Random Fun Things I’d Like to Do in 2019…

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After putting together this column the other day about prioritizing me in the new year, I still had this list leftover of random stuff that I’d like to do that don’t necessarily fall under the heading of “resolutions,” per se…

2018 Holiday Advent Blog – Merry Christmas!

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  1. Look at the Christmas!
  2. Merry Plex-Mas!
  3. A Funko Pop Christmas
  4. The Great Hot Chocolate Quest
  5. The Gift of Water Safety
  6. It’s About Freakin’ Time…
  7. Mickey’s Very Merry Monorail Ride
  8. The ABCs of Christmas
  9. The Truth About Santa Claus
  10. Holiday Hospital
  11. Caroling a la Car
  12. Strike a Family Pose
  13. Once Upon a Christmastime at Christmas
  14. Dinner with Mickey & Friends
  15. At Home with the Animals…
  16. The Great Santa Wait!
  17. The Gift of Date Night
  18. You’d Better Watch Out…
  19. Glittery Porch Pirate Revenge
  20. How to Celebrate Without Going Crazy
  21. Best. Christmas Special(s). Ever.
  22. The Sevener Family Christmas Card
  23. More Family Christmas Pics…
  24. Putting the Band Back Together…

Christmas Day is here again.

All in all, I think we had a pretty good day. There were definitely some stressful moments, which probably should’ve been anticipated given our house with three toddlers and their tendency to fight over toys and whatnot, but there were also some really great moments where sharing surprised us, so that was nice!

It was definitely a real treat watching Christopher unwrap his brand new monorail because that kid has been looking forward to that thing all year long. We actually talked about whether to make it wait until last, but I just couldn’t do that to him after how much he’s been anticipating it, and to be honest – the kid was on cloud nine the second he started tearing the paper away…

The monorail was definitely the toy of the year for 2018 and hopefully it’ll stand up to being fought over for many months to come.

Otherwise, we just kind of hung out around the house all day with no particular place to go, so it was a nice bout of family time that we all probably needed.

With any luck, maybe next year’s festivities will be marginally less stressful, but thankfully we’ve got another 11 months at this point before we find out.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and be sure to have an extra piece of gingerbread for me!

2018 Holiday Advent Blog – Day 24 – Putting the Band Back Together…

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I definitely get attached to things, but at the same time I try to remind myself that toys are made to be played with and that sometimes they’re going to get broken.

Granted, I don’t necessarily think that Hallmark created this set expressly as toys, but what can I say? When you’ve got a house full of toddlers, pretty much everything becomes a toy at one point or another…

So as much as it pains me to think that these fine musicians are probably going to get tossed in the trash once this Christmas season is over, knowing how much fun the kids have had playing with them … particularly Matthew, who was known to walk around with Donald’s dismembered torso in his mouth while it still tried to play music (?!) … well, I suppose in the end that’s all that really matters.

BEFORE

AFTER

(Donald Duck on guitar, Missing in Action; also Daisy’s head, Mickey’s nose, and both of Goofy’s arms)

2018 Holiday Advent Blog – Day 22 – The Sevener Family Christmas Card

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We’ve been really terrible about getting these out this year, which is weird because we actually got them super early so that we’d have them before we went on vacation and everything.

At this rate, if they get in the mail by Presidents Day, I’m going to consider that a win…

The photos were taken, as pretty much all of our family photos have been, by Keli Gerber with Sweet Cheek Photography. She always seems to do a great job at capturing our boys in the moment, which works out good because while they’re all toddlers, the chances of them actually posing in unison for anything is slim to none!

I really loved the candid shots that she got this year of them playing with these very cool wooden Christmas cookies that my cousin makes for photography props … the corresponding milk bottle was an adorable touch. 😉

2018 Holiday Advent Blog – Day 21 – Best. Christmas Special(s). Ever.

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For me it would probably be a three-way tie between A Muppet Family Christmas, A Garfield Christmas, and Will Vinton’s Claymation Christmas Special, but nevertheless this review by PushingUpRoses provides a great retrospect into this nearly perfect holiday classic that I couldn’t agree more with!

The humor is top notch.

The huge cast, even including the Sesame Street gang and the Muppet Babies, is nostalgic beyond belief.

The Christmas medley at the end … literally leaves me in tears. 😀

And Jim Henson’s own cameo? Delightful, to say the least.

2018 Holiday Advent Blog – Day 20 – How to Celebrate Without Going Crazy

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Celebrating the Many, Many Joys of Christmas

This is an essay I wrote today about struggling with not getting to do every last thing that you wanted to do for Christmas.

Things like putting up lights on the house make me sad when I miss them because I know how much the kids would love them, but sometimes you just need to put in perspective the things that you have done and not beat yourself up over the ones that you didn’t.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s tough. But Christmastime is way to much fun to spend it being down on yourself over a few strands of garland or some Christmas cards that everyone will have thrown in the trash in a month anyways…

oh poopies…

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So apparently I had a hard drive crash in my Plex server while we were on vacation last week.

Possibly two … still looking into that!

What’s really weird is that throughout the whole week, whenever I’d connect remotely (we typically tether Sara’s iPad to the TV so the kids can watch their shows on the road), the drive that holds most of the kids movies & TV shows was reporting as missing … however when I got home and finally had a chance to troubleshoot, it turns out that drive was fine and it was a completely different one that was clicking away like a hard drive on its last legs!

…one that oddly enough, we were able to connect to on vacation…

Now I’ve got that one unplugged until I can see if I’m able to copy the contents over to a new drive … need to address that sooner rather than later because it’s the drive where all of our new TV shows download to before they get copied to wherever they actually live.

As for the other impacted drive … I don’t know what the deal is there because it mounts ok, but the OS just doesn’t recognize it. Really hoping it’s something I can easily repair so that I don’t have to hassle with re-downloading everything…

I mean, the first one doesn’t really surprise me because it was one of the oldest drives in the server (almost 3 years old) and it honestly gets a lot more use than all of the others. If anything, I can’t help but think that if I had already been able to upgrade to my shiny, new rackmount NAS, the system would’ve recovered automatically and this would’ve barely counted as a blip on the radar!

That said, I’m happy that at least Plex itself is up again because I’ve had it down for two days now because the NAS part didn’t want to reboot thanks to the dying drive, so at least the kids can go back to watching their usual shows without having to “borrow” Grandma & Grandpa’s Netflix account.

It’s kind of amazing how much you end up relying on this stuff without realizing it. I definitely need to start exploring some backup options next year as this 50 TB media library continues to grow. 😛

2018 Holiday Advent Blog – Day 19 – Glittery Porch Pirate Revenge

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We’ve been pretty lucky in that I’m not sure if we’ve ever had a package stolen off of our porch.

A few weeks ago I had a couple mis-delivered to a neighbor’s house, but they were very cool about it.

Fun Fact – When I was still living in my first apartment, I actually had a neighbor accuse me of stealing their packages because the FedEx guy had dropped them on my doorstep by mistake and I’d pulled them inside to take over to their house after work the next day! The lady left me like a page-long letter taped to my door about reporting me to the police and the building managers because they needed that package to take to her parents house that weekend.

Needless to say, I hope that stupid printer jammed whenever they tried to print anything that their Grinch of a daughter sent to them… 😯

Now that said … this video is still amazingly satisfying!

It’s by Mark Rober, who worked for NASA on the Mars rover, and he goes into incredible detail describing his engineering process before finally showing what this little payback device can do to someone who dares to steal from kids at Christmastime.

P.S. +1 for the fart spray 😉