If you’ve been coming to this blog looking for new material, you aren’t going to find it.

At the end of December 2008,  I moved this blog to a server hosted by BlueHost.  While there are some trade offs (the biggest one being that the new site doesn’t get traffic from other wordpress.com blogs), overall, I’m happy with the move.   I now get to tweak the format of the blog in a way that you don’t get on wordpress.com.  It’s time for the training wheels to come off.  :)

I’m not deleting this site yet, since as of February 6, 2009, this blog still get more hits than our new one, primarily due to a few crafting posts we made in late November and early December.  I have replaced some of the more popular posts with pointers to our new blog, particularly the kirigami and sure-cuts-a-lot stuff, to make sure that people can still find the information they are looking for as well as any updates.

We’ve been busy at the new site, and we’re reposting the articles from our previous efforts Survivor Germany and Survivor France, so please stop by!  We’d be happy to have you.

Cece’s gotten into this habit of making silly faces every time we pull out the camera.  I picked three of the funniest ones and threw them up on this wall I found on the internet.

The original version is much higher quality, and I recommend that you watch in that format if you can.  It might work better if you let the whole thing download first.  You can see how much has been downloaded in the status bar at the bottom.

The original is here.

The YouTube version is here.

I just finished uploading our 2008 Christmas video.  You can go here to see it.

As I mentioned earlier, we used a “South Park” theme this year.  The caricatures of the girls turned out pretty well and the animation was fun to do, if a bit tiring.  We also put in a little bit of stop motion animation and a green screen effect just for good measure.  

The green screen was probably the hardest thing to pull off, mostly because we don’t have good enough lighting to really make it work well.  It’s important to get the screen lit as uniformly as possible, and we had to cheat a little bit.

In a first for us, the girls sang the song used in the credits.  It’s a song by Jack Hartman that Sandi found while helping out at the school this year.  It came with a music only track that we put to good use.

Anyway, we hope you like it.  Merry Christmas!

Carissa’s class at her school seems to participate every year, though, and tonight was her program.  It was held at the high school this year in a good size auditorium.  Last year, when the program was in the elementary school gym, there were people who literally couldn’t get in the door.  Even with the larger venue, the performance tonight was standing room only.

Unfortunately for us, this meant we had to sit at an odd angle to the stage and due to the way the risers on stage were set up, we couldn’t even see Carissa.  Sandi, who was closest to the center, tried to take a few pictures, but quickly gave up.

Really, this is the best one we got.  I’ve circled what I think is Carissa’s head, but I could be mistaken.

There will be no school Christmas programs in this year’s video.  :(

Here’s a sample of what I’ve got so far (click to see the details better):

Germany is an interesting place to spend Christmas because nearly every town has a Christmas festival called a Weihnachtsmarkt.  The primary feature is a marketplace of tiny stalls filled with various gifts, ranging from gingerbread to glass ornaments to clothing to kitchen utensils.  There’s also a lot of food, mostly very tranditional, such as bratwurst and gluhwein.  We went to several festivals that year, including the one in Strasbourg, France, which might as well have been in Germany.

Many of the festivals had small carnivals as well, usually including beautiful marry-go-rounds.  The girls loved riding them, even in the biting German cold.

It’s funny now to look back at the short ice skating segment in the video.  Carissa really wanted to try ice skating, so we took her to the ice rink in Schwinningen.  I’m not surefooted enough to support a second skater, and Carissa wasn’t yet coordinated enough to make it work.  Now, she and her sisters roller skate around like they were born doing it.  We’ll have to try ice skating again soon.  I’m sure we’ll be much more successful now.

Sandi was very pregnant with Sadie by this time (Sadie was born on New Year’s Eve that year).  By the following Christmas our family had reached full size, and the real fun could begin.

If you’d like to see our 2002 Christmas video, click here.

I finished putting together the soundtrack tonight.  The video is trending toward 4 minutes and 50 seconds long, and since I have the animation storyboarded already (that sounds more impressive than it is — it’s sort of a stretch to refer to what I’m doing as “animation”), I need to find video to fill about 3 minutes of that time.  This will be one of our shorter videos, but I’m still worried that we aren’t going to have enough good video to fill it up.

We’ve gotten a few miscellaneous interesting bits, including what is hopefully going to be an interesting sequence showing the assembly of Sandi’s gingerbread house in stop motion.  I need to work on that next to see if it will work and what the timing is.

My goal is to finish up as much of the video as I can now, and focus on getting good footage this weekend and early next week once the kids are out of school.  We’ll see.

It might snow tomorrow here in Indy.  That might be interesting…

I spent most of the weekend making cookies with whomever wasn’t sick at the time, which unfortunately, didn’t include Sandi.  She spent most of Saturday feeling like she was going to be sick and then spent Sunday actually being so.

I got to make a lot of interesting cookies, though.  We made lemon meltaways, chow mein noodle Christmas trees, stained-glass sugar cookies (what a lot of work!), coconut-orange marmalade crescents, candy cane cookies, reindeer sugar cookies and cherry-almond pinwheels.  And that was after I cut four other recipes from my list!  Oh well, there’s always next weekend.  

Or maybe not.

In fact, as of 10AM, December 13, 2008, if you search for the phrase “kirigami pattern” on Google, our site is *momentarily* the number one result.  It won’t last long — the bubble of visitors has already passed and internet popularity is notoriously short — it may have even changed by the time you click on the link.  This will be especially true in our case since I don’t plan to turn this into a site for Cricut kirigami patterns!  Still, it’s an interesting effect that I only noticed because I was searching for other kirigami patterns that we might try.  The world of “kirigami patterns” is pretty small — it only yields about 24,500 hits.

It attracts a lot of attention at this time of year.  Here’s a note that was attached to the driver’s side window when I came out of Wal-mart this afternoon:

Our thanks the anonymous fan of our car: you made our day as well!

One of the really popular bits of the 2001 video is the part right at the beginnning when Sandi is lowering and raising Cece in an out of the frame.  Everybody oohs and aahs over the cute little baby.

It seems very distant now, but we made this video 3 months after the 9/11 attacks, and the song we chose “God Bless The Children” is pretty sappy and sentimental, but seemed very appropriate for the time:

“God bless the children everywhere,
For they haven’t yet learned not to care,
We must not let time age their souls,
May the child stay in us all”

My favorite part is when the girls line up with frosting on their noses.

We used Rubber Band’s version of “Feliz Navidad” for the credits, which has become a family favorite.  It also appears briefly in the video we did about our trip to Italy during a funny sequence showing how we kept our kids entertained during the trip — by showing them old Christmas videos!!!

The video can be downloaded here, if you are interested in seeing it.

Here’s the page I made about the event.  The background is the same one we used in the invitations and the gingerbread men are copies of the little ornaments we sent to everyone.

Rob is a transplant to Arizona, but Mary Ann is a lifetime resident, and so the 20 degree (with windchill less that 10 degrees) weather was quite a shock to her.

No trip downtown at Christmastime would be complete without a walk through the downtown circle and seeing the Soldiers and Sailors monument decorated and lit up, so we hoofed it, in spite of the weather.

Sometimes when you’ve lived in a place for a long time, you forget how interesting it can be.