Skit Skat Skoodle Doot

Last summer (2014) I bought a new phone, the OnePlus One.  It was great, but after about a year I started having tons of touchscreen issues.  Part of it was hardware failure, since after I dropped it one time there was a band across the middle of the phone that was completely unresponsive.  It was incredibly irritating, since it happened to be right where the buttons on a lot of confirmation dialogs showed up.  If the app didn’t support screen rotation then I couldn’t press OK.

That was bad enough, but in addition there were frequent problems with the notification panel.  I would tap on a notification and it would just close the panel rather than open the app.  I had the system set to display a dot wherever I touched, so it knew that I clicked the right spot, it just didn’t recognize it.  It would often take me 5 tries to open a notification.

So I finally got a new phone, the Nexus 6P.  It showed up late yesterday, so I’m still getting it set up.  But so far it’s great!  I love how fast the fingerprint scanner is, it’s even better than my iPad.

I still need to put the camera through its paces, but it looks good so far.  At the top of the post is one sample picture of our elf on the shelf, Clarence.

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This past weekend my parents were in town watching the girls, and Jen and I spent two nights in a hotel downtown.  It was great getting away and not having responsibilities for a while.

Friday night we went out to Filomena for dinner.  Always so good.  After dinner we were feeling overly stuffed, so we walked back to the hotel.  Along the way we saw a bunch of light-based art installations for the Glow project.  I’d share some pictures, but they’re all on Jen’s phone since mine is pretty terrible.

Saturday we met some friends for brunch in the morning.  We were planning on going to the spy museum that afternoon, but we were kept out of the hotel room by the maintenance crew fixing the shower drain.  By the time we were able to get back in it didn’t feel worth it to go to the museum, so we skipped it.  Instead, that evening we went to a holiday street market with a bunch of arts and crafts booths to walk around.

For dinner we went to Acadiana, and I had the most amazing pork tenderloin with a sweet potato corn bread.

After dinner we tried to go see the White House Christmas Tree, but were shuffled out of the area by security before we got a good look.  We still don’t have any idea what was going on…clearly nothing groundbreaking or it would’ve been on the news.

All in all a great weekend.  But it was still great getting home to a babbling toddler excited to tell me everything she did with grandma and grandpa.

And since I didn’t really take any pictures this weekend, I’m including one of today’s lunch.  Looks delicious, right?

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I just realized it’s been a full week since my last post.  Oops.

It’s been a busy week…last Friday I was deathly ill.  Fever, hot/cold flashes, sweats, the whole nine yards.  Saturday I woke up fine, though (just tired).

Saturday night Jen and I went out with some friends for a birthday while her parents watched the kids.  We saw some stand up comedians at the Arlington Drafthouse, and it was a lot of fun.

Her parents left on Monday, and mine are getting in any minute now.  They’re going to watch the kids all weekend while Jen and I stay in a hotel downtown.  We were originally going to fly out to Denver for her company’s Christmas party, but the logistics just didn’t work out.  But rather than canceling our babysitters we decided to just stay local, but still enjoy some time to ourselves.  This will be the first time we’ve been away from the girls together.

The only other bits of excitement are that we’ve decorated the house for Christmas, largely thanks to the efforts of Jen’s parents.  There’s still a little more to do, and we’ll try to knock that out before this weekend.

The other thing is that I got my Christmas present from Automattic, a brand new FitBit!  I got the Charge HR, and I love it.  I’ve only had it since Sunday, but it’s been great.  I can’t say why I need to know my heart rate at any moment, but I do.

It’s especially nice since I couldn’t have anything like this at my old job.  Nothing with wireless capabilities for security reasons.  Working from home is so much better.

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A cool feature of WordPress.com that I didn’t know about until now – there’s an option from December 1st through January 4th to have snow falling on all your pages.  You should be seeing it now, at least if you’re visiting via a desktop computer.  It doesn’t look like it works on mobile.

And because I feel like a post is empty without a picture, I’ve included one I took last year in the creek that runs through the woods behind my house.

We got a pie pumpkin in our crop share last week, so I made a pie for Thanksgiving. I used this recipe, the first result when googling “fresh pumpkin pie”. It came out great, and got a ton of compliments. The pumpkin cutout on top was Jen’s idea. I also included a picture of the empty crust because it’s probably the only crust I’ve ever made that hasn’t been full of tears and patches.
   
 I also fried a turkey again this year. It’s always delicious, but this year it came out extra juicy because we brined it overnight.

   
 And the photo at the top of the post is of the sugared cranberries that Holly’s mom made, because they’re outstanding. I ate most of that bowl.