Grishny's Journal

I wrote that post about a month ago, but only today (Hey, Happy St. Patrick’s Day everybody!) finally figured out how to get it to post to my blog from my iPad.

Now I’m immediately writing another entry since it’s been a month.

The iPad’s certainly made life more fun. I carry it with me just about everywhere. I’ve used it at church as my Bible a few times. It was a great boon to my recent career upgrade (more about that further in). It makes waiting in all sorts of places more tolerable and even downright enjoyable.

And I’m hoping it’ll help me blog a bit more regularly. It certainly has made me into a more regular Tweeter, though I’m not certain that’s always a good thing…

It’s become my primary music / podcast player, at least when I’m in the car alone. And when someone else is driving I can use it to check my email, read my RSS feed, etc.

So enough about that. Recent happenings:

Jonathan turned 11 on Monday. His birthday also happened to coincide with day one of his required-by-the-state standardized testing, which he did along with a lot of other homeschoolers in the area at an organized event at Faith Bible Fellowship church in York. So that was a bit of a bummer to have to do that on his birthday, but he handled it okay. He got to have several of his friends from church over all afternoon on Sunday, and they ran rampant through the house and the backyard after having a lunch of mini-pizzas on English muffins, chips and of course, cake and ice cream. Jonathan’s friends gave him some nice gifts including some new Lego sets to add to his collection.

Jonathan had been asking for his own digital camera for a few months, and we’d been looking for one but hadn’t been able to find one we were willing to spend the money on. I had my own ideas for a rather pricey gift for Jonathan, and couldn’t afford to do both, so it looked like the camera was going to have to wait. But then Grandma Kanost found out about his birthday wish, and as Grandmas have a way of doing, she made it come true. So on the evening of his b-day Jonathan got to go to Best Buy and pick out his new toy. He went with a Kodak, which I think was a good choice; we’ve had several good Kodak cameras through the years.

Jonathan’s big gift from us was a new bicycle. He enjoys riding, but we’ve struggled with finding him a bike that’s the right size for him the last few years, going through three different ones all of which ended up being a bit too small. So this year I decided I was going to take him down to the Bike House in Jacobus and get him “professionally fitted” for his first 24-speed bike. He picked out a black and gray one with yellow highlights. He got to ride it for approximately 1 minute after we brought it home before it started raining. I also took my own bike in for some maintenance, so once I pick it back up again no doubt he and I will hit the Rail Trail together. And now Matthew can upgrade to Jonathan’s old bike instead of the one he has now that’s too small for him.

The big news in my life is a major change in my job / career situation. Last December I started putting out feelers toward the end of making a job change. My current employer has been very good to me through the past five years, but since being acquired by a larger company the whole mood and company culture has changed, and so many others have left for other jobs that its just not the same workplace it used to be. So I updated my resume and put it out on some of the major job sites, and began meeting with recruiters and even went out on one interview in the Lancaster area. I wanted something closer to home, since my salary hadn’t really been keeping up with rising costs of everything, especially vehicle maintenance and fuel. We’ve been down to one vehicle since my car died in October, and looking at the numbers there was just no way I could keep up.

Then I was pleasantly surprised at the beginning of the year when my company updated my job title and gave me a very good bump in pay along with it. It was enough of a raise that I decided it might be best to stay where I was for the time being, and I stopped actively looking. However, I left my updated resumes out on the job sites. A couple months went by and nothing happened. Then in early March, I got a call out of the blue from a recruiter that saw my resume on Monster. They referred me to a company in Camp Hill, PA that was looking for a web designer / front-end developer. I did a phone interview, and that went well so they brought me in for a face-to-face, which went extremely well. I was offered the job the next day, accepted it the day after and gave my two weeks’ notice on Friday of last week.

Needless to say I’m excited and just a little nervous. Change will do that, but I really think this is going to prove to be a blessing. The job is half the distance from home as my current situation. The salary is another bump up from the bump I just received in January. I expect it will be enough that we can begin putting some money aside and in a few months be able to purchase a second vehicle for me to drive to work again so that Amy and the boys will not be stranded at home unless they drop me off at work.

So that’s what’s new around here.

So its been a while since I wrote anything for this little corner of the web I call my own. What is up is that thanks to my generous mom, I am writing this particular entry on the WordPress app on my new iPad.
My mom got me a snowblower for Christmas, a gift with which I was pleased. However, I soon came to realize that it wasn’t very practical for the small size of our property and the (usually) small amount of snow we get each winter. That coupled with repeated difficulties getting the snowblower to run–I’ve never been very good with machinery–eventually led me to decide to return it.
So a couple weeks later, Best Buy gift card in hand, I picked up my very own, and very first, piece of Apple tech. So far I’ve been nothing but pleased, and every day seem to find some new way to expand the usefulness of this little device.
For example, I have started using it during my morning devotions. Using a free Bible app called Logos, I can read any passage of Scripture, in just about any version. I can touch any word on the screen to pull up info on the original language including its number in Strong’s concordance. Saves a great deal of time.
I picked up my iPad on the same day that we drove out to Bellefonte, PA to visit my uncle Gary and his family again. Hopefully it did not absorb too much of my attention during our visit. We got in three games of Settlers of Catan, and one each of Quiddler, Rage, and Fluxx, so I think I managed not to get too sucked in. We had an enjoyable visit as always, and this time their pastor thought my name was Robert. He remembered Amy’s name, though.
Matthew is a sight to see right now. He is missing three of his front teeth at once, which makes understanding what he’s saying a very interesting proposition. The tooth fairy has been getting a bit overwhelmed at our house. On the most recent tooth, he was a day late, since Matthew lost the tooth in the evening and decided to place the tooth under his pillow without informing anyone else of its loss. I guess he thinks the TF is omiscient.
Jonathan is still sprouting up like a weed, getting taller and taller. I have a sneaking suspicion that he is going to be taller than either of his parents. He is taking after Grandpa Kanost. His 11th birthday will be next month, and he wants his own digital camera. And so it begins… now he knows about technology, and every year his gift requests are going to get more expensive!
At least his little brother is still content with legos and action figures.

Late last year I went in to see my optometrist for my “annual” eye exam. I was surprised to learn that it had been nearly two years since my last visit… I thought I’d been in more recently than that. The doctor did his usual round of tests, and after I read all the little letters and numbers for him, determined that my prescription hadn’t changed. However, this time I failed the glaucoma test. The pressure inside my eyeballs was too high.

If you’re not familiar with it, the glaucoma pressure test is the one where you look into a viewfinder on a rather large machine at a little green LED light. The doctor tells you to open your eyes as wide as possible and hold as still as possible, and then the machine shoots a puff of air right into your eyeball, making you jump. Sometimes you bump your nose on the machine. I bet sometimes, people even yelp and maybe fall off the chair. That’s never happened to me, but if you got a jumpy person in there, who knows?

Anyway, the doctor shot his little air puffs into each of my eyes three times, and then shared the results with me. During previous visits, I’d been told that while my numbers were a little higher than normal, they were still within the “safe zone”. This time, I was over. According to my doctor, the upper limit of the safe zone for intraocular pressure is 21; mine was at 27. Still, he said it might be an anomalous reading, so he ran the test again a few weeks later when I came in to pick up my new specs. Numbers were still high, so the doctor ordered up a series of additional tests.

I go in for those tests tomorrow. My regular optometrist won’t be doing them due to insurance issues; I’ll be a seeing a specialist. It’ll be an adventure. I cannot say I’m looking forward to it, but I am glad that this problem has been caught early on. After the initial diagnosis, I talked to my mom about her father, who also had glaucoma. She told me that its pretty likely he started with it around the same age that I am now, but because he never really went in for regular eye exams, his glaucoma wasn’t discovered until he suffered a hemorrhage in his late forties. He lost a good deal of vision from that, and it affected his night vision to the point where later in life, he couldn’t drive at night any longer. I still remember watching him take his drops when I was a kid.

Soon it’ll be my turn!

*Update – the news was good; I do not have glaucoma. The doctor informed me that I have a thicker-than-average cornea, which can throw off the results of the standard air puff pressure test. He used some more sophisticated tests on my eyes and my pressure read on the high end of normal (and he said that probably means the actual intra-ocular pressure is more like 15 or 16 because the thicker cornea gives a higher reading).

2010 wasn’t a big year for this blog, and I doubt 2011 will be either. I’ve never been really big on journaling, so I suppose it should come as no surprise that the blogging thing didn’t quite catch on with me.

But there’s always hope, and there’s always something to blab about if I feel like it. New Year’s Day is as good an excuse as any. Still, the problem these days always seems to be that I have way too many things I want to do and nowhere near enough time to do them all. I think I’m pretty good at prioritizing when I want to, but it always feels like work so I almost never manage to do it for personal things. I almost always end up defaulting to whatever I currently feel like doing the most (which usually isn’t anything productive like writing a blog entry).

This personality trait is very dangerous for me in a spiritual sense. As a Christian, I know that my number one priority should be giving time and attention to God; looking for ways to become more like Christ and glorify him with my life. I know that the number one necessity in order to do these things is to start each day by opening my Bible and studying it–and that’s one of those “personal” things I have trouble prioritizing.

Sometimes I feel like a stupid animal, running through a series of lab tests and never learning anything… or rather, learning the same lesson over and over again because I never use what I learn to improve my performance. Every day that I skip my time with God, I see the effects of it in my life. When I’m walking in the Spirit, I’m not as crabby, grouchy, grumpy, mean-spirited, angry and spiteful. It’s easier to forgive the faults I find in others; it’s easier to see the faults I usually don’t in myself. When I’m not, the opposite becomes clearly true. I lose my temper; I say and do things I later (and sometimes instantly) regret.

Confessing all this in a blog that next to nobody reads on New Year’s Day feels cliché to me. I didn’t start out this entry planning to write on this topic.  I was going to talk about all the neat new stuff I got to do or  try in 2010, and about all the neat new stuff I’m looking forward to doing or trying in 2011, but once I finished typing the opening paragraph, it just seemed pointless. It’s all vanity, just like Solomon said in Ecclesiastes. It’s all fluff that I filled my life with to hide from myself the fact that my life is meaningless and empty apart from God. It’s far too easy to do, but if I continue down that path I know one day I’ll look back and realize I did nothing with my life that really mattered.

I want it to count for something.

When somebody registers on your blog with the user name “sex”, it means it’s time to change the registration settings. So that’s just what I’ve done. Until now, anybody who wanted to could register, but you could only post comments if I gave permission. Those days are over; if you want to be a registered subscriber you’re going to have to request that I register you. I’ve also deleted the 100+ spamalicious users that have registered over the years. I tried not to delete anybody I actually know, but if I accidentally deleted a legitimate user, please let me know and I’ll re-register ya.

June… July… August… September. Yes, it’s September now and the last time I posted here was in June about stuff that happened in February. That’s bad; that’s real real bad. Uncommunicative me. I’ve been rather busy you see… I haven’t updated my photo album since June either and have quite the backlog of photos. Very busy.

Still am, in fact, so this post needs to be quick. Here are some highlights of what’s been or currently is going on in Grishny World:

This summer our family participated in the library’s York County Parks program again, and this year we completed all of the 30 parks, finishing at Kline’s Run near Wrightsville. The boys will get 3 entries each in the grand prize drawing, and we got to do lots of fun hikes and discovered quite a few interesting places in and around our area that we didn’t know about.

We recently spent a long weekend with my uncle’s family again in Bellefonte, PA and met my folks, my sister Sarah and her husband Matthew, and my other sister Gwen’s kids Jacob and Lydia came along with them. We got to set up and use the tent that mom got the boys for their birthdays for the first time, and I spent two nights in it chaperoning 4-5 adventurous kids. My mom fell and broke her hand the week before the trip, but came anyway and it seemed to get better over the weekend. Sarah Beth and Matthew are pregnant!

I recently marked my 4th anniversary in my current job. Things are changing at my workplace, which is one of the reasons I’ve been so busy. Can’t get into the details… quick post, remember?

Here are some latests:

Latest movie: There Will Be Blood. Liked it. “I drink your milkshake!”

Latest book: Salem’s Lot by Stephen King. Actually listening to the audiobook. Sorry Mr. Kurtz.

Latest album: The Suburbs by Arcade Fire. This is their third album and the best one they’ve put out yet. Or so this guy thinks. I’ve been listening to it over and over and there’s only one track on it that I dislike. I can’t pick a favorite song from it because there’s too many good’ns.

Latest other stuff: Just finished the first season of X-Files on Netflix and the third season of the new Doctor Who (and started on the fourth). “Blink” was awesome. Beat Super Mario Brothers Wii and got gold trophies in all the grand prix races in Mario Kart but still haven’t discovered / unlocked everything in either game. Was asked to consider becoming a deacon at church; still haven’t made a decision regarding that one. Started teaching Jonathan how to play Starfleet Battles. Started collecting MTG cards. Have almost caught up to the present listening to Pseudopod and Podcastle podcasts, and started listening to / reading Lightspeed Magazine.

I could keep blathering but I’ll stop now. Maybe I’ll post again soon!

Where was I?

Oh yeah. Talking about our long weekend trip to Washington D.C. from FOUR MONTHS AGO. This is why I call this a “journal” and not a blog, because it is not, nor will it ever be, anything close to resembling “regular” or “current.”

In case you hadn’t noticed, I’ve been writing these entries in conjunction with posting the photos from the same weekend over at our online photo album. Many of the captions for the photos there are part of these journal entries. I will continue that trend with this last entry about our DC trip.

So our first day in DC was almost over. We’d seen all the stuff we wanted to on the National Mall, and walked back to the Reagan Building via 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a.k.a. the White House. We saw some dudes on the roof doing something with some equipment on a tripod, and a helicopter!

We took a self-portrait too! Then we realized that we were standing right in front of the national Christmas tree, so we took a picture of it too, even though it didn’t have any lights on it or anything. Upon reading the plaque about the tree, imagine our delight and surprise to discover that the tree was originally transplanted from our own town of York, PA! So we took a picture of the plaque too.

For lunch, we returned to the Reagan Building food court, which was packed with people due to a security conference taking place in the atrium. Everybody got something different; I had some okay Chinese food. I still say the best Chinese food in America is in Maine. At least the best I’ve had. After lunch, it was getting close to 3:00, so we decided to head out of the city and try to beat the rush hour. We were fairly successful, as I think we made it to our hotel in Gaithersburg by 4:30 or so.

We took no pictures at our hotel for some reason. I think I may have photo burnout, because I rarely feel like taking pictures any more. But it was a nice hotel, a Candlewood Suites. It had an exercise room, which I didn’t use, and an indoor pool which we did use. It was near a mall area that reminded me a lot of the Greene near my sister’s house in Kettering, Ohio. That night we had dinner at one of the nearby restaurants, a Mexican place called Uncle Julio’s. I tried quail and it was okay. Everybody else seemed to enjoy their meals though.

The next day we took the Metro back into Washington for our second day in the city. Gaithersburg was chosen for our accommodations because it was near a Metro terminal. We got one-day passes, and rode the train all the way into downtown D.C. The boys both really enjoyed the train ride as it was their first, unless you count riding the tram at the airport in Baltimore when we went to Texas.

Our first (and only) stop of the day on day two was the National Museum of American History. Originally, we were supposed to be in D.C. the first day as part of the home school group from our church, and were to spend that day at the history museum, but everyone else ended up cancelling due to a snowstorm and we decided to do our own thing since we were no longer part of a group.

The National Museum of American History was jam-packed with things to see; way more stuff than we could fit into one day; still, we toured the whole museum and saw as much as we could. I know there were things I missed. The camera came back out for the museum, and I took plenty of pictures, though not all of them turned out, and many of them were blurry since I didn’t have my tripod with me.

We saw the original C-3PO suit worn by Anthony Daniels during the filming of Star Wars Episode IV: Return of the Jedi. That was in one of the glass cases that line the grand hallway at the main entrance to the museum. These cases are full of all kind of American memorabilia, but we didn’t spend a great deal of time looking at them; instead we moved on to the museums main sections. The first one was themed “On the Water” and was all about the history of travel and trade on America’s waterways. This was one part of an entire wing dedicated to the history of transportation, and all of these areas kind of merged together; we saw boats, trains, buses, automobiles, and all other kinds of ways that people have gotten around over the years.

In one spot (I think the theme was public transportation) there was a painting on the wall of commuters coming down the stairs off of a bus or some other type of public transportation; the museum had built a set of prop steps continuing from the painting out of the wall and down to the floor. The boys thought this was great and had to climb on the three fake steps.

After a couple hours of walking around looking at stuff, we all started to get a little tired. Matthew went inside an old-style bus interior to have a little quiet time. I joined him for a bit. It wasn’t all that quiet; the front end of the bus was a video screen that showed a bunch of women in 1950′s style clothing gabbing about their Christmas shopping.

We kept on going, though, and saw many more exhibits that day, with subjects including, but not limited to, Thomas Alva Edison, Pop Culture, Musical Instruments, Abraham Lincoln, and the history of all of the United States’ presidents to date. By the time we left and boarded the metro again for our return trip to G-Burg, we were all tuckered out. Jonathan fell asleep on the train.

That evening for dinner we once again went to one of the restaurants near our hotel, California Pizza Kitchen. Amy had never been to one, and she was appreciative of the fine cuisine. I don’t remember exactly what we did afterwards, but I think we visited the hotel pool again, and the boys and I played some games in our room.

The following day (Saturday) our mini-vacation was over; since we had to be home for church on Sunday we headed back in the morning. On the way we stopped at historic Savage Mill in Savage, Maryland, where there are a number of shops; I had heard about the family game store there and wanted to check it out. Amy found a craft shop and got to buy some scrapbooking fancy papers. I didn’t buy anything for myself, but Jonathan picked out a new expansion for his HeroScape minatures game; we decided to consider it an early birthday present.

And then we went home. Here ends the tale of our Washington Weekend. Four months in the telling! Epic.

After we descended from the Washington Monument, we made our way east toward the other end of the National Mall. The first place we visited was the World War 2 Memorial. It’s a huge oval, surrounded by pillars with a large pool and fountains in the center. Each one of the pillars has the name of a state or a U.S. territory on it. It still being winter, the pool was empty and the fountains turned off. The WW2 Memorial is a fairly recent installation… it was opened to the public in 2004.

After walking through the war memorial, we walked down the pathway through the trees on the south side of the Reflecting Pool and made our long way to the Lincoln Memorial. Everything is so open at the National Mall, the Lincoln Memorial looked closer to me than it actually was. It probably took close to ten minutes to walk the length of the pool and up the steps to the Memorial. This was likely in part due to the fact that I kept stopping to take pictures.

Looking back on visiting the Lincoln Memorial, I began to wonder why it exists in the form it does. It is very, very much like a temple, down to the massive “idol” with offerings laid at its feet. I doubt that anybody actually comes and worships the statue of Lincoln, but still—none of the other monuments or memorials idolized the person or people they commemorate in quite this way. I think much of it is explained by the inscription over the head of the statue: “…he saved the union…”. Our country might no longer exist today if it hadn’t been for Lincoln’s leadership.

I did a biographical report on Abraham Lincoln when I was in elementary school; I think it was for sixth grade history. Everything I’ve ever read about Lincoln makes me think that, as humble a man as he was, he would have been very uncomfortable with being remembered in such a big way… which seems ironic, since his great humility is one of the reasons he is, and should be, remembered with such respect.

After visiting the Lincoln Memorial, we walked back the way we’d come and wandered over to see the Korean War Veteran’s Memorial. A large part of this memorial consists of a field of low shrubberies with life-size gray statues of soldiers walking through wearing stone rain ponchos. They look very mournful. Amy thought all of these soldier statues looked spooky. I guess because they’re all gray and kind of look like soldier ghosts.

Next we headed across the Mall to visit the Vietnam War Memorial. We saw the Three Soldiers, the Wall, and the Vietnam Women’s Memorial. We took pictures of the boys, looking at and reflected in the wall. We explained to both of them what the names on the wall meant, but it didn’t really seem to have an impact on either Jonathan or Matthew.

Something that I’d never realized, despite having seen many photos of the Vietnam Memorial, was the fact that the wall was built into the earth, and that it wasn’t all the same height. I’d always pictured the wall in my mind as a free-standing structure with the names engraved on both sides.

Since we didn’t know personally anyone who died in Vietnam, we weren’t looking for any names in particular. However, if you go to the website for the wall, you can search all of the names to find out where a particular one is located. Amy’s mom had a relative who died in the war at the age of 19, but she didn’t remember his name correctly until the next day, and we didn’t make it back to the Memorial to look for him.

The afternoon was getting on by the time we finished seeing everything we wanted to on the National Mall, and since we wanted to avoid the rush hour traffic that we experienced on our way into the city, we decided it was time to go get some lunch back in the Reagan building and then leave for our hotel in Gaithersburg, Maryland. On the way back, we strolled over to Pennsylvania Avenue so we could get a better view of the White House. While taking some pictures, I noticed a couple men up on the roof of the White House, and I wondered what they were doing up there… but it’s probably a matter of national security, so I guess I’ll never know.

We left our house early on Thursday morning, February 25, at 6:00 AM. We were planning all along on getting breakfast once we arrived at our destination — Washington, D.C. I thought we’d make the trip in about three hours, but it ended up being closer to four by the time we made it to the Ronald Reagan building and found a place to park in the underground garage there. Our original plan had been to find a metro station outside of D.C. to park at and ride the bus or a train into the city. Then we learned about the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center at 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue. This building has a huge underground parking garage, and we found out we could park there for only $20 for the whole day. It took some time driving around inside to find an empty spot, but it was worth it. Closing in on 10:00 AM by the time we walked into the food court, we went to the first place we saw that was still serving breakfast… Bassett’s!

Giddy with excitement at stepping foot for the first time on the soil (concrete) of our nation’s capitol, Amy and the boys began to run around the big open plaza outside of the Ronald Reagan building. It was cold and blustery, but sunny that day. Still, we all needed our coats, and it wasn’t too long before we all had them fully fastened and zipped with hoods up.

We saw a giant sculpture in Woodrow Wilson Plaza that Amy dubbed “The Shoe.” According to the Reagan Building’s web site, it’s supposed to be a hammer, was created by sculptor Martin Puryear, and is called Bearing Witness.

Making our way out of W.W. Plaza to Constitution, we rounded the corner of a building and caught a very patriotism-inspiring view of the Washington Monument, behind some trees in between the edge of the Museum of American History and Old Glory. We passed by the National Museum of American History on our way to see the monument. Originally, we were supposed to be meeting several families from our church’s home school group at the museum at 10:00 AM Thursday morning, but bad weather forecasts in Pennsylvania caused all of the other families to cancel the trip. Since we had already booked and paid for a hotel room in Gaithersburg, Maryland for the weekend (no refunds), we went ahead and made the trip.

This wasn’t my first time ever in D.C. No, the first time I was ever here was in 1998, when my friends Gordon Scott and Korbet Finley were flying with me on our way to my wedding. We had a layover at Reagan, so I got to see all of the monuments, memorials, and historical buildings from the air as we landed. But we had to catch our flight to Boston, so there was no time for sightseeing during that trip.

Even though it was bright and clear all morning, we had to deal with high wind speeds, which made the low temperature feel even colder. The National Park Service rangers at the Washington Monument told us that the gusts were in the 24-27 miles per hour range, and that they would have to close the monument if they went above 30. But I thought that even if we didn’t get to go up in the monument, it was still impressive just to be there, right next to it. At one point, I walked up to the monument next to Jonathan and put my hand against the stones. “I’m really touching it,” I said— or something to that effect. Jonathan looked at me dubiously, and then tried touching the monument himself. “What’s the big deal?”, he probably thought.

We had been warned by some of our friends who had been to Washington a few years before that tickets for tours of the Washington Monument were in high demand, and that the only way to get them was to go to the ticket window on site as early as possible and wait in line. However, I found out that it is now possible to reserve tickets on-line for a small fee (normally they are free). We didn’t do that, though, so I assumed that we’d just be looking at the monument, but not going on the tour to go up to the obervation deck and mini-museum at the top. After walking up to the monument itself and checking it out, Amy wanted to go back down to the ticket booth just to see if we could still get tickets. Turned out, maybe because it was off season or perhaps because of the forecast for snow that day, that there were still plenty of tickets left, even for the very next tour!

At the top of the Washington Monument is an observatory, with small windows facing out in every direction. Despite the small number of people able to ride up in one full elevator, it was pretty crowded at the top, at least until most of the group got tired of looking out the windows and went down to the mini-museum one floor down where the elevator to go back down was boarding. Then we had a few minutes before the next group came up to look out all the windows ourselves and take some photos. Then, when we’d finally had enough of gawking out the windows, we joined the rest of the folks waiting on the floor below for the elevator back to the ground. The ride back down was a lot more interesting that the ride up, because we slowed and even stopped several times to view the commemorative granite blocks that comprise the walls of the monument. On the outside they’re all smooth, but on the inside there are all sorts of carvings honoring the different state and national organizations that donated the blocks.

Check out the pictures from the first part of our Washington weekend! And check back in the near future to read about the rest of our weekend.

Lookit me, I’m halfway to seventy! Now I just have to do the other half plus a week to see the year 2045! How cool is that?

My email inbox was flooded with messages from fellow Facebook users this morning. That’s new; when I turned 25 and even 30 I could probably count on two hands the number of people who wished me a happy birthday on the day. Modern times!

This is the first birthday since I turned 29 that I’ve been in Dayton, Ohio with my whole family on my birthday. After we moved to Pennsylvania, we always traveled on Thanksgiving or other holidays, but never for Christmas. This year would have been the same, but then this little wedding thing happened and changed all our plans! We would have come here for Thanksgiving this year, and probably taken a full week, but instead we used two of the vacation days to come for Sarah Beth’s wedding two weekends before Turkey Day.

I wasn’t sure how I was going to use the remaining two days, until I was talking to Mom on the phone a few weeks before the wedding and she was bemoaning the possibility of having no one at her house for Christmas morning. At the time, Gwen and Dan were planning to be in Canada with Dan’s sister, and Sarah Beth and Matthew were going to be visiting his grandparents in Chicago. So I told my mom that she and Dad should come to York for Christmas, but I knew that probably wasn’t going to happen, since Mom always hosts Christmas dinner for the whole Dayton Kanost clan on the afternoon of December 25th.

So I emailed my father and suggested that if they couldn’t come to see us, we would come visit them for the holidays, and try to surprise Mom. Surprising Mom isn’t easy. We brought Gwen, and eventually all of the Ernsts and Sarah Beth and Matthew in on the secret as well. Yesterday, we drove out to Ohio from PA and came straight to Gwen’s house, arriving around 4:30. We parked two blocks away and around two corners from her house so our car wouldn’t be spotted. Gwen invited everyone over for dinner, Mom included, and we practiced surprising her twice, first when Sarah Beth and Matthew arrived and again when Dad showed up. Gwen had rearranged her living room, and had Jonathan and (our) Matthew crouch down on the couch while Amy and I sat on the floor, so that anyone coming down the steps into the room couldn’t see us until they walked over past the couch.

Sarah Beth and Matt, and Dad as well, saw us right away, and pretended to act surprised even though they knew we were going to be there, and we were ready and in our places when Mom arrived straight from work around ten after six. Gwen had Jake sitting at the computer in the corner of the living room and his job was to call Grandma to come look at what he was doing so she would have to cross the room and walk past the sofa. It worked, and she walked right past us without even seeing us. Everyone else was sitting around the room and grinning, and Mom turned around and said “why is everyone laughing?” And still she didn’t see us! She looked right at Gwen, who was standing behind the couch where we were, and then finally glanced down and saw us.

A split second and a double-take later, Mom was screaming, running around the room and waving her hands wildly in the air, laughing and crying and then hugging. It was the best Christmas surprise ever! Dan had set up his video camera to catch the whole event on tape, and I hope to get a copy to post here eventually.

La di dee, la di da, what’s been goin’ on?

We spent our first Thanksgiving ever in our own home in York this year, with Amy’s mother who drove down from New Hampshire to spend part of the week with us. We moved to York five years ago, and the first year we made our first trip back to Ohio to spend Turkey Time with my family; then in 2005 we went the opposite direction and spent the holiday with Amy’s family. 2006 saw us going back to Ohio, and then in 07 and 08 we were invited over to the home of some friends from church.

We all enjoyed the holidays very much, and I especially enjoyed receiving one of my Christmas presents from Amy early on Thanksgiving Day … a brand new Toshiba Satellite laptop computer. I knew that my wife was saving up to get me a “big deal” gift this year, but I didn’t know what it was, and I certainly wasn’t expecting to get it a month early, but then our PC went out of commission (still is, by the way) and Amy feared I would go out and spend money we didn’t have to get it fixed, so she acted decisively and basically said “here, you can use this until we get the other one fixed.”

On Black Friday I went shopping! (This is unusual for me; I’m usually a Black Friday Hermit and try not to leave the house on that day). There was no getting up at 3 AM to wait in line anywhere, but I did hit Target, Toys R Us, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and even Advance Auto Parts. AAP came first, and I spent several hours that morning in the garage, putting a new alternator into our 1994 Oldsmobile and getting worked up into a temporary bad mood, which usually happens when I am forced to work on home or auto repair projects and haven’t really got a clue what I’m doing. And of course once the new part was in, the car still wouldn’t start, but it turned out to be nothing more than a nearly totally drained battery that just needed to be recharged.

The big ticket items purchased that weekend: the alternator weighs in as the single most expensive, at around $130 bucks. I also picked up two new Wii games for the kids to open (but for all of us to play), both involving a certain mustachioed Italian plumber in red overalls. Other purchases were a new set of earbuds (my old Skullcandies finally died the week before) and a wireless router for our house to use with the new laptop (and also the Wii, and also if we can get it fixed our desktop PC, which came with a wireless card that we’ve never used).

The latest guess on the PC woes is that it needs a new CPU fan, which I priced at Best Buy the other night; it would seem I can get one for around $30 bucks and change, but I’ll also probably need to replace the thermal gel that gets sandwiched between the heat sink and the processor chip. Oh, the things I’m learning! Sadly, it seems as though we’ll have to wait until after the New Year to make these repairs, and then find out if they are the only repairs required or if there is yet more. The recently repaired Oldsmobile must pass state inspection by years’ end; the mortgage and multitudinous other bills must be paid, and there are certainly other unforeseen holiday-related expenses to come this month; the Kanost coffers will have to be refilled before computer parts can be acquired.

Well, when I started this post I had no intention of writing a consumer report on how my family is contributing to the economic health of our country and fighting the recession, but I suppose that’s the nature of blogging; at least when I do it. Maybe next time I’ll go back to talking about television, movies and books.