Why I Oughta...

That's a shot of Nat and I on the Tower of Terror down in Orlando at Walt Disney World.  It was taken at mile 10 of the Disney Wine and Dine Half Marathon.  And it was the first time that I had ever been on the ride.   Under normal circumstances, I would have been able to fend off the pressure from Nat to ride on something like this, but perhaps it was the half-marathon brain fog that weakened me and dropped my defenses.  I pity the person who had to sit in my seat after we left.  I was soaked at this point from the humidity and my back was starting to seize up.  I left a pool of sweat behind, I'm sure.  You can also see the other people to Nat's right that were running the race, too.  The dude looks like he's reading his phone, though?  Total pro move, I guess?

One morning in the past few weeks, I witnessed this weird event:  a tree in the front yard was shedding all of it's leaves at once.  Check out what seems like a shower of leaves falling.  One right after the other.  You can see from the pattern on the ground that this tree was dropping them all in a matter of minutes while the other trees still are holding on to theirs.  You can also notice that there's frost on the roof across the street from us and I *think* that this might have been the first frost?  Could that have set off this reaction? 

Via the Kansas City Star:   ...But “Dilly Dilly” wasn’t a pure stroke of genius out of thin air. According to dictionary.com, the origins of “dilly” are in a shortening of the word “delightful” or “delicious,” probably from the 1930s. On its own, it has come to mean “something or someone regarded as remarkable or unusual.” File this one away next to the "It's Wednesday, Gary."  "I know that Janet" one  as gold.

We brought just a little bit of Indiana Street with us to Downers.  Over the weekend, we put up our trees inside the house, but we also went to Menards and bought a small 5' Fraser Fir to put up in our front yard.  Just like we did on Indiana Street.  Starting with our first Christmas in Elmhurst (in our first house), we participated in the tradition of erecting a 'front yard tree' along with our neighbors.  My sister Vic told us about the tradition before we moved in and sure enough, we fell in love.  The street(s) always looked so great when all of the homes had a uniquely-styled and lighted tree.  You can see the C7 bulbs I put on our tree this year out in front of our #newoldfarmhouse.  Nat did a great job doing 'classy' decorations on the porch with garland and lights.  And wreaths in the windows that you can see above.  So, while we have moved out of Indiana Street, we still wanted to bring some of that tradition with us in our new digs.  So, right no

There are plenty of Christmas traditions that we participate in (trains, advent calendars, elfs, tree day, Walnut Room, etc), but there's also a beer tradition that I've grown to look forward to:  the opening of the annual Anchor Steam Christmas Ale as done by my brother-in-laws in Naperville. I've chronicled this in the past here on the blog.  Here's a post from last year's version .  Here's the 2015 version .  And here's a post from 2010 with that year's bottle .  And based on those posts, I've been drinking a little bit of this stuff for 10 years now, despite this only being the fourth version that I've documented on the blog here. As for this year's brew, they once again picked a unique tree for the label.  From the Anchor Steam site : This year’s tree is the Santa Lucia fir. Extremely rare, it is native and limited to California’s Santa Lucia Range along the central coast of California. They bought some smaller bottles like nor

The kids and I recently upgraded our bird watching area with the introduction of our heated birdbath.  It is more like a re-introduction as we had this heated bath at our old house, but up until a week or so ago, it was just sitting in the basement.  We put it right next to a few of our feeders that you can see in the top part of this photo.  If you look closely, you can also see a very pretty cardinal right behind the pole on the right and a little bird - a finch of some sort, maybe? - on the feeder on the left.  We get a lot of yellow and black and brown little birds.  Finches, nuthatches, chickadees and pine siskins/  We also run a suet feeder right in this area, too so we're getting visits from woodpeckers despite us not having a tailprop version.   We're getting a lot of late fall/early winter action on these feeders and have, so far, stopped squirrels from owning all of them completely.  I still find a squirrel trying his best to get to these, but usually, the cage

On Black Friday, I popped into the Jewel to pick up a few rations (and get 'cash back' because our bank wasn't close) for our trip to the Christmas Tree Farm (where they only take cash for the trees) and came out with a few of these Goose Island Bourbon County Brand Stouts.  By total accident.  I was making small talk with the cashier and she was telling me about how there people were camping out overnight in hopes of scoring these bottles.  She pointed to them and said that they found two bottles after the crowd left.  I asked if I could buy them and she said "sure".  So...almost $20 later, I came home with proudly with two bottles.  Of stout.  Nat loves a good stout.  And so do her beer nerd brothers, so they'll enjoy them this Christmas season.  I texted a photo to Dr. Jeff - who normally hosts our craft beer dinners and has even had a stout one before - and bragged about getting two of these.  He sent me back a shot of his haul:  all six versions