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Discolor Online

Weblog of the sweetest person you never want to piss off.

 

Vappu!

A shout out to all my Finnish brethren, happy Vappu everyone!

Here's a little about Vappu in Finland:

From Finland.com
From Wikipedia
From Metafilter

Importantly: Vappu without drinking is like Christmas without presents.

Unfortunately I don't have any student caps and I think I'm short on overalls, too. However, since it's game night around Chez Ronin this evening, drinking shouldn't be too hard to manage. In fact, I still have some of the booze I brought back from our Ropecon trip and have been hoarding. What a perfect time to break it out, hot on the heels of having "oily" Finnish beer and Salmiakki drinks at Copper Gate (careful, link contains boobies) in Ballard last week!

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Long Weekend

Kate had a friend over yesterday for a play date that turned into a sleepover. Some Guitar Hero was played. Her new room set-up provided play and hang-out space so the girls didn't have to commandeer the living room. We made an abortive attempt to have dinner at Stellar Pizza because Kate wanted to introduce her friend to "the best mac and cheese in the world" but Stellar was closed so we routed up to Columbia City and improvised dinner at Geraldine's Counter instead. Then we made a run to the video store where the girls rented Lego Star Wars for the 360 (we only have the regular Xbox version) and Meet the Robinsons.

Today Pramas was scheduled to play SotC down at Tim's so Kate and I had a sort of Bed Day. Except I couldn't decide if it was better to have Bed Day in bedly comfort or have "bed" day on the new couch watching movies on the nice tv. In the end we opted for the nice TV.

It was all 80s all the time today. First: Adventures in Babysitting. Holy crap, I never clicked that Vincent D'Onofrio was "Thor" in that movie (and that was after Full Metal Jacket according to IMDB). I thought Kate might like it as a girly caper movie but her final verdict was "Meh." Then we watched Mad Max Beyond Thunder Dome which I picked because it was rated PG-13. Kate hated it. "They gave you a character but no plot. It didn't make any sense." We also watched The Last Starfighter which TiVo had pulled down from SciFi for me. I had vague memories of that movie being decent but watching it again I found it pretty cringe-worthy. Kate was most interested in that one, though even she recognized it as a pale knock-off of Star Wars. That was enough 80s for me for one day, let me tell you.

For dinner I had failed to plan ahead and was looking to throw something together in a hurry for my hungry family. I remembered that I had all the ingredients on hand for Heidi Swanson's Toasted Wheat Germ Soup, from her excellent book Super Natural Cooking(and the blog 101 Cookbooks) so I whipped that up. It was so unearthly simple I could have kicked myself for not having tried it before. Seriously: a cup of toasted wheat germ, six cups of veggie broth, an onion sauteed and then simmered with a few red pepper flakes, some sea salt, a can of crushed fire-roasted tomatoes and four cups of white beans. To my utter amazement, after a few ultra-tentative sips Kate had multiple bowls of soup and declared it "pretty good" which made my night.

One more precious day of holiday.

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Squeezing the Life out of 2006

Lest anyone worry that I might spend the last few days of the year in a lazy haze of Xbox 360, TiVo and Christmas cookies, I've reassured myself that my calendar remains quite jam-packed and I will continue to be a busy bee on into 2007.

Sometime today, to Kate's dismay, Rosie goes home. In order to maximize her time with Rosie, Kate slept on the couch in the living room and has been encouraging Rosie to curl up on the couch with her while she plays Viva Pinata. Later I will be hosting Mexican Fiesta night at my house with two families from my Mom List and some combinations of their spouses and children. Chelane is bringing wine and I've got margarita mix and a selection of foods to cover all the bases for any surprise picky eaters.

Tomorrow I hope to get a few things done like filing the huge stack of papers obscuring my desk, catching up on the "no, really, I still haven't sold anything in Indiana since GenCon" paperwork for the retarded Indiana state department of revenue (who really need to do the temporary seller's permit thing the way California does it and save everyone a LOT of trouble) and just general household maintenance.

Friday night we're invited to enjoy some Chicago-style hotdogs and latkes out in the 'quah and then we're already into the last few nights of the year, the last of Kate's winter break, the last of the long weekends for Pramas until we head to New York Comic Con in February (which, being a work show, doesn't even really count as a long weekend except that he won't be at Flying Lab those days).

As with much of the rest of 2006, I find myself looking around and wondering where the hell my time went. 2006 was a year of living on fast forward. If I have a resolution for the new year it's to put the brakes on in 2007 and do what I can so the year doesn't wash over me and leave me feeling like a person who has been thrown out of the raft on a whitewater excursion.

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