Pancakes in Pain

Latest cartooning effort. This one was inspired by my nephew, who recently had to make a trip to the hospital for an appendectomy.

The "flow" for this cartoon is less than ideal; just make sure to follow the numbers (requires a weird right-to-left jump at one point).

Knitting

It is with great pomp and fanfare that I announce that Lydia has completed a major knitting project:

This is a vest that my mom set her up with; the wool is Angora and is amazingly soft and lovely. Lydia has been working furiously on it for the last couple of weeks, and she finally finished it off last night (she was working hard so that she could bring it in and show it off at school). She has also been using the "circular" needles given to her for Christmas, along with various other bits of knitting "kit" contributed by parents and relatives. She certainly enjoys it, and she seems to have the patience to get her projects all of the way through to completion.

Comics for Girls

When I was a kid, I spent countless hours reading and rereading the "Tintin" cartoon books (nowadays they would be called graphic novels, but back then, the term hadn't been invented yet). Some of my favorites were "The Black Island", "The Crab With the Golden Claws", and "Flight 714", but in fact they were all very enjoyable. Ethan has gone through every one of the Tintin books, but when I tried Lydia on Tintin, she was not especially interested.

I realized at that point that when it comes to graphic novels and cartoons, most of the main characters are male: Tintin, Asterix and Obelix, etc. I decided that there must be some cartoons and graphic novels out there (for kids her age) with female main characters, so I fired up my web browser and began to search. So far my efforts have been largely fruitless. True, there is the Akiko series by Mark Crilley, but as far as I can tell, Akiko is a girl in name only-- there doesn't seem to be much that's girlish about her. There are cartoons that feature girls, but they aren'y really stories, per se (just bits and pieces).

One cartoon that I have found that features a female main character is Halo and Sprocket, by Kerry Callen.

These books are in "short story" form (no sweeping epic adventures) but both my kids have enjoyed reading them (they are very funny and quirky). I am hoping that the author will write a few more in the series...

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...