Month: December 2018

GRINCH

Last night, Alex and I played in the Grass Roots INdoor Charity Hat Tournament, also known as GRINCH. There were 90 people on eight teams, and even though our team didn’t go to the championships, we had a good time.

Laralee came along to watch, and took some pictures with my camera. Since I don’t have a high-speed zoom lens, and the action is usually pretty far from the sidelines, the photos tend to come out a bit blurry or grainy. Still, she managed to capture a few good ones of me and Alex.

It’s clear from these nice shots of Alex and me scoring in separate games that we have the same form in our catches:

Here’s another one of Alex scoring without all the drama of a big leap:

And I’m reaching above Rhonda a second time:

Alex did a great job on the field, especially considering he hasn’t played ultimate much lately. (I don’t have a good excuse, as I play weekly.) It was fun to be on a team together.

The card

Continuing the tradition of ghastly Christmas cards, I decided this year to do something completely different. Like the last four years, there was an added challenge of incorporating one of our kids who was away on a mission (Alex for two years, now Kyra for two). Without an opportunity for a “photo shoot”, I turned to the Renaissance.

After a bit of searching, I found a painting by Charles le Brun that would work. It was a family portrait featuring an incredibly homely group, with the added bonus of Charles painting himself painting (note the creepy guy in the mirror on the left).

This particular guy had more kids than me, so I had to do some cropping. I was able to remove a daughter, Charles himself, a dog, the weird bust and globe, and the marble head on the floor. The result wasn’t half bad:

Laralee thinks “her” hair looks awful (it does), and Zaque was less than thrilled about being a chubby naked baby. But all the girls who saw the card remarked “You’re so adorable!” which lessened the trauma a bit.

I had the cards printed on “premium textured” stock, thinking it might make it seem a little more like canvas. I’m not sure the effect was really there, but it was fun to hear what people thought of the card when they opened it.

For an added bonus, as part of a 25-day Christmas gift game with Kyra and her mission companion, we were asked to send a family photo. Naturally I couldn’t resist printing this and framing it for her. Apparently her companion thinks our family is weird. Go figure!

Merry merry

Christmas was, as always, a rousing good time. We spent some time in the morning opening our presents…

“Who needs a pocketknife when you have a katana?” said Alex as he cut through the wrapping paper and packaging tape.

Laralee was a little nervous about her 12,000-piece jigsaw puzzle:

I managed to score not one, but two ties: a snowman that plays “Jingle Bells” (of course) and a cat-taco-burger-space monstrosity that I love.

Zaque enjoyed the unicorn head we took home from our white-elephant gift party; it even included hooves and a little sound machine called “Emergency Horse: providing you with horse sounds when you need them!”

As usual, Kathy won the Coolest Packaging Award with her custom name tags:

After a traditional breakfast of cinnamon bread, we talked to Kyra for a few hours. She’s still in California, with 56 days left of her mission.

A game of Sheriff of Nottingham, some homemade pizza, and watching Miracle on 34th Street completed a great day. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

BoomFlag

After spending literally hours looking at random combinations of words and figuring out which ones were (1) available as domains, (2) easy to say, (3) easy to spell, (4) short, and (5) totally meaningless, La and I settled on our new “personal” domain:

boomflag.com

Oh yeah. So now I’m going to start “transitioning” all of my personal email away from Zing, and using boomflag for everything. I figure with a six-month runway it should be okay. I’ll also eventually retire most of the other domains I own, which frankly aren’t used all that much anyway.

And that means this blog is moving from cyberschroeder.com to boomflag.com (it’s redirecting automatically). So if you’re one of my six loyal readers, it’s time to update your bookmarks!

Monkeys

Over the next few months, I’m going to have to transition away from using my @zingstudios.com email address, since I won’t be part of the company any more. So I’ve been thinking about domain names. Although I’ve had cyberschroeder.com for over 17 years now, I find that spelling it for people is a real pain. And an email on that domain is doubly bad for Laralee, since no one can spell her name either. I need something short, sweet, and memorable.

La, Alex, and I have been brainstorming ideas. Of course my first idea was thoughtmonkeys.com, based on the name of my latest business, but sadly it’s taken. Using the theme of “monkey”, which is a great word, easy to spell, and will definitely be memorable, we’ve been coming up with all kinds of combinations and checking whether the domains are available. shadowmonkeys.com, lightningmonkey.com, monkeytreat.com, and so on.

That led to talking about old 80’s TV shows, and what happens when you substitute “monkey” in the title. You end up with things like…

Mork and Monkey
Monkey, She Wrote
Monkey P.I.
The Greatest American Monkey
Little Monkey on the Prairie (or, Little House on the Monkey)
Monkey Days
Who’s the Monkey?
Quantum Monkey
Saved by the Monkey
Bosom Monkeys
Monkey Who
The Twilight Monkey
Monkey Night Live
The Love Monkey
Punky Monkey (possibly my favorite)

La and I are laughing so hard. Alex is chuckling, but since he doesn’t know the original shows, he can’t fully appreciate the jokes.

White elephant

Every year our friends host a “white elephant” gift exchange at Christmas time, and I often struggle to come up with a creative idea for a gift that’s both cool and lame at the same time. But a couple of years ago a thought struck me, and I’ve been working on it since then.

Behold, two thousand dollars in Amazon gift cards!

Because my credit card rewards program offers gift cards as an option, both Laralee and I have been cashing out our rewards as Amazon cards for years. It’s an easy way to buy books and games without feeling too “guilty” about spending the money. Well, I’ve been saving them for a couple of years now and have a stack of eighty that have all been used. I’ve slipped one unused card into the pile, so the lucky recipient of this gift will get twenty-five dollars. However, they’ll have to type in the fifteen-character codes on the backs of every one of these before they find the one that’s valid. Mwah ha HAAAA!

Cool! And lame!