Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Category: Family

  • The gift tally

    Really good holiday this year (by which I count my birthday and the Christmas days together), with good gifts but especially with family and good friends. My birthday was fairly low-key, with just the family and a boozy theme: a gift card to the Brew Shop, a giant bottle of Jack Daniels, a magnum bottle of Anchor’s 2010 Christmas Ale, a bottle of German mulled wine.

    (Update—forgot to mention a new computer chair for the office as well.)

    Christmas Eve was the first of the big parties: we hosted at our house (which we do every year), with homemade pulled pork sandwiches, lots of potluck food, lots of candies and cookies, and of course lots of good drinks. I warmed the mulled wine in a saucepan, and we had plenty of beer (both homebrewed and specialty bottles our friends Paul and Sandi brought over), wine, and some mixed drinks going on (our friend Karen brought over some homemade vanilla schnapps she had received).

    Food was great, the company was greater. Besides Paul and Sandi and Karen, Shannon and Brian and their son joined us (and of course my family was here as well). Everything went off without a hitch and everyone had a great time (I hope!).

    Then of course, Christmas day. Which began really, really early (does it start any other way when you have kids though?)—the kids were up at 6:45 checking their stockings (that’s an arbitrary time we’d set up long ago), but I had mostly been awake since around 6. (Plus, the dog had woken us up at 2am, barking briefly at something we couldn’t figure out. Maybe Santa?)

    After opening presents, we had homemade crème brûlée French toast and bacon for breakfast. Yes, it was pretty much as good as it sounds.

    For Christmas, I got:

    • Candies and chocolates, a flask funnel, mini bottles of coconut rum and cinnamon whiskey, Guinness-flavored BBQ sauce, and lottery Scratch-Its in my stocking. (“What’s in Santa’s Beard” is the weirdest Scratch-It game ever.)
    • Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King
    • A Charlie Brown Christmas Tree
    • A gift set of Evan Williams Single Barrel Vintage bourbon, with a combination cigar holder/flask
    • Four specialty beers
    • A belt
    • A bottle drying rack (for cleaning beer bottles for homebrewing)
    • A homemade calendar day planner (my daughter made it)
    • Money

    The gifts are awesome, but it was spending Christmas out at Mom and Dad’s with everyone (Paul and Sandi and Karen joined us again, as well as some other old friends we seen once a year) that really made the holiday for me. My parents put together a fantastic dinner and party and it was perfect. There was so much good food and drink that food coma had set in by the time we got home. But we couldn’t have asked for a better Christmas.

    I hope everyone else had a great holiday this year too!

  • Auld lang syne

    I suppose the measure of how good a New Year’s party is would be the hangover you have the next day… if so, then the party we had last night was a pretty good one. It wasn’t wild or crazy or anything like that, we just had friends over (a bunch of them brought their kids), and it was just the accumulation over the course of the evening that did me in.

    That, and the two (two! ugh) shots of Jagermeister I drank. I was mostly fine until that.

    Anyway.

    I never did the obligatory post-Christmas post-birthday post, either. So I’m rolling it all into one.

    My birthday was very nice. We had lunch at the Bend Brewing Company where I drank their Hophead Imperial IPA and their seasonal Doppelbock. Both good. I love the fish and chips there. For dinner we had take-out Chinese and my mom and brother and his girlfriend joined us. Cake was a delicious dense dark chocolate cake.

    My gifts? The traditional photo Christmas ornament (the photo is of the kids), a beer rating guide book (the name escapes me at the moment and it’s not nearby), Barnes & Noble gift cards, money, a PS2 video game, a bottle of Jack Daniels with a measuring shot glass, and a neat shot glass and beer tasting glass from my brother in San Diego.

    Christmas Eve was dinner at our house with the family. Lasagna, this year. (We don’t really have a traditional Christmas Eve dinner, unlike, say, ham on Christmas day or turkey at Thanksgiving.) We set out the mountain of presents (90% for the kids) and the kids could hardly get to sleep.

    Christmas morning the kids were up at 6:30 and going through their stockings by flashlight. So I got up a little before 7, started coffee, checked out the stocking loot, and helped the kids sort out presents. You can imagine what followed.

    My gifts? Stephen King’s latest novel, Lisey’s Story, slippers, a bottle of beer, a book on the making of the Charlie Brown Christmas TV special, some crafty ornaments from the kids, more money, another PS2 game, a gift certificate to Pegasus Books here in town, and surprisingly, I even got the lightsaber I asked for! Totally didn’t see that one coming.

    Am I forgetting anything? …probably.

    Since then, I’ve spent some of my money and gift cards on a bunch of books, another PS2 game, some beer. And, I only worked two days in the past 11—five days off around Christmas, two at work, then four more for this last New Year weekend. Going back to work tomorrow? Uh, yeah, not really looking forward to it.

    …but at least I’m not still hungover!

  • Kids + illness + birthday = entirely too busy

    The “illness” referred to in the title above is our daughter’s; she isn’t seriously sick but has this cough that really kicks in after she’s been asleep for a few hours, and this happens two or three times a night. It really sucks to have your sleep punctured every couple of hours to go administer meds or water or whatever.

    Anyway. It was also our daughter’s birthday weekend, so we were running around a lot getting things ready and such. The birthday party went really well, so that’s good. Thankfully they seem to get easier as the kids get older and more autonomous. No need to give the little ones booze and sleep it off anymore.

    I’m kidding. (Or am I?)

    The only hitch was two kids didn’t get picked up; turns out the mom who was supposed to be picking them up went to the wrong place. Fortunately, we had our minivan and cellphones, so we were able to take the extra kids to where they needed to be. That may well have been the first time we’ve carpooled…

    Anyway, I’ll try to get back to my regular blogging schedule. Which hasn’t been very “regular” of late, I know. I’ll get right on that… sometime…

  • A new kitten

    Friday, after much hand-wringing and debating and questioning sanity (almost entirely by my wife), we adopted a new kitten from the Humane Society.

    He’s about seven weeks old and has that full-on kitten rambunctious flexibility that all the good kittens possess. Kittens like that are like crack for some people.

    Thankfully the first night was the only night (for me) that messed up my sleep… seems like the last cat we got kept me up a lot more at first. I’m not complaining!

    So far, the other two cats are still unsure of what to make of the interloper. I’m sure that will pass and they’ll start kicking his ass any day now.

    And now, of course, the obligatory kitten pictures.

    New kitten
    I haven’t decided yet if that black on the nose qualifies this cat to look like Hitler…

    New kitten

    New kitten

  • Mortality

    One year and two weeks after we lost our first cat, we lost our second cat today. We had to have him put to sleep, the same as before; he was essentially end-stage advanced urinary tract disease. We’d spent the last two weeks doing everything we could for him.

    This was our cat Lucifer. He was 13. We’d also raised him from a kitten. He was a big Maine coon, with six toes on each of his front paws; he looked like he was wearing mittens. He was also the sweetest cat you would ever meet.

    Yes, it sucks. It’s like that, sometimes. But at 13, he lived a full, happy, loving life with no complaints; there’s not much more you can ask for.

  • Pets are expensive

    Our Labor Day weekend itself was decent enough overall, but Sunday night we had to take our oldest cat to the emergency pet hospital because he’d been acting weird all day, and by the evening was seemingly in serious pain. Turned out he had stones in his bladder and was all blocked up.

    Since our regular vet wouldn’t be open until Tuesday morning, the cat stayed at the emergency hospital from Sunday night through Tuesday morning (about 36 hours), receiving treatment. Tuesday my wife transferred him to our regular vet, and they performed surgery to remove the stones that day.

    Recovery Tuesday night, and again tonight. Probably home tomorrow. But all this adds up to another hefty bill. Pets are expensive. I’m beginning to wonder if we should have insurance policies taken out on them.

    And before anyone thinks I’m totally cynical, the cat is doing just fine. He’s 13 years old, but remarkably healthy otherwise.

  • Life is what happens when you’re making other plans

    Yeah, that headline there? Totally saccharine and goofy and pointless. Yes, I know it’s cribbed from John Lennon, so what?

    Anyway.

    The “life that happened” was a sudden and unexpected gall bladder removal for my wife last week. Yeah, I know—Wha?!? She went to the doctor on Wednesday, confirmed that she had gallstones, and they wanted to take the gall bladder out either that night or Thursday. We opted for Thursday, so I spent most of that day at the hospital and the rest of the weekend taking care of, er, everything. So I’ve been busy.

    You know what’s crazy? They treat gall bladder surgery (formally known as cholecystectomy, in this case laparoscopic) as basically outpatient; my wife was able to come home Thursday night.

    Okay, this is even crazier, and creepy (from that Wikipedia article):

    Gallstones are, oddly, a valuable by-product of meat processing, fetching up to $900 US an ounce in their use as a purported aphrodisiac in the herbal medicine of some cultures. The finest gallstones tend to be sourced from old dairy cows. Much as in the manner of diamond mines, slaughterhouses carefully scrutinise offal department workers for gallstone theft.

    Wow. And “ew.”

    On the other hand… no, I won’t even go there.

  • Post eye surgery

    The eye surgery went very well, our daughter has been recuperating marvelously all weekend (it wasn’t a very eventful weekend because of this), and things are more-or-less back on track.

    Saturday morning we did make a Costco run, largely because I had an eye exam of my own at the optometrist there. It’s been probably 15 years since I last had my eyes checked, and the kids having the surgery—not to mention having had eye floaters for years—put me in mind to getting it done. As it happens, I have nearly perfect vision; I see 20/20 in each eye, and have a very mild astigmatism that may necessitate getting glasses in a few years. The floaters are normal.

    And yeah, go ahead and get the “floater” jokes out of your system; I can hear a bunch of you snickering in the back.

  • In Lake Oswego, eye surgery tomorrow

    Like the trip we had almost two years ago, tonight we’re in the Phoenix Inn hotel in Lake Oswego in preparation for our daughter’s corrective eye surgery tomorrow. Pretty much anything I would say is covered in that previous post; the only details being different really are that my daughter is six and it’s her third (and hopefully last) such surgery. And I’ve taken today, Wednesday and Thursday off from work for it (back on Friday).

    On the positive side, we had a really excellent dinner at Piazza Italia in Portland’s Pearl District; we got to try some cheesecake from The Cheesecake Factory at Washington Square; and we’ll be doing a Trader Joe’s run sometime before coming back on Thursday. Anyone need anything from TJs?

  • My brother’s garage sale

    A promo-note to any garage salers reading: my brother and his girlfriend are having a garage sale today (Saturday the 15th). Among other things, he was planning on selling some of his older video game systems (Nintendo 64, Super Nintendo), with games, and we took a toddler mattress over there for them to sell ($45 OBO).

    They live over on Douglas Street, just off and north of Wilson. I told them to post an ad on Craigslist, but I don’t see one there…