As promised, more pictures of Emma have been put online.  I added a few new pictures to the “Autumn 2008” album, starting with this photo.  There is also a Christmas 2008 photo album, with subalbums for each of the times we celebrated Christmas.

So I said over four months ago that I would try to put up some pictures of our new house.  Well when we decorated the house and then cleaned it up before we had company over, I decided I’d take some pictures.  Without further ado, you can find those pictures on our photos page.

Among the highlights is Stephanie’s snowman nativity scene.  Because, you know, most biblical scholars agree that it is likely that Jesus was a baby snowman.  You’ll also see a picture of Stephanie barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen.  Making dinner no less!

I also want to make some comments about this picture of my messy bonus room/noise room/office.  You can see the following things in the picture, from (roughly) left to right:

• The cardboard cube you see there was going to be a Mario ? block to hang over my cubicle, but I never finished it.  In part because I would need to buy some yellow paper, and in part because I thought it might be too corny even for a programmer’s office.  And I’ll openly admit that I got the idea from someone else.

• You can see the Sumo Lounge bean bag chair that I won last year.

• There is a book of Christmas music for the ukulele that I got last year.  Mele Kalikimaka!

• You can see my big amp, my acoustic guitar, and my Micro Cube mini-amp (which I wrote about on this very blog a while back).

When I went to take the pictures off my memory card, I realized there were still pictures from our Labor Day trip to Lake Lure with Stephanie’s family (we also went there last year).  If anyone is interested, I put those pictures up for your perusal.

I put up a set of Christmas photos.

I know I haven’t posted in a while, and I’m sorry to keep you all waiting. We have had a very busy Thanksgiving and Christmas season already. For those of you just starting to read this blog, Kip and I are newlyweds, and this was our first Thanksgiving married. It is sometimes said that new brides have the need to attempt making a big Thanksgiving dinner for their new husbands. I did not have this desire, I did however attack the area of dessert.  I made two pumpkin pies from scratch, including the crusts using my grandmother’s recipe, and a turkey army.  Both of my deserts were huge successes at the Robinson Family Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday, so that makes me happy.

We came home from his parents house Sunday afternoon. Kip had planned on going for the Christmas tree on Monday night, but since we got back so early, we went ahead and went to two different tree lots and picked out what I think is the most perfect Christmas tree ever!!! You have to understand that I have never had a real tree due to my mother’s allergies. We carried the tree up two flights of stairs and placed it in our living room. That night we hung lights and the ornaments that I have been collecting my entire life.  We also hung two ornaments that we just purchased as our two first  ornaments as a married couple.  That night I also decorated our mantle with figurines and candles. The tree lot guy gave me some of the branches from the trunk of our tree to use in decorating around the apartment as well, and I’ve been trying to find places for them to go. On Monday I went by Wal-Mart and picked up tinsel to add a little sparkle to the tree and it just makes it shine!!  Unfortunately we are still short one tree topper.  But we’ll hopefully get one soon!

Tonight, Kip and I finally had the right staples that fit into our staple gun, and we were able to decorate the porch of our apartment. There are blue twinkle icicle lights across the top, a strand of plain white Christmas lights wrapped around the corner pillar, and these new snowflake lights along that banister that twinkle and sparkle and look totally awesome. Kip took Punky for a walk afterward and got some pictures of the lights. I think that we are like the first ones in our apartment complex to get lights up outside, at least the first that I have noticed. I hope that everyone else is enjoying the holiday season as much as I am. Merry Christmas!!!!

It’s Christmas Eve and I am back in Newton for a few days.  Unfortunately, I have to go back to Charlotte today.  You see, I am taking care of Stephanie’s fish over the Christmas break, and I’m apparently bad at it, because I left him at my apartment yesterday and he’ll probably die before I get back there--unless I make an emergency fish-trip today.  His name is Mo, short for Molybdenum, which is element forty-two on the periodic table of the elements.  This is the kind of thing that happens when you marry a chemist. :)

I also finished reading Michael Crichton’s State Of Fear Wednesday night, which meant I only spent five nights reading it.  Not that I exactly set any speed-reading records for that, but I don’t typically read that fast so I’m mentioning it as an indication of how much I enjoyed it.  This marks the fifth Michael Crichton book that I’ve read since Garrison introduced me to the author in seventh grade.  I’ve read: The Andromeda Strain, The Lost World, Prey, Jurassic Park, and State of Fear (in that order); I think it’s my favorite of them.  I am starting to pick up on a certain “Crichton pattern”: a part fiction/part research paper story about a few good guys--at least one of whom is extremely intellectual and holds radical new theories that modern science rejects--go up against bad guys who started off meaning well but things got out of control.  And of course every book has to somehow incorporate chaos theory, the idea that humans can’t predict and therefore can’t control or understand the behavior of complex systems and that trying to do so is a recipe for disaster.  Look forward to long lectures wherein Crichton states his scientific views through the personas of his characters.  The Andromeda Strain doesn’t quite fit into that model but it was his first book.  Not that I’m complaining--I happen to like the way he writes.  I’m just noticing a pattern.  State Of Fear stated a lot of things that I’ve really kinda thought for years but I didn’t realize there was so much evidence for it.  For those of you planning to read the book I won’t spoil it by talking about it...  I wasn’t even planning on getting the book, but it was on sale at the bookstore and I read the inside flap and saw something to the effect of “from the glaciers of Iceland to the volcanoes of Antarctica” and I was sold.  I have always had a fascination with Antarctica for some reason.  Which might surprise some people who know me and my abhorrence for cold weather that seems to intensify with every passing winter.  But I still think Antarctica is really cool, probably because there’s so much there that no one understands or knows anything about.  And I wonder what all is trapped under the ice, since it was a jungle many many moons ago.  Speaking of cold weather, I’d like to see a survivor somewhere that’s not super hot.  I’m not saying they should go to Antarctica or Siberia or Greenland.. I’m more thinking somewhere mountainous like the Andes mountains or Nepal.  I’m getting tired of islands.

This morning I had a dream that the day before I had let an army recruitment guy talk me into signing up for the Marines, and that now I had papers saying Boot Camp would start at 1 am on January first and that after six months I was going to be deployed to Tokyo for some reason.  And then when I was slowly becoming conscious, I was freaking out thinking “why did I sign up for the Marines, there’s a war going on and people are dying, why would I do that??” and I was laying there trying to decide if I had dreamed that or if it really happened, and I finally decided that it was a dream by walking through everything I did yesterday and realizing that I never met any Marine recruitment guy.

Stephanie just called and said I don’t need to pick up Mo, her parents will pick him up on the way back to Laurinburg tomorrow.  That saves two hours of my day.  Wahoo!

I don’t care what your momma says
  Christmas time is near
I dont care what your daddy says
  Christmas time is dear

Okay so I was wrong about Survivor, the most predictable outcome ended up happening.  I guess my prediction was based more what I was hoping would happen...

So on Wednesday I went to Raleigh for Stephanie’s graduation.  Unlike most graduation ceremonies, her Chemistry Department commencement was actually pretty well done.  They only had to hand out like twenty diplomas, so they had some leeway I suppose.  They ended with a “chemistry experiment,” where they determined what two lighter-than-air balloons were filled with by holding a lit candle on the end of a yardstick to each.  The first was filled with helium and just popped.  The second was filled with hydrogen, and made a nice fireball.  It was a good way to end a graduation ceremony I thought.

Then that evening I got to experience Christmas with the Hafers for the first time.  If you have met any of them, you’ll know that they are very.. energetic. :)  It was lots of fun and I ended up with several presents which I wasn’t really expecting, including some Homer Simpson bedroom shoes that are totally cool.  I also learned that when your fiancée and her sister look similar, make sure you know which one you’re talking to.  But in my defense, it was that time of day when the sun was low and cast a yellow glow on everything, and the walls in this house (that I’ve only been in once or twice before) were a yellowish off-white and Stephanie was wearing a solid white shirt, and Mandy had changed into a yellowish shirt (and the last time I had seen her she was still wearing a dress).  So in my mind I thought the walls were white like Stephanie’s shirt, and that everything was yellow-ish from the setting sun.  Plus Mandy was leaning over so her hair covered her face.  It wasn’t until I finished a sentence and got no response that I leaned forward so I could look up at her face and said “... you’re not Stephanie are you...”  Adding to my confusion was the fact that I was in the process of catching a cold at the time and probably should have been resting and not running around doing stuff.  But it was still a fun day. :)

Thursday at work I learned that SolidWorks, a company which I guess would be called a “sibling” to my company (both owned by the same parent company), has developed Cosmic Blobs, 3D graphics software for kids.  Not only that, but everyone got a free copy of it to play around with.  I installed it and played around with it for about five or ten minutes at work but that’s about all the time I’ve put into it.  It’s a pretty nifty little tool, and it lets you do fun stuff pretty quickly, but it still has a learning curve that I didn’t climb in ten minutes.  Part of that is because nothing on the interface is labeled (did you know that word can be correctly spelled “labelled” or “labeled”?  I didn’t until I just looked it up..).  I guess that’s because they figure kids won’t bother to read the labels anyway.

Before I go, I should mention Wikipedia.  Perhaps I’m a little behind the times, but I only found out about this site and how cool it is a few days ago.  For those of you who don’t know, the idea of a “wiki” is that it’s a website that anyone can edit.  Not that I like it because I can edit it (I haven’t edited anything yet), but it ensures that lots of people can very easily put information out there.  You can look up practically anything you can think of (I don’t think there’s anything I’ve searched for that it couldn’t find), and find tons of information about it.  It’s like what we were told the internet would be in 1994, before it got super-commercialized.  One of the neat little extra features it has is that you can find a list of historical events and famous births/deaths on any particular date, maybe even my birthday.  That’s cool.  If I were on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, I think I’d have my phone-a-friend person wait with a web browser open to Wikipedia--I now hold it higher than Google for trivia/fact finding.  Not that Google isn’t still super useful...

Until next time.. find someone else’s blog to read..