Merry Christmas to those of you who are celebrating! I hope you have a fantastic, stress-free, fun day with your loved ones. I hope those of you who don’t celebrate Christmas ALSO have a fabulous day. We’re going to hit the theater (providing the five of us can agree on a movie)…right after we do all of this:
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As Good As It Was, The Conversation Ended Pretty Much How It Started.
The enjoyment of weight training workouts is something seventeen-year-old J and I have in common. When he was playing midfield in lacrosse a couple of years ago he discovered that adding resistance training on top of his practices made him stronger, of course, and his game improved. For the last two years he has chosen a weight training unit in gym class as much as is allowed, skipping over other units like basketball, soccer, and other sports, and on school breaks he’ll use the Bowflex we have in the basement. I have always (well, since I started working out twenty years ago) enjoyed feeling strong and having some tone in…
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Record Store Day 2012!
Your Black Friday traditions might include trying to find retail bargains, sleeping off your food coma, or putting up your Christmas tree. As usual, my family goes in a totally different direction. Our tradition, which is in its second year, is twofold: some of us (Jim and the boys) leave bright and early to hike in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and some of us (my sister and me, joined by Mom this year) head out to celebrate Record Store Day! Record Store Day celebrates vinyl and the idea of actually holding your music in your hands rather than using a digital file: believe it or not there ARE…
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The Greatest Show On Earth
Last night I went to the circus. My sister, J, and I headed out to take in the show and I realized it had been approximately thirty-five (ish) years since I had enjoyed a “real” circus, if you don’t count the much smaller-scale Shrine Circus that my father-in-law participated in when he was a clown named Jingles. (And I don’t.) Even that was about eighteen years ago. As the circus–the one known as “The Greatest Show On Earth’–started and seventeen-year-old J had the look on his face of being really impressed with the amazing acts (rather than the “I’m a teenager and I really don’t belong here” face), I suddenly…
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Weirdest Halloween Ever.
Halloween came and went (as it tends to do), and for the first time in twenty years we didn’t have a kid in costume. Not only that, but Halloween was almost–dare I say it?–exactly like any other day. It was bizarre to say the least. In fact, when J left for school, he said goodbye to me like he always does and walked out before I even remembered that it was Halloween at all. My decorations, as I’ve written about before, were pitiful. I didn’t even have time to take pictures of Roxie in her 2012 costume because I took a TDM class in the morning and then worked on…
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I’ll Take Pop Culture for $400, Alex.
We’re a pop culture-obsessed family. (Well, some of us more than one* of us.) It started with my sister and me. We are pop culture fanatics. We watched a healthy dose of television as youngsters**. As we grew up, we devoured movies, live shows, music, and magazines (and of course these days, the internet). As adults, we have exposed D and J to pop culture in the same way we were, and we have shared all of our favorite shows, movies, and music from our own youth. The result of the preoccupation with these kinds of things, besides the ability to be really good at answering questions from friends when…
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Retirement Party Surprise!
Next month, my Dad turns seventy and retires from a long (37 years-ish?) and storied* career in the hospitality industry, hotel management to be more specific. He is looking forward to Retirement Day so much that he has been counting the days for months now. (His enjoyment of the countdown has been greatly aided because of what he’s had to deal with at work lately: pimps, hookers, and drug dealers. Yes, really.) We wanted to throw a party in honor of his retirement, and it just so happened that he and my Mom were coming to town last weekend for her 50th high school reunion. Perfect. My sister designed some…
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Making A Fun Meal Plan Takes Talent & A Lazy Eye For Editing
For the entire time (minus a couple of lazy weeks here and there) since my sister moved in with us, she and I have made a monthly meal plan so we can keep track of who is cooking what and on which day. (Jim and J get dinner duty here and there, too.) At first we started with a straight-up paper calendar that we hung on the refrigerator, but once I finally entered the 21st century and started using Google Calendar for my own scheduling purposes after Julesie had been suggesting it to me for eons, I realized that being able to see the meal plan on my phone–say, if…
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Princess and Knight Training at Medieval Times: A Giveaway, Too!
With all of the things my family has ever done in the Chicago area, believe it or not we’ve never been to Medieval Times. Correction: We HAD never been to Medieval Times until just weeks ago. The Medieval Times Dinner and Tournament has always been on our to-do list, and why not? Horses! Battles! Colorful characters! Jousting! Eating food without utensils! My family was invited to check out the show as well as the Princess Training (we just watched, of course, having not brought a young girl with us, though I tweeted at the time that I probably could have taught the course…) and so we headed to the castle.…
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Go Ahead Punk, Make My Day.
Jim is watching “The Enforcer”, and after watching a scene which contained some very unexpected dialogue (I’ve never seen the movie before), I sat here for five whole minutes doing my best “Dirty Harry” impression in J’s face, finger-pointing and all. “There’s a lot of shooting in this movie, PUNK.” “Hey, he just shot a nun, PUNK. A NUN.” “That wasn’t very nice of him, was it, PUNK?” “Hey, that woman was in a very popular television show in the 80s called ‘Cagney & Lacey’, PUNK.” “As a matter of fact, that was a show about two lady cops, and it was awesome, PUNK.” “Hey PUNK, you’re not even listening…