A Different Kind of War

Not too much had happened yesterday. I felt really tired all day... stupid Monday. In the evening, Sarah found some card games. She and I played Non-Violent Politically Correct War. It's like the regular card game War, except that to win you need to get rid of all your cards. Plus, all the cards have on them nice PC terms like "unity", "diversity" and "peace". Though the Joker card looks like a cross between Rambo and Duke Nukem.  Sarah won, in case you were wondering. By the way, here's a link to the rules.

Overnight we received a few inches of snow. Nice to see the world covered in fresh snow again.

A co-worker at my day job celebrated 25 years with the company today. Hard to imagine working at the same company for so long. The cakes were all pretty good... they had three kinds:

• white with raspberry jam in middle layer,
• chocolate marble with bavarian cream middle layer, and
• chocolate with chocolate icing.

Sarah made empanadas tonight for supper, using a filling I'd made this morning of browned taco meat and chopped onions and green pepper. Mmm... The dough she used was left over from Dutch pigs in a blanket. (If you're up here in Dutch country, be sure to get some. They rock!)

After supper I had an LCS appointment to help a previous customer with a problem he was having with email software and his ISP's email servers. As far as I could tell, the problem was with the ISP. Very strange. And then his email software suddenly started working anyway! I think the ISP's email server doesn't like having multiple email software accessing the same mail account within some arbitrary time frame. Regardless, the customer had already created a Gmail account, so with his permission I set the ISP email to auto-forward everything to there, which I what I've been doing for years.

Happy New Year, 2011

Winter returned today. Yay! The temperature dropped throughout the day and the winds picked up. I think the daytime temperature was around 35.

I got a good start on two of my new year's resolutions. One of them is to read the Bible through this year. The boys + Olivia had given me a chronological NIV Bible for Christmas. Neat!

Even though I was up pretty late the night before waiting for Tim to return from his party, I didn't sleep in too late. I just don't like feeling as if I'm sleeping the day away, and that's how I feel whenever I'm in bed past 10 AM.  I had a pretty busy day, anyway, and wanted to get started on it.

First, I started my world-famous pizza meatballs in the slow cooker... sauteed some chopped onions, then mixed into that some pasta sauce and my secret ingredients, and poured that over the meatballs.

After my wife's lunch break, I wrapped presents for our extended family Christmas party. Then we all went to that party. It was a pretty good time. Doug & Olivia showed up! And I kind of learned a new card game. I forget its name, though.  Something like "nerf" cards, because when you think you've one a round, you yell out "nerf!" (only not "nerf" but rather the word you're really supposed to yell out).

Here are some pictures:

dinner!

dinner, still! and there's Bennett again! and
Jon sure does turn around a lot!

snowman on the tree, just hanging out