Where's The Ziti?

Lately Andrea has been trading weekly meal plans with her sisters-in-law. One of this week's recipes was for baked ziti and so the last time we were in the grocery store I was assigned the task of finding the main ingredient. Ziti's a noodle, right?

Okay, I know the noodles are ... right here. Wow, lots of noodles. Spaghetti, spaghettini, angle hair, lasagna, tortellini, penne, farfalle, macaroni, gnocchi, cannelloni. No ziti.

Ziti is a noodle right?

Okay, this can't be too hard. Alphabetical order? No. Fancy boxes? No. Top shelf? Bottom shelf? Why are there ten different kinds of spaghetti? Oh good grief.

I finally did find it, tucked between small shells and the rigatoni. It could have been worse, my brother-in-law had to go through two grocery stores before he found his.

Happy Birthday Paxton

Paxton is officially one.

We had cake and presents at Mom and Dad's while we were in Idaho, so the big day passed kind of quietly here. It's hard to believe that our littlest man popped into this world only a year ago. It's hard to believe that it's already been a year.

We had a small pre-early-birthday party at Steve and JoAnne's. Paxton's not quite sure what to do with the wrapping paper, but likes the look of the box underneath.

All the uncles, aunts, and cousins gathered at Mom and Dad's to help Paxton celebrate. Paxton was generally oblivious to all the commotion, but did take notice when the cake with the little flame was put up on his tray. After a few tentative pokes and some help from Grandpa he was finally able to tear away a decent chunk.

Yum, chocolate!

Where did all my ice cream go?

Time for presents. This is always more exciting for the audience then for the one-year-old, but Paxton liked the tissue paper anyway.

A Boise State Bronco's snow suit, just what I've always wanted! Yay!

Happy birthday little buddy.

Holiday Travels

The start of the holiday season found us once again stuffing all of our earthly possessions into the bed of the truck and hitting the road for Idaho. We spent two and a half weeks between Andrea's parents and mine and enjoyed our much-needed break immensely.

It rained on Thursday night and coated the world outside with a fine layer of ice. Fortunately the roads had pretty much melted by the time we got going on Friday afternoon so we made pretty good time through Iowa and into Nebraska. Here's the view off our back deck on Friday morning.

Friday night found us in Lincoln, Nebraska and Saturday dawned cold and windy. We drove for about 16 hours that day, wanting to get to Andrea's folks' place that night. Winter can be a tricky time of year to cross Wyoming, but we got through with only a couple of challenges. I was glad to be driving the truck.

Paxton did well for his first long road trip. He slept, watched his brothers, threw Cheerios at the back of daddy's head, and worked his way through his bag of toys. And between that and a couple of bouts of let-me-out-of-this-seat-right-now-or-I'll-surely-explode fits of desperation, he played peek-a-boo. Boo!Anyway we made it to Andrea's folks place and were relatively coherent on Sunday. Andrea's cousin Melinda and her husband Keith stopped by for the afternoon with their two boys. It was nice to see them again.

The boys with their second cousins.It snowed pretty much the whole week of Christmas at Steve and Joanne's, so we cranked up the fireplace and drank coffee and watched the kids play.

Steve's tractor got a workout too. Kenrick spent a lot of time with the sled on the hill behind the house.
And learned how to set up domino blocks into all sorts of crazy patterns. There they go!We headed a little further west to my folks place for the week of New Year's, where we enjoyed spending some time with my brother and his family and seeing both of Andrea's brothers and their families a couple of times.

Mia enjoys getting to know her cousin. Paxton enjoys his bottle.Everyone came to Mom and Dad's on Saturday to help Paxton celebrate his first birthday (more on that later). It was really nice to have everyone there, although Paxton seemed a bit oblivious to the whole birthday thing.

The boys with all but one of their first cousins.We did get to see Tristan later that weekend, which means that the only relatives we missed on this trip were Sally and Matt. They are currently off on some wild adventure to parts unknown, but we know they would have loved to have been there.

On Monday morning we packed up the truck again and pointed her east. Then we waited in traffic. And waited. While it snowed. It took us about two hours to get out of Boise, mainly because of traffic. The four inches of new snow didn't help either, and the weather never really let up all the way across Idaho and into Utah. By the time we got to Wyoming the snow had finally stopped and the roads were decent, but we were about five hours behind schedule and tired of driving. Except Kenrick.
We stopped early, ordered pizza, and went for a swim.
Tuesday and Wednesday were much better travel days and we made good time, but it still took us about 31 hours total to get back.

We had a great trip, one that the kids will remember for a lifetime, but it's sure good to be home.

Wish you were here...

This morning on my way to work the thermometer in the car read 18 degrees below zero. Cold.

Signs of the Times

On our way home from Idaho I noticed a sign along the freeway, an advertisement for a hotel in the next little town. It was a bit old, kind of faded like many of the billboards that are scattered along that lonely stretch of Wyoming desert, but it had a phrase on it that I found interesting. It said: "Free High Speed Internet."

A few years ago that advertisement would have read, "Cable TV." Which implied, of course, that some hotels didn't have cable TV and any hotel that did must be very up to date.

I can even remember when that beat up sign along the highway would have shouted "Color TV!", which, as everyone knew, was the superior way to view the fuzzy broadcast of the Cosby Show and the nightly news.

And, there was a time sometime between the two that the most desirable hotels served a "Continental Breakfast!" Hooray for stale bagels.

Today we just assume that a hotel is going to have access to 54.5 or more channels of identical garbage (in color) and that we can download our e-mail and web news and weather and whatever else we can't possibly live without from our room (in high speed) and that we can load up on watery juice and waffles at the breakfast bar in the morning. So here's the question: If yesterday the greatest thing that a hotel could advertise was its TV, and today we can't do without free food and our high speed connection to the world as we travel across this great country, then what will tomorrow's necessity be? What's that sign going to read in another ten years?

Pushing Paxton

Paxton enjoys a ride in his new wagon. Anthony likes to push, but gets a little wild sometimes.

Gingerbread Architects

Summer Project

My summer project last year was to fix our leaky kitchen door. A hard rain would cause the top of the door to drip and when the shims along the top and sides started swelling and the door got all jambed up I figured that is was probably time to do something. I removed the trim pieces to take a look. Yep, it's wet back there.

The tin roof above the door was in kind of sad shape, so I assumed that was the source of the leak and tore it off. Don was more than happy to help.

Since the new roof would require a more secure seal against the second story gable, we tore the old siding off of that wall. And the second layer of siding under that. The third layer was in pretty good shape, so we put some sheeting over that and then ran the rubber roofing up the wall a couple of feet to make a good tight transition.

Since I was replacing the siding on that end of the house, I decided that I might as well replace our three leakiest windows as well...

I finally quite tearing things off the house and started sealing it back up again.

In the end our leaky door resulted in three new windows, fresh siding on one side of the house, a rubber roof and a new gutter. Here's what it looks like.

So far, no leaks.