Rampaging Reindeer

We gave the new Festivus pole a week to shine on its own, but on Sunday it was time to unleash the reindeer. Each year we try to add a bit more, which means we need to recruit plenty of help! We try to turn it into a celebration in its own right but really it's more Darren and I trying to squeeze some free labor out of our friends. Thankfully they all had a good spirit about it (unlike me, who was grumpy all morning from trying to recover our satellite TV signal after a couch broke the jack. Damn gnomes always rearranging furniture and breaking things...) Luckily Sarah's gourmet Mac and Cheese and Natalie's gluten-free cake buried any lingering frustration I had. Having friends who bake so well has got to be one of the keys to a happy life.

New additions for our fourth year were the Festivus pole, the huge star on our front gable (which admittedly is lost a bit in all the icicle lights surrounding it), and Santa's sleigh which could literally fly off of our roof at any moment.

Enjoy the photos while I record some of the mundane notes that I'll want to remember for next year:

• Buy colored lights with white wire for the windows and door (why is that style of light so hard to find?). If we can't find any then string the lights as tightly as possible and double up any excess length on the bottom of the window.
• Santa is prevented from liftoff by a string from the base of the fan to the vent on the roof (careful reaching over the power lines...) and two strings tied together to make one long connection from the base, through the window, and finally tied off on the leg of the futon.
• The star is attached to the gable by fishing wire that is hanging from the spindle of a rolling pin that is jammed between the shingles and vinyl siding at the peak of the roof (follow all that?). Probably don't need to put all the little stars around gable as well next year.
  
• Suck up to your friends all year because their help is invaluable when it comes time to decorate (it also helps to lure them to the house with promises of a CD exchange party - more on that later)!
  

Philolanthropy?

As mentioned previously, I’m going through a phase of minor addiction to online edutainment. A few days ago I thought I might be able to manage my habit. I was coming to terms with losing my first Scrabulous game, and having finally beaten level 12 of the World Traveler’s quiz, I was ready to retire with my newfound knowledge that Vladivostok, Russia is just above North Korea and that somehow Norway inexplicably owns an island midway between South Africa and Antarctica called Bouvet. But then my little pusher, I mean sister, had to go ahead and ruin everything by offering me some of this great stuff she found at www.freerice.com... and I was hooked all over again.

FreeRice is essentially an adaptive vocabulary quiz. Each time you get a word right the next one is theoretically harder. Get one wrong and it gets easier. Nothing too exciting… unless you are a mild word nerd (philologist) like me with fond memories of the now-renamed “verbal” section of the SAT. But what makes FreeRice unique (to me at least) is the philanthropy angle. For every word you get right, the proprietors of FreeRice donate 20 grains of rice to the UN’s World Food Programme. Riiiiiggggttttt. But apparently it is legitimate. Now admittedly it isn’t the most efficient way to donate time or money to a charitable cause, and I think my circle of friends would contract dramatically if I started throwing out some of the higher level words in conversation, but that doesn’t stop me from feeling just a bit vogie each time I get a word right. I figure I’ve donated some food, learned a new word that could help in Scrabulous someday, and gotten one step closer to reaching vocab level 50 (level 48 so far – yeah it keeps track of that too. Did I mention it taps into my competitive vein?). And I’ll admit that the philologist in me enjoys learning a word that we’ve heard through our lives but probably had no idea what it meant, like kith (friends, as in kith and kin). Plus, while my friends may not speak these words, they do write them, like George's satori (enlightenment) and Dagny's affianced (betrothed)…

A Festivus for the rest of us

Frank Costanza: Many Christmases ago, I went to buy a doll for my son. I reached for the last one they had, but so did another man. As I rained blows upon him, I realized there had to be another way.

Cosmo Kramer: What happened to the doll?

Frank Costanza: It was destroyed. But out of that a new holiday was born: a Festivus for the rest of us!

Our house lost a tree this year. Thankfully it wasn’t the Connolly Tree, which now stands alone in the front yard, patiently awaiting the addition of this year’s strand of lights. The Connolly Tree did look rather lonely though and the right side of our lawn is just a bit empty now that the massive maple has been removed. So Darren and I came up with a plan: Where the maple once stood… we would erect a Festivus Pole! Although traditionally unadorned we decided it would look like a flagpole or unfinished construction project if we simply planted a pole there, so we decided to enhance our Festivus Pole with a friendly (though not so subtle) sign. In honor of Festivus, which falls before Christmas, we will give the pole a week in our front yard alone before the full onslaught of holiday lights and decorations are added next Sunday.

Notes to Jon:

• While we nearly settled for the pole of a volleyball net or PVC pipe (spray painted chrome), our search led us to the electrical aisle in Home Depot where we discovered a Festivus pole that had been captured and was being sold as electrical conduit. We liberated the pole from a dreary existence shielding electrical cable in some commercial warehouse and brought it home. I believe it is 2” outer diameter, ¼” thick, and 10’ long, and while it isn’t aluminum, it does meet the Festivus requirement of having “a high strength to weight ratio”.
  
  
• Three sections of four foot rebar hold the pole in place surprisingly well.
  
  
• Painting the white letters on the black board is critical to being able to read the Happy Festivus sign. Just using the lights alone wouldn’t have been legible.
  
  
• We drilled holes in the sign just big enough for each light’s base to slide through but not for the bulb itself. This was a plus because we didn’t have to glue the lights in place, but then again we did have to take out each bulb and reinsert it once we slid the base through the hole… and that can be a problem because: Although the lights say they stay lit when a bulb “burns out”… they don’t stay lit when a bulb isn’t seated properly in the first place. Turns out that made it a pain in the ass to figure out which bulb wasn’t reseated properly when I plugged the sign in and it didn’t light!

Facebook Free-Fall

I blame Chris. I didn't know why exactly, but I knew I didn't want anything to do with MySpace or Facebook. I was fairly proud that not only did I not have an account with either of them, I had never actually been to anyone's page on either site (the fact that MySpace is blocked at work probably made that easier). Then I traveled around West Africa this summer and I took my first step down the slippery slope which seems to have tossed me right off a cliff (I just finished watching the 2006 season of Everest on the Discovery Channel so that's the imagery I have in my head right now). I noticed that whenever we stopped at an internet cafe and I checked my email or uploaded photos, Chris seemed to be updating something on Facebook. When I got home I wanted to know how my malaria-stricken friend was faring as he made a solo trek through Sierra Leone, Liberia and Cote D'Ivore (did I mention he's hard core). Having seen him in operation I knew the best place to find out wasn't his blog... but on his Facebook profile!

The trouble (or blessing, if you worry about stalkers) with Facebook is that in order to view someone's profile you have to have a profile of your own (and get them to accept you as a friend). Despite my reservations I relented and created a blank profile so I could keep up with him. Oh I took precautions. I was very clear in my status message and in a note that I wasn't actually planning to use Facebook and asked everyone to please not "friend" me. And yet I suddenly got a flood of friend requests. It turns out the other trouble with Facebook is that no one can see your status or your notes without being your friend in the first place. Damn catch-22. I ignored the requests for a while (several weeks actually) but as they piled up I figured there was no harm in simply accepting them since then my friends would see my status and my note and realize I had no intention of being sucked into the Facebook world. Wrong again. Soon I was getting emails about people writing on my wall, asking me to compare movie tastes, and even challenging me to a game of something called Scrabulous. Again I resisted. For weeks.

And then one day I was having lunch with the Scrabulous challenger who berated me for not accepting her request to play. Apparently when you challenge someone you actually start the game and she'd started with a high scoring word and was excited to see if I could catch up. The next day I accepted the challenge. And ever since I've been in Facebook free-fall over that 10,000 foot cliff without the sherpa's safety line.

See Scrabulous is fantastic. It's like Scrabble... but so much better. I've always had a thing for words... and games... and yet ironically while I enjoy an occasional game of Scrabble I haven't played it considerably more than any other board game growing up (perhaps I am still bummed about being denied the word "revoided" in a travel Scrabble game on my trip to the UK in 2000 - here let me use it in a sentence for you: "The cashier scanned my Corn Flakes twice, so she voided one of the transactions... but it failed to clear the charges so she called over her manager... who revoided it". See perfectly valid! But I digress...). So why is Scrabulous better than Scrabble? Well for one thing you essentially have an unlimited amount of time to plot your perfect move. But what really does it for me is the built in dictionary lookup that is available in "regular" games. I can check all sorts of weird combinations of my letters and magically stumble across the perfect word which I never even knew existed! There is just something exciting about typing in an endless combination of letters that you really need (ok so "need" is relative) to form a valid word and suddenly having the valid word appear in glorious green print. Instead of only playing safe words that you know everyone will agree on (like revoided :-p) I can discover that "aa" is a word (a type of lava flow - which I somehow knew from Geology classes), as is "oe", and that "qaid" is a useful "q" word that doesn't contain a "u". Other words I have discovered from Scrabulous (I'll update this list over time... unless I manage to shake this addiction)

• Grister - Someone who grinds things, I believe. This was also my first ever "Bingo" (80 points for that word) where I used all 7 of my tiles (revoided would have been my first which is why I fought so hard for it).
  

• Torii - A word I didn't use in the game but found while trying different letter combos. This was probably my favorite because a couple days later I was looking through Emily's blog about her trip to Asia and she had a picture of a Torii (the Shinto gate shown in her picture)
  
  
• Vogie - An obscure Scottish word used in the 18th and 19th century which means... happy! You can never have too many words for happy, so I am bringing vogie back (and I'm not the only one)
  
  
• Ut - A Middle English precursor to "do" (as in do re mi - the song certainly makes more sense now that they changed it to do). But more importantly it allowed me to play my second bingo "entreat" on the only spot on the board where it could fit.
  
  
• Askoi - The plural of Askos, a modern term for a form of ancient greek pottery used to pour liquids.
  
  
• Oxyphenbutazone - Some molecule that is far more famous as the highest scoring single play word in American Scrabble. No I did not type that in randomly. I saw it on the Scrabulous high score board and did some investigating.
  
  
• Inchers - My highest scoring bingo thus far (for 113 points), doesn't really seem like a word at all until you put a number in front of it, e.g. 9-inchers.
  
  
• Dildoes - Ahem. Scrabble word lists aren't censored, so if you've got the letters... Anyway, aside from the good laugh we got out of this bingo—which incidentally played off of the word "Fakes"—we learned that this word can be spelled as either dildos or dildoes (though blogger thinks they are both misspelled, I guess they do censor). Who knew?
  

I might have been safe if Scrabulous was the end of it, after all I can only play as fast as my opponent is willing to so I should be able to squeeze some sort of a life in between... but today... today Alexandra doomed, er challenged me to the Traveler's IQ Quiz. This was even more fun than Scrabulous, and I could play as much as I want (yes there is a Scrabulous mode where you play against the computer but I'm not stupid enough to try that... I hope). This is a geography quiz where you have a map of the world and they throw out cities (or historic landmarks/battles etc.) and you click as close as you can to their location on the map in under 10 seconds. They plant a flag where you click and then toss in another flag at the actual location and award you points based on how many kilometers you were off (I'm proud to say my closest guess so far was 20KM off... on the location of Fenway Park!). The questions get harder for each of the 12 rounds and you have to score enough each round to advance. All three tries today I missed out on getting the 55,000 in round 11 to make it to the 12th and final round (my second try I missed 55,000 by 197 points!). And now I am off to try one more time before bed to reach round 12...

Somebody please set up an intervention...

Antietam: Bringin' Sepia Back

On Sarah’s suggestion, we took a different style of hike Sunday as we visited Antietam National Battlefield in Sharpsburg, MD. More than anything else I think the trip was inspired by her knowledge of a local ice cream shop to hit after the hike (something we’ve deemed essential as a post-hike ritual… even when it is in the 40s apparently) While it was cold, Sarah’s booty music warmed us up (and inspired some ribald inside jokes) and while it wasn’t the solemnest of visits the Battlefield has seen I would recommend this as an interesting change of pace hike. Here are some notes to recreate our success:

• Depart Ballston around 10:45. Sleeping in and hiking, a new concept for us

• Pick up lunch at Sheetz off highway 65 (we missed the 5 subs for $10 deal, but may go for that next time). Optionally, make assorted jokes about where AB can store food, the Fizzinator, low hanging front ends, riding handlebar mustaches, and general ho-liday puns (it worked for us)

• Our “family” arrived at the Visitor Center about 12:40 ($6 per family or $4 per person) and took a 20 minute “running” tour of the quarter mile loop of memorials around the visitor center. Leave more time for a more respectful pace (honestly, once Darren decided to bring sexy back with his Civil War era mustache, we knew what kind of a day it was going to be and decided not to fight it)
  

• Watch the 26 minute video at 1pm on how General McClellan failed to press the Union advantages, potentially resulting in another three years of war (it also gives an overview of the fighting that day which is useful as you hike those areas)

• From 1:30 to 4:30, take the driving tour and stop to re-enact the day’s battles along the Cornfield Trail (download an audio tour), the Union Advance Trail, and the Final Attack Trail, which total about 4.3 miles of easy hiking (except for the perilous groundhog holes! You have been warned…)

• Reward yourself with a stop at Nutter’s Ice Cream Shoppe a mile away on the main street of Sharpsburg. We worried it would be closed by 5pm… on a Sunday… in November… but they are open until 9pm (not that we stayed that long)! We agreed the Pumpkin ice cream was our favorite flavor but it was hard to beat the Hot Apple Sundae with Vanilla and the Hot Fudge Sundae with Peanut Butter Ripple.

Through the looking-glass

It all began on our family trip to the UK in 2000. We stumbled across the Victoria and Albert museum during a Chihuly exhibition. It's ironic we discovered his work in London since his studio is in Seattle (granted I have been to London and not to Seattle so I guess it isn't that ironic... and there's a long debate on what irony is anyway). I then saw his Sea Forms exhibit at the Monterey Aquarium in 2004 and his permanent (I think) installation at the Bellagio in Vegas that same year. Since then it has become a bit of a family tradition to visit any Chihuly installations in the vicinity. Last year we caught the show at the Botanical Gardens in New York and this year we took Friday off work in order to pull a day-night doubleheader on the last nighttime show at the Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh (of course they have since extended it... until February!)

Despite the overcast skies and my camera's inability to take decent low light shots (or my inability to adjust the settings appropriately... but let's go with the first option), the weekend turned out as well as we could have imagined. Our plan was nearly foiled when they sold out of tickets for the night show, but Dad managed to get three tickets for us and through tactical use of the elevator and the incoming crowds all four of us wound up inside. Way to go Dad! We weren't the only family engaged in covert operations though, as I witnessed someone pass tickets back out through a fence later in the evening. I guess it was a popular exhibit! The rest of the trip was just as enjoyable because we got to visit my good friend James (who recently launched a promising, though sadly Republican, political career by defeating a 20+ year incumbent for a seat on the Mt. Lebanon school board. Congratulations James!) and his two adorable kids, and as an added bonus we picked up lunch at Jimmy John's, a staple of Mimsi's college diet which doesn't exist in the DC area.

The slideshow is a mix of my photos and Mimsi's photos, with all of the nighttime (and generally any of the more impressive) shots taken by her.

Where will our next Chihuly encounter take place...

I’d climb the highest mountain...

Jemaine: Would you really do that, climb the highest mountain?

Bret: No, probably not

Jemaine: Why not make it a bit more realistic… things you’d actually do?

Bret: Well, I’d hang out with her… (check out the Flight of the Conchord's song)

Or in my case, I’d hike Old Rag. And since I wasn’t hiking up for, or with, anyone in particular I reveled in my mostly solo hike (which made for some fun shadography). Thanks to Diana for getting me to finally do this climb for the first time (it only took about 31 years of living around here!), for driving, and for letting me cast the deciding scheduling vote so I could hike it on my birthday weekend.

Notes to Jon:

• I theorized that we witnessed the latest sunrise ever over our morning pitstop, Wawa. This is the first year of the new daylight savings time and Saturday was the last morning before we fell back, so that sunrise shot was taken at 7:41 am.

• We spotted the strangest rainbow (a rainspot?) which was a prism of color that kept glowing out of one spot in the clouds a good distance away from the sun. It remained for the final 15 minutes of the drive and was visible even as our road twisted off in different directions.

• Departing Ballston at 7am was early enough to avoid the bottlenecks on the rock scramble section despite being one of the busiest weekends of the year. Leaving later would have been a disaster. Hiking back down the rock scramble around 1pm we encountered people who’d presumably arrived closer to 10 or 11am. They were in a line that easily stretched back 100 people and couldn’t possibly have taken less than an hour to work through the bottleneck.

• There is a bypass to the left of the bottleneck (as seen from the bottom), but it isn’t for the faint of heart and I needed a hand (actually a bent leg) to get started. It also isn’t much of an option when the line gets as long as it did because no one is going to let you pass through the line to get to the bypass. Coming back down on the other hand worked just fine!

• We chose to hike up the rock scramble and then back down it rather than taking the easier fire road home. If you are willing to crab walk down the bypass I think that’s the better option. I didn’t take the fire road but I can’t imagine it would be more exciting than another trek through the rocks.

• The hike took about two hours each way, which accounted for a decent amount of time wandering off for photos, but not much for waiting in line if you go later.
  
  
• My winter biking gloves were perfect for keeping my hands warm and scrape-free.