Christmas Day & Christmas Caroling

12-26-2010 ~ Blog #361 ~ David

The December blog has gotten pretty large and I posted quite a few pictures of

Christmas Morning and Christmas Caroling on a separate Christmas Day page.

Merry Christmas

12-24-2010 ~ Blog #359 ~ David

Christmas Eve

Skate Skiing Around the House

   I've been skating around our house nearly every day for the past week.  The snow is great and I've actually been spending more time skiing than grooming.  The girls outgrew the pair of size 33 skate boots so I ordered a new size 35 pair for them to share.  Joan's old size 37 skate boots are now just a bit too big which means that they can both skate together with reasonably sized gear.  Both girls are fairly natural with the skating motion, but use their poles minimally.

Annika Bakes

Ice Again

Decorating Ammonia Cookies

12-20-2010 ~ Blog #358 ~ David

The girls began the long, tedious job of decorating this year's ammonia cookies.  They only got about 15 cookies done between bath time and bed.  They will have many more chances to ice and decorate because this year's half recipe made 126 cookies. (not counting the "samples")

Decorating Our Lady of Victory Church for Christmas

The girls helped Joan and the decorating committee decorate the church for Christmas. 

I also made a slideshow and took a time lapse of the decorating session.

Ice

Hallbuzz Turns Five

  Our photoblog is now five years old and has received over 96,000 total hits (up from 57,000 last year at this time).  The main Hallbuzz index page has received just over 26,000 total hits (up from 20,000).  The entire site at this point uses 23.5 GB of disk space on our server at Bluehost (up from 9.5 GB).  I've been publishing movies at a higher resolution which accounts for most of this increase.  The total traffic this year was over 400 GB of bandwidth and three million files.  This year hallbuzz received hits from 172 countries.

Happy Birthday Brigitta

12-15-2010 ~ Blog #357 ~ David & Joan.

   Brigitta turned nine today.  Since we had a snow day yesterday and Svea will be out caroling with her class, we decided to celebrate her birthday yesterday.   Actually, we celebrated her birthday in June (Brigitta's Harry Potter Birthday Party) because she has always wanted to have a summer party.  And no, the frosting on the cake below is NOT TAR!

Schneetage!

We started the week of with two snow days; it was awesome.  I spent much of my time shoveling and snow blowing the driveway followed by packing and grooming the ski loop with the Ski-Doo and groomer-blade.  The girls played outside a bit.  I think we got about 15-17 inches and the ski trail should be skiable tomorrow.

Some Friends are Worth a Visit - more than every 20 years or so...

   We went to the west side of Cleveland last Saturday night for dinner with some of Joan's old college friends and their families.  It had been over eleven years since Joan had seen one couple and almost twenty for the other.  There were six adults and eight children, all of whom played extremely well for having just met.

There was Play-Doh and a Wii to keep the kids amused.  I think it was the first time on the Wii for our girls.

DNA Dan: the Double Helix Man

   In college I bought a beat up-incomplete 1917 Graphlex camera for $50 because I wanted to experiment with the focal plane shutter.  The 3.25" X 4.25" film it required was nonexistent, so I built a new camera back to hold standard 4" X 5" film holders.  The shutter mechanism was gummed up and the bellows had several light leaks.  I spent a few weeks fixing it and experimenting with various modifications to the shutter.  I needed to get the focal plane shutter speed to smoothly slow down from a fraction of a second to several seconds.  My goal was to alter the camera so moving objects would appear to distort over a short time.  In the photo below there's about four seconds difference between the top and bottom of the image; Tim rotated 360 degrees while the 1/8" focal plane shutter dropped four inches over the film.

Gingerbread Houses

12-6-2010 ~ Blog #356 ~ David.

This Saturday Joan and the girls made little gingerbread houses:

German Family Society Christmas Program

On Sunday the girls performed in the Christmas Program at the German Family Society. 

Kindergruppe sang songs in English and German.

The Junior Youth Group sang and danced.

Every year at Christmas representatives from several generations light a blue candle in remembrance of their German heritage.

Miracle on 34th Street

Saturday night we went to see our neighbors and other friends perform in the Tallmadge Dynamics production of "A Miracle on 34th Street".  It was a good play and story.