is one of my favorite weekends of the year.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Sleepies
I can't decide if my new vitamins aren't as powerful as my old brand, I'm catching a cold or the cold weather sapped my energy but I am on the brink of falling asleep all the time. I slept in the car during soccer practice last night, went to bed as soon as I got home, slept through my morning workout and now I'm nodding off at my desk. Today is going to be a long day.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
One last picture
Grandmother Bishop
Pacers Run in the Rain
In spite of the cold and the rain both kids chose to run in the Jr Sprint. Because of the cold and the rain most other kids didn't. Sunil took first place in the boys under 8 and Sheela took third in the girls 12-9. Sara finished second and her little sisters managed to be first and second in the under 8 girls.
Friday, November 23, 2007
The labor continues
Thanksgiving Lunner
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Bonus week
Dad and Eileen are here for Thanksgiving and we've come up with a ridiculously long list of potential projects. All of our computers are ready for some serious maintenance, we need to network the printers and the copier, the file cabinet had to be disassembled to bring it back downstairs and we don't actually know how to reassemble it, we still need to level and install the hot tub (hey, we bought a hot tub last week), I'd like to re-wire the lights on the trailer so it can be street legal again, we need to rehang all of the pictures in the olf family room/new computer lab (we just repainted), and hang pictures in the reclaimed guest room.
In genral I'm thinking this won't be our most relaxing vacation ever but I love getting these projects done. Every one completed just seems to lighten the background load.
Friday, November 16, 2007
Indoor soccer outdoors??
Thursday, November 15, 2007
The sun surpassed
Comet Holmes is now the largest thing in our solar system even larger in diameter than the sun by only a few hundred million miles. I'll have to take a closer look this evening to see what I can see from here.
Monday, November 12, 2007
Girly Things
The boys went camping this weekend with the cub scouts, leaving Sheela and I to our own devices. This time we spent the time together just the two of us. We caught a movie, Fred Claus, went for a bike ride, baked cookies, worked on her choice board projects and spent hours playing with makeup. Luckily for her, Sid took the camera with him. Usually she came out looking beautiful, but towards the end we began to indulge our more dramatic sides.
We chose to skip the family campout because we were told that the siblings wouldn't get to do some of the more fun activities like the archery. It turns out that they did let the siblings have a turn. Oh well, now we know.
Friday, November 09, 2007
One of the many things......
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
A low key birthday
Sheela baked Sid a "Thunder Cake" and decorated it herself. Thunder Cake is the name of a children's book about a little girl that is afraid of thunder. Her grandmother helps distract her during the coming of the storm by getting her to help gather the ingredients for baking this cake showing her how brave she is along the way. In the end the girl is too busy eating the cake to be worried about the thunder. The unique thing about this cake from my perspective is that it is made using tomatoes (in an essentially chocolate cake). It was very good but the frosting that we made to go with it was an overly sweet buttercream. Still it was a nice gift and it came from her heart.
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
School musicals
Weather
The drawback to the time of year is that allergies have given way to sinus infections and bronchitis. Sid is finishing up his course of antibiotics and Sheela is just starting hers. This year she has also been given an inhaler. Sunil and I seem to be hanging tough (knock on wood).
Monday, November 05, 2007
Creek Clean up
Friday, November 02, 2007
4th Grade Musical
Every year each grade puts on a show for the school and again for the parents. The fourth grade this year chose a baseball theme and arranged their show to fall between games five and six of the World Series. The season ended a little sooner but the show went on as planned. The kids wore baseball jerseys from any team they could find (or their school grade level shirts) and baseball caps. The show was filled with song and little known baseball facts and stories. There were popcorn, peanut and coke vendors and even a dot race. A good time was had by all.
Thursday, November 01, 2007
Halloween
It was low key on the Halloween home front this year. Sheela went with her friend Anna and was a vampire again wearing last year's costume. Sunil went with his friend Hunter and wore last year's Darth Vader costume (without the mask). I was so pleased with the way his pirate costume came out but at the last minute he apologized for hurting my feelings and asked to switch. My feelings weren't really hurt. He's gotten a ton of use out of the costume over the last month or so. I stayed home and passed out candy to the dozen or so groups of trick-or-treaters. Sid was sick and about halfway asleep upstairs.
I did enjoy the holiday at the office however. Our department is all about the food and we are known to have the best food at the potluck. We wore chef hats and focused on what we do best. I ate my weight in goodies before lunch time.
This year the first place group skit went to our Insurance Administration Department. They built a flat screen TV and living room. Their skit was a broadcast of an entertainment news show complete with commercials and live coverage of the California wildfires, a Marie Osmond interview, a Whitney Houston/ Bobby Brown interview and a few commercials
Second place went to the Clinical department with their French Bistro complete with small tables, mood lighting, fresh homemade pastries and a complete wait staff. I particularly enjoyed the chocolate croissants
Third place was a take off on Vision 2010 with a road crew paving the way to a billion dollars over the bodies of the competition. Vision 2010 is our corporate rallying cry
They turned off most of the lights and cranked the A/C up. The room was chilled to about 65 degrees. Everything was draped in black trash bags and Dr. Death was performing autopsies on a variety of "corpses", some living some dead. Random bodies moved at various times
Other skits included: Dog the Bounty Hunter meets COPS, The Mad Hatter's Tea Party, The Ofix Raisins, A Day at the Beach, The Fashion Police.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Favorite flower
As of about 10 minutes ago I have a new favorite flower.... the plain old tiger lily. Our office is very bland, cream walls and moss green cube walls (as far as the eye can see), but today Deb has a bouquet of tiger lilies sticking up over the cube wall in the main hall. The orange is very striking in the sea of green and cream. I took a really lousy picture but I'm going to share it anyway..... and then get back to work.
I told you the picture was lousy.
Monday, October 29, 2007
This is Texas after all
A friend from work bought another horse. Tre, the one on the left, is five months old and newly arrived here from Canada. Jamie, the one on the right, is five years old and is Texas born and bred. Shannon has a third horse named China. His temperament doesn't lend itself well to being on the welcoming committee. Aren't they beautiful?
Book-free weekend
I'm so proud of myself. I went all weekend without reading a single book, not even a chapter (except for the Boxcar Children # 5 Mike's Mystery that I'm reading to Sunil). This meant I had much more time to accomplish household stuff and spend time with the kids. We cobwebbed the hedges in the spirit of Halloween. I made a vest for Sunil's pirate costume, we bought and carved pumpkins, bought poster board and twine for a math fact family mobile, went to the Plano Pacer's Run. Sheela finished fourth. Sunil went with Dad to a Cub Scout event called "CUBE". I have no idea what it was or what they did aside from launching model rockets made out of empty soft drink bottles of various sizes. We started to clear the family room walls in preparation for drywall repair and repainting. Sid conned Sheela and Zach into washing his car for free. You get what you pay for. Sunil had a school friend over to play. I bought a bunch of new clothes for me and new jammies for the kids. They both still love foot pajamas but it isn't quite cold enough at night to wear them comfortably. I bought them anyway by the time it is cold enough they won't have any at the store. In another episode of "I'm Turning in to My Mother" I bought Sheela the same pair this year that I bought her last year. For some reason I can just see her in that fabric when I close my eyes……. go figure. At least they are pretty and she does like them. They are bright red with glittery snowflakes on them.
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Surgical Steel
wear 14k gold (or better) and surgical steel jewelry. I didn't worry
about it too much before as she rarely wore anything besides her studs
but here lately she has attempted short time wear of some of her
favorite fashion styes with disasterous results. In preparation for
giving away her entire earring collection we have purchased a variety
of replacements. Some of them are really pretty but there aren't too
many styles made with the surgical steel and they get lost too easily
to invest much in gold.
In a related blunder she wore a necklace for two days and ended up
with her neck ringed in red welts.
Friday, October 26, 2007
My Bobcat
PT Conference Round 2
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
PT Conference Round 1
He is right on track in math, spelling, reading, etc. He tends to write too quickly so that it is illegible. He has already been prepared to get the answers marked as incorrect if they can't be deciphered. This should encourage him to self correct.
The approach to the math is one that I like. They divided all six of the 1st grade classes up based on how quickly a child gets through a lesson and work sheet. So that the class is tailored to the pace of the teacher. This reduces the number of kids left behind or sitting bored at the end. The make up of the classes changes week to week as the kids start to catch on faster or more slowly.
Official photo
Here Sunil is pictured with Mrs. Norris accepting his Shooting Star Award at school. Even better than the picture and the (suitable for framing) certificate is the "bag tag" he earned. Each student earns a collection of plastic dog tags during their elementary career. Perfect attendance, honor roll, Pride Council, etc are all good for a special tag. So that no one is left out they also earn tags for more mundane activities like having a birthday and pledging to live drug free.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Round Two
I launched another biologic product today. I'm enjoying these new products and their potential benefits to the world at large. Take a look at a company called Osiris that does adult stem cell products. There are some amazing products coming in the next few years. I was particularly interested in the studies for Acute Graft vs. Host Disease.
Monday, October 22, 2007
DI 2008
Sheela has been placed on a Destination Imagination team with five of her classmates. It is an all girl team this year. One was on her team last year, one is my favorite of her friends, one is her favorite of her friends and another is a really good friend. The last girl I've never met, but I really like her mom. Overall Sheela is very pleased with the team (and so am I).
Sunil unfortunately has not been placed on a team. No one volunteered to be the team manager for the little kids. I'm right on the cusp of volunteering myself, but keep pulling back. It is a ton of work and I don't know if I have the time. I've been trying to pressure the other parents to come up with at least one other co-manager but so far no luck,
Charles River
Trains
The cub scouts "Go See It" this month was a light rail trip to the Children's Hospital where a very impressive collection of model trains run through hills, mountains, deserts, canyons, cities and towns. Apparently watched over by an equally extensive collection of superheros. Here is a self portrait of our little cub taken on the light rail.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Hit by a hawk?
Boston
Srinigar
Monday, October 15, 2007
The hairy Harry wig
Storm Cells
Friday, October 12, 2007
Grading Period One - Complete
Gina returned
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Memory Lane
Shooting for the Stars
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
20th Semi Annual Golf Tournament
Big Tex Welcomes you
The food was good as always. This year's winner for the most creative new fried food was "Fried Latte", I think best taste went to "Fried Frito Chili Pie". We stuck with the traditional fried foods: chicken on a stick, corny dogs, etc.
The kids rode only a few rides but made a point of hitting the bubble house, the glass house and the haunted house (all variations of fun houses). Sheela escorted Sunil on a child's airplane ride rather than join Anna and Kristina on the roller coasters. We rode the skyway tram over the Midway for some stellar views of the chaos below. The extra attraction this day was a concert by the boy band "The Jonas Brothers". Two hundred girls had to be treated for heat exhaustion as a result of the humidity, heat and the crush.
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
Christmas Trip
for Christmas. I'm excited about this trip we will get to see Sid's
oldest brother, Ravi, and family. We are hoping to spend a day or two
in NYC and then we are going to drive up state to visit Gramma and any
of the NY cousins that we can track down. It's been a couple of years
since Gramma has seen the kids and I've not seen the NY cousins in at
least a decade... or their kids ever.
Three signs of October
I finally got to flip the page on the otter eating his dinner. I'm now being watched over by a beautiful big horn sheep. The kids brought home their state fair tickets last night. But the truest sign of the new month is that I've mailed off for Christmas Parade tickets. The parade will be early this year, Dec 1st. It is also the 20th anniversary of the parade and our 10th time attending.
Monday, October 01, 2007
Bowling
3:00AM
Friday, September 28, 2007
Little president
Sheela brow beat Sunil in to dressing up for picture day yesterday. She did not approve of his t-shirt and shorts so she upgraded him to an oxford shirt and tie. I didn't actually get to see him all dressed up but now I can't wait for the pictures to come back. He liked dressing up so much that he did it again. He thinks he looks like the president. I just think he's cute.
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Follow Up
Sheela did not get elected to the Pride Council but then neither did the girl that she thought would be a shoe in. Zach did get elected and he did not get to run unopposed. Sheela decided not to turn in her application for the puppet team so now she will have to go outside and play with everyone else during recess. Oddly enough she does not like recess.
Monday, September 24, 2007
50+ Balloons
We managed to wake the family up early enough on Sunday to get out to the balloon festival in time for the launch. I've never really gone there for the launch (when they didn't have to cancel due to high winds) so I was surprised to learn that they take off from a dozen different locations. That was my logical assumption until we went to the glow one year and they were all clustered together on the one site the map designated as the launch field. We watched first from a nearby school/park and then a future subdivision development in the middle of the launch fields. The kids counted at least 50 balloons but the photo ops weren't great, everything was pretty much gray in the early morning light.
Friday, September 21, 2007
Dallas
Birdfeeders, umbrellas and crocodiles
The crocodile exhibit was there last time I took the kids but was new to Sid. The crocs were all up to their eyeballs in their pond so we took this picture instead.