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.

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.

 

One last picture

before Oma and Opa head back to Florida. We had a wonderful visit and are looking forward to seeing them at their house in the Spring.

Grandmother Bishop

Dad and Eileen brought an entire duffel bag full of Grandmother's stuff for us to sort through. Her jewelry box contained not only all of her stuff but a bunch of Granddaddy Bill's stuff. His high school ring, a bunch of his masonic rings and cuff links, even a tie clip. It took us hours to go through it all. Then there were the stacks of photographs and photo albums. I've left it out for now so I can sort through it again. I went and bought an acid free marker to label the photos that I can. Most of them are not labeled.

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.

The labor continues

It is pretty cold today but Opa and Sid are attempting to level a spot for the hot tub. Both the kids and I took a few turns at shoveling up the turf so we were extra pleased to see the rototiller show up. Oma stayed inside but she is preparing turkey soup so it is a pretty good trade.

Thanksgiving Lunner

We enjoyed a wonderful, traditional Thanksgiving meal late yesterday afternoon. We cooked a huge turkey, made stuffing, green beans, fresh cranberry jelly, gravy and pumpkin pie with fresh whipped cream. Everything was delicious. Afterwards a managed a few hours of the nap game with Sunil while Sid slept in front of the football game. We topped off the evening by watching The Incredibles on TV while eating turkey sandwiches.

Bonus week

I ended up getting to take the whole week off from work. Yay! We've been way too bust trying to rearrange stuff in the house so the extra time came in very handy. Plus it let me take Sunil to the doctor (it's his turn to have bronchitis) and do the frequent breathing treatments over the first few days. He's fine already.

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.

Indoor soccer outdoors??

When Sheela signed back up to play indoor I had some basic expectations, they mostly involved heat, bleachers and indoor plumbing. But the indoor team arranged for a scrimmage last night against a crosstown rival and the game was played outside, at the edge of the practice complex with only half of the field lit and a wind chill of about 50oF. Aside from being cold (and therefore cranky), I was tired and the field is a size larger than when she last played as we've aged up again so I couldn't even really see the game. It wasn't as much fun as games gone by. Color me nostalgic already.

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.

 

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.

One of the many things......

that I love about our little town is its ethinc divirsity. I picked Sunil up from his DI meeting last night. Posted on a white board were the names of his teammates: Raena, Takeyoo, Kim Le, Vanil ..... bummer, I forgot the other two names. In any case there wasn't a Mark or Susie in the bunch and I'm the only one of the parents for whom English is not only my first, but really my only, language.

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.

School musicals

Our friend Jazmine is now in the 7th grade. She will be starring in her school musical this weekend. They are doing Mulan. She has been singing on stage forever and is definitely a ham, this should be right up her alley. I can't wait to see the show. If you've never seen the movie this is a must see. It is one of my favorite animated movies.

Weather

This is the time of year that makes people choose to live in Texas. Our days are in the low 80s and our nights in the upper 50s. The skies have been clear and blue during the day and clear and twinkling with the light of hundreds of stars at night. There is too much light pollution for the 1000s and 1,000,000s of stars seen elsewhere but ours are pretty just the same.

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).

Creek Clean up

The cub scouts spent their Saturday cleaning up a nearby creek. Here Sunil, Sid, Ben and Troy pose with a coil of really old barbed wire that they retrieved from the banks.

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.

 

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.