Why I Oughta...

Do you guys follow Boyfriends of Instagram ?  Besides all the pizza nerdery that I follow on (as the kids say...) Insta, my favorite account *has* to be Boyfriends of Instagram .  For those of you new to this handle, it is a place where people share images and videos of people forced to take ridiculous instagram photos of their girlfriend/spouse/partner/friend/etc. So, when I came across this weird situation right in front of Cinderella's Castle at the Magic Kingdom down at Walt Disney World, I knew that I had witnessed a 'Boyfriends of Instagram' moment myself! Check out what this Dad (I'm assuming??) is doing to get *that* special photo of his daughter in her big, Princess dress.   This is taking place up the ramps that are open sometimes, like right in front of the opening that you take to go 'under' the Castle.  During a super busy time.  You can see all the other people just walking past trying to experience the Castle.  All the while....Dad is being a

The folks at TrainWorld just shipped a few of my 2017 Christmas Catalog pre-orders including this one:  the 2017 Santa and Snowman Tag Boxcar.  The box is not a normal O Gauge train box from Lionel, but a two piece top/bottom orange box.  The front of it only reveals the blue boxcar.  But once you open it up? You see this: That's the boxcar with the platform on top, Santa, Frosty and the 'bridge' that you put up for the boxcar to pass under. Here's the side of the box with all the product details.  I haven't set up our track yet, nor can I find this year's model being run on YouTube, but I *did* find this older version that gives you a sense for how it works.  Kinda cute, right?

Have you had these pretzels yet?  They're a fast-emerging ' favorite thing ' of mine this Holiday season that I'm certain will make this year's list .  And, unfortunately, they quickly disappeared once they arrived in our pantry.  The peppermint and almond one?  Awesome.  The sprinkles one?  Fine, but always the last tray to empty.  I've mentioned to Natalie like four times that the 'next time you go to TJ's, can you buy more of these ???', but it appears that they might be sold out already because our rations haven't been restocked.  Or perhaps it was the fact that I/we devoured these in four days that she's purposely not rebuying?

Caught this moon showing up strong just as the sun was setting on a walk to the train one evening.  Nat alerted me to the moon based on her view in the suburbs and sure enough, framed right down the valley of high rises and above the Gehry pavilion:  there she is!  Lots of buzz around the Christkindl market and theatre crowds arriving for early dinners, but it was still worth stopping and enjoying. 

Now entering #21 in the [Coaster Collection] here on the blog.  This one from The Broadmoor in Colorado Springs.  Which...is a delightful place.  Turns out, it is owned by the same folks who own Heaven errr...Sea Island .    That explains a lot .  I have a few photos of my stay (which was entirely too short) that I'll post up here on the blog with more details at some point. The most recent coaster prior to this one was Abracadabar down on the Disney Boardwalk . You can find the full coaster collection here .

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

I picked up this "Back the Beagle" glass at Goodwill in Elmhurst recently when I was dropping off a whole bunch of old Halloween decorations.  I figured...while I was there....why not take a quick stroll through the store to see if there were any treasures.  This one seemed like a natural addition to our vintage glass collection.  It is the exact same shape/style as the Chipettes one that I posted about last fall . The thing that jumped out at me was that we had a "Character X for President' glass in the collection with this "Pooh for President" glass from Sears . The front features Snoopy and the slogan "Back the Beagle".  The back, seen below, has a 1958 copyright, which isn't when this glass was produced.  Can't be. I went digging ebay and the web to find out more about the glass and it turns out, there was a series of four of these glasses - all around the "Vote Snoopy" campaign.  Here's a screenshot from a li

There is apparently an entire set of these small, annual passholder buttons that you can/could have scored at the 2017 Food and Wine Festival at Epcot Center this fall.  Eight of them , in fact.  Alas, we have just this one that we picked up at the Light Lab .  I'll stick it on the pin board along with some of the other "non-pin" Disney Pins like this "Happy Birthday Mickey Mouse" button we scored on a visit to the parks on Mickey's birthday last year and the  @wdwtoday Twitter button I posted about yesterday . 

We ran into the @wdwtoday folks at the half marathon expo where they were handing out these buttons - which I'm not totally sure I understand.  Didn't stop me from grabbing one, though. Is this a button that *they* wear?  Or...am I supposed to wear it in the parks to tell people that I'm tweeting things?  

Another Thanksgiving day of turkey and trotting and family....and...of course, Levon and the boys in The Last Waltz.  This marks 14th years of posting on the blog about the film on Thanksgiving.  Here's last year's post .  The first one was all the way back in 2004 but there are a few missing years in there for some reason. Turn it up! Here's my post from 2015 on The Last Waltz . Here's my post from 2014 on The Last Waltz . Here's my post from 2013 on The Last Waltz . Here's my post from 2012 on The Last Waltz . Here's my post from 2011 on The Last Waltz . Here's my post from 2010 on The Last Waltz . Here's my post from 2007 on The Last Waltz . Here's my post from 2005 on The Last Waltz . Here's my post from 2004 on The Last Waltz .

Came across another one of these construction signs that includes a quote from Walt Disney on the walls of a job site inside of WDW.  I've posted two of these before including this one about deadlines and this one about curiosity .   This one was on the backside of Cinderella's Castle in the Magic Kingdom in an area that I think was where the crane was located as they installed Christmas lights. Unlike those other ones that were outside of Epcot, this one is definitely Fantasyland-themed and is appropriate for the place it is hung. This one, too, is sponsored by Stanley, which I continue to think is a nice sponsorship integration for both parties.

Last night, I watched the end of the Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize program where they awarded David Letterman with the honor as I was getting into bed.  Dave was always my guy in late night.  Some of my friends were Conan guys, but Dave was the only one who could keep me up.  ( Craig Fergusen came much later ...and I did love his show - whenever I could stay up *that* late!)  I caught like the last 20 minutes or so.  And in that portion, Dave's wingman Paul Shaffer came out and introduced Eddie Vedder who covered a song by Warren Zevon and said:  "Dave...let me thank you...because if it weren't for you, I probably wouldn't have known who Warren Zevon was. So, it makes it a real honor to get to sing one of his songs to you." Here's that performance. This was a 'stop me in my tracks' moment.  The song.  Thinking about when Warren wrote it.  Thinking about my own kids.  Just a powerful moment. We have Comcast, so I hit "info" on the re

Look who is coming along for the ride with the new Bells & Whistles Christmas Decor building from Lemax at Menards this year?  That's right...Santa Claus himself!  That might sway the Mayor of Mantleburg, I would think?  This one is also part of the Caddington Village collection like the past few days that included the Vintage Grind Coffee Company and The Dog House .  Mantleburg is already such a seasonal town, it would seem to be a logical fit to have a Christmas decorations-specific store in town, right?  Boost the local economy when it is thriving?  They only get visitors during the holiday season and they've resisted the whole "spookytown" transformation over the years.  This one seems like slam dunk for annexation, but maybe once the sale prices come to Menards... Or...we actually set up Mantleburg for the first time in three years.  One or the other.

During a recent trip, we finally found time to sit down and have a beverage in the Abracadabar on Disney's Boardwalk where they have these neat, custom coasters.  It doesn't do any magic tricks or illusions like the "posters" on the wall, but it is cute to see the top hat as cocktail glass being used here, isn't it?   Full [Coaster Collection] is here .  Including this new one, I'm up to 20 total coasters in the collection and 9 (and counting) Disney-specific coasters including this one from the Boathouse , the Flying Fish restaurant , the Skipper Canteen , Raglan Road restaurant in Disney Springs,   the Disneyland Hotel and Walt Disney World resort hotels  as well as the *new* Walt Disney World resort hotel version .

The King of the Ball Tossers came home with this It's a small world pin from a trip earlier this year.  We have a few IASW-based pins, but they're mostly modeled on the little kids in the ride.   This is genuinely one that *he* picked out.  Without any of our help.  Which...I think was a surprise to everyone.   One of the projects I have on my list to kick off is pin boards hung up in the house.  Maybe in the basement?  Or in the kids' rooms?

Another in the series of Walt Disney World construction signs that feature a quote from Walt Disney himself.  This one was on the walls outside of Disney's Hollywood Studios in the area where they are building the skyway near the walkway to the Boardwalk. This is the third of these signs I've featured here.  First one here .  Second one here . This one, too, is sponsored by Stanley.  You can find out the details of the sponsorship (which I find pretty clever!) in this post .

Those were the days.  I was going through some of my personal effects and came across this piece written by Tony Scott at the Kendall County Record (I think?!) that covers some of the shenanigans we were up to back in the early aughts.  I made some of the strongest connections of my career during these JoinCross.com blogging days as Chris Rhodes.  Pretty incredible to think back at how far the Boss let us go with the blog.   Today?  They're probably right to be a bit more careful with their political image.  And who's blogging today anyway?!? Here's post from the archives here on the blog from Dan Johnson-Weinberger that talks about the same thing Tony Scott says :  those were some heady days of GOP blogging.