Christmas with the Kaisers!

Infrared christmas tree


many of you know...
meg had to work on christmas, and so her parents and brother were coming up to our place to bring christmas to her (and me).

much housecleaning ensued.

Then meg got home from work at 9am on christmas with her parents not coming up until after 1pm. so she got a nap.

so there wasn't much hanging about, entertaining, and whatnot. once they got here and brought in all the pots, pans, and casserole dishes for dinner, and got the food cooking it was a go.

the following are the sum total of the pictures taken during the whole evening.

with the exception of our presents to them, they had already had their presents, and so it was all meg and i opening. which is not conducive to snapping a bunch of shots.

now for the loot:
i got the "planet earth" dvd series, "the war" book, dvd, and soundtrack (the ww2 ken burns documentary), an airzooka, remote control helicopter (and a car), a box of pears (all to myself), and some other small stuff. it was really very nice, and it will keep my entertained for hours (if not weeks).

meg got me the first season of a show called "flight of the conchords" and it is really funny. she also got me a french film i haven't seen called "delicatessen" by the director of amelie it looks pretty good, i'll let you know, and some glow wire for the car.

friday through sunday i will be in hanford to see cory and annie and the rest of the family. i am looking forward to that, probably nothing else until i get back.

hope you had a great christmas, and your new year's eve is "rockin"

Rest in Peace: Claude

today, after battling a month long illness my veiled chameleon claude passed away. he was pretty (at times), and fiesty, and really a pretty lousy pet. but i loved him. he was 1.5 years old, taken too soon. the following pictures are claude the day i got him, and today.
private services will be held for the family.

Re-decking the halls

(afraid of electricity-and not without good reason)

so, on the way back from the kaisers we decided to up our christmas game, so to speak. we picked up our first live christmas tree (and a stand as well) we had been using the same artificial "charlie brown" tree for the last 5 years, and we now had more ornaments than tree. but with the limited space in an apartment we didn't want to store a full sized fake tree, so despite the environmental impact surveys we conducted we got a real one. this is the final result

visiting the in-laws

Over the weekend we went down to meg's folks. They have quite the collection of beasties. i am holding an umbrella cockatoo (shoulder), parrotlet (shirt pocket), yellow-naped amazon (left), and a caique (pronounced ki-eek, right) and those are just the psittaciforms. meg is getting kisses from CC, the most recent addition to the zoo. and that is meg and trouble the friendly squirrel, with albert the less friendly kookaburra over her shoulder. mind you this barely scratches the surface.

its always fun to visit them, we went out to dinner and a movie. (DO NOT see michael clayton it is the slowest dullest movie ever made, including the combined lotr trilogy-aweful)

new "oc" workshop, with your host nate abrams

today i finally got to work on the skirt around the new perch for charlie. this was the first time i got to use my new dremel. i cut up some quarter inch mdf boards and half by 2inch pine for support in the corners. i used butt joints and assembled it on the perch then stapled it into the base--it will never come off. the dremel cut impressively through both the pine and mdf, i should invest in some clamps to secure the guide rail (as vise-grips work only marginally and bite up the wood)

i am really pleased with the results, and now the dog will not spread cedar chips around the house. woo hoo.

Meg and Charlie's Christmas

This year for meg i set up an appointment for a makeup consultation at MAC and also a gift card to use toward the products. The idea being that meg would get some instruction and objective input on colors and her skin tones etc. Ever since we began dating meg had held in reverence the mac brand, and always said "someday when i can afford it i am going to wear that makeup", i decided that she deserves that luxury for christmas this year.

we started out today with a field trip to the newport bay wilderness preserve, ogled some plants and animals, and then went to cha for tea for lunch. then we went to omar's and spent some more christmas money on a new stand for charlie. you can see the old stand he was using on the left, it was plastic that was barely staying together. i still need to add a skirt to the sides of the base to keep the dog out and the bird in-but that is what i have a dremel for.
then we went to meg's consultation. she was uneasy at first but seemed to be having fun when i returned to pick her up. she looked very nice, the makeup was incredible. and now she has a souvenier that she can wear whenever we go out.

post-thanksgiving vacation

We had a very nice thanksgiving with the kaisers, but for the fact that i left my camera at home. they have a new baby cockatoo that is adorable and lives to be held. their parrotlet felt otherwise.

friday morning i had to work so that afternoon we drove up to my people's in sunny and warm Hanford , California. that night we opened our christmas present from my parents-as it is likely that meg will not make it up ther for christmas due to work-, which was incredibly generous (thank you again, so very much). after the small festivities we all went out to the hanford christmas parade, always one of my favorite events. it is a small town parade, lots of kids, lots of 4-h-ers , trucks pulling hay wagons full of children and a small gasoline generator that is powering more christmas lights than would fit on your house. The vendors pushing their carts of various inflatable and light up googaws and cotton candy past the crowded sidewalks . highschool acquaintances sit in lawn chairs bundled under blankets and wool caps as squeaky versions of jingle bell rock are belted out by sweaty marching band members. it is quaint, campy, divine. one long standing tradition was sadly dark this year. the furniture store that converted its windows into giant holiday displays featuring animatronic forest critters frollicking had gone out of business, and with it took the fuzzy robots of yesteryear.


Saturday we went shopping . meg bought clothes and i got a dremel. i feel about it the same invincible way i felt about my leatherman. with this tool, i can do anything. at present i have not used it for anything more than defacing the box it came in-but I COULD do so much more...

we had a nice time , took photos with the folks and went home on sunday.

adoption day

so, today the new computer came, it is incredible, better than i had fantasized. it does it all, quickly and very big (except the keyboard). transfer from the old computer was easy. my new favorite feature is that it can play/record live tv, and then export it to my ipod (where i can watch it in the car {when i am not driving, officer}, or wherever when i have a few minutes). awesome. plus i can set it to record my shows so i can keep doing homework-thats the official party line. mostly it's the ipod thing.
the keyboard is diminutive, like if you took an "us weekly" and tore it in half top to bottom. and only as thick as 2 quarters. "chicklets on sheetmetal" it has been well described. not at all awkward, surprisingly.

new addition to the family...

on wed of next week we (i) will be adopting a brand new 24" imac. i held out as long as i could, there were screen issues, there was a new operating system that needed compatibility checking, a new wireless keyboard design. and finally i could no longer foresee a future that involved meg's 5 year old hand-me-down imac g4 (the one that looks like a table lamp). it is (obviously, since i am on it right now) still functional, and will be given to a very deserving family.
so now you're wondering where the largess comes from, admit it. i took it out of my g.i. bill money. (i just couldn't stand to waste it all on education). but i solemnly swear that the rest of it will go to ensuring a brighter tomorrow for america's (aging) youth-namely me. just wanted you all to know. the new technology will allow for better content on this page from now on, maybe video posts too, as i like talking better than typing.

(bet you thought we got a new pet when you saw the title)

Barbara: patron saint of compromise

so, friday night at 6 i woke meg up for dinner (she was on call thursday) and proposed we take a roadtrip to the grand canyon. we both had the weekend off, and that happens so rarely that we should do something about it. meg wanted a quiet weekend at home, and so instead of driving all night we got up early and drove to santa barbara. I love driving, so the first 2 hours of the day were bliss for me, and since we had never been to santa barbara the rest of the day would be an adventure. we got to town around 10 and after grabbing a greasy but filling breakfast at mcdonalds we went to the zoo. it was a nice medium sized zoo, about the same as fresno, and slightly larger than santa ana. we had a good time, you could feed giraffes, which we did, and then it tried to strip meg's arm of a hand. cool though to be so close. then we wandered up and down state street browsing the shops and generally being touristy.we had lunch at a little deli. then we decided to spend some time on the beach. we brought a blanket and some martinellis and had a romantic little time on the beach. it was nice. the fog started rolling in (it was around 430) so we drove back into old town and dragged the strip again to find a nice place for dinner. we ate a les valentien who seemed startled to see people at 530, we both had very good steaks and then creme brulee for dessert. we wanted to see a movie, but by the time we were finished it had already started. so we drove home. moderately foggy. wee made it home by 9.

happy halloween!

(lazy, and creative)



meg, chris, and mahtab


Rebecca, meg, and others

Meg got invited to a couple of parties saturday night by the nurses she works with. meg's costume is brilliant, in case you haven't figured it out she is the "operation" board game. i couldn't come up with anything better so i went with the old standby of fatigues. the nice thing about the costume is that with your face painted, no one recognizes you, which is fine when you don't know anyone, it is social as well as natural camoflage. meg's friend/fellow trauma surgeon, Chris, came as a geisha which was especially cool since he's a dude. very impressive makeup. another favorite was the marie antoinette costume.

mods...finally

seasons greetings from the santa ana cemetery

so what is the point of having an overwhelmingly customizable car if you don't make it your own?! so today i did just that. i put in LEDs in the footwells, (and eventually in the trunk) it is a pretty cheap trick, and good old fashioned fun with electricity. it was pretty easy to get in and on, but to make it work exactly right and look clean tripled the time. it is dual controlled, they come on when the door is opened/unlocked, and they are switched so that when the door is closed they can be turned on for mood lighting/cruisin' etc. that took the longest time. it has 7 colors, strobe and fade options, but i like the green.

SPOOKY!

All's fair in love and LA

me and "bossy"

what can i say, crows like me
Meg was off all this weekend (a rare occurance) so i negotiated a trip to the fair with her. We had never been to the LA county fair (in pomona) and thought we'd check it out.

lousy tourists

as animal hobbyists we like to go see the offerings of the local livestock scene. as far as fairs go, the LA one was surprisingly full of animal exhibits, moreso than the OC fair and close to that of SD. there was a big petting zoo with hoards of kids and ewes, that was probably the highlight of the day.
Meg prefers "goat rendezvousing" to "mutton munching"

goats, however, seem to prefer "nate and meg munching"
we picked a lousy day to go, as it was intermittently raining, making the covered areas around the stalls much more coveted, and the ground a sloppy mess of wood shavings and animal waste. (meg wore sandals-but didn't complain)

we wandered through the shopping pavilions and were dazzled by the sheer quantity of tacky crap in the world. we now have 6 chamoise that can hold 30 gallons of water each, knives that can cut through a brick and still fillet a salmon, and the latest in juicing technology-it was hard to get out the door with just one. (all of the above is a lie-except the tacky crap part)

in all we had a nice time, and came home tired and ready for a nap.

...You're always 17 in your hometown.

SO... been a while since i posted, no good excuses. but a momentous occasion of momentous occasions occurred over the weekend-my 10 year high school reunion. for those of you who i have not bored to tears with the minutiae of my preparations for the festivities, this should be interesting, for those i have--well you listened to the boring stuff--why not this.

i will at this point draw attention to the fact that this blog will contain NO gossip, not that i am above that sort of thing, but for one thing most of you who read this will have no idea who these people are, and for two, you should never post gossip in a litigious society such as we live in (whisper it, it sounds better).

i had a nice time. turn out was a little disappointing, there were probably 60-70 graduates, plus their +1's. it filled the room nicely, but out of a class of over 300, there were so many people you hoped to see, but didn't. although it was a nice number that allowed you to talk to everybody in the room as much as you wanted (some more, some less) without feeling like you would never make it through the crowd. i probably knew 75+% of the people there, at least casually, it was really the people from elementary and junior high that were there, my core group of high school friends were noticeably absent with the exception of Amanda (formerly stickler)
(flashback: winter formal 1996) fortunately i had frequent dalliances outside my group and had more than enough people to catch up with.
most notably Melanie (formerly mcgee). she was/is a crazy talented artist from a crazy talented family, who has a penchant for vintage (60's-70's) clothes. she was there with her husband of 2 weeks, Michael.

(don't let his boyish good looks fool you, Michael was a madman on the dancefloor) they were a lot of fun and we spent most of the night together. Mel recounted to me a story which i had forgotten, and makes me look like a jerk, but it gives an accurate portrait of my personality in my formative years.

we were in a play together, and in the play were romantically involved, in the climax of the scene i am embracing her and move to kiss and then walk away. (you can only imagine how horrible this must have been performed by freshman drama students. ) anyway, Mel being the sweet innocent girl she was had never been kissed, when this piece of information made it around a dare was made. a person, who memory has shrouded off stage, gave me $5 to kiss her on stage in front of an audience where she would be confined by the scene to act accordingly. so i did it. it was awkward. clearly she has not forgotten that i stole her first kiss, and for that i am sorry. i had no right. but she seemed to bear no grudge.

i also ran into Micah dudley
(this is the face i make when i realize that he's taller than me now)
, a friend since elementary school, who now lives in orange county as well, and who i hope i will run into now and again. Ryan cody is now an assistant pastor,
(here he is being asked to leave) which was news to me-not like he was a hard living, gang banging excon the last time i saw him, but it just surprised me, i thought he would be a farmer.

there are many more stories, but you'll have to get them from me in person.