Month: October 2015

I felt like I should get some more mileage out of the sweet tri-corner pirate hat I bought for Halloween. I only had a chance to wear my costume twice. So tonight, we headed over to Red Robin for dinner and I wore the hat.

I called it the “urban pirate” look.

Our friend Rocio really wanted to take some senior pictures of Kyra. She’s not a professional photographer or anything, but she’s worked with a few of Kyra’s friends and their pictures turned out nice, so a few days ago they went out together and had a photo shoot.

I’m not really a huge fan of senior pictures, but of course when it’s my own daughter I’m probably a little biased. I think these are pretty great, and of course Kyra is beautiful. I love her long, flowing blond hair.

This week Alex was able to send some photos to us. Here’s one of him looking all official: he’s wearing his missionary name tag (Elder Schroeder).

And of course he managed to sneak in a “frowney face” shot as well. Apparently the guy on the left end didn’t get the memo that it was a goofy picture.

I saw this snippet of C code on Github:

So evil! If you know C, or even a reasonably similar programming language, you’ll understand why this single cruel line, slipped into an include file somewhere, would drive code testers to the brink of murderous insanity.

Last night was our annual Halloween party, and it was fun as always to put together a costume.

Kyra and her friend Chaille decided to be Sponge Bob and Patrick, who are apparently a sentient kitchen sponge and his friend the starfish. The idea sounded a little shaky, mostly because I couldn’t figure out how Kyra would be a huge sponge or Chaille an enormous starfish. But their costumes actually turned out pretty sweet:

That’s (Girl) Alex in the middle, dressed as Bucky, the arch-enemy and ex-friend of Captain America. It took me a moment to figure out that costume.

I was a little short on ideas this year, and a few weeks ago I aborted my Zorro idea in favor of a generic pirate costume. I picked up a sweet tri-cornered hat and “pirate wig”, made a red sash, and reused some of my props from last year’s Dread Pirate Roberts outfit. I even grew out a bit of a beard.

Voila!

I love my sword and it typically gets a lot of attention– particularly from kids– but I kept running into things at the party, or people would plow into it, so I eventually had to retire it.

The party was fun, of course, and I already have my idea for next year’s costume. I suppose I’ll need to start working on it in a few months…

In our family photo shoot about a month ago, we ended up with some hilarious pictures of the kids and yesterday I decided to have them printed to replace the framed photos in our family room. Those pictures were about fourteen years old.

The result was awesome.

Yep, those are our kids.

In the latest installment of What My Kids Do All Day, I took a picture of Zack sitting on the couch playing with a Rubik’s Cube in between a few pages of his comic book.

Sometimes, that’s pretty much a summary of his day.

To his credit, he’s been working hard on learning how to solve the Cube, and he’s become pretty good at it.

Off to the races…

And he’s got it!

Meanwhile, Kyra was demonstrating what she does all day: reads young adult fiction novels on her tablet.

She’ll burn through a novel every few days. Laralee is much the same, and they’re always talking about “you should read this…” and “I didn’t really like how that happened…”

Laralee has a huge dry-erase board on the side of the refrigerator, and it’s where she keeps her various shopping and to-do lists. Since the board is so big, there tends to be a bit of space on it. A few days ago I decided to add some artwork.

So I created three limited-edition pieces featuring various animals:

Breathtaking, I know.

Zack saw the snake and thought it looked like a dude with a long tongue, so he took the liberty of adding his own artwork to the board:

I think dry-erase art could be a new medium. Before you know it, the major galleries will feature some of this stuff.

Today there was a company-wide email exchange that ended up turning nasty.

Ouch. Clearly Brent isn’t a fan of Freddy’s, although most of the team isn’t fond of Chuburger (home of unseasoned meat and soggy grease fries). Five of us headed over to Freddy’s without him, and when I came up to the register I asked the guy if I could get a paper hat for a friend. He told me they don’t have any paper hats, but he would look around to see if he could find a real hat.

The result:

Free hat, ohhh yeah. Brent’s jealous now.

As a follow-up to my post a few days ago about Thom and Katie’s wedding, I wanted to add a few photos from the official wedding photographer. I didn’t take any of the ceremony or the stuff afterward, since he was hopping all over the place like a squirrel on meth and had a much more impressive camera than I did.

Here’s the nice “you may kiss the bride” moment:

Then we started taking various combo shots, and apparently I’m the only one who didn’t get the memo that we were not doing a “goofy shot” here.

Classy.

Then we decided to actually do a goofy shot, and suddenly everyone started laughing and pointing. I figured that was the theme of the shot, so I pointed as well. What they all saw– and I didn’t– was a little chipmunk that had popped up on a nearby rock next to the wedding certificate. I suppose that’s a sign of some kind, although I have no idea what it might mean…

We were eventually able to get things together and do a proper goofy shot.

Here’s a nice one of me and my favorite bro.

And finally, the happy couple surveying their domain.

“Everywhere the light touches, Simba…”