December 2004 Archives

Happy New Year, everyone! We're spending a quiet night at home with Maddie, watching both the Peach and the NYC ball drop. Bill is watching "Bad Santa" (interesting movie) and we just put Maddie to bed for the first time tonight. Since we know she'll be up anyway in an hour, we're not worried about her missing the festivities. (She's started wanting to stay up all night long and play with her toys lately. Gonna have to work on that...)

We hope everyone has a safe and happy New Year's Eve and not too rough of a New Year's Day.

All our love.

Congratulations to Jennifer Frazier for winning the Hoosier Hysteria Fantasy Football league when her "FootballsFirstLady" team beat "Da BSU Spartan Bears" in the Superbowl. Here is a picture of Jennifer accepting the league trophy from commissioner James Frazier (her hubby).

Not only did Jenn pull off a major upset, beating the top seed after only getting as high as third in the league all season, but she also repeated. Yes, Jenn won the title last year, when the league was called "The Monsters of the Midway," and was managed by yours truly. Being the only girl in the league, Jenn decided to have a female-bodied trophy made after last season's championship. It's sort of a good thing that she won again this year, or someone would have had to file the boobs off of the thing...

By the way, I stunk it up this season. I finished fifth in regular season with a 7-6 record. I managed to upset the four seed in the first round of playoffs, but fell to the top seed in the semis when the Titans' Drew Bennett exploded for him. Ironically, Drew then melted down the next week, which killed my OTHER fantasy team on which he was a starter. (And that was the league in which Superbowl tix were the prize!) I'm just glad both leagues are over.

By the way, new Christmas pics are up. The link is on the right. :)

This morning, Maddie woke up at exactly 8am to find that Santa had brought her a huge, new play table with a working train and a block village!

She was actually impressed. She said "Wow!" and everything. I have video to prove it.

Of course, she immediately began stacking the blocks. (The kid loves to stack!) And when she ran out of blocks, she became Madzilla, crashing through the wooden train track and tearing down the bridges. It was pretty funny, considering it took her about two minutes to destroy the whole village...and it took "Mr. and Mrs. Claus" about an hour to build it.

While I cooked breakfast (ham/swiss/mushroom omelets ala "Good Eats" and puff pancakes as baked in the "Queer Eye Christmas Special"), Alecia fed and played with our little Christmas angel. The morning seems to have been a little overwhelming for her, though. After only being awake for about an hour, Maddie grabbed her blankie and wandered back into her bedroom to take a nap. And this is a kid who NEVER volunteers for sleep.

She's still asleep right now, and Mommy's napping with her. After a long night of contractions, mommy needs sleep, too. (Alecia confessed this morning that it got so bad last night, she thought we may be having a Christmas baby.)

I just put the turkey in the oven and cleaned up the breakfast dishes, so I'll probably straighten the house and try to get a shower before the girls wake up--and before the Alabamily arrives. Mic has a habit of getting everyone up early on Christmas, so I would bet they're already in the car and on the way over as I type this. It'll be funny if they get here before the girls wake up. Alecia will love greeting them all in her bathrobe, without a shower. :)

All in all, a wonderful start to our Christmas morning. It's sort of funny, Alecia and I had massive insomnia last night. It was like we were kids again, waiting for Santa to arrive. I watched as much as I could stomach of Scary Movie 3 (what a crappy movie), while Alecia tossed and turned. When I finally shut the TV off, it still took me an hour or so of rolling around before I fell asleep--and Alecia was awake the entire time. We just couldn't shut ourselves off! We may pay for that lack of sleep today, but I'm sure the excitement of the day will keep us going.

Merry Christmas to all of our friends and family, wherever you are. We wish you were here with us, sharing this special day.

We love you all!
-Bill, Alecia, Maddie, and baby-yet-to-be-named

Just before Halloween, we had this family portrait done. I thought I'd post it here, just so there was an image on the front page of this site. (If it seems like we're always getting professional pics taken, it's because Alecia gets a lot of free coupons, by the way. We don't pay for them.)

I think this was one of the pictures we enclosed in our Christmas cards this year. (Like I said, be patient if you haven't received yours. They're en route.) The copies we put in the cards were bad printouts on crappy paper. If anyone wants a real photo-stock image, let us know. We should be restocked on photo paper and ink after the holidays.

About a month ago, we had some Christmas pictures taken of Maddie. Click the link to the right, under "pictures," to check them out.

Those of you who've already received your Christmas cards will recognize at least one of the pictures. (And if you haven't received your card yet, be patient. I just mailed out the last twenty today.)

Now, I know I'm biased. But you have to admit, that's one photogenic little munchkin. :)

I won't bore you with technical details, but it should be pretty obvious that I made some changes to the site. While it will look like I simply made the design more boring, I actually changed all of the behind-the-scenes stuff, and the grey design is just a side effect. The new stuff I put in place on the back end will allow us to manage the site better, post more easily, and do more with the design (when we get around to it).

One immediate positive is that our comments are working again. So feel free to leave a note if you've been DYING to say hi. Pretty soon, I'll launch the chat application and our new message boards. That's right, you'll finally have a place to post your own family's news and notes (how's that, Julie?).

I'll work on that stuff soon. We still have some Christmas shopping to do, as well as a bunch of cleaning. And I need to post some updates soon, so the extras may have to wait a few days...

Okay, so I keep breaking things. My bad. All will be new-and-improved by the weekend. Sorry for the inconvenience.

By the way, do you like the Christmas look? Alecia did the graphics, quotes and color changes last week. Just like our house, we like our site to be in tune with the season!
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Okay, I just moved the site over to a new server, and I somehow broke the comments. I could probably fix them if I put some time into it, but instead, I think I'll use this as an opportunity to revise the way I'm doing things on this end. Not to bore you with technical details, but I just switched over to a different management system for another site I run, and this site would also benefit from the same system, which should take me a few days to install.

So bear with me for about a week, while I rebuild this site behind the scenes. If you'd like to send us holiday wishes before then, feel free to call or email us until I get the feedback function on the site going again. We NEVER get phone calls from anyone but creditors and salesmen, and it would be great to hear from any and all of you.

Thanks!
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I finally put up the Thanksgiving pics, but I'm not happy about how they turned out.

See, I got some new photo gallery software right before we went on vacation, which I used to put up the galleries on Alecia's mom's club site. I figured I would use the same software to put up our trip pictures, since it has tons of cool features and such.

Sadly, the damn thing won't do what I want it to do. No matter how simple the request, it finds a way to screw things up. I won't waste your time describing all of the errors it's given me over the last week (and especially over the last four hours). But I will tell you that there are supposed to be captions on ALL of the Thanksgiving pictures, not just the first and last.

So if you want to know who the people are in each picture, you'll just have to use your imagination for now. The slide show feature is kind of cool, though. Assuming you have a broadband internet connection.

Anyway, check out the pics. I'll work on restoring the captions when I have more time. I also have some new portrait pics of Maddie that are some of my favorites. But right now, I need to sleep more than I need to post pictures.

If there's any interest, I may even post a recap of our trip in a few days. But by now, it's probably not something you're dying to hear about.
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