The Family

Update:

OK, couple of posts and some more conversations later, here’s the final plan:

1 – All the kids are excepted.  These limits are only on the grown up’s exchange.

2 – We’ll get together Christmas Eve (a Sunday) in New Braunfels (we’re in the middle) to exchange gifts, eat lunch, play games, and have a relaxed and enjoyable time together.    We’ll figure out lunch specifics later, but it’ll basically be like all the other times.

3 – Gift Exchange specifics:

• Each family (Nelia & Luke, Ramona & Joseph, Christina & Chris) will give a gift to each adult.   Ramona & Joseph will get a gift for Nelia, Luke, Christina, and Chris; Ramona will receive a gift from Nelia & Luke and from Christina & Chris.   Make perfect sense?
• These gifts will be simple, inexpensive things – ‘I was thinking of you and thought you would like this’.    There’s no set-in-stone price limit, but let’s say under $20.
• There aren’t going to be any themed gifts (the past Christmas Eve exchange) and no drawn names.

And everyone is reminded to update their family site wishlists, their Amazon wishlists, and ESPECIALLY the kid’s various wishlists.

Let the fun begin!

For the original post & comments, read more ….

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I enjoyed the coloring books for Christmas and am enjoying all my colored pencils, but I am obsessed with ink.  It is all your fault Chris!!!  you and your fountain pens.

I am pestering Chris with letters, writing siblings I have never written before, seeking pen pals online.  I am writing in my journal and writing nonsense and making perfect circles and practicing letters and tossing used up paper in the trash.  It is addictive.   Every evening I want nothing more than to sit and write.

Well, it’s official.  We close on Tuesday.  It will probably take a while to completely move in, but we will soon be living on the land.  I am really looking forward to living closer to you both and looking forward to looking out my windows and seeing grass and trees instead of houses, but I think we are crazy.  I guess we will get moved in eventually, but it is going to take me forever to get things done.  Then I can putter around there as well as I can putter around here.

Every now and then I run across some documentation that has an amusing element, side story, or something a bit beyond the usual.

This one came up a while back and I’ve gone back and read it a few times when I needed a laugh.  It’s the last bit…

Command: steal-file

only valid way to move a file from another account into the current account.

This physically moves a file to the current master dictionary from another master dictionary.
“steal-file” prompts for the account name and requires “sys2” privileges. It also requires that the
user invoking “steal-file” is not protected against updating the file at any level, master dictionary,
file level dictionary, or data file level.

After “stealing” a file, the former owner has no reference to it, not even visitation rights. He or she
can get visitation rights by building a “q-pointer” to where the file moved, or by referencing it via a
“file path”.

Maybe I’m the only one that finds it funny; that’s ok.  Makes me wonder about who wrote it though, and if anyone else reviewing the documentation noticed.

Several months ago, this crossed my desk at work – https://pages.18f.gov/content-guide/voice-and-tone/

It’s a style guide – a really nicely done one – with one particular page on defining one’s organizational ‘voice’.

But it got me thinking. What is my personal voice?

Our voice is our unique personality. Just as you can identify your best friend in a crowd as soon as you hear her distinctive laugh, you can use a person’s voice to identify a piece of writing even if you haven’t seen the byline. A well-crafted voice communicates personality and values — it’s a distilled representation of an author.

It seemed like it would be a good exercise – a psychology profile, more than anything – to try to define my own voice.

And I’m kinda stuck.

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At the Austin Zen Center there are tea and snacks available after the Saturday Dharma Talk.   The other day the ‘snack’ came from Voodoo Doughnut.  Voodoo Doughnut is open from Wednesday to Sunday – 24 hours a day, but they close on Sunday when they sell out.   Since doughnuts do have a shelf life, they do like a bakery does:  ‘day old’ doughnuts are available (really just ~8-12 hours old) if you are there to catch the deals.  Maybe they aren’t as fresh, but the price reduction can make it worth doing.

Or, if you’re like me, and feel like being a bit silly and don’t have a clue about what any of them are going to taste like…   Well, I went in hoping to catch a deal.  The deals come in two forms:  A box of random doughnuts for 6 dollars, or a bucket for 10 dollars.   They were all out of boxed doughnuts.  But…

So. Many. Doughnuts. Yep, we’re going to make ourselves sick if we’re not careful here.

They did have a few buckets.   So I bought one.  (it was either that or a simple dozen for 10.00 )  Oh, and that bucket – it isn’t empty.  Mostly empty, but there’s still a dozen or so doughnuts in there.  Bottom ones got a bit more smashed up than the rest, but that’s expected.

Sometimes the kids have a contest over who gets which doughnut (‘but I wanted the one with the pink sprinkles, not the chocolate sprinkles!’).  Not an issue today.  I think I broke the barrier between ‘rare treat’ and ‘unlimited resource’.  I’ll be trying these and figuring out which ones are worth re-trying fresh and which ones I’ll pass on in the future.   Like that pink one – Daughter said those were ‘too sweet’.  I haven’t tried it yet, but that’s impressive when she doesn’t want to finish even the 1/4 piece of donut.

Oh, and I also bought a fresh doughnut.  No Joke:  it’s the Cock’n’Balls.

Yes, it is cream filled.

Regular doughnut provided for scale.  To quote Christina:  “Oh.  It’s bigger than the pictures online make it look”   And really, the jokes just write themselves here.

Here’s the plan:

We’ll all gather in New Braunfels on Christmas Day. The idea is to all gather at noon, but that’s flexible. Whenever everyone is here is when we’ll start.

Food is going to be open grazing, not any formal sit-down meal. We’ll get something to eat before starting in on presents, and we’ll bring desserts out after presents, but other than those obvious outlines it will be pretty relaxed.

As far as eating, here’s what we have:
Nelia: veggies and fruits, pumpkin cheesecake
Christina: rolls, dessert item tbd
Ramona: meat & cheeses, punch/juice, cookies tbd

If I’ve forgotten some major food group, let me know. Or feel free to just bring it along. It’s all good.

Theme:  Something Inky

I’m leaving that up to interpretation.  Pack of colorful pens, ink&paper drawing, a squid – all have come up as “would that be allowed?”.  Well, they are all inky, so yep.  Totally allowed.

Luke has Ramona
Nelia has Christina
Joseph has Luke
Ramona has Chris
Chris has Nelia
Christina has Joseph

There’s the list – I didn’t so much draw names as look at last year’s Christmas drawing and started at the top with the rule of “flip family, flip gender”.  Worked till the end, which would have ended up with Christina/Nelia trading gifts with each other, so I switched Christina & myself’s recipients.    Hope that works out well enough for everyone.

What is our usual price range?  I’m drawing a blank on that one…

Last year we drew names for an adult gift exchange.

I thought it worked really well. I’d like to do that again this year.

Collective thoughts? Was there anything we did last year that you’d like to change for this year?

And who has the Christmas Eve cat this year?

Carrie sent me a picture of a Tomato Hawk worm that they found wandering around on their front porch.  He must have been in a garden that was harvested and uprooted for the fall because he is obviously well fed.  They still had some tomato plants so they gave him a new home.

“The tomato hornworm, Manduca quinquemaculata, is the larva of a sphinx moth, also known as a hawk moth. Caterpillars of the tomato hornworm grow up to four inches in length, then form a dark brown pupa in the soil. During this resting stage the larva transforms into an adult moth. The life cycle from egg to adult can occur in less than two months during the summer but in winter the pupae remain in the soil for several months.  The adult moth, which has a wingspan over four inches and a body length of about 2″, is a strong flier and is sometimes mistaken for a hummingbird. It may be seen at dusk hovering over flowers and sucking nectar. The female moth mates then lays eggs on tomato plants.”

It will turn into a Sphinx Moth (also called Hawk Moth).  If the size of the worm determines the size of the moth, it’s going to be a big one.

I’m glad Carrie and David like insects and saved this one.