A few Christmas pictures

Here are a fewew fun pictures from Christmas Eve. I of course, wasn't paying attention and left the camera at a really high ISO setting, so all the pictures were a little grainy : (

Thanks to her friend Annie for the cool headgear!

Here she is wearing a box skirt. She just wandered in wearing that!

In the last photo, Megan actually informed us that she was posing like her cousin Lauren (as she saw a picture that Nana and Papa had of Lauren on the stairs). She is so funny.

Megan is posing with Baby Mandy (we finally named a baby!)
We have lots of dolls named "baby", a pair named"brother and sister" and one named "Baby Lily" after her cousin. This is the first semi original name!! Progress......

Something silly -- the Thudguard

I found this in a kids magazine I was reading. I found it almost comically silly. Sorry if I offend one of you who owns this item!

Christmas at School, 2008

Megan Christmas School 2008
Originally uploaded by homanhouse

Another stab at a scrapbook page, this time using some templates and papers, and a few elements I created myself. I am getting a bit faster as I practice, so in a few years I might have this down! Chris is getting into photoshop too (not scrap layouts but he can design all sorts of fonts that now blaze with flames!) so we are having fun with this!


Credit
papers -- Mandy Mystiques, Homanhouse
brushes -- obsidian dawn
template -- made by Kate and by SugarplumPaperie, HomanHouse

Another update to our oven adventure....

So when we got home from Sears, the "door locked" light that was stuck on the old oven (part of the bad computer) suddenly turned off. Then the lock made a few noises, and even moved. And wouldn't you know it, the darn oven works. I mean I was sad that it broke. But then we were sad that it "un-broke" because, you know, we had just bought our really cool oven.

I must say that we have "Returned" the new oven (cancelled the order) and will be cooking some more in this one. I dare say we won't be braving the self clean feature any time soon.

Just what we always wanted....

First, I have to say that today is Chris's birthday (HAPPY BIRTHDAY CHRIS!!!).

Today, the oven repairman came, and basically broke into our oven -- you should have seen it. It looked like a jimmy that you break into a car with and it took 15 or 20 minutes. Then he determined that we needed a new lock and also the oven computer, because the relay was fried and thinks that the door is still locked, so the oven won't cook. $600 for all this.....

We choked because, first of all, it is about a 10 year old oven (it was the original from when our house was built) and it isn't a particularly nice model, so it only costs $700 or so to get a new one that is similar (but doesn't look like it has been broken into to!). So we told the repairman "Thanks, but no thanks", and then headed off to Sears.

Ok, well we are better shoppers than that, so first we checked consumer reports for the best wall ovens (we LOVE the consumer reports online subscription where you just login and look up stuff!), and then we decided (in an effort to avoid the mall on the last shopping Saturday before Christmas) to check out this new Sears Appliance Store that we have in Mansfield.

And since this now became part of our Christmas present and Chris's birthday, we upgraded from our old oven and got the model we really liked online (and consumer reports top pick!) so we are looking forward to playing with the new features, including the convection oven option!

It won't be delivered for a few weeks, but that is ok. At least we can make Santa some cookies in Amarillo!

No Christmas Cookies here

It is a good thing Santa will be visiting us in Amarillo, as we are short on Christmas cookies. You see, yesterday, I got industrious and decided to clean the oven. And by clean, I mean "self clean" so all you really do is press "Start" wait for the door to lock, wait five hours, and then wait for the door to unlock....and wait for the door to unlock....and I am STILL LOCKED OUT of my oven. This is insane. We have cycled power, and recleaned the oven, and still a no-go. The mechanism must be jammed because you can hear it desperately trying to open (this woke me from a dead slumber after last nights "re-clean") but it is no use.

I was annoyed and a bit irritated. So I got on the internet to do a search for how to fix it. And while I didn't find many good ideas, I wound up laughing and laughing and giggling so much that Chris came to check on me. Seems I am not the only person locked out of my oven -- there are hundreds of other people (at least on this one site) who all have similar stories. Some people claim they took the top of their stove/oven off to get the cookies out, and one poor woman still hasn't retrieved her cookies days later. Then there is the guy whose cookies won't bake right because his oven door won't SHUT (the lock stuck out while the door was open). These three are people who weren't even trying to clean their ovens, and the renegade thing just locked. Maybe it isn't all that funny to you, but after you have argued with an inanimate oven for a day, you WOULD find the humor in it!

All of this because I cleaned the oven. See if I try that again........(repairman coming tomorrow!)

The glitter escapade remembered

A start to my scrapbook procrastinating!

So here is a quick page from last Thanksgiving in Amarillo. I keep saying I will get Megan's scrapbook done soon, so one page down, many more to go!

The Carriage Ride

Here is a photo from our group outing last week to see the Christmas lights. Megan had fun, and the weather was remarkably nice for this time of year -- we didn't even need hot chocolate to warm up! Thanks Melissa for arranging all the fun!

Lots to catch up on!

Wow! What a week. We are still recovering, so I will catch up this week.

The last week has been a blur. Last Saturday, we went with our friends Dave, Melissa and Annie on a great Christmas Light viewing carriage ride in Highland Park. Many of the houses were already decorated spectacularly, and then many other houses were just spectacular in themselves. We had fun, although Megan seemed the most interested in the horses. Since we were in the carriage, we really didn't have the *best* view of the horses if you know what I mean, but Megan didn't know or mind. She had a blast, and has since been wearing the cool jingle bell headband that her friend Annie gave her that night -- thanks Annie! I promise to find pictures soon!

And then Monday we started feeling badly, and Megan and I got sick. By Friday, her doctor diagnosed the poor kid with pneumonia, so we are just getting back around to feeling a little better, although with the bouts of coughing, we do sound a little like death warmed over.

As sick as she was, she did manage to get into my craft stuff and get glitter EVERYWHERE. Despite my best attempts to clean it, our whole house sort of sparkles right now. It would be kind of festive if I hadn't already tried to clean it up twice!

In part of the downtime, we have gotten back into photoshop trying to learn a little. I built this blog background among a few other experiments, although I can't tell how it looks on smaller monitors. So if anyone is interested in being my guinea pig, let me know as I am having a little fun experimenting with ideas.

I have a few fun pictures from the week, that I will sort through this week. Me and my prescription cough medicine (yea for drugs!) are now headed off to bed...

: ) AL

Rejoining the wired (or wireless) world!

Wow. I feel so disconnected. We just recovered from a 4 day service issue that made me realize just how addicted we are to some sort of connectivity.

Last Friday, we made the exciting switch from Charter cable to AT&T Uverse. We were excited and everything worked great Friday, so we called Charter to disconnect. Saturday we finished hooking everything else up and then everything went out. No internet, no wireless, no cable so no TV.

Sunday we couldn't figure out what to wear -- what was the weather going to be like???? Didn't there used to be phone numbers for time and temperature or something? Oh yeah, we DO have an antenna hooked up to one of our TVs. Phew, crisis averted.

I have a long four or five page letter detailing the saga. It started kind of average, got really bad in the middle, and then ended in something a bit stupid on our end, which slowed down my five page saga! Basically we had everything working, then apparently had an ethernet connection issue, but this all happened at the same time as AT&T had some crazy flood in the basement of a hub in St. Louis and they lost their ability to fix stuff. Literally. One whole day, they couldn't accept incoming calls -- AT&T, a PHONE COMPANY, lost PHONE SERVICE. Then they couldn't dispatch repairs. The whole time, there was some outage in the software that wouldn't allow them to switch out my modem, and once that was all finally fixed and I switched out my own modem at midnight on Monday night (I was the official field tech after getting a replacement modem from a tech who couldn't switch it while the software was down) it ended in a bad connection found today in a ethernet cable. Hmmmm - not sure which was the root cause of the really bad first weekend of Uverse. The ethernet cable was our issue, but the others some combination of bad luck (Modem zapped or something), a flood, service outage, and an install where not quite everything got hooked up by the tech (she installed one of our computers, but we have a few more than that. It is embarressing to say just how many).

In the middle of all my AT&T visits, charter came by to disconnect my STILL WORKING cable service. Some kind of cruel universal humor or kharma for breaking away from the cable company.

And I managed to reach out in the middle of this via a visit to McDonalds to use their WiFi hotspot! Megan didn't complain about this at all on Sunday. She got to play - a good reason to take your laptop to McDonalds to pass the sliding time!

It is a much longer story than this even, but for now I just want to say "Yeah! We are back!" and "We know what to wear tomorrow! It'll be chilly!"

Decorating the tree

decorating_NEW
Originally uploaded by homanhouse

Megan was just adorable! Every time she hung an ornament, she threw her hands in the air and proclaimed "ta-daa" Every time until I got a camera to capture the cuteness. Here she pretends to eat one ornament. The other was a bow I mistakenly gave her to hang. She spent a long long while trying to retie it, without any help of course.

Did I mention she cleans?

swiffer_NEW
Originally uploaded by homanhouse

Ok, well she makes as many messes as she ever cleans, but this was a cute swiffering kid, who was of course immediately more interested in seeing the camera