Adventures at the Purple House

First, let me point out that I have finally added some of my friends' blogs to my blogroll. Sorry it took so long, guys. I also added a satirical political blog I found, Jon Swift, and (s?)he actually kindly added my blog to his. If the writers' strike is giving you Colbert withdrawal, I suggest checking it out. I am sure I will get all kinds of traffic from that site until folks figure out it's just pictures of my kids up in here. (But not today! Today we have a helicopter also! I'm talking to you, Pippa!)

So anyway, we went to the purple house this past weekend, and also Alex made a fortune teller along these lines:

"Do you want to play, Mom? Pick a color. But not purple, because I don't know how to spell that."

So anyway, at the purple house we saw, although not in action as it was the weekend, an unusual timbering procedure. Instead of building a road up the mountain, as well as a bridge over some water, in order to bring down the timber, it's brought down via a giant helicopter. I couldn't say the type for sure, but it sure looks like a repurposed Chinook to me. The crew is from Oregon, and there's a fuel tanker onsite to refuel. None of these figures are independently verified, but supposedly it costs about $5,000 per hour (half of that for fuel) to run this operation. Jeff and Mary sent pictures from when the operation got back into swing:

Unfortunately, my attempts to upload more pictures just keep failing tonight. I promise there will be more pictures, cute ones! Little boys and Christmas trees, little girls and kittens, it's gonna be awesome.

Josh and Molly are funny, too

Soon, pictures from the purple house weekend...

Me, looking at Walgreens 48-page Sunday circular: "wow, you could get all your Christmas shopping done at Walgreens if you wanted to."
Josh: "if you wanted to kill the spirit of Christmas, sure."

On the way back from the purple house Fred and Chelcy and Alex played 20 questions. Molly kind of got into the spirit of it too. She would "think" of something, and they would guess what it was, she would say "no" until she heard something she liked and then she would say "yes". Sample game:
"Is it Daddy?" -- no --
"Is it the purple house?" -- no --
"Is it Lilly?" -- no --
"Is it the world?" -- YES!

Alex was the best at "guessing" her answers.

Fun Thanksgiving, funny kids

This year we spent our Thanksgiving in Corolla, on the Outer Banks, with family, in a lovely house with a hot tub. Thanksgiving Day was lovely and warm. Exhibit A is Molly channeling her inner Bo Derek (Henry channeled his inner (?) nudist, but this is marginally more appropriate:)





The other days were rather cooler, but still fun. Did I mention the hot tub? A big hit.
The night we arrived, Molly was in the hot tub at 1:30 a.m. Mama went to bed.

There have been a number of cute/not so very cute Boyer antics we've been trying to remember. The last night in Corolla, Saturday, we tried to go out to eat to a Mexican restaurant my dad and grandma had enjoyed earlier in the week. They were closing when we got there, which was strange because it was like 7:48. Did they close at 7:30? No. 8:00? No. 7:48 was evidently their closing time. Anyway, they had a specials board advertising their fish tacos. As we got back in the car, I said, "dang, I was looking forward to those fish tacos." And Molly said, "I wan fish choco!" (This would be fish chocolate, if you're not fluent in Molly.)

One evening after Thanksgiving, Alex started playing with these foam insect-construction toys that the kids got for their birthdays. Josh asked him if he was ready to read the Chronic (what -- cle of Narnia) before bed, and Alex said, "Well, I didn't know I was going to catch my interesting on this, Daddy."

Another Alex cute moment was when I took him to school on Monday, and he was less than enthusiastic about the return to school. The prior week he smashed the dickens out of his big toe, and spent two days out of school with his swollen purple foot propped up on pillows, so he'd had a week off. I tried to explain to him that we appreciate vacations more because of the time we spend doing things that aren't as nice and relaxing, like going to work or school. I told him if we spent all of our time on vacation at the beach, that we'd be bored and wouldn't realize how nice it was, so we had to go to work and school to make those times more meaningful. "What do you think of that idea?", I ask. "I think it's a dumb idea." Alex says. I told Josh this story; he agrees with Alex.

Upon our return from the beach, we tried to unpack the car while the kids played in the driveway and Molly's favorite, in the car. In the space of perhaps 90 seconds, Alex had a baseball bat going in full swing at my taillight (lowest cost estimate to date, $90, and it's overdue for an inspection), and Molly had stuck coins into my CD player. The factory stereo radio buttons have also frozen. So my stereo is currently a quite large receiver for NPR.

All part of the job. All part of them catching your interesting. If they didn't break your stereo and taillights occasionally, you wouldn't appreciate the fish choco so much, right? Okay, it's a dumb idea.