Off white Christmas

With all the snow we've had (basically 3 days in a row of it), it got to where I had nowhere for the snowthrower to throw it.

Then of course, it warms up (and rains). Almost all of the snow (over a foot) is now pretty much gone. Our once invisible Christmas lights in the yard out front are now visible again.

Santa brought me Guitar Hero World Tour (Wii) this year. It's the set that comes with the drums, mic, and guitar. I've only played Guitar Hero one time prior to owning it, and was somewhat hooked, but could never convince my wife that we should buy it. We played it for 4 hours straight the first night we had it, mostly swapping out between guitar and mic (because drums are a little loud, though obviously not as loud as the real thing). It's an interesting setup. . .

I was kind of surprised that there was a base drum pedal included, but more surprised to see a MIDI input on the drum kit. As far as I can tell, there's a piece of software for PC that you can use a USB to MIDI connector and adjust the sensitivity of the drum set. From what little I know of MIDI, that's kind of odd, but I guess I don't know that much.

Of course, another odd thing I discovered was an RJ11 (telephone) jack on the guitar. I haven't even googled to find out what that's for yet.

It's got a pretty good mix of songs, though there's a bunch of european stuff that isn't in English, so it's a bit annoying on the vocals. I'm still playing on guitar on beginner, working up through medium, but we've played through most of the career part already. There's a couple of things you have to "buy", but we have to earn a bit more money for that.

You can also use Wii points to buy individual songs (supposedly due to the way the Wii download stuff works it can't get groups of songs, which means some stuff that's available for XBox 360 isn't for Wii, since some bands apparently want to force bundle songs - according to the message forums for GH. Stupid limitation. They could have basically made it a tarball and untarred it on the receiving end).

And you should see a 2.5 year old on drums. . .and mic. . .and guitar. . .all while we're trying to play those instruments as well.

Hell Freezes Over

And the Eagles are back together. . .of course, that was years ago.

On Dec 12th, we joined most of the state in a terrible ice storm. It started late Thursday (when I got this picture), and went on through the night. Most of the night, my wife was kind of worried due to what sounded like gunfire. The next day, we saw that it was branches of trees throughout the neighborhood finding their way down into the street.




We had the power flicker a couple of times, then the dogs woke me up just before the final power outage at 6:30am.

For the morning, we just chilled out without power, which is more difficult than you think when you have a 2 year old who wants to watch TV or play video games.

We eventually decided to go out to McDonald's to get something to eat. That in itself was a challenge. . .most of the roads were blocked with downed power lines and branches.









One thing we did do was build a gingerbread house. Something I've never done before. We ended up with something rather decent looking (I guess it's easier when you're working from a kit).








After not being able to get food from McDonald's (because the power was out), we just gave up and went to a hotel out of town. We ate McDonald's there instead :)

Most of the surrounding area has been without power since Friday. We were lucky enough to get it back Saturday morning, but most of the people in the hotel were there for the same reason, and numerous others I've heard this morning we out to eat or whatever for the same reason. Some people aren't expecting power for a while yet. I guess we're lucky in that it's a small town with municipal power.

Despite all of the destruction, I haven't seen a damaged house or car (lots of sheds though). 3 roads I could see from my house were blocked. It is amazingly beautiful, too. . .ice coated trees really sparkle in the sunlight. Here's a couple more pics.

Park Place

Owner collect $2000.

Not really. And I'm not even sure if the value is right for Monopoly.

And it looks a lot different with the fence.

My daughter loves playing outside, especially at the park. Slides, swings, sandboxes, that sort of stuff, makes her day. At our old house, we had purchased one of these swing set / slide contraptions, and at the new place, we needed a good place to put it. So we made one.

We picked out a 20' x 20' patch of land (which happened to be where the grass was growing best) that was fairly level. 400 sq ft of landscape fabric was rolled out and pinned down. We tried the kind of plastic border stuff that you simply hammer into the ground, but in the soil we have up here, that wasn't happening. . .basically, there's a minimum of 500 rocks per cubic ft of soil. Stakes work ok, but anything bigger is a pain in the arse. We ended up using the roll up plastic stuff that you see in the gardening section of Walmart, with a bunch of plastic stakes pinning it down. This worked remarkably well.

So the point of all that was to create an area in which to put mulch. Not just any mulch, but the good rubber mulch, made out of old tires (you can actually see some of the imprints from the tire on some of it). This stuff is expensive, but it doesn't decompose, you don't have to worry about splinters (unless there's some kind they make out of steel belted tires - ouch!), it won't float off in a heavy rain, and it's relatively soft. We probably should have a lot more in there, but it's kind of cost prohibitive, and it's not really like anyone's going to be falling very far into it.