Like Father Like Son


The other day a Guitar Center catalog came in the mail and quickly captured the attention of the men of the house. N was flipping through it while E was eating dinner but E quickly became distracted and insisted on looking through it with N. E would point to every guitar on the page one by one and exclaim, “guitar!” and then add some fervent but unintelligible commentary. It cracked us up.

I love my boys.

E’s Birthday Celebration

E had a great birthday yesterday. My sister-in-law Miranda and I took the kids up to Discovery Gateway, a children’s museum in Salt Lake. They loved it. There was lots for them to do and explore.

L and E in a fire engine conveniently built with two steering wheels.

E and L at a construction play site.
(Lately E has been really into hats. If there’s one around, he’ll put it on. Last week he was wearing some other kid’s hat when I picked him up from daycare at the gym.
)

Clambering around in a defunct Life Flight helicopter than was donated to the museum.

A, Miranda’s daughter, was a trooper while we were there.

After we got home I baked E some dairy-free, egg-free cupcakes from a mix by Cherrybrook Kitchen and then E and I went to the store to buy him some balloons (still one of his very favorite things). When N got home from work we had dinner and then cupcakes and presents.

The cupcake (and frosting) was well-received.

We gave E a Yo Gabba Gabba themed toy guitar. (He keeps unwinding the strings on his ukulele so we thought he’d do better with a string-less toy.)

And this toy car. Both were big hits.

E had a great day. He learned the word “birthday” and kept shouting it in excitement. It was a lot of fun.

Halloween Pics

E loved the Halloween festivities this weekend. On Friday afternoon I took him to N’s office for their party. E was a little apprehensive at first but very quickly got the gist of the holiday (i.e. candy) and would scoot up to people and mumble “icko-reet!”

E as a dog and me in my cop-out black cat costume.

N and his team at work rockin’ it out as an 80s hair band.
(Note: this is the only photo of N wearing jeans you will probably ever see. He hasn’t owned a pair since he was 14. I had to go to a thrift store and buy these especially for his costume.
)

Before this weekend E had only had candy on a few occasions. But he very quickly learned how to say “candy” and has been running around the house trying to wheedle pieces from us all weekend. On Saturday evening I had planned on just taking him to a few houses but he insisted on going all the way around the block but then lost steam and I had to tow him back home.

All things considered, it was the best Halloween I’ve had in a long time.

First Snow

Even though I’ve lived in Utah for a number of years now I was still surprised when we got three inches of snow earlier this week. (Bleh.) Last year E was too small to really care about the snow but this week he was excited to go outside and explore.

E’s plucky, can-do attitude lasted all of about 30 seconds…

…or the amount of time it took him to trip and plant his hands in the frozen snow.

(I know, I know–he needs mittens and a new coat. But cut me some slack; I had naively thought I had until November to get them.)

Two Cousins at Two

My sister-in-law Miranda asked me to take a few photos of her son L to commemorate him at two years old. L’s a real cutie and it was fun to take his photo. L is two months older than E (E’s birthday is next week) and it’s always fun to see the two of them together.


Unfortunately E’s been having bouts of separation anxiety lately and he really freaked out when Miranda held him out of the way while I was taking L’s picture. He thought I was trying to dump him off for babysitting.

Miranda, unlike me, is a great seamstress. While we were at her house she presented E with his birthday present: a stylish three-quarter length coat she had sewn herself.

Unfortunately even receiving such a great a gift did not do much to assuage E’s abandonment fears.

But eventually time did. After a while E figured out I wasn’t going to go anywhere and relaxed enough to play with L. The two of them looked very dashing together in their coats.

Woodworking Fall 09: Week 5

This week woodworking went really well. Last week I ran into some issues and so this week I came prepared with a list of tasks I wanted to accomplish and I pretty much got them all done.

I made some good progress on my box lids and also on my cuttings boards. These first boards are for my jewelry box lids.

I cut the blanks I glued up into strips and then flipped every other strip over to form a checkered pattern.

Then I glued them together, paying special attention to matching up the lines.

The panels after gluing (left to right): purpleheart and curly maple, walnut and bloodwood, and African lacewood and maple.

My unfortunately non-square cutting board.
You can kind of see how the strips shifted while they were being glued and it turned into more of a parallelogram instead of a rectangle. Lame.

After I trimmed the edges off on the band saw it looked more squarish.

I went over the edges on a router so they would be slightly rounded.

And then I started sanding the surface of the board.

I have some more sanding to do next week and then I’ll slap a couple of coats of mineral oil on it and call it good. It still won’t be totally square but after giving myself a mental pep talk I’ve managed to let go of the notion that it needs to be absolutely perfect. I’m okay with it being slightly wonky. (It helps that it’s only for myself and not someone else).

I also re-sawed and re-glued the other cutting board that was having issues. So I think I’m in good shape for next week. Who knows, I might actually have time to make E a toy afterall.

Fall Holgas

It has suddenly turned chilly here–bleh! While I love autumn I hate the long snowy Utah winters. And even though I’ve been trying to take it easy and I drank almost a gallon of orange juice yesterday I still feel like crap this morning. So I thought I’d post these pictures I took with my Holga back with the fall was bright and lovely to cheer myself up.


Woodworking class is tonight. I’m already running through my mental checklist: camera AND memory card–check!, the plans for E’s wood bulldozer–check!, extra glue for cutting boards–check!, a determined but patient attitude–check! (?)

Wish me luck. Project pictures tomorrow or Friday.

Concert Photos

I’m feeling worse today than I was last week. This cold has settled into my chest and I have a lovely hacking cough that makes sleeping difficult. But other than being sick this weekend was quite fun.

On Friday night N and I went and saw BrakesBrakesBrakes and Ezra Furman and the Harpoons play at the Kilby Court in Salt Lake. Both bands were really great which makes it even sadder that there were only 14 people there (unfortunately, not an exaggeration).

On the upside, I was free to move around however I liked to take photos because I wasn’t getting in anyone’s way. So there’s that.

BrakesBrakesBrakes

BrakesBrakesBrakes

Ezra Furman

Ezra Furman and the Harpoons

You can kind of see how the Kilby Court is basically a glorified shack. It’s one of my favorite venues in Salt Lake though. It’s too bad no one was there for this show. I hadn’t listened to either band before we went to the show but I liked both groups. If you’re interested N has a review of the show up on his blog.

Train Ride!

Both E and my brother Steven love trains. So last week we drove up the canyon to Heber City and we took a ride on the Heber Valley Railroad. There were two trips to choose from: a 3-hour trip and 90-minute trip. We went on the 90-minute trip and it turned out to be just the right length. The ride was a lot of fun. You could sit in the open cars or in the old passenger cars. We switched between the two.

Chugging along next to a reservoir.

E and his Uncle Steven.

E liked climbing around on the benches.

The wind gives E a stylin’ do.

The fall foliage in the canyon was a nice bonus. It was breathtaking.

The only downside to the trip was that E got carsick on the drive back home through the canyon and threw up a couple of times. It put a bit of a damper on things. But overall it was a really nice outing.

If you’re local and have avid train fans in your family I think it’s worth going once. The train rides are fairly pricey ($24 for 90 minutes, $30 for 3 hours), but kids under 3 are free which helps. I don’t think we’ll be going again anytime soon but I’m glad we went this time.