The Manlius Formation

Just wanted to give a quick shout out to our good friend, Holly, and welcome her to the blogosphere. Take a minute to check out her newly minted blog, centering around ways to feed the soul and the stomach.

In related news, I hope to inform my legions of readers about composting and companion planting this spring. Our compost pile right now is a bunch of frozen vegetable peels and eggshells, but I hope that in the early summer it will be a decaying mass of wormy nutrition for the milpa I plan to set up in our backyard.

It will take a fortuitous convergence of time, energy, and extra petty cash to pull it off, so keep your fingers crossed - but not so crossed that you can’t click on the link to Holly’s blog. Speaking of which, why are you still here? Get over there.

When talking with friends and loved ones who reside in warmer climes, the conversation inevitably turns to the weather here in the greater Syracuse area. “How can you stand it?” they inquire, and not unreasonably so - we have, after all, won the Golden Snowball for the past several years. Today’s post is a three part pictorial answer to that question.

Part one…

Part two…

Part three…

The boys have had me outside sledding every day since we got home from Holiday Grand Tour 2008. Today we were outside for almost two hours of non-stop sledding. My bones are weary.

Here are a few videos^[1] of our escapades.

The first video shows the boys sledding down the driveway. Keep an eye on Thomas at the top - he ricochets off the snow at stage left and faceplants into the snow on the other side. You can faintly hear him say something palindromic like “o, no” or “oy, yo” as he approaches the edge; he was laughing uncontrollably when he got up with a face full of snow.

The second video is a driver’s view of the ride down the hill. It’s me chasing Thomas, with a little 360 added in at the end for extra style points. Daniel was the “referee” on this one - the ref’s job is to throw himself in front of wayward sledders headed for the road. Safety first, I always say.

1. Huzzah to Chris for his tutorial on XHTML-compliant YouTube embedding. [back]

I don’t know about you, but I’m all set for 2009, aka the BEST YEAR EVER. But first, here’s a look^[1] at how we wrapped up 2008:

After opening our presents on Christmas morning…

… we set off on “Holiday Grand Tour 2008.”

(more…)

1. I have fewer photos than I’d like because we spent so much time enjoying ourselves that I often forgot stop to capture the moment! [back]