It Looks Like This

When you try to make your face look as small as possible, you look awesome. Exhibits (A) and (B):

Theme Night!

Not because it needed to happen, certainly, and not because either of us are really obsessed with Colin Firth (though we both agree he is pretty cool), but just because the name -The name! This one was too good to toss back into the water!- demanded it, we hosted the Colin Firthquake this weekend. The way it happened was this:

1. Read a list of natural disasters unlikely to occur
2. Got so cracked up over this idea that we decided it must occur
3. Assembled an event around the name

It came together well. Meghan has an Anatomy and Physiology final coming up for which she must know the ins and outs of the human brain. So she made a diagram of Colin Firth's brain and did a short presentation on his life and film career. Then I MC'ed a game of Colin Firth charades with movie titles and bits of information from the Wikipedia Colin Firth page. And then the main event of the night: a mash-up of the Victorian manners of The Importance of Being Earnest, the rough-and-tumble hijinks of a game of spoons, and the pace-tracking literacy of Horse. Thrills! Each time the name Ernest was spoken in the movie (and you know it's quite a few if you've seen it), everyone had to take a spoon from the table, and the last one to get a spoon got a letter. E-R-N-E-S-T. I spelled Ernest first, and I was out. We continued the elimination, removing one spoon from the game each round, until Kirsten and Meg duked it out and Kirsten won.

Also, compliments of the house artist, we each had little badges to wear.

For the girls:
And for the guys, even higher aspirations:The question you're probably asking at this point is, "Hey, can I steal your idea and have my own Colin Firthquake?" And the answer is ABSOLUTELY! The concept of staking a unique claim on any sort of idea is so nine years ago (except in Eastern Texas), and we sort of appropriated it from another source to begin with anyway. This is the age of open exchange. Go for it. While you're at it, The Fresca Fiesta and the Emilio Festevez are both begging to be hosted. Let me know how those go.
Adios,

Kent

Ultimate Truth

Thanks to Urn for calling my attention to this.

O Weihnachtsbaum, O Weihnachtsbaum...

Last year, we had just gotten married when Christmas came around, and we were over in Prague, enjoying the goofy language and the lights and the old city. It was amazing, and I wouldn't trade it away for anything, but it sort of feels like it's been two years since we've had a legitimate Christmas with family and a christmas tree and presents and maybe a candlelight service. All of those things. We're doing our best to make up for it this year, though. We have a steady stream of Christmas songs going and several Christmas movies lined in the Netflix queue (Next up is the Grinch. We've watched White Christmas and A Charlie Brown Christmas so far.) We have cookie plans and wish lists and shopping goals, and we even have a paper chain that we've been tending to each day. But up until yesterday, we still didn't have a tree!

Last night was the night for it, though. Kirsten got a tip about trees at Rite Aid (seriously), so we went to look, but they weren't selling them. They did have good deals on lights, though, so we picked those up there, and then the next place we thought to check was Home Depot. They had several kinds of trees and good prices (Noble Fir: $40. Douglas Fir: $20. Knowing what the heck the difference is between the two: Priceless.), and we had an awesome tree within about ten minutes. The guy doing the wrapping and the cutting off of the bottom inch of trunk was the nicest guy ever, too. He seemed like he's a retired guy with a few young grandchildren that are his favorite part of his life, and he volunteers a month of his time each year to come and wish everyone the most gently warm "Merry Christmas" they'll hear all winter as they buy their trees. I wanted to hug him.

We didn't have anything to tie the tree to the top of the car, so we put it in the trunk instead. Surprisingly, it fit pretty well. And we only live a half mile away, so we weren't afraid of anything crazy happening.
I screwed it into the tree stand Kirsten had gotten earlier in the day, and she said it looked like I got smashed by the tree. I agree. Smashed and eaten.

A few ornaments later...

...and we were ready for the topper, which we went and picked out at Target.

Even though this could easily be a music blog, it isn't. But I do have to make one suggestion: use Pandora. For those of you unfamiliar, it's pretty simple. You put in one song you like, and the folks who run Pandora serve up a bunch of music you'll probably enjoy as much. They use a huge database of hundreds of musical characteristics of each song to make it work. If you like a song, you can hit the thumbs-up button, and if you don't, you hit the thumbs-down, and it'll skip to a new song. You don't have to hit either button -you can just let it play- but if you do, it'll get more and more zeroed in on what you're likely to enjoy. It's pretty cool. Anyway, the reason I suggest it is that the creators were small enough to make "Christmas songs" one of the categories in their database, so you can enter "Jingle Bells" as your starting track, and *boom!* instant Christmas radio station with better variety than the mall. Try it out.

Whatever you do to get your Christmas on, make sure to really embrace it. Turn the music up! Decorate a stocking! Enjoy yourself, eat some unhealthy holiday things, smile at people... If it snows where you are, invite a stranger to take a few minutes to have a snowball fight (this happened to us recently at a bus stop and totally made our day) or build a snowman. Watch Charlie Brown (and then aspire to name your firstborn Linus). And slow down. Look around you, and enjoy it all. Get into it.

I'll be back later with more Christmasy things and leave you now with the illumination of our very first tree.

Kent

kirstenkirsten.com

In case you didn't click the link in the last post...
We've bandied about it and wished we had Flash and generally protracted the whole process for quite a while, but I finally just brought my work computer home, downloaded the free trial of Flash, and cranked out version 2.0 of Kirsten's web site! She has some newer artwork up, and we'll be adding more as it's finished. So if you haven't swung by kirstenkirsten.com recently, now's as good a time as any. If you encounter any weird (non)functionality, let me know, OK? And also, if you're interested in buying any of her artwork or getting some design work done, drop her an email. I'm so proud her! You will be too. Have a look.

The End of the World

And so it ended. The Middle East attacked Afghanistan, and, without so much as a misplaced grain of uranium, the world was conquered by red, which was me. I was surprised, actually. We knew it was a good name at the end, because the balance of power was tilted heavily in three different ways over the course of the last few weeks. Richard had it handily for a little bit, and then we trimmed down his guys and Urn was all over the place, yellow as far as the eye could see. Then Urn and Richard took Mike most of the way out, I finished him and got his cards, and that's when the tide turned. Chain reaction, got Richard's cards, pushed Urn back into Asia, he put up a huge fight down in Australia, and then it finally ended in that hotbed of political and military turmoil, the Middle East. Everybody played well.

We're going to play Risk again, but this time, we're moving to our new map, the Puget Sound! Yes yes. I thought it would be fun to try the same game on a different map, and here we are in one of the more geographically interesting areas of our country. It all came together. I used the long weekend we had for Thanksgiving to draw up a map from a little internet research. It's divided by county instead of continent like the original map, and Kirsten drew some awesome totem animals. Instead of a tank, a soldier, and a horse, this game has a salmon, a deer, and a seahawk, all rendered in the American Indian style that has almost turned into northwestern kitsch. Have a look:

This time, we're probably going to have all six armies used. We'll see whether we can keep this up without cutting into anyone's productivity too much. And if you're ever in Redmond...