Getting close to Christmas

We are definitely getting into the mood for Christmas; last weekend we went and collected a smallish tree, which the kids decorated in record time:

Lots of cookie-baking recently; Amy and Lydia made three batches (cutouts, some sort of chocolate thing, and then peanut-butter cookies with Hershey's kisses on top) and I did nut bars with Lydia. I am not as good at making them as my mom, but at least they come out tasting something like the way they are supposed to.

Also: snow! This morning we woke up to another 8 inches or so of the white stuff. Very powdery unfortunately, so no prospects for snowballs or snow forts. The kids did their other favorite game, which is to make a huge snow mound and then tunnel through it:

 

 

Ok, maybe a little too much snow at this point. Time to head in side and warm up:

 

Word games

Ethan has been having fun with a cool web site: www.wordle.net. Here is a Wordle that he created with it to describe his World Geography class (currently his favorite at Diamond):

Kind of neat. You can create your own by typing in a bunch of words (including repeats for particularly important words), and it will arrange them in interesting styles for you.

Off for a Bike Ride

Here is an inter-generational photo of some assorted male family members getting ready for a bike ride, just after Thanksgiving.

Pretty motley crew. Rustin is on his commuter bike, Ethan is riding Rustin's old mountain bike (a superb ride), I'm riding my ancient road bike, and my dad is stuck with my beat-up old moutain bike, which is in horrendous shape-- it never fully recovered from a year of hard use in England. I am somewhat amazed that he managed to make it all the way through the ride without a catastrophic breakdown of some sort.

We had a nice Thanksgiving meal, then hosted Janet and Tom for brunch the following Sunday. Their son Theo is now four months old and is an incredibly good-natured and cute baby-- lots of smiles.

Kitchen stuff

We had some work done on our kitchen this fall-- new cabinets and a new countertop. Amazingly, it was pretty much finished before Thanksgiving (we had tempted fate by scheduling the work in the second half of November). Here is a shot of the semi-completed product:

 

We are still waiting for the cleanup and final coat of paint, however. Oddly, the guy we hired seems to have completely disappeared on us, even though there is only a tiny bit left to do. Home improvement is a mysterious process...