January is just flying by. Things are going pretty well here. You can tell that we are a little behind from Christmas because we still have our little Christmas tree up, and we are the only house on the block who still has Christmas lights hanging in the front yard. It has been such a mild winter so far you can't even blame it on the weather. Sad.

So things that are new: Soren started last week teaching as an adjunct professor at Northern Virginia Community College NOVA. He is teaching an organic chemistry class on Saturday mornings. His first class was last week and he said he had about 20 students in his class. The department chair said that most of the students are taking his class, with plans to go into the health profession (pharm, med school or dentistry). I never had to take ochem to get into nursing school but I hear that it is not walk in the park. Soren has been working really hard in the last couple of weeks to iron out his lessons plans and crunch the numbers to show some real life examples of how ochem is useful. He bought a chemical model set right around christmas that you can made models of the chemical structure of things. When he opened it we came to two conclusions, first that emily probably shouldn't get ahold of it or she would scatter it around the house. and second I hope that by the time emily goes into kindergarten not only will she be able to spell water but she will also be able to show us the chemical structure. I am hoping that she takes after Soren in the science department.

Emily is doing really well. She started nursery at church! hurray! which means I can go to sunday school and Relief Society again. plus she gets to spend 2 hours on sunday playing with toys with kids her own age. She is getting better at talking and now says hi and bye bye. it is funny when you go in to get her in the morning she says hi and when you put her in bed at night usually she says bye bye when you shut the door. I know I have said this before but it is funny to see them as little people.

Things with me are pretty standard, just trying to keep up with Soren and Emily. I did venture into new territory the other day and I made turkey Empanadas. I will be the first to say that I am very much a gringo and I have never had an empanada before but the ones I made were pretty tasty. I really like the combination of rasins and olives which sounds strange but it was good.

Happy January!

Thanksgiving catch-up

Yes, I know it is new years eve but I realized I hadn't posted any pictures from Thanksgiving on the blog. Here are a couple from when we went to go visit my Uncle Paul and his family.

This is my brother Nick and his Wife Lisa
Emily and Abby in a ball, having a ball.
Another picture of Abby (She is a month older than Emily)
My Brother Hiram and his youngest Benjamin
Dad
and more of Emily posing as an elf.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Merry Christmas

We hope you had a wonderful Christmas. This year we went out to Cincinnati to spend time with Soren's side of the family. We opened some gifts here before we left.

On Christmas Eve we went over to the Jensen's home for a Christmas program. It was a lot of fun, they have a program and then dinner and dessert. This was the cake that Soren's dad made. there are 10 layers of sponge cake.

While the appetizers and the program were going on Emily was playing in with the toys they had in their basement.

Christmas morning- emily got the most adorable little bumblebee backpack from nana and grandpa.

Merry Christmas

Holiday Haircut

New Holiday haircut!

not to shabby for my first attempt at an actual haircut. it breaks my heart a little bit to see her with a haircut because she is growing up too fast.

Christmas List by Soren

When I was younger, my Christmas list was already several pages long by Halloween. And even while I was in college, it still wasn't too difficult to come up with a list of things that I really wanted but just wasn't able to buy. But now that I'm an adult, making a Christmas list is pretty difficult. First, my worldly possessions fill either a modest house or a large moving van, and I am reluctant to accumulate more. Second, my wish list has shifted towards intangible or ungiftable items, like a play-day with Emily, a night out with Mandy, success at work, or six seasons and a movie of Community. And finally, in the times that I decide that I really do want to acquire something that costs about what a reasonable Christmas present would, I can do so almost without a second thought. Internet retailing has allowed me to indulge myself so easily that the only things that stay on my wishlist for more than a few weeks cost hundreds (new laptop) to tens of thousands (new car) of dollars. Impulse buys throughout the year deplete my list of pretty much everything that I could reasonably suggest that someone else to buy me for Christmas.

On the other hand, when I was a kid I took for granted being around my family during Christmas. And now that I'm older and we live in five different states, I'm looking forward to seeing my parents and siblings more than I am looking forward to discovering just how much stuff I get to pack into the trunk of my car and schlep all the way back to DC. So the material and commercial aspects of Christmas have become less important than the familial and communal aspects, though not because I have become less materialistic or less of a consumer. And I have the feeling that the commercial aspects are going to recover their importance once Emily starts making a Christmas list of her own. But I think that it will become even harder to make my own list once I start enjoying Christmas presents vicariously through my kids.

That said, if you, Gentle Reader, think that my waning enthusiasm for Christmas qua commercial event is a terrible tragedy that can be remedied only by buying me a CTS-V wagon in Thunder Grey, I'm sure that Lynn White, the Internet Sales Manager of Lindsay Cadillac in Alexandria, will be happy to take your call.

About that one time I taught a Primary lesson inspired by Quentin Tarantino

FILM CRIT HULK is on my short list of “must read every article” blogs. A couple weeks ago he posted his inaugural article at Badass Digest, recounting a formative conversation he'd had with Quentin Tarantino, in which Tarantino told him, “Never hate a movie”. Go read that article and then come back here when you’re done. Or after you finish reading everything else HULK has written.

So for a couple weeks I’ve been thinking over the pointlessness of hating (yes, I did just use that as an intransitive verb) and other forms of speaking negatively. Actually, I’ve been thinking about this for months. I’ve been thinking about negative patterns of speech reinforcing negative patterns of thinking, and how our culture claims to value positivity, but it actually celebrates destructive criticism, mockery, and derision. I’ve been thinking of the pervasive “everything sucks” culture of the Internet, and ways that I could use my job to be constructive and helpful despite the relentless criticism and rejection that’s inherent to my job as a patent examiner. There's something uncool and kinda naïve and vulnerable and dangerous about making a genuine effort to find the good in something, and about sincerely enjoying and praising it when you find it.

And all this mulling came to a head last week when I found that the text for my lesson in Primary was James 3. The official lesson material was a little, well, bland. I teach the 10–11 year-olds and I’m acutely aware that these kids are in a narrow window where they can conceptualize the difficult situations of their teenage years (and to some extent are looking forward to them), but aren’t yet stuck right in the middle of them. So I tend to bring up a lot of points in my lessons that require the explanation “this is going to make a lot more sense in a couple of years, because you probably haven’t had the experience yet, but it’ll happen all the time in high school and beyond”. And many of these lessons go pretty smoothly because the difficulties of the teenage years are still theoretical.

So I decided to go off script for my lesson. I asked each of the kids to tell the class about something they really liked, whether it was a book, or a movie, or an activity, or anything else that wanted to share. Most responded immediately and enthusiastically, but one of them responded in a way I didn’t expect, at least for a kid of his age. He said, kind of evasively, “I like the floor”, and then tried to defend his disingenuous answer by explaining how terrible it would be if we didn't have floors to prevent gravity from pulling us into the middle of the earth. This was the kind of smart-alecky answer that seemed four years too early for a ten-year-old. So I kept needling him until he sheepishly gave a sincere answer. And then I explained to the rest of the class what had happened, and explained that some time in the early teenage years is when most people decide that it’s no longer cool to sincerely enjoy things, and that most teenagers and adults are far more comfortable talking about things they dislike than things they like, and are far more comfortable criticizing than praising. “That’s weird,” exclaimed one of the girls. I really wish that none of these kids would ever feel any differently.

So we read from James, and I explained that speaking negatively leads to thinking negatively and acting negatively. I rolled back in the official lesson material by talking about various types of negative speech—not just derision and destructive criticism, but vulgarity, profanity, irreverence, and so forth. And I gave them a homework assignment to speak positively of something this week when they were tempted to speak negatively of it instead. Because I’ve decided Tarantino is right: “Never hate [something]. It won’t help you and it’s a waste of time.“

Halloween 2011

it was chilly the night that we had the Halloween Party at our church. So she wore a sweatshirt under her costume.
On the prowl for food
She has a stuffed zebra that she sleeps with at night so we incorporated it into the costume, but in the picture it just looks like a jumble of stripes.